Fill us at daybreak with your kindness, that we may shout for joy and gladness all our days. And may the gracious care of the LORD our God be ours; prosper the work of our hands for us! Prosper the work of our hands! If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke (Lk 12:13-21, today's readings).

Then Jesus told them a parable. “There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones.'"

Jesus shares a parable with the crowd after someone tells Jesus to demand that his brother share his inheritance with him. What the inheritance is, we don't know. But Jesus knows the man's heart and warns the crowd to guard against greed and attachment to possessions. The man in the parable builds larger barns and celebrates having, as he says, "so many good things stored up for many years." This also is vanity, Qoheleth would say, that his moment in the sun would not last. As Jesus finish the parable, we hear God say to the man: "You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?" Jesus concludes the parable by teaching us to store up treasure not for ourselves but to labor on earth to become "rich in what matters to God."

God, help me today and every day of my life do the work that Jesus lays out in storing up treasure in heaven. Help me recall the way Saint Paul puts it: dying to this life and finding our lives hidden with Christ in God naturally follows when the focus is on what is above and not what is on earth. Give me the grace, Lord, to live a life that is rich in faith and generosity in the divine inheritance I have in the hope of the resurrection to eternal life.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.