Excess and Abundance

The lesson opens with the parable of the rich fool retold as the dot-com collapse of Pets.com, then uses Luke 12 to ask a question the original parable does not: not whether we have enough, but what we chase past the point of moderation. Excess is gluttony and gluttony is idolatry, the argument runs, drawn from Proverbs 23, Titus 1 and a passage from C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, with two blunt self-tests attached. It turns at Isaiah 55 and Malachi 3 to what God gives without measure, and closes with a call to name the thing and give it up.