Today’s gospel is the primary cause of drug abuse in financial planners. All of us, from farmers to engineers, have times in our lives when we have more than we need, and these times tide us over for those times we don’t have enough. Is Jesus telling us not to do that? There have been times in our history where people have tried. In St. Francis’ lifetime he tried to do just that: ask for what you need, and only that, and trust that you will always get enough. That turned out to be unsustainable and counterproductive, and even the Franciscans now have endowments, building campaigns, and development offices.

Perhaps this gospel reading is not about “you’ll go to Hell for saving too much grain,” but is instead a warning about trusting too much in our safety nets. A few years ago the economy took a bad turn; it was largely due to the greed of a few people, but nearly everyone suffered. We saw our investments tank, and unemployment became a curse that landed at many of our doorstops. Older relatives have stories of the Great Depression where banks failed and whole industries shuttered. Others tell of even more horrific events: genocides, natural disasters, and the like. The man in the gospel didn’t have to die to see it all be taken away: a famine or a war could have done the same thing.

It’s not my intent to scare or depress you. For most of us, these things will never happen. But we need to understand that as people of faith, God does not guarantee us a life of no suffering, or even just the suffering we deserve. I think the first reading today is instructive. The writer is struggling with the purpose of doing the right thing, when it could all go away, or even worse, go to someone else less worthy. Does this sound fair? If the unjust benefit from the labors of the just, why be just? Several years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book based on Ecclesiastes called When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough and I strongly recommend it.

In the book Rabbi Kushner argues that many of us hold the idea that we know what we will need to be happy: we have to hit a certain income, or own a house, or have the right number of children. And then we fulfill those goals and wonder why we’re not as happy as we expected to be. He believes that most of us do want the right things, but we are looking in the wrong direction. Things won’t make us happy: what makes us happy is to live in harmony with God.

For those of us old enough to remember, bands of priests used to travel to parishes once a year or so and give parish missions. They were tightly scripted events: you would go to the church each evening and there was a different sermon encouraging us to “get back on track” with our faith. A common parable was told at many of these: A man walks out one morning to get his newspaper and realizes that the date is one year in the future. He recognizes that he now has a window into what will happen a year from now. Excitedly he opens to the financial page and begins to look at which stocks he will buy when the market opens in a few hours. After he has the list, he begins to read the rest of the paper. It goes well until he reads the obituaries and sees his own name. Suddenly the year ahead of him looks very different.

So how will this year look? After the initial shock, I think the man has a choice. He can spend the next year dreading that date, slowly dying, or he can do something else: he can regroup. Maybe he spends the year preparing his family, making sure things are in order, and living the kind of life he’s always wanted. Spending time with family, travelling, whatever. The point is that he likely isn’t going to watch the stock market in the hopes of getting wealthier.

And maybe that’s the point I would make to the writer of Ecclesiastes. It is all vanity. Some of your labor will benefit others and we don’t always withdraw exactly what we deposited. The people who lived through the Great Depression kept working, and eventually they recognized that they still had what was important. If your work doesn’t provide you all that you want, it doesn’t make it worthless. It pays in different ways and in ways that may never make sense, but valuable nonetheless.

And so, a tip of the hat to all the financial planners out there. We still value you, but as for me, I’m always going to be aware that my goal for me isn’t necessarily what will happen to me.