9 September 2026 • Friday of Trinity 14 (observed) • Luke 12:13–24a
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A man interrupts the sermon Jesus was giving to ask about money. “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me” (Luke 12:13).
He was probably right. The rabbis had rules — from the book of Moses the oldest son took a double portion, but a doubtful claim could be split even. This brother might be the one who got cheated. So it goes to Jesus, a rabbi, for a ruling.
And Jesus will not touch it.
“Man, who made Me a judge or an arbitrator over you?” (Luke 12:14).
Now hear what He does not say. He does not say the claim is greedy. He does not say the brother is in the right. He does not ask to see the last will and testament. He says, in effect: that is not My office. We would say, that’s not my job. And our Confessions cite this verse and say that in the same way the Church is not about dividing estates either. That belongs to the civil court.
So what do you do with a Christ who will not take your case? Because you probably do have one, and maybe one like his. The eighty acres that went to the wrong side of the family. The parents who never wrote down their will.
But Jesus will not give you a ruling. He gives you the story of a farmer instead.
“The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully” (Luke 12:16).
Nothing is wrong yet. He did not steal the crop — God gave the increase, of course. But now he has the problem every farmer in our county would like to have. There is no room left in the barn.
“I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods” (Luke 12:18).
First the silo. Then the second silo. And then the succession plan, so the place is not sold off in pieces at the auction the week after they bury you.
Not one of those things is wicked. That’s the trouble. Scripture tells you to work and provide, and even to pay your preacher — we heard that. “The laborer is worthy of his wages” (1 Timothy 5:18), which Luther filed under the Fourth Commandment. This is no sermon against money.
Then, when the worldly barns were full, you upgraded, maybe to a different kind, a religious kind. The pledge card. The estate gift to the congregation with your name on it. Your pastor helped, of course — he told you to give first and trust God with your money. True, every word of it. But it can become, every word of it, just another barn, storing it away for the proverbial rainy day. Not trusting God.
Luther did not call this greed. That’s where you might want to go, or think to go — tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me — but he isn’t being greedy. Luther was right. He calls this idolatry. On the First Commandment he writes that the man with money “Feels secure and is joyful and undismayed as though he were sitting in the midst of Paradise.” The man with wealth, in other words, is content apart from God. And this is, as he says in that same First Commandment in the Large Catechism, “the most common idol on earth.” More on that on Sunday.
The most common idol is not a statue. It is a full grain bin in a dry fall.
Now notice who is there with the farmer.
Nobody.
No wife in this story. No brother. No neighbor. No hired man. No poor man at his gate. Just one man. He thinks within himself, he speaks to himself, he answers himself. “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry” (Luke 12:19).
In other words, he preaches himself a sermon. And it is a good one. It has a text — the goods. It has a doctrine — many years. It has an application — rest, take your ease. This man is his own pastor, and his soul responds: amen.
Of course, then another voice speaks — the only time anyone but the man says anything in the story.
“Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?” (Luke 12:20).
Whose will they be? Maybe you have stood in a yard in October while they were selling off a man’s goods, his tools off the back of the hay wagon. The tractor he kept the way you keep yours. The auction sale, the good wrenches. His wife’s dishes in a box for four dollars. Everything he pulled down a barn for, going for whatever the day gives, finally, in the end, going to men who did not even know him.
Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided? And he cannot even answer that question, because he will be dead before it is asked. Which means you cannot answer it either. You might have been doing that math at three in the morning, because somebody in this parish is dying and now you are contemplating your own mortality, counting down your own years. I know that happened with me recently with Dan Heidemann. I was thinking about spending all of his retirement years in dialysis, basically. Doing the math. Maybe try to retire early, so at least you can enjoy the time a little bit.
This is why He, Jesus, would not be your arbitrator. You, like the rich man, want a ruling. He has come to tell you the estate has a court date you do not know about, so you dare not plan for it. And the planning is the reason He calls you Fool.
Okay. That is usually where the sermon ends on this Gospel text, because that is where the parable stops. Go home, don’t be like him, be generous, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring. That’s true. But I thought it was helpful that the reading appointed for this day does not stop there. Jesus continues.
“Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them” (Luke 12:24).
Similar to what we will hear from Matthew on Sunday, but different. Namely, the ravens. A raven. We think of the birds, the beautiful ones, the songbird at the feeder by the window. Not a raven, which is the bird you would have shot at over the corn. Black, loud, carrion-eating, and useless to you.
And yet Jesus gives it as the example, and look what He says about it. The raven neither sows nor reaps. It has no storehouse. It has no barn — contrast that with the farmer. And God feeds it in a hard winter. God feeds it the year the corn fails. God fed it every day you were out there worrying about your own year, and it never once thanked Him, and He fed it again the next morning.
That’s the whole point! Find the one creature in this parable with no barn. It’s not the farmer. It is the bird. The man with the barns is dead by morning, and the bird that never built anything, never earned anything, never once put something away for later, is fed. By God. Today. And tomorrow.
So do you see what He has done here? He has set your whole economic system next to a creature that has none of it, and then points out that it gets fed anyway. Not fed because it was careful. Not fed because it was diligent. Not fed because it made good plans. Fed because God feeds.
Of course, He is not just saying this to the ravens. Ravens don’t need sermons. He is saying it to His disciples, and He says it to you.
Your Father does not feed you because you have got the right barn size. He does not feed you because the estate plan is finished. Or because you gave the right amount today, or before, or in the future. He does not feed you because you finally stopped worrying. He feeds you because He is your Father, and that is what a Father does, and He has been doing it every day of your life, even while you sat there counting the cost, doing the math, thinking about stewardship.
That is, again, why He said: not My job. He still will not divide your estate. He does not tell you how to financially plan. And He never will.
That man wanted a share of what his father had left him, an inheritance. But hear what your Father has left you. He did not divide it and hand you only a portion of it. No — He gives to each and every one of us all of it. The entire estate, in His Son. And there is no brother to fight over it with, because there is more than enough for all.
We might say it this way: Jesus came to be your estate.
Everything the farmer was building toward — security, a settled soul, many years, finally resting and taking his ease — Christ has. As a man, in a body, for you. He did not even have to build a barn. Indeed, He had nowhere to lay His head. He owned one coat, and the soldiers rolled dice for it even while He died. Indeed, Christ was stripped of everything a man can have, so that when God asks “whose will those things be,” the answer over you is: they are His, and He has willed them all to you.
That is why the night the barn is emptied is not the night you are lost. Indeed, your soul will be required of you too. And when it is required, it will be required of the One who bought it, and He has it, and He will not lose it.
So when it comes for the man in this parish who is dying, it will not find him with nothing. It will find him with everything. Because it was never about the barn and the grain and the wealth. It was about Christ the whole time, and it still is, and death has no claim on it.
Of course, He does not send this inheritance in the mail, or bestow it through a judge. He bestows it upon you in the Divine Service. He puts it in your mouth and into your ears.
In a moment you will come up here with nothing in your hands. You did not sow this. You do not reap it either. You have no storehouse for it, and there is no barn to put it in. Because it is a body you did not grow and blood you did not press, given into your mouth, into the mouth of someone who neither sows nor reaps. This is the one meal you will never have to store.
And God feeds you.
Thanks be to Jesus, in His holy name. Amen.
Rev. Christopher R. Gillespie
St. John Ev. Lutheran Church & School — Sherman Center
Random Lake, Wisconsin