The Seven Deadlies - Greed

Luke 12:13-21 (NRSV)
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”
But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, 'What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'
“But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures but are not rich toward God.”

O.K. Here we are on Deadly Sin Number Five. Since I've had to raise my hand every week before this, I think it's no surprise that I'll have to raise it again today. After spending some time this week thinking about greed I have to say, “Yes, in addition to struggling with pride, envy, anger, and sloth...I'm greedy.”

I can trace my problem back to a very early stage in my life. Most of us come into the world with a propensity toward greed. Learning to share our toys with others is an early lesson in tempering our avarice. One of the first things we learn to say, maybe even before 'mama' or 'dada' is the word 'mine.' So we get this greed thing early on. One image for who we are as human beings is the seagulls in the movie Finding Nemo who hover around the water saying, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” A lot of our life is spent trying to claim the same thing.

But I wasn't trying to explain how you might be struggling with greed. I was telling you how I realized I was greedy. It was comic books. I read a lot of comic books as a kid. The Flash. The Green Lantern. Captain Marvel. And in the back of the comic books there was usually a section devoted to really cool gadgets. It was kind of a classified section for everything an adolescent boy might dream of having. X-ray vision glasses that would allow you to see through walls. Practical jokes like chewing gum that would cause your mouth to foam or your tongue to turn black. Miracle methods for developing muscles. Itching powder.

It was the itching powder that did it. Most of those things inspired me to think, “Man, my life would be so much better if I just had that. Now don't ask me why it was the itching powder that most inspired my need to acquire, but that was it. My friend, Philip Jaderborg, and I pooled our allowance money and sent off an order for itching powder.

You know, I think it was Old Bay seasoning. That's what it looked like when it came – like somebody had taken some Old Bay and put it in a plastic bag. No instructions on how to use it and we really weren't creative enough to figure out how to inconspicuously put it down somebody's back or in somebody's underwear so we ended up using it on each other just to see if it worked. What a total disappointment.

You would think an episode like that would have started me down the path to virtue and to realizing that things, stuff was not going to be the magic cure for my desires, but like most everyone else in this society that is built on the need to get more stuff, I haven't shaken that childish belief that my life would be better if I just had that. You've seen the bumper sticker, “The one who dies with the most toys wins”? I may not have that on my car, but that belief that I'm somehow in an unholy competition to get more stuff sometimes works on me.

We've talked each week about how insidious these sins are. Greed, I believe, is in a class by itself. Not only has greed managed to get close to us, it has managed to convince us that it's not even a vice. It masquerades as a virtue.

What do I mean? Well, think about how our economy is built on the notion of greed as good. Advertising appeals to the acquisitive, covetous side of our natures. This iPod? It's not just a desirable little piece of technological wonder. You need an iPod. This Hummer? You could rule the world with this vehicle! This cereal? Your breakfast is going to be so much better with Count Chocula! Everywhere we look we are being told that there are things that we don't have that we not only want, but need.

This week I was in Nashville doing some filming for a DVD for a curriculum that I've been writing on vocation. For the first time in my life I had to sit and be made up for 30 minutes. The young woman doing the make-up said, “You have very dry skin. You should get some man lotion.” Man lotion! I didn't even know there was such a thing. And now that I know there is such a thing, how can I get along without it? I need man lotion! You can bet that before I went to location for the second day of filming I had bought me some man lotion! This is how we get trained in the ways of greed. Henry Ford knew this when he started selling cars at the turn of the last century. He knew he couldn't just poll the people in the market to discover what people wanted. As he said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they'd have said, 'a faster horse.'”[i] He felt he had to educate them on a need they didn't even know they had.

We have even become convinced that buying things is a noble activity. Shortly after the attacks on 9-11 and on at least one occasion since, our president has urged us to keep shopping as a patriotic exercise to support our economy. If you're like me, you probably felt a little uneasy about that. Of course, we want our economy to be healthy, but there is something wrong about the health of our nation being dependent on whether or not I own a TiVo or another pair of trendy shoes.

In the 1987 movie, Wall Street, Oliver Stone created a character that has come to symbolize the worst excesses of greed in our society. Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, is a New York financial tycoon who makes his millions by buying other companies, milking them of their profits and then selling out. In one of the most famous scenes in the movie, Gekko gets up at a stockholder's meeting of Teldar Paper and declares that what we generally have thought of as immoral is, in fact, a great civilizing impulse:

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed -- you mark my words -- will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”[ii]

Greed is good. This is where we have come. Most of us would not agree with Gekko. Most of us believe that there are limits and that individuals, groups, corporations can all go too far in overreaching. But not many of us would agree that it is good to be greedy. It's just hard to know where to draw the line. As Bishop Will Willimon puts it, I am pretty good at seeing when you have crossed the line but pretty poor at seeing when I have tripped over it myself.[iii]

So what's a Christian to do when Greed clothes itself in the garb of a righteous person? How do we know when we've gone too far? We need some “stuff” to survive, but when have we gone from simply living to being truly greedy? As with all these deadly sins, the reason they still beset us is because they have settled in very close to home.

Jesus knew this about us. The temptation to greed wasn't invented by the advertising industry. He knew how easy it was to be distracted by things and the desire for things. He also knew how dangerous it was. It wasn't for nothing that he told the disciples that it was easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In the gospel passage we read today, Jesus tells the story of a rich man who had an incredible harvest on his farm. That's the good news. But he thinks to himself, “Self, what am I going to do? I don't have enough space to put all of my stuff.” And since this was in the era before climate-controlled rental storage units, he said to himself, “I think I'll tear down my barns and build bigger ones so that I can put all of this grain in there.” Sounds like a pretty reasonable plan if you've got the means to do it. Pretty sound thinking.

But then he does something else. He says to himself, “Self, you are in the green. You've got good socked away for many years. It's party time!” (This is from the New Revised Alex Joyner translation of the Bible). Then God says to him...well, what does God say to him?

In most translations you get to this part and it reads, “You fool! This very night your life demanded of you. And these things you have prepared, whose will they be?” That makes it sound like what Jesus is trying to say is: “You can't take it with you.”

But there's another way to translate this. You could read the Greek as God saying, “You fool! This very night, they are demanding your life from you.” And who is they? Those things. That stuff. It's after your very soul. In this case it's not immanent death the man has to worry about...it's slavery to his stuff. Then Jesus follows this up by saying, “Don't worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear...God knows what you need and will provide.”

Our things, our greed, has a way of doing to us what all of these other deadly sins so to us – they can turn us in upon ourselves so that we lose touch with who we really are, so that we lose touch with where our salvation lies, so that we lose touch with the people around us. We saw this week the story of the two winners of the $340 million dollar lottery – one of the biggest ever. We like to fantasize about what we would do with that kind of money...maybe even to fantasize about all the good we would do with it. “I would help the church. I would help the poor. I wouldn't keep it all for myself.” But we have heard enough stories about the fate of lottery winners to know that we need to say a special prayer for Mr. Ed Nabors in Georgia and the unnamed person in New Jersey. If they are like many other people who come into sudden money, their souls are at risk.

Kenneth Lay became a symbol for greed when his company, Enron, went down in a sea of bad business practices. He died before he ever went to prison, though he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. He always seemed a bit bewildered by his fall. How could it happen? He didn't feel that he his life of wretched excess was anything to be concerned about. He owned 15 homes, mostly in Texas and Colorado. He bought a $200,000 yacht for his wife's birthday. Despite his wealth he had over $100 million in personal debt. And when they asked him about it, Lay said, “It was difficult to turn off that life like a spigot.”[iv]

But I don’t tell that story so that we can look at how different Ken Lay was from the rest of us. I tell it because Ken Lay is so much like us. We easily get blinded. We can’t see what our stuff is doing to us. And even though we may not have 1,000 pairs of shoes in the closet like Imelda Marcos, we’ve got our own closets with things so dear to us that we can’t see what’s really important.

So what do we do? If we are so bad at being able to see where we’ve gone over the line, what can we do find our way back? One thing we might try is just saying ‘no.’
What if we said to some of the things that we think we might need, “Thank you, but I’ve got enough”? What if it’s not true that every teenager needs a car? What if it’s not true that only new clothes will do? What if it’s not true that we are depriving ourselves by spending the evening at home together than out spending money? These are things Christians ought to struggle with. If we decide some of these things aren’t true, we’re going to look different.

Another thing we might do is to give. The most radical thing the church may ask you to do is to give money. Why would it do such a thing? Everywhere else I am asked for money I do so in exchange for a service. What sort of service am I paying for when I give to the church? You might say that you are paying to support an institution that you believe in. You might say that you are giving to support a worthy cause – mission projects and other programs that serve people here on the Eastern Shore and around the world. You might even say you’re giving in order to help meet the budget. But none of those things is at the heart of why giving is part of our discipline as Christians.

We are asked to tithe, to give a tenth of our income to God, because it is a spiritual practice that helps us to be freed from greed. The discipline of generosity is a way of freeing us from the illusion that our security is found in our possessions. Our giving is a way of giving thanks to God. As Willimon says, “Gratitude is sparse in those with Greed, Pride, and Envy, too. Greed is that great lack that enables sin to flourish, that great misreading of the true condition of your situation, that refusal to worship God, the giver of all good gifts.”[v] If we are able to emulate God in the giving of a portion of our gifts back to God perhaps we can reclaim the freedom from Greed we are intended to have.

Finally we can acknowledge that our needs are disordered and can only be reordered when we give ourselves to Jesus for reshaping and remaking. Combating greed is the work of a lifetime for Christians. It is something that comes with the daily work of being conformed more and more to the likeness of Christ. Unless we are doing things daily to put ourselves into Christ’s presence, unless we are daily finding ways to give to God, Greed will continue to deform and distort the people we are truly meant to be.

For the foreseeable future we will continue to live in a “bling” culture. The world around us will continue to offer us what Marc Yaconelli calls the unholy trinity of identity. In other words, the world around us will tell us that we are what we look like, we are what we do, and we are what we own. As Christians we must say ‘no’ to all of these. We are far more than our physical appearance. We are far more than the job that we do or the roles that we play. And we are certainly far more than the things that we own. At the end of the day, we are children of God – nothing more, but absolutely nothing less. Thanks be to God.

[i] Richard Laermer & Mark Simmons, Punk Marketing, (HarperCollins: New York, 2007), p. 4.
[ii] Stanley Weiser & Oliver Stone, Script for Wall Street, 1987.
[iii] William H. Willimon, Sinning Like a Christian, (Abingdon:Nashville, 2005), p. 100.
[iv] Phyllis Tickle, “Greed:The Mother of All Sins”, www.beliefnet.com/story/109/story_10952.html
[v] Willimon, p. 105.