“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2)
These are heavy words to begin a Sunday. Yet how true they are.
Ecclesiastes speaks from the depths of experience—of one who has lived richly and wisely, built houses and planted vineyards, gathered silver and gold, and achieved greatness… only to discover that none of it holds. All of it, he says, is hebel—a vapour, a passing breath.
And then we turn to the Gospel of Luke, where a man in the crowd approaches Jesus with a very practical concern: inheritance. “Tell my brother to divide the family property with me.” Jesus, ever the discerner of hearts, refuses to arbitrate. Instead, he tells a parable—not about fairness, but about futility. A rich man builds bigger barns to store his wealth. But that very night, his life ends. All his plans, his striving, his carefully laid security—gone.
“So it is,” Jesus says, “for those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God.”
For us monks, this is not a reading about external wealth alone. We do not have barns, bank accounts, or inheritance disputes. But we have our own inner storehouses. Our attachments. Our comforts. Our carefully preserved identities. We can cling to our sense of being right. To being useful. To being needed. Even to the holiness of our liturgy or the silence of our days—if these become ends in themselves rather than doorways to God.
That is why Paul’s letter to the Colossians strikes so precisely:
“Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.”
“You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
Paul speaks to a church discovering what it means to put on the new self—not simply to believe differently, but to become different. This is not a light project. It involves putting to death the old nature—greed, anger, pride, impurity—those very forces that lead us to build our barns and storehouses in the first place. But Paul doesn’t leave us in the negative. He says we must “put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.” That renewal is not just for the moral improvement of individuals—it is for the healing of the human race:
“In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, slave and free—but Christ is all and in all.”
This is where the monastery—this monastery—finds its true meaning. Our life here is a daily letting go of the illusion of control. A daily resistance to building barns of spiritual pride. A daily return to the simplicity of silence, where Christ dwells not as a possession but as a mystery.
The world outside tells us constantly that we must secure our lives, define our worth, build our futures, defend our legacy. But in this place—in this sanctuary of slowness and surrender—we live by another rhythm. One that says: Your life is not your own. Your value is not in what you do or preserve. Your treasure is not in your barns, but in your hiddenness with Christ.
And here is the paradox: when we truly let go, when we really become poor in spirit, we discover the only wealth that matters. The kind that cannot be taken away. The kind that death itself cannot touch. Christ is all, and in all.
So today, let us return again to that hidden place. Not just in our external silence, but in the hiddenness of our hearts. Let us examine our own barns. What are we storing? What illusions do we cling to for security? What identities do we refuse to surrender?
And then let us pray for the courage to empty them. To be poor. To be unknown. To be entirely God’s.
Because in the end, only one treasure endures:
To be found in Christ.
To be poor in everything else.
And to be rich toward God.
Amen.