Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
Saint Luke 12:13–31
One night, not so long ago when I probably couldn’t find a sporting event or one of the “cozy mysteries” on PBS I was doing what most guys do when they are bored and staring at the television. I was channel surfing.
I had surfed so long that I was up into the high numbers that the folks at DirecTV have now assigned to the religious broadcasters when I came across some old guy playing the piano.
Please understand that I use the term “old guy” advisedly because sometimes when I see a person either on TV, in the movies, or on stage I wonder to myself, “Is that person still around. They must be 1,000 years old!” However, when I Google them, quite often they turn out to be younger than I am now.
While I recognized the old guys face, I more fully recognized him by his piano playing. It was the mixture of Gospel and honkey-tonk that made him one of the most popular televangelists of the 1980's.
It was Jimmy Swaggart, whom CBS newsman Dan Rather once called “the country’s greatest speaker.”1
He was something! A real force of nature! He was an unashamed Pentecostal “whose preachers excelled at rousing audiences’ ardour, and Swaggart commanded the stage better than most. He paced, pounced and poured forth sweat while begging listeners to turn from sin and accept Jesus.
In 1982, Newsweek magazine noted his musical chops, naming him the “King of Honky Tonk Heaven.”Swaggart’s on-stage charisma powered the launch of a television ministry that would reach millions within a decade. Viewers were captivated by his soulful tunes and fire-and-brimstone sermons. At its height, Swaggart’s show was televised in 140 countries, including Peru, the Philippines and South Africa.His ministry also became the largest mail-order business in Louisiana, selling books, tapes, T-shirts and biblical memorabilia. Thanks to the US$150 million raised annually from donations and sales, Swaggart lived in an opulent mansion, possessed a private jet previously owned by the Rockefellers, sported a yellow gold vintage Rolex and drove a Jaguar.2
His lifestyle was heavenly while he was sending all sorts of other folk to the fires of hell "as he denounced what he called “‘cults,’ including Catholicism, Judaism and Mormonism ... warning followers about the evils of abortion, homosexuality and godless communism.”3
It all came crashing down when he was caught in a dalliance with another woman who was not his wife. (Believe me! I worked long and hard to make that last sentence palatable to a church audience.) Confessing his guilt “Swaggart delivered an histrionic apology before 7,000 parishioners. Through copious tears, sobbing and shouting, Swaggart abased himself, stirring the crowd into such a frenzy that some began speaking in tongues.”4
Upon his death on the 1st of July at the age of 90 (Gee! He was older than me!) what led off the announcement of his passing was not his preaching or piano playing it was his tear-stained confession.
“I have sinned against You, my Lord. And I would ask that Your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain, until it is in the seas of God's forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me anymore.”5
“Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity... and a chasing after wind.”6
One could certainly say that Swaggart gave into his vanity. Calling out the sins of other’s he thought his would never be found out. While he could have been remembered as, in Dan Rather’s words, “one of the country’s greatest speakers” upon his death he was remembered in one headline as being “the sobbing preacher who imploded in a scandal.” His vanity caused him to look more than foolish.
Jesus told a story about a foolish guy once.
Only with the guy in Jesus’ story, Dr. Fred B. Craddock reminds us in his commentary on Luke; there is no hint of scandal. There is nothing here of graft or theft, there is not mistreatment of workers or any criminal act. Sun, soil, and rain join to make him wealthy. He is careful and conservative. He is not unjust.7
In fact, we “honor these people in our yearly roundup of ‘the most successful’ and the most famous’ in our celebrity magazines.
Here is a prudent, productive man whom we might call a success. He is not only a success in farming but he is also a wise manager. He builds great secure barns to hold all of his grand harvest. We might give him the “Farmer of the Year" award.8
With full barns and ample savings, he is well fixed to sail into a prosperous and happy retirement.
Here we have the fabled American Dream, work hard, be prudent, save wisely, put things aside today for security in the future. Then sit back, relax, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.9
As one of my pastors, the always insightful Dr. Lucy Foster-Smith wrote in a devotional:
It is that this dude is living out his life for himself: he talks to himself, he makes all of his plans for himself, he is so proud of himself, he probably would have had a portrait of himself on every door of the barns. His life shrunk inside as his possessions expanded exponentially. Jesus says he was a fool. In amassing it all for himself, he filled his life with things and crowded out his very life.10
In short, this guy mistook his life for a barn. His life was all about him and his possessions.
“Jesus takes us inside his head for an intriguing little chat.”11 By my count ten times in three sentences, he uses “I” or “my”. If you run them together, he sounds rather full of himself.
‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: 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, be merry.’
“Just as he’s plotting bigger barns, he drops dead. God isn’t punishing him for his plans, or for his productivity. God isn’t punishing him at all. His time simply is up.”12
In the parable God finally gets a word in edgewise with a very important question: “Your barnful of goods—who gets it?”13
He would have done well to heed the warning of the writer of Ecclesiastes. “I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me —and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish?”14
The author of this bit of the Good Book is the exact opposite of the self-absorbed landowner. The one thing the landowner has going for him is that he is, at least, positive. The author of Ecclesiastes is a bit of a downer. The New Revised Standard Version uses the word, “vanity.” In the Hebrew the word means “vapor,” “mist,” or “whisp.” It’s all meaninglessness or triviality.”15
Both these authors are totally self-absorbed. One has so ignored his mortality that he has forgotten to write a will while the other is worried that his beneficiary might be a bozo. What is left out of one’s exaltation and the other’s lamentation is God.
Without God life is an unhappy business. Treasures mean nothing. Life is meaningless.
What we can be left with this morning is two examples of “precisely the sort of person you should not become, and exactly the foolish behavior you should avoid at all costs.”16
I think we know that.
I think Jimmy Swaggart knew deep down in his heart of hearts that he was becoming the kind of person he had taught others what they should avoid being at all costs. I think he knew that when he was “a $30-a-week itinerant Louisiana preacher”17 but fame, and glory, and money, and power caused him to forget.
It is so easy to forget. It is so easy to put our faith in what we have and what we have built. It is so easy to mistake our life for our barns.
That’s why we need this place and places like it. It is where we go to be reminded that is something more to life than we think there is.
We’re not hearing this kind of thing alone on our Sunday morning run unless you are remembering where you’ve heard it and deciding to pick-up the pace so you can hurry back to the place where you will hear it again.
We’re not hearing this at Lolapaloosa jammed in with thousands of our closest friends to hear music on Chicago’s lakefront.
But we’ve heard it here so that later in the week when, just when we need it most, it will come to us with all the force of a hint.
Later on in the book the author of Ecclesiastes will get the hint. After moved by the spirit to write those couplets made famous by Peter, Paul, and Mary: “a time to be born, a time to die...” The author hints at what I have been trying to tell you when the words appear: “{God} has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, He has put eternity in their hearts.”
Here in this place, we have been reminded that there is something more. That our life in more than a barn filled with goods. That it is not all vanity. That eternity can come into our hearts, and hands, and hearts, and minds.
Its here now in song, and word, and in the bread and wine all of which is Christ’s own gifts to us.
Here we receive a barn full of grace. Its grace that is worth more than a barn-full of goods. It “grace-a-paloza”!
Embracing this grace, living out this grace, when our time comes maybe just maybe we’ll be remembered as someone who was “rich toward God” and in that way as someone who was rich indeed.
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1. Diane Winston, “Jimmy Swaggart’s Rise and Fall Shaped the Landscape of American Televangelism,” The Conversation, July 11, 2025, https://theconversation.com/jimmy-swaggarts-rise-and-fall-shaped-the-landscape-of-american-televangelism-260377.
2. https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/jimmy-swaggarts-rise-and-fall-shaped-the-landscape-of-american-televangelism/
3. Winston,. loc.cit.
4. “The Televangelist Who Imploded in a Sex Scandal,” The Week, July 18, 2025, 35.
5. Michael E. Eidenmuller, “Jimmy Swaggart - Apology Sermon (21 Feb 1988),” American Rhetoric, February 21, 1988, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jswaggartapologysermon.html.
6. Ecclesiastes 1:2 & 14. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version updated edition]
7. Fred B. Craddock, Luke: Interpretation Bible Commentary (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1990), 163.
8. William H. Willimon, “Wise Up,” Pulpit Resource, Year C, 35, no. 3 (July 1, 2025): 25–28.
9. William H. Willimon, “Wise Up,” Pulpit Resouce 21, no. 3 (2022): pp. 15-17.
10. Lucy Foster-Smith, “Luke 12:13-21,” Devotion for Saturday, July 30, 2022. Fourth Presbyterian Church (Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, 2022), https://www.fourthchurch.org/devotions/2022/073022.html.
11. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say August 3? 8th after Pentecost,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, 1AD, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.
12. ibid.
13. St. Luke 12. 20. (MSG) {MSG=The Message. Eugene H. Peterson, “St. Luke 12:20.,” in The Message: The New Testament in Contemporary English (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1995).
14. Ecclesiastes 2:17. (NRSV)
15. Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg and Nicholas Schaser, “Is Everything Vanity the Hebrew Meaning of Hevel,” Is Everything Vanity The Hebrew Meaning of Hevel (Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! December 8, 2021), https://www.patheos.com/articles/is-everything-vanity-the-hebrew-meaning-of-hevel
16. Richard Lischer, Reading the Parables (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 36.
17. The Week, loc.cit.
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