The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 13C
From the letter to the Colossians: “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry).” From the mouth of Jesus: “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” And from pen of the writer of Ecclesiastes: “I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me — and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.”
Greed is idolatry, life is not about stuff, and you can’t take it with you when you die.
But… the thousands and thousands of years of human history show that greed is a pernicious sin that plagues us persistently. We want stuff, we want more of it, we want to keep it, and, most importantly, we don’t want to lose it.
We don’t want to lose what we think we are owed – which is why the man asks Jesus to tell the man’s brother to split the inheritance with him.
We don’t want to lose our stuff when we die – the writer of Ecclesiastes worries that all his work will be in vain if a foolish person inherits his stuff, presumably to squander it. I do wonder how the writer of Ecclesiastes would feel about our modern society, in which there’s a strong possibility of having so much wealth that your offspring will manage to fall upwards, no matter how many times they fall!
And, as we read in Colossians, we also struggle to put to death this primal urge for earthliness, greed, and idolatry. Why?
Why do we struggle so much against these things, when we proclaim in our faith that there is far, far more to life than stuff, when we proclaim that God gives us a gift of life now, through the Holy Spirit and Jesus, a life that knits us to God’s eternal love now and forever? Why do we struggle with these things when we can start living in the Kingdom of God now?
Why do we struggle so much to let go of things that do not serve us – and why do we cling so tightly to us serving those things instead?
We exchange freedom in Christ for slavery to stuff. We sell our birthright as children of God for an exhausting, endless fight to try to win over other people. We sell our siblings into slavery and suffering in order to keep more for ourselves.
We as a human family do such terrible things, when there is such abundance. And when we have enough, when we have more than enough, when we have way more than we’ll ever need, we are more afraid of losing it than we are eager to share it.
Greed is not the sin of a cartoon villain who wants a giant pile of gold to count every day. Greed is the sin where stuff is valued more than life – where stuff is treasured above the life of creation, the life of human beings, the life of human society. Greed is the sin where I’m more afraid of losing even a fraction of what I have than I am worried about how someone or something else might thrive or survive. It’s a soul-sickness that grows.
Fun fact: many of the absurdly wealthy don’t actually have those billions sitting in a bank account. They don’t have a big pile of gold in a money vault. All of those billions are from the combined value of their stocks, and they do not sell those stocks to get money because that would trigger capital gains taxes. The comically wealthy can take loans against those stocks, and then pay those loans back, or get new loans to pay off old loans, or move money around between companies to pay them off. And when the monstrously wealthy living off loans die, then the way inheritance laws work at that level of wealth means that the heirs would get to retain much of the value of those stocks.
These are not the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts lighting cigars with a hundred dollar bill and then starting up universities and charitable foundations to make themselves look generous … and get a tax break. These are people so enamored with their numerical value that they’ll play an elaborate game of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul and then borrowing from Mary to pay Peter, all in the name of not losing the value of a single cent that they extracted from others.
Imagine being so divorced from your community that you cannot see the human beings at all – and can see only numbers. Imagine being so alienated from the compassionate heart we are all born with that you cannot imagine the interconnectedness of God’s creation – and can imagine only new ways to re-write the laws and rules to benefit yourself.
The wisdom we read in Colossians and Ecclesiastes, the guidance from the mouth of Jesus himself is not the sentiment of the poor trying to shame the wealthy. This is the dire warning of prophets and sages that greed ultimately eats the person alive, and greed robs them of the greater riches: creation flourishing, and humanity within creation flourishing, and individuals flourishing within humanity. The greedy lose these greater gifts of God, even as they fear losing the value of numbers on a spreadsheet or a bank account.
Do we want a world of fear and loss, a world of suspicion and greed … or do we want what God wants, a world of celebration and gift, a world of mutual gain and flourishing? Do we want to be enslaved by greed, or do we want to be freed by generosity? Do we want to stay the same and lose all the greater gifts of God, or do we want to live the life that Jesus taught us would bring us greater life? The world around us is yearning for Christians to awaken the compassionate heart at the soul of humanity. The world around us is begging for hope for the future and joy in the present. What will we do, then, to share the abundant riches of God and join God in healing the world? Amen.