Musings from Bishop Miller 7/31/25

An occasional series of posts by Bishop Miller called “Musings,” normally reflect on one or more of the texts appointed for Sundays. We hope you will find these thoughts useful for your own meditations on scriptures.

Luke 12:13-21

The author of Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth in Hebrew, often translated Preacher) calls his efforts “vanity of vanities” and compares his labors, and even his gaining of wisdom, to chasing after or feeding on wind. These words sound to us like despair and hopelessness, a kind of “why bother” attitude toward life.

In Luke, chapter 12, Jesus is confronted by a young man as he is speaking with his disciples. This takes place as crowds gather around Jesus, pressing in on him, trampling one another to get close to him. Imagine the difficulty Jesus must have had as he tried to impart wisdom to those disciples while they were being jostled about by the crowd. And the disciples had their own struggles to listen while also holding back the growing horde of those who wanted their own time with Jesus.

Then a voice cuts through the chaos and noise: “Teacher, tell my brother to divide his inheritance with me!” Brushing off the request with a simple “Who made me judge over you,” Jesus uses this as an opportunity to warn his disciples from greed “for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of one’s possessions.” He illustrates this with a parable about a foolish rich man, a landowner who experienced an abundant harvest of grain. This man, he says, decided to store up his harvest in new barns built just for that purpose and then live the rest of his life in ease, only to have God demand his soul from him the very night he decides to embark on this new construction.

Both Jesus and Qoheleth take on greed. While Qoheleth recognizes vanity in accumulating wealth as vanity – “I hated all my toil in which I toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me” – the parable of Jesus similarly states, “the things you prepare, then, whose will they be?” In our day we recognize this as well with our adage, “you can’t take it with you.”

I look at the abundance in my home—my clothes closet is full and so are our cupboards; we have sufficient funds in our retirement accounts—and early this morning, as I walked the streets around the Phoenix Convention Center, I noticed the many people sleeping on sidewalks and benches: What connects these to each other?

Qoheleth and Jesus remind us that the end of all things is the same, no matter how much we have. And both point us toward the same goal – trust in God and not in things. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” says Jesus. Trust in God leads me to struggle against my proclivity for accumulation. Trust in God leads me to wonder how I can use what I have for the sake of my neighbor. Trust in God moves me from despair—vanity of vanities—to hope in a future in the hands of our creator who is our true wealth and abundance.