Jesus was a master storyteller. He could take profound spiritual truths and make them accessible to his listeners. Using the places and things that were part of their everyday lives, people could immediately relate to the pictures Jesus was painting with His words.
As I was prepping and praying for the sermon about the “Rich Fool”, I was pondering and asking Jesus, “how do I bring a fresh take on a story you told that has been sermonised on for nearly 2,000 years?” And the answer I got was, “You don’t need to”.
You see, Jesus told these stories because they are relatable. People at every period of time through all the ages have needed to hear these stories and will continue to need to hear these stories time and time again. My job was to simply identify the objects of our trust in our time.
For the wise fool it was his big barns of surplus grain, but for us what do the ‘wise’ fools of our generation trust in? I chose to highlight house ownership and certain political systems as some of the things we mistake as our true source of peace and security.
How would you take one of Jesus parables and turn it into a message for today? How would you modernise it for a twenty-first-century audience with everyday objects that people could identify with yet keeps the spiritual truth central?
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