Download 3-03-13 -- The S Word, Greed, Sin that is Never Satisfied CTV

“The S__ Word: Greed, the Sin That’s Never Satisfied”
Rev. Cathy Vitek
March 3, 2013
Ellicott City Parish
Scripture Readings
Mark 10:17 – 31
1 Timothy 6:17 – 19
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TV_Q37cKfo&playnext=1&list=PL65C49AD76
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Greed is good! So says the voice of Michael Douglas and the character of Gordon Gecko
Douglas played in the 1987 movie called Wall Street. Greed is right, greed works. Greed
is good. It saves companies; it spurs the economy that helps the great nation run well.
Greed is right, greed works. Greed is good.
Or is it? Because if greed is good, why is it that most of us this morning would not seek to
emulate the avaricious, malicious, self-serving character of Gordon Gecko? If greed is
good, why don’t more of us want the word “greedy” as
our epitaph? If greed is good, then why was the graceless
Ebenezer Scrooge the villain in A Christmas Carol?
Charles Dickens writes of his character: “Oh! But he was
a tight fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A
squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,
covetous old sinner. Hard and sharp as flint, from which
no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret and self-contained, and solitary as an
oyster.”
I don’t know very many who aspire to be Scrooge.
So maybe what’s good about Greed is that’s so easy to spot…
Berni Madoff and Ponzi schemes, Deepwater Horizon and the
Gulf Oil Spill, private jets, Enron, rain forest waste-lands, Haitian
ex-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, Scrooge McDuck, Nucky
Thomspon in Boardwalk Empire, Tony Soprano, Cruella DeVille,
Jim Baker and his wife Tammy Faye -- and a little closer to
home, for those of you who have been around long enough to
remember former Old Court Savings and Loans President and
now-ex-convict Jeffrey Levitt – all these people and places and
events conjure some image of greed, don’t they?
These kinds of images make it easy for us to see how systemic, political, national, cosmic
even, that greed is – greed is about the BIG stuff, the stuff that newscasts are made of….
It’s so easy to talk about some evil done to us or done to our community or to the nation or
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to the world by wicked, greedy people in wicked, greedy institutions that create and sustain
unjust economic and ecological systems.
But the reality is that greed is an equal opportunity employer, and no matter our economic
status, our social status, or our level of perceived success in life, greed lurks just around the
corner. For everyone. Everywhere.
And despite Gordon Gecko’s declaration, greed is decidedly not good.
When early church father John Crysostom wrote his rules for clergy, he indicated that
greed was the chief clerical sin, and so I think he would agree with author James Ogilvy
who wrote that “Greed turns love into lust, leisure into sloth, hunger into gluttony, honor
into pride, righteous indignation into anger, and admiration into envy. If it weren’t for
greed, we would suffer fewer of the other vices. (Wicked Pleasures: Meditations on the
Seven Deadly Sins). In greed, our desires get the best of us and bring out the worst in us.
Greed takes our desires, and through our desires, greed brings out the worst is us. I think
that’s the key to understanding why we need to proactively guard against greed individually and collectively. Because like all of the other Seven Deadly Sins that we’ve
been focusing on during this Lenten season, at the base of greed there is a desire for
something good -- something good that we were created to use and enjoy, something good
that only when distorted by sin, does it become hideous and infectious and destructive.
The “good thing” that lies at the base of greed is that we were created in the image of our
Creative God. And so there is this desire in our DNA that makes us want to create and be
productive and to think and to explore and to somehow make a mark on this world that will
last a long time after our mortal bodies pass away; our natural human inclination to be
seeking.
This seeking has afforded us things like personal computers, smart
phones, space travel, life saving medical treatments, breath-taking
art and architecture, the wide world of sports, delicious food and
beverage and things that have become so common to us that we
take them for granted – things like bathrooms and automobiles,
airplanes, round things called wheels, clean water supply and fire.
Amazing things, beautiful and wonderful that make life “more”
than what it could be without them.
One of the things that often happens, though, is that in our quest for more innovation, for
more “better things” we neglect to take into account the effect that our quest might have on
other people or on the environment. And so we wind up with children working in
sweatshops to give us fashionable clothing and depleted rain forests for the sake of
supplying timber for development and people already living in impoverished circumstances
dying of lung cancer from working in coal mines.
Now I think a good thing is that much of the time when there is a collective awareness of
abuse and disease and damage which occur because of our man-made quests, there is most
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often a cry to remedy or reverse or to find another way. But in the meantime, because it is
far too difficult to disentangle ourselves individually from this kind of consumer-induced
communal greed, we ought all be about becoming more and more aware of the impact of
our purchasing decisions while at the same time crying out with unified voice: Lord, have
mercy on me, a sinner.
We were created with this desire to create, but I think more than that, even, we were made
with this longing, this intense desire to connect with something bigger than ourselves…we
were made with this longing to connect with our God. As St. Augustine said, we were
made for a relationship with our creator and without it our hearts will always remain
restless and hungry. And I think that it is this desire for something bigger than our selves
that greed so often distorts into self-centered ugliness.
Restless and hungry hearts look everywhere for fulfillment. Restless and hungry hearts
think that if only I had more money or a bigger house or the perfect vacation house or the
higher paying job or higher status job or more expensive clothes or looked younger or more
beautiful/handsome or had better stuff – or if I can be the one that dies with the most toys –
then my heart will be satisfied. Content. Then I will be fulfilled. Then I will find peace.
But that’s just the thing – none of that “stuff” is ever going to be the thing that satisfies our
restless hearts because our hearts are not hungry for money or for status or for stuff or for
the perceived security that money can provide; our hearts are hungry for relationship with
our Divine Creator, God.
St. Thomas Aquinas said that greed is a kind of self-delusion because riches (money) have
a way of deceiving us into believing that we can attain self-sufficiency and all we could
ever need or desire. Greed becomes a false god, a matter of misdirected worship. And the
first of our commandments is “I am the Lord your God…You shall have no other god
before me.” (Exodus 20:1-2).
In today’s scripture reading I think we find the rich man suffering from this kind of selfdelusion, that money is the only thing that could provide what he needed, and yet, he knew
something was amiss. Jesus had been going about the region of Judea teaching the crowds
who gathered around him to listen. And on this day as he was just setting out, a man ran up
to him and knelt in front of him.
There was clearly an urgency in this man’s need to be seen and heard by Jesus. It couldn’t
wait – he ran to Jesus. And what’s more, he knelt in front of Jesus, assuming the posture of
one who needed to be healed. He saw himself as someone not quite whole – someone in
need of something to make things right, searching for something else that would make him
complete. In my mind’s eye I can see how anxious he is, how important it is for him to
know the answer to the one thing he needs to know the most. “Good Teacher,” he asks
Jesus, “what I must I do to inherit eternal life?” The man thinks that if he could just figure
out the answer to that question, then his quest would be over – the longing in his heart
would be met.
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Jesus reminds the man of God’s goodness and of the commandments and the man said to
Jesus, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” And then
Jesus looked at him, really looked at him – into him, through him,
and Jesus saw what was missing, he saw why the man’s heart was so
restless and scripture says that he “loved him --- when you love
someone you have compassion and kindness and patience and love
makes you want to give what a person needs, love makes you want to
answer the question – and so with love, with the man’s very best
interests at heart, Jesus said “you lack one thing; go, sell what you
own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in
heaven; then come, and follow me.”
What Jesus saw was that the need for money, of earthly treasures, the accumulation of
“stuff” had a hold on this man. Despite what we sometimes hear, scripture doesn’t say that
money is the root of all evil; scripture says the love of money is the root of all evil – and
Jesus could see that this man – this man who could proclaim God’s goodness and who had
kept all the commandments since he was old enough to be accountable for his actions – this
man loved money and the stuff that money could buy and even though he was aware that
something was still missing – that the money and stuff had not filled that restlessness and
hunger of his heart – even though he knew that Jesus was somehow linked with what it was
that would calm his restlessness and feed his hunger, this man could not leave his treasure
behind – he couldn’t love Jesus more that he loved his stuff.
Scripture affords us the opportunity to see that man’s reaction – our translation says that he
was shocked – but in Greek the word used there means sad... the man was sad when he
heard what Jesus was telling him and he went away grieving. It was like a death sentence to
him. The love of money – putting wealth and stuff above relationship – relationship with
the environment, or with humans we’ve never and will never meet, with humans we know,
with our family, our friends, with God. Putting money, or the acquisition of money or stuff
above everything else, is greed.
And greed is not good.
And yet, probably none of us in this room are called to live lives of poverty, cloistered
away from temptation. We are called to live grace-filled, productive, light-bearing lives
right where we are.
So the question is, how do we live in a society where money is necessary and the things it
can acquire are helpful and fun and make life enjoyable and better? How do we
accumulate these things without giving them god-like status? I think part of the answer lies
in knowing when enough is simply enough. We need to learn to cultivate that
characteristic, the self-discipline that allows us to limit ourselves to those things that are
really going to make a difference in our lives. We need to learn to ask ourselves the
question: will that bigger house or that other car or that new wardrobe or whatever it is –
how will that better the life that I have right now? And if it will, great. But if the only
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explanation we can come up with is “I just want it”…maybe we can put that decision off
for a while and reconsider.
It’s a counter-cultural idea, I know -- I think that’s always been a counter-cultural idea.
Even the disciples were perplexed at Jesus’ acclamation that it’s not easy for those who
have wealth to enter the kingdom of God – the rich can have everything they want, cant
they? If the rich can’t be saved, who of us can? Jesus said it’s hard – we can’t do it on our
own – we can only be saved with God’s help and with God are all things possible, even
opening the clutching, covetous hand of an old sinner like Scrooge, even opening my eyes
and your eyes to how we all too easily allow sin -- including greed and the other Seven -to seep into our everyday lives and infect just about everything we do.
Whether we like to admit it or not, whether we like to talk about it or not, sin is very much
a part of our ordinary, everyday lives...and so the only way for us to address it is through
seemingly small, mundane, daily acts of defiance and resistance, the self-denial that we are
called to especially in this season of Lent, and then in that way we can begin to let go of
vice and allow virtue to take root and thrive.
Greed is most vulnerable where its counter virtue, generosity is at work. In the church,
when the offering plate is passed and we are asked to put our money where our hearts are,
when we are asked to take a stand publically to say just where we are in regard to the things
of this world – the offering, given open-handedly, gratuitously, generously may be one of
the most radical, countercultural, defiant acts the church demands of us.
Learning the art of generosity, or allowing the Spirit to cultivate that fruit in us – not just at
offering time, not just at church – but throughout our lives, keeps greed at bay. Generosity
helps us imitate our gracious, generous, Creator and makes us more human – humanity as
God intended it to be. Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35).
And Jesus, who gave his everything for us, would know.
And I think the practice of Sabbath is a valuable tool to help us cultivate generosity as
well…Sabbath, or the time we allot on a regular, recurring basis to take a time out from
working – to remember and reclaim that our purpose in life is not about labor and
productivity, our purpose in life is not to acquire stuff, our purpose in life is simply about
the enjoyment of God and God’s creation. The purpose of our lives is to cultivate a
relationship with God and to live out our lives through that relationship.
Sabbath is a time to re—member, to re-connect, to re-orient ourselves, to reclaim our
status as God’s sons and daughters, and to be so filled with gratitude for what we have been
gifted with that it spills over into generous acts of giving in all areas of our lives as our eyes
are slowly opened to those in need all around us. May our hands be more frequently open,
our eyes be more readily open and our hearts be more open to act as we continue to our
journey, living into the likeness of our gracious and generous God. Amen.
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