COMPULSIONS OF THE FALSE SELF: GREED
Text: I Timothy 6:6-10; Luke 12:13-21

I woke up on July 12 and spied out my front window an abandoned Volvo wagon sitting in the street in front of my house. “That’s funny,” I thought, then watched the police come and take care of it. An hour later I went to get into my car, and it was gone! Thieves had dumped the Volvo and traded for a newer model. Mine! I got it back that evening. It was a mess inside, but no damage, except for the last remains of police fingerprint dust which goes deeper than sin - - and is harder to wash off. The one dent above the passenger-side window where they had pried the window open is now repaired.

They stole everything inside including glasses, briefcases, check book and golf clubs. They did leave three books on baptism. I suppose they weren’t interested in baptism.
I can still see slight smudges left by the fingerprint dust. I’m OK with that. They are a daily reminder of Jesus’ words:

Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal. Lay up instead treasures in heaven.

The incident has been a pain. I’m still filling out papers. It has tempted me to another of the deadly sins, Anger. But it has served to reveal to me my attachment to possessions, particularly my car. I have too great an attachment to the car I drive. It means too much, carries too much value, occupies too much thought, consumes too much psychic energy. I have an auto-attachment disease. So the incident is helping pry my fingers off my golden calf of a car. Anne Lamont says that everything in life she’s needed to let go of has claw marks all over them. So with me.

I

I’m speaking today of the fifth of the seven deadly sins: Greed, or as it is sometimes called, Avarice. It is a compulsion of the false self. Here’s my working definition: Greed is the love of possessing that orders the self around possessions and closes its eye to the neighbor.

I could quote Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist warnings against greed. It is a universal disease. The Apostle Paul wrote:

The love of money [not money but the love of it] is the root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.
Where do you feel those pangs?

Tolstoy told the story of a man who was told he could have as much land as he could run around in one day. He set off at dawn to encircle his land. As the day wore on, the circle got bigger and bigger. Compelled by the thought of all he could own, he kept widening the circle, stride by stride, until at sunset he staggered and fell, dead from a heart attack.

Where are you running and running, widening the circle?

In her brilliant book on Greed, Phyllis Tickle shows how the Latin form of Paul’s warning was formed by the early church into an acrostic which lampooned the greedy character of Roman culture. Down the left margin were the letters that spelled Rome: ROMA; across from each letter were Paul’s words:

Radix (the root)
Omnium (of all)
Malorum (evils)
Auaritia (is avarice)
As we might do today with U.S.A.:
The United
States
of
Avarice
 

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to the testimony of Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, July 16, 2002, to the Senate Banking Committee following the Enron and associated scandals.

Why did corporate governance checks and balances that served us reasonably well in the past break down? At root was the rapid enlargement of stock market capitalizations in the latter part of the 1990s that arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice. An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community.... It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed have grown so enormously.

Pieter Bruegel, the sixteenth-century painter, depicted Greed in a painting entitled, “Big Fish Eat Little Fish.”

In the center is a grotesque beached fish, big as a house. It takes a ladder for the fisherman to climb to its back. One fisherman, using a knife as big as he, has to cut open its stomach. From the fish’s mouth and stomach pour hundreds of smaller fish, each vomiting smaller fish from its mouth.
The twentieth-century Donizetti paints Greed as a beautiful, naked figure. She is almost too thin; she has the short, tousled hair of a boy! She’s holding a bag of treasure to her cheek; she’s sitting on another larger bag. They all are perched on a small raised platform. She is beautiful but unspeakably sad. We ache. For her, for ourselves.

The church has its own share of greed, as it has through the centuries muted its prophetic voice to protect its fortunes, truly as Non-Prophet Organization. Or it has engaged in what has been called Simony, the selling of the free grace of God. The Reformation began in part in protest against the selling of indulgences, where a gift of silver would reduce one’s tenure in Purgatory.

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Pardoner tells a morality play about Greed. Three men find a chest of gold. One of them goes to bring back wine and bread for supper. While he is away the other two plot to kill him. When he arrives they do him in. But the deceased has already poisoned the wine. They drink it and die. All three lie dead at the foot of their treasure, killed by greed.
Then after telling the story, the Pardoner offers to forgive anyone of their sins – including, of course, greed– if they will pay the appropriate fee!

Our Simony is subtler today. Heaven is traded for obedience, including giving to the church. In America, churches preach a gospel of prosperity which makes promises Jesus never made.
Greed insinuates itself into national policy, both domestic and foreign. And it comes not just from a voracious appetite for more but from a deep economic anxiety about the future.

The next twenty years will test our nation’s character as it addresses huge budget deficits, fears of Social Security insolvency, and safety nets for the poor. Will we have the character to ask equal sacrifices from all our citizens for the good of the nation? And will we let more than a few decide what is good for the nation?

II

The Bible warns against greed throughout its pages. “Do not covet” is one of the Big Ten. The prophets warned a proud nation against the corruptions of greed. Amos said of Israel:

They sell the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of shoes.
They trample the head of the poor
into the dust,
and turn aside from the way of
the afflicted.

We could have been reading the New York Times and The Charlotte Observer. Jeremiah said, “From the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain” (Jeremiah 8:10).

In Proverbs 30:8-9 the writer asks to be spared both riches and poverty, lest in riches he be full and deny God and say, “Who is the Lord?” or lest in poverty he steal and curse God’s name.

Then there’s Jesus, who makes us really nervous. But freedom is what he’s after, a radical freedom from attachment to things. And love is what he’s after, the love of neighbor as ourselves.
In today’s text a man asks Jesus to settle a dispute with his brother over the family inheritance. Jesus says, I did not come to preside over your greed. Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, he said, then told the parable.

A rich man had a bumper crop. What would he do with his even greater fortune? Here is his speech:

What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?...I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul (or self): Self, you have ample goods laid for many years. Take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.

Notice the pronouns: I, I, my, I, I, my, I, my, my, I, my, self, self, then a you and a your referring to himself. I counted: 15 out of 62 words referring to I, me, mine.

He is stuck in the first person singular, no thought of God or neighbor or anything outside the self.
Then the verdict. Death comes and says: Fool! This very night your soul is demanded of you. And all these things, whose will they be?

So it is, Jesus concludes, with those who store up treasures for themselves and are not rich toward God.

I want to be “rich toward God” - - at least I think I do. How about you? How, where do we find peace as Christians about such matters? My guess is we all feel more struggle than peace.
What Jesus offers us is a way, the way of gospel simplicity. We find not only peace there along that way, but also joy. If not, it’s not gospel simplicity.

Let me draw this picture. The dominant cultural pattern in America is the way to affluence: You are what you own. Its hand is the grasping hand. It is a compulsion of the false self, always needing more, always fearful of losing what it has.
The opposite way is the countercultural way of asceticism: You are what you refuse. The hand is held up in righteous refusal. This path can be as compulsively driven as affluence.
Some of us bounce back and forth between the two, between splurge and self-denial, between binge and purge. Monastery and South Park Mall.

Jesus offers a third way, the way of gospel simplicity. Its hands are open, open to receive God’s blessings and open to generously pass them on to others. Open hands, grateful hands, generous hands.

When we’re in the spiritual space of gospel simplicity we’ve discovered what we need, what is enough. There’s peace and there’s joy about what we have and what we give. We are finally content.

In Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow there’s a stark contrast between a wise old farmer named Athey and his brash young son-in-law, Troy. Berry writes:
He [Athey] and Troy were different, almost opposite, kinds of men. Athey said, “Wherever I look I want to see more than I need.” Troy said, in effect, “Whatever I see I want.” What he asked of the land was all it had.
In our greed what we ask of the land, of God’s world, is all it has. And in so doing we rob our children and their children of God’s gracious gift of Earth.
Greed never has enough. It says, I need this to be beautiful, to be powerful, to be fulfilled, to be secure, to be me.

Conclusion

Carlyle Marney preached a number of times on Psalm 37 and the verse “Delight yourself in the Lord, and God will give you the desires of your heart” (v.4). Here is how Marney would translate the verse: Delight yourself in the Lord and God will change your wanter!” or he’d translate this way: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and God will teach you what your heart can afford to want.”
We need, we want that kind of wisdom: to know what our hearts can afford to want. It’s that place where God’s desires and the desires of our hearts are in sync. Where our wanting comes from the true self, not the false self.

Dante pictures the greedy in Purgatory stretched face down on the ground, repeating the words of the psalmist, “My soul cleaveth to the dust” (119:25). Dust is not what we want, but God and one another in relationships of love.

So we, wiping the dust off our faces, our mouths, look up and cry with another psalmist: I will lift up my eyes to the hills, from whence comes my help.
Come, O Help, come.