SERMON FOR AUGUST 4, 2019, EIGHTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST TEXTS: LUKE 12:13-21; ECCLESIASTES 1:2,12-14, 2:18-23

The July 2019 issue of the Atlantic magazine featured an article entitled “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: Here’s How to Make the Most of It.” The author, Arthur C. Brooks, was president of the American Enterprise Institute, which Wikipedia describes as a “conservative think tank that researches government, politics, economics and social welfare issues.” In anticipation of his unavoidable decline, Brooks recently resigned this executive position, with what he describes as its high demand for fluid intelligence. This is the ability to reason, analyze and solve novel problems; in other words, to think fast on your feet and innovate. It peaks in early adulthood and begins to diminish in one’s 30’s and 40’s. Mr. Brooks is 55 years old. He has now become a professor of public policy at Harvard, which he perceives as a more age-appropriate endeavor, because it draws on crystallized rather than fluid intelligence. “Crystallized intelligence . . . is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and knowing how to use it.” He concludes: “That older people, with their stores of wisdom, should be the most successful teachers seems almost cosmically right. No matter what our profession, as we age we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way.”

In Mr. Brooks’ reassessment of his life the quality of one’s being takes precedence over that of one’s doing. He points to the difference between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues”: “Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual, and require no comparison.” Your eulogy virtues are what you would want people to remember about you: “He was kind and deeply spiritual,” rather than “He made senior vice president at an astonishingly young age.”

The key to achieving this kind of success is to scale back one’s career ambitions, even if one is at the height of professional prestige (like Mr. Brooks), in order to ratchet up one’s metaphysical goals. Brooks realizes that the advance from résumé to eulogy virtues requires moving from activities focused on the self to activities focused on others. He concludes, “The secret to bearing my decline — to enjoying it — is to become more conscious of the roots linking me to others. If I have properly developed the bonds of love among my family and friends, my own withering will be more than offset by blooming in others.” Apparently Mr. Brooks regard this as ending on a cheerful note.

I can’t begin to match Mr. Brooks’ professional qualifications and accomplishments — I mean, how many people retire to a faculty position at Harvard as the perfect place to grow old gracefully?! But when I finished reading his article, my initial response was, “Well, duh!” I wondered why it took him so long to get with the program. Why did he have wait to catch on until he was over 50 and travel to India to consult a guru to learn what Sunday school taught me before I reached double digits in age? And why, even in his newfound selflessness does his self remain so central to the story? “Remember,” he writes, “people whose work focuses on teaching or mentorship , broadly defined, peak later in life . . . . My hope is that my most fruitful years lie ahead.” Maybe, maybe not. Becoming a teacher might not play to his strengths after all. For all the experience and insight that potentially come with age, you can still be a crashing bore in the classroom and woefully out of touch with your students. Your knowledge may not be that helpful to them. Moreover, the designated heirs to your wisdom might well disappoint you. You have no control over what they make of your legacy. “. . . .who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity,” laments the writer of Ecclesiastes.

In today’s Gospel Jesus tells the story of a successful man. His fields have produced an abundant crop; he is delighted by the bounty, certain of his continued productivity and wealth. He literally builds on that confidence: “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, and be merry.”

The line between aspiration and greed can be hard to map. We fill our barns, physical and metaphorical, with a variety of riches: money, possessions, success, power, self-regard. They each play some necessary part in the shaping of our lives, and they are all variable. No matter how ample the return on our investment or how shrewdly we diversify when our circumstances change, we can never count on any of these assets to secure our wellbeing. Sometimes we have to let go; always we have to hold on loosely.

Mr. Brooks makes an honest and poignant admission midway through his article: “I suspect that my own terror of professional decline is rooted in a fear of death - a fear that, even if it is not conscious, motivates me to act as if death will never come by denying any degradation in my résumé virtues This denial is destructive because it leads me to ignore the eulogy virtues . . . .” “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”

In Luke’s Gospel Jesus follows the story of the rich fool with a series of well-known sayings that themselves never appear in the lectionary. They sound all the more extraordinary when they are read

in this context. After concluding the parable, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God,” Jesus continues: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you — you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well” (Luke 12: 22-31).

Here is the soul the rich man envisioned, the one amply provided for, one who can relax, eat, drink and rejoice before God. Jesus calls us away from the ambitious and anxious practice of getting and spending and into a life of generosity and service, of humility, hope and trust. In 1517, when Martin Luther presented his 95 theses for debate he confronted the greed of the church of his day on multiple fronts — its inordinate wealth, its extraordinary claims to worldly power, and its shameless hoarding of God’s grace. In thesis no. 62 he tells it like it is: “The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.” And as Jesus reminds us, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We all need to review our investment strategies on a regular basis. Amen.