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Biography |
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"A Rich Fool" He was the sort of man who was not only a man of property but a man of foresight in that he planned to do even better, to knock down his property and build bigger barns. Many people would have said that he was a brilliant genius. But God called him a fool. And when God calls a man a fool, it is well that we take time to ask why because we may be making some of the same mistakes even though we may not be deemed to be as financially affluent. This emphasis and this statement comes from a story which Jesus told and which was read as our lesson this evening (Luke 12:13-21). It is about the man who did so very well that he thought he ought to do even better. And in all that this man said and thought, all the ideas that he articulated, it’s quite clear that he was missing out on some of life’s essentials, and making some very, very serious mistakes. We want to suggest to you in the first place that this man was a fool because he didn’t allow for the uncertainty of life. Everything that he said implied that he had a lease on life and it was threefold. He assumed that he was here forever and a day. There is no indication that he thought that life might not exist for him tomorrow, or that he mightn’t be around next week. All his talk had no awareness, no insight, about life’s total uncertainty. This is a very common error and a form of foolishness in which so many of us indulge. We don’t make allowances for life being uncertain. We assume that we are going to be around for a long time. Now, quite obviously, it would be very unhealthy and very morbid to spend all of our time thinking of death and all the possible things that could go wrong, but it is equally unrealistic not to recognize that you and I as persons are, in fact, but one breath from death. We've no guarantee that we will be around tomorrow, or next week, or next year. And yet so often we talk as though we will be, as though we are sure of tomorrow. Joe and I were great friends together. We played the same ball games which in my country are called rugby and soccer. We sat in the same form together. It was invariably the back seat because not only were we back seat boys but we weren’t particularly bright and that’s where the teachers felt we were better located. We went through school and then went to university. There is nothing to be read into the fact that both of these not-very-bright boys entered the ministry. He went into the Episcopal ministry and I to the Methodist. We went our separate ways. We met from time to time. Joe was a very delightful, warmhearted chap who did very well in his church, and there were many people who said he would go very far. One evening when I came in for my evening meal, there on the television screen was Joe’s picture. And they were announcing that he was dead. A young man in his forties with life stretching out in front of him with all its possibilities. Obviously that sort of thing makes an impact and you think of it for days. We all have that sort of experience. We hear of some contemporary who is being cut down early in life. When we hear it, we say, almost without realizing what we are saying, “My God, not Mary, not James, not John!” We are shaken by it and reflect on how uncertain life is. And then we get up and go on as though it never happened. You might say — well, what is the point of this sort of statement and why do you make it? It is simply this: are you so busy thinking about the here-and-now that you make no preparation for the hereafter? Are you so wrapped up in time that you forget about the thing called eternity? In the north of Scotland there was a crofter who lived on his own who was coming toward the end of his early journey. There came to see him some folk who felt they had some God-given right to speak to him about spiritual things. To some of us, this seems almost an invasion of a person’s privacy, and that’s how he felt. And he didn’t seem to be very interested in what they were saying. In fact, he seemed completely indifferent; so much so that they got a bit angry with him, and finally they said to him, “Do you not realize that you’re not so well, that maybe you’re going to die?” And he said in his own Scottish dialect, “I haven’t waited until the storm has come to thatch my house.” In other words, what he was saying was that he was prepared for life’s eventualities and uncertainties because he recognized that none of us can be sure of tomorrow, and he was prepared. You, my friend, are a fool if you too don’t realize that life is uncertain. We want to suggest in the next place that this man was a fool because of the value that he placed on his possessions. Let’s be quite clear about this. There’s nothing wrong in having possessions, in having things, enjoying things, and making use of things. Jesus never got at people for what they possessed, but what he did say is that you have to be very careful that your possessions don’t possess you and that they don’t take you over, rather than you keeping control of them. And if this is a lesson that needs to be learned in any age, it needs particularly to be learned in this age. We are obsessed by things, by having things, by the money we earn, by the wages we receive. We even evaluate people in the press in this sort of way by saying that she was a $15,000-a-year typist, or he was a $50,000-a-year business executive. What sort of people are they? That is describing a person in terms of the money they’ve got or by what they earned. And that’s a very foolish mistake to make. Foolish, because — when you come to think of it — possessions of themselves don’t make for happiness. Possessions do not bring us happiness of themselves. You've only got to think back to when you first got married. It wasn’t very easy. You had to work hard; you had to gather up things. And there wasn’t a great deal of money going around. So you worked together. You had to think long and hard before you made any purchase. You had to plan what you were going to do. It was all such good fun and all such hard work. And it brought you together in a very real way. Things have gone well for you now. If you want anything, you simply go into a store, you write a check for it, and they send it along. Yet some of you will be the very first to say that you wish you could get back to the simple things and to the days when you hadn’t so much, because in your sharing and caring together you came together, and knew a depth of a relationship that now seems to have slipped out of your grasp. Possessions of themselves don’t bring us happiness. Possessions, further, cannot mend a broken heart. The cynic will say, ''Oh, at least it means you can be miserable in comfort,” and maybe so, but possessions, when your heart is breaking, do not wipe away the tears, do not ease the pain, do not mend the brokenness, or do not bring you together. Things of themselves cannot do that. They haven’t the capacity to do that. And that’s what so often folk have learned in some of life’s tragedies, in some of life’s disasters, in some of life’s heartaches. Then they have discovered the poverty of things and how inadequate they are. There are many intriguing stories told about the ill-fated Titanic, which was built in the Queen’s Island in Belfast many, many years ago. That ship was on its maiden voyage, and aboard that ship, it was said, there were gathered together the most affluent and significant group of people who had ever been brought together on one ship at one time. They were enjoying the trip when the ship struck an iceberg. It sank very rapidly with much loss of life. There is a particularly poignant story about a lady, who when the ship was about to go down and she was alerted to what was happening, went into her stateroom and there in front of her on the table was jewelry worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. But side by side with that was a bowl of fruit. She left the jewelry and she took the fruit because she had the wisdom to recognize that right then the fruit would be of more value in an open boat than any jewelry could be. What a sad reflection on human nature that so often it takes a tragedy or a catastrophe to bring us to realize that possessions can't do everything, that money cannot buy us safety or security, or that what we have could ever mend a broken heart. There are some folk who would say that there are two places where you can keep your values right: one is on the broad of your back or on bended knee. And certainly to be ill or to share illness, agony, heartache and pain is to see things in a different perspective, and on bended knee is to realize the values that God can give which are timeless and unchanging. It’s not wrong to have things and don’t imply that we said that. But recognize what Jesus was saying in that he taught that we mustn’t be possessed by the things we've got because they don’t, of themselves, make us happy. And they can never mend a broken heart. May we suggest to you that maybe in the final analysis that this man was a fool, not just because he didn’t allow for life’s uncertainties although that was a very foolish thing to do, not just because of the value that he placed on his possessions in that possessions of themselves cannot bring happiness or mend a broken heart, but he was a fool supremely because he left God out of his reckoning. If you listen to his conversation, he says, “I have done well. I have gathered up many things. I will say to myself, ‘Eat, drink and be merry.’” There is no mention at all of God in anything he said. And significantly, also, there is no mention of what he might be able to do with his resources to help the children of God, and those who are deprived, and rejected, and unwanted, and hungry, and homeless. No thought of it. He was totally absorbed with himself, totally self-centered and selfish. And he left God out of his reckoning. And any man who does that, no matter how brilliant he may be said to be, no matter who he is or whence he comes from, or what heights he has achieved, any man who leaves God out is a fool. It may be that in your education system that you do or do not do algebra. It’s a form of mathematics. I did algebra at school, or maybe more correctly I tried to do it, but I never did it very well. I would do all the usual schoolboy dodges of trying to work from the answer back to the solution and the correct problem. Or I would copy from somebody else and discovered that this was a very foolish mistake because either I copied from some fellow who was so brilliant that the master knew it couldn’t be my work, so the two of us got into trouble. Or else I copied from somebody who was as stupid as I was so that was even worse. So I very quickly learned that honesty was really the better policy because I seem to have a block about algebra. But what I discovered about it was this. That when I would go into school, and the schoolmaster would come along, he would take the math book, he would have the problem, and he would go to the blackboard and he would read out the problem, and he would say, “You have ‘x’ of this, and ‘y’ of the next thing, and you have ‘z’ of the next thing,” and he would take every element of the problem and he would put up a symbol on the board and when he had done that, he would close the book, and he would solve the problem. And he was always right. Now I discovered this — the reason why he was always right and why I was invariably wrong — was that he didn’t leave out a single factor. And so because he neglected no factor, he was right. My friend, I may have not learned much algebra but I think I learned a lesson for life. If you leave out any factor, if you neglect any dimension of your being, no matter how brilliant you may be, you are just fudging the answers, you are cheating. It is not authentic. It is not real. It is not true. Any man who leaves God out, has left out the most significant factor of all. This man was called a fool. I wonder what God would call you, or me? Because at the end of the day, it’s what he calls us that matters in time and for eternity. |
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