When I read the phrase, “Eat, drink and be merry” in Luke’s Gospel, I am immediately reminded of the refrain of a song by the Dave Matthews band.  In the song “Tripping Billies” Matthews chants, “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die; we’re tripping billies.” To my ears, the song is fairly ironic. It invokes an ancient saying condoning the carefree enjoyment of excess, but it does so with melancholy overtones. The great irony is that excess doesn’t lead to feelings of joy and a carefree existence. Many people today have more than some can even fathom, yet our world is filled with more fear and anxiety than ever.

Look at the faces of the people you encounter in the grocery store, on the sidewalk, or in board rooms. It is amazing how much energy we spend on worry and anxiety in today’s modern world. In a country that consumes much of the world’s resources, in a society that has more and more material goods at its disposal, most of us walk around worried. We are concerned about whether we have enough and how we can get more. We work longer hours, often without a Sabbath rest, and we raise the achievement bar higher and higher, and for what? Security? Peace of mind? A moment of freedom from care?

In Luke 9, a man in the crowd approached Jesus about settling an inheritance dispute. He wanted some assurance that his livelihood would be secure. Like most of us, he was only looking for his fair share of the pie. Jesus seizes upon this man’s desires in order to teach his disciples a lesson about the dangers of greed. The disciples probably found it hard to imagine that they should be concerned about greed. As laborers, many of them were just getting by and lived a disaster away (a sudden illness, family death, etc.) from being destitute. They might have found it odd that Jesus would use a seemingly reasonable question about inheritance issues to admonish them against greed. Like those early disciples, most of us don’t think of ourselves as greedy. Greed conjures up images that are far removed from us: pictures of gluttons and Ebenezer Scrooge, robber-barons and Emelda Marcos’ shoe closet. Greed, like most sins, is much more apparent in others than in ourselves. It is hard for us to fathom that our need for security
and desire for stability may, in fact, be rooted in greed.

The parable that Jesus uses in Luke underscores the subtle ways in which greed affects our thinking. In the parable, a man receives a blessing in the form of a bumper crop. The man’s first response speaks volumes about his spiritual life. Instead of gratitude or thanksgiving, the rich man can only think of how to hoard his fortune. His thoughts are of himself, but, like the person worried about his inheritance, his good fortune actually had very little to do with him or his own efforts. The man may have planted his fields, but he did not bring about the rain and seasonable weather that increased the yield. He could have just as easily been faced with a drought or a plague of insects. The excellent crop the man reaped was a blessing, a gift from God, yet he doesn’t acknowledge it as such. He tells himself, “Eat, drink and be merry.”

Those listening to Jesus would have heard in this phrase an echo of Isaiah 22:13 which depicts God’s people refusing the call to repent and saying to themselves, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die.” Ironically, in the rich man’s case, that very evening God appeared before him. Calling him to account for his life, the Creator asks, “And as for the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” Jesus concludes his parable saying, “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” One of the great problems with greed is that it narrows our focus, making “self” our primary concern. In The Message, Eugene Peterson interprets Jesus’ conclusion this way: “This is what happens when you fill your barn with Self and not with God.”

Jesus’ challenge to his disciples is one involving trust. Where have they placed their trust— in money, in inheritance, in the stuff they’ve saved, or in God? It is difficult to be a faithful disciple when one is primarily concerned with creating one’s own security. It is difficult to think of others, to have a thankful heart, and to bear the fruit of repentance, when all our time is spent worrying about whether we have enough and trying to figure out how to get more.

The irony of our lives is that our consumer culture has taught us that we have to have more of everything, but it hasn’t suggested how much is enough. In today’s terms, nothing is ever enough. God’s question of the rich man in the parable is the same challenge that is placed before us: what accounting will we give for the gift of life we’ve been given?  It is easy to become preoccupied with amassing money, things, and prestige to the neglect of one’s relationship with God. The way to have the elusive happy life we are seeking is not by acquiring more things and building bigger barns. The one who trusts God in all things, who sees life as a gift and blessings around every corner, the one who believes that her life is worth more than what she owns, that is the one who can truly “be merry.”

By Rev. Kym Lucas, Rector, St. Ambrose Episcopal Church, Raleigh