Our readings this week are Job 12:7-10 and Luke 12:16-21.

I've been reflecting a bit this week on how different cultural contexts can shape our understandings of events and ideas, and the ways we react to them.  Take for instance that well-known phrase, 'yIlop! wa'leS chaq maHegh!', or, to translate it from the Klingon, 'Celebrate! Tomorrow we may die!'

Over the last 60 years, the fictional Klingon culture has become surprisingly well-developed, evolving as part of the Star Trek universe in the hearts and minds of writers and fans.  Within the stories, it has a defined worldview, a mythos, religion, and even a coherent language - a complete culture that is in many ways familiar, and in others alien.  As a literary device, like any imagined people, it serves both as a mirror to, and a challenge for, the culture that created it.

Marc Okrand (the professional linguist who created the Klingon language), in his book The Klingon Way: A Warrior's Guide writes of this particular proverb:

'This ancient Klingon saying is unrelated to a similar expression heard on Earth, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die." The Klingon locution speaks of celebrating one's own impending, presumably honourable and glorious death.  The Terran version has come to mean "Enjoy yourself now; it may be your last chance."'

As a Terran phrase, it has its roots in scripture - we find it, or something very similar to it, four times in Ecclesiastes (2:24, 3:13, 5:18, 8:15), and almost exactly in Isaiah 22:13, which is in turn quoted by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:32 .  Then, of course, we have Jesus making use of it in his story at Luke 12:19, where the rich man says to himself, 'relax, eat, drink, be merry' - and then, tomorrow, dies!

That 'last chance' Terran thinking is very much the context of Isaiah 22: in a situation in which the realities around them should have been lifting the hearts and minds of the people to the God who loved and sustained them, they instead decided '‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’   Again, where Paul quotes this moment in 1 Corinthians, he does so to underline his hope in the resurrection; if there is nothing more than this life, he says, then whatever I can get my hands on becomes my best hope, and my best purpose, and I may as well give up as my ancestors did: "If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’"

It's an attitude that pervades our culture - and the way it pursues fame, fortune, glory, and pleasure, and turns them into ends in themselves, masters to be served, and, worst of all gods to be worshipped - as if there were nothing else!

This is the point that Jesus subverts in his tale - the ludicrous farmer he paints is as deluded in thinking that he can live forever, luxuriating in opulence, as he is in believing he can build new barns fast enough to store his mounting harvests...  His assumption that his wealth and pleasure are the most important thing, or his only hope - that the best he can do is 'eat, drink, and be merry' is ripped away when God calls him home.

Of course it's nonsense - how can we possibly think the trappings of wealth and privilege are the be all and end all, when in the hand of God 'is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.'  Even, says Job, the animals know this!

The best, you see, is yet to come.  Reality is bigger than we generally remember on a day to day basis.

And this, again, is the understanding we find in Ecclesiastes - that most wonderfully 'real' of all biblical texts.  At the end of all his considerations, the writer concludes - again, and again (and again, and again!) - that the only reasonable response to the immensity of a God who is so unfathomable as to go unmentioned in the text, is to surrender to the reality of an existence yet beyond our capacity to know.

Yet, counterintuitively, that releases us to be able to enjoy the here and now even more fully!  By recognising earthly pleasures to be diminished foretastes of that which is to come, we strip them of their tantalising promises of vainglory, and release them to be enjoyed afresh and to the full; by looking up to glimpse heaven above, when we bring our eyes back down to earth we find the world has become beautified and redeemed - and through its redemption, conformed more closely to the wonder that yet awaits.

So drink deep of the creation around you - celebrate its beauty, and the extravagance and abundance of the God it reveals - not gulping it down like the desperate glutton seeking to rinse every last drop before darkness and destruction; but savouring it as a connoisseur of the kingdom to come - tasting today the bread of tomorrow: yIlop! wa'leS chaq maHegh!