In my experience, funerals are difficult, but there are often even more difficult times after the funeral—like when it comes time to start deciding who gets Mom’s Precious Moments collection. Slicing the family pie can be extraordinarily tricky. On top of all the grief, figuring out who gets what is often a nightmare of long-buried recriminations.

Why do I say that, for many families, the time after the funeral is the hardest part?

Because while funerals are often searingly painful, they at least have a positive purpose—to allow loved ones a formal way to begin grieving. Funerals, done well, are about embracing and owning the past so that it’s possible to move forward with hope.

On the other hand, the rugby scrum whereby people take stickers with their names on them and start laying claim to stuff is almost never a redeeming experience.

“I get Mom’s wedding ring!”

“Not so fast. Three years ago, Mom promised I could have her wedding ring when we were at the beach.”

“No, see, I talked to Mom at Christmas, and she was clear that I was getting her wedding ring and you were supposed to get her Danielle Steele novels.”

“That’s not right. I’m pretty sure I get the ring, Janice gets the Danielle Steele novels, and you get her used Kleenex collection.”

Humans have an amazing capacity to believe that no matter how much they have, it won’t be enough. Believing the pie is only so big, we grab for as much as we can get since the more someone else gets of it, the less there’ll be left for me.

How else do we explain the fact that the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population owns 40% of the wealth? How can it be moral to have so much while others struggle to put food in their children’s mouths and a roof over their heads?

Take our Gospel for this morning. Right before chapter 12, Jesus has just concluded a series of verbal confrontations with the religious big wheels. He denounced the Pharisees and Scribes for their dogged interest in accruing as much honor and power as they could get their hands on. He calls the Pharisees “unmarked graves” and accuses the Scribes of loading people with burdens too heavy to bear while refusing to lift a finger to help.

As you might imagine, this doesn’t make him any friends among the temple elite. In fact, Luke tells us that the environment around Jesus was getting increasingly hostile.

Jesus has more to say about money and the relationship of power to money than any other single thing in the Gospels. Jesus wants to set money in the context of eternity … but for Jesus, eternity isn’t some far-off land after we die; it’s the reign of God unfolding right here and now, where everyone has enough, but nobody has too much, where those who’ve lived for so long on the margins get to take their place in the center, where abundance is a function of our commitment to sharing, and not an accident of nature or fortune.

Too often, stewardship is a month in November when we talk about money and how-are-we-going-to-keep-the-lights-on-if-people-don’t-pull-out-their-checkbooks? But Jesus is droppin’ a little stewardship on y’all right here on the last day of July, trying to remind us that stewardship is a way of looking at our world and the lives we live in it and realizing that there is enough for everyone … if only we’ll treat community as an opportunity to share ourselves and what we have with one another, and not a competition.

As chapter 12 opens, we see a great multitude gathered to hear Jesus speak. In fact, the number of those gathered was in the thousands. And Luke tells us that “they trampled on one another,” presumably to get a better look at this Jesus guy, who’s issuing a Galilean smackdown out in the countryside.

With the crowd assembled and his disciples at his feet, Jesus turns on the Pharisees again. “Don’t let the Pharisees fool you. You know that the life you live in private will finally catch up to you; the corruption you cling to in the dark will be open for all to see.”

Then, Jesus changes tack and tells his disciples about not fearing the authorities, those who can kill the body but nothing more. The folks in charge want you to think that they control the world, a world where it’s standard fare for the rich and the powerful to have more of everything than they need while everybody else has to scrape by. They want you to think that this is just the way the world is, and they’re willing to make life miserable for anybody who can’t get on board.

But Jesus says, “God has another world in mind, one in which there’s enough for everybody, and nobody gets forgotten. Even the sparrows and the hairs on your head have value. And here’s the thing, if the ruling authorities come after you for holding out for God’s new world rather than tucking your tail between your legs and settling for the one the powerful want you to think is inevitable, don’t worry; God will stand with you in the face of their wrath. If you’re unwilling to settle for this tiny pinched world of scarcity, God will hold you up, lest you fall.”

What’s Jesus doing here? What point is he driving at? What, finally, is at the bottom of all that he’s saying?