Proper 13 Year C 2025: Luke 12:13-21

I’ve heard it said that funerals bring out the best in people. I’ve also heard it said that funerals bring out the worst in people. But in my experience, funerals bring out the most in people. Whatever you are, deepest to your core, is what the death of a close loved one will bring out in you. There is a segment of my family who are,, at their core, grifters. They’ll never turn down the opportunity to make a quick buck. And any time you see an obituary for anyone closely linked to this part of the family, no matter how long they’ve been ill, it will always say “memorials to the family for future designation”. “Future designation” meaning to line their pockets. There’s no charity those memorials are going to. It’s so much a part of who this branch of the family tree is that whenever anyone does something cheap or blatantly trying to get something from someone, my mom and I will say to one another, “memorials to the family”. It’s our code for “cheap person who will do anything to make a quick buck”.

We don’t know about this guy who approaches Jesus. Is he truly being wronged, or is he “memorials to the family”? Jesus…isn’t particularly interested either way. Because Jesus sees this question posed as being asked to judge whose greed is more righteous. We can tell because the next thing Jesus does is tell a parable about greed and hoarding wealth.

The Law wasn’t full-on primogeniture, where the first born son inherits everything, like it would become later on in areas of Christendom. Different portions of the Law made provision for those beyond the firstborn-son-heir - for the daughters of men who only had daughters, for sons from different wives, and for younger sons. So your well-being if you were not the firstborn son wouldn’t necessarily be entirely dependent on the firstborn son’s benevolence. But in today’s story, this younger son clearly had an issue with the way in which his brother was interpreting the Law, and so he thought he’d bring Jesus into it. The man wasn’t wrong to ask Jesus. A teacher, or rabbi, could be expected to know and interpret the inheritance laws. But Jesus says, “no thank you”. Jesus instead tells a story about greed and hoarding wealth. Jesus makes the point that the rich man - in the Bible I used the story is titled “the parable of the rich fool” - has an overabundance of goods and decides that his time and money would best be used building better ways for him to hoard even more of his wealth.

You’ve probably heard the adage that Jesus quotes through the rich man in the parable: “eat, drink and be merry”. Do you remember how it ends? “For tomorrow we die!” This was a common saying even in the time of Jesus. Some version of that saying appears several times in the Hebrew Bible, like in Ecclesiastes 8:12-15 which reads, “Though sinners do evil a hundred times and prolong their lives, yet I know that it will be well with those who fear God, because they stand in fear before him, but it will not be well with the wicked, neither will they prolong their days like a shadow, because they do not stand in fear before God. There is a vanity that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity. So I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.”

Throughout Ecclesiastes, a common theme is everything being under God’s control. The word “vanity” appears many, many times throughout Ecclesiastes, as it did in today's reading, but there isn’t a great single word translation for what is meant by the Hebrew hevel. It is translated as “meaningless”, “absurdity”, “emptiness”, incongruity”, and “uselessness”, its literal meaning is “breath”, “breeze”, “vapor”, or “mist”. Whether understood more as liquid or as air, hevel is fundamental to sustaining life despite the fact that it evaporates and dissipates. So if meaning is only found in the permanent and unchanging, then the book of Ecclesiastes will seem incredibly frustrating.

Jesus, and his audience, would have known all of this. Ecclesiastes is read in the Jewish community during the feast of Sukkot, a joyous pilgrimage festival that is established in Deuteronomy. This festival underscores the precariousness of life and yet the joy to be found even in the enigmatic nature of life. 

My favorite scriptural usage of “eat, drink and be merry” is in the apocryphal Tobit where a man is about to be married. The woman has had 7 husbands, all of whom died immediately following their wedding night. And so the woman’s brother says to the man, you might as well eat and drink and be merry, with the implication that if the past is any indicator, tomorrow he will die. So it’s not particularly pithy in the Old Testament, but it is when Paul quotes it in 1 Corinthians. When Paul uses it, he turns its meaning on its head, saying that if there is no resurrection of the dead, we might as well eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die and then there is nothing else.

But he makes the same point. Tomorrow isn’t a guarantee, so whatever we do today ought to count. As the writer of Sirach notes, “One becomes rich through diligence and self-denial, and the reward allotted to him is this: when he says, ‘I have found rest, and now I shall feast on my goods!’ he does not know how long it will be until he leaves them to others and dies.”

What is the difference, where is the line, between responsible saving and hoarding wealth? That is a question that each person who is fortunate enough to have more than what they need for that given day, that given pay period, must answer for themselves. Because when you’re at a point where you’re not living paycheck to paycheck, money stops being a math problem and starts being a values problem. What does how we spend our money say about what we value? I’m not saying we should never “eat, drink, and be merry”. Living in a completely stark and stripped down environment isn’t sustainable. I once went to a seminar on theological themes in Harry Potter. One of the first questions the clinician addressed was “why Harry Potter?” Like why pay attention to this with everything else going on in the world that is more important than a fiction series? And the answer she arrived at was, “because we’re made for this too”. We’re made for art and for music and for beauty. We’re made for balance. And one of the ways we can find that balance is to ask the values question when we spend our resources. Are we storing up treasures for ourselves while not being rich towards God?

Throughout the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of Luke, greed is viewed as idolatry, where it's not a math question, it’s a values question. And by putting wealth above all else, through hoarding it, wealth becomes the ultimate goal, thus creating an idol. So Jesus time and again tells us to sell what we have and give to the poor; sometimes to get rid of everything. But, I don’t think Jesus means everything in a literal sense. Although he’s using hyperbole as a rhetorical device, it doesn’t mean his point isn’t valid and can be dismissively thrown out. The more uncomfortable “sell everything and give to the poor” makes us, the more we are tempted to ignore it as hyperbole, the more Jesus is inviting us to look at the problem we think is a math problem. Because what we might find instead is a values problem. Amen.