Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick Sermon
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Trinity Church, Hartford, August 4, 2013
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 13C
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Colossians 3:1-11, Luke 12:13-21
Last Sunday’s lessons pointed to the importance of distinguishing between what Paul calls the elemental spirits of the universe and the spirit of Christ. The elemental spirits are those that are ultimately grounded in what he calls a philosophy of empty deceit. In today’s lessons the substance of that philosophy of empty deceit is identified both by Paul and by Jesus with greed. Now what is greed? It is something that we religious folk love to hate. When Gordon Gecko in the movie “Wall Street” extolled to his financial workers that “Greed is good” it was easy to mock him and to point out the obvious truth that religious morality does not condone greed. Rhetorically beating up on greed is one of the easiest tasks Christians face. But I sometimes wonder why, if greed is so obviously wrong, both why it is wrong and why the religious voice has so little real traction in diminishing the greed that abounds in our society and even in our own lives? Why is greed so intractable? Certainly greed is something from which none of us is exempt. It is so powerful a motivation that some, like Gordon Gecko and some political philosophers, have made it the reigning philosophy of their lives, the essential motivating force behind all our decisions and basic life choices.
At one level we all know greed in its mundane and often trivial forms and we all succumb to it at one time or another. I want the largest piece of pizza remaining in the box: I desire an automobile that is classier than anyone else’s. In each of these cases, however, I don’t really need what my greed wants or desires. Greed makes us want more than we really need in order to live a healthy and satisfying life. Notice I’ve said want and desire when referring to greed: not need. What we actually and truly need is what is essential to living lives that are ultimately fulfilling in relation to God and to other persons; that help us to realize all the gifts that God has given us, and that allow those gifts to flourish in ways that are appropriate for our particular personality. We don’t all have the same gifts and the flourishing of our personalities will differ from one unique individual to another. God did not make us by a cookie cutter from which each cookie comes out looking identical to all the others. Differences, healthy differentiation between one person and another, are what make our lives exciting and rewarding. But differences, when exploited by cunning and the philosophy of empty deceit, can also become the basis for greed. When I see someone else living, at least on the surface, with “stuff” that I don’t have, I am tempted to become resentful, to want what he or she has so that I can become fuller than they.
What lies behind this desire for what others have? Basically it is fear: fear that I have not acquired enough stuff to defend myself against those ‘others’ out there who have more than I do and who might take away from me what I already am desperately clinging to. Then we project onto others the same fear and greed that we feel toward them. Greed arises from a psychology of perceived deprivation. Greed encourages us to believe that we don’t have enough to be truly happy and that there is only a limited amount of what is out there and that we’d better get our share now as quickly as possible and by whatever means necessary including deceit and immorality. In this sense greed thrives in an atmosphere of fundamental distrust: we simply do not trust that God will fill us with all things needful. Greed and a lack of trust in God go hand in hand. The more we fear being left on our own, the more room greed has to get a foothold in our psyches, promising us that the more we have the more protected we are from deprivation at the hands of others. Of course the feeling of deprivation is relative and greed exploits the virtually infinite number of things greed encourages us to possess. We want more of everything that money and advantage and privilege can buy. But what amount of income is enough, what size or number of houses is enough, what number of cars is enough, how many clothes, how much property, how many vacations, will satisfy greed? The answer is that no amount of things will ever fill the desires greed convinces us we must assuage because greed is insatiable.
Now at some level we all know these truths: we know, in some deep part of our being and consciousness, that no amount of goods or material possessions will bring us the kind of satisfaction and fulfillment that love, family, friendship, and generous participation in a community of others brings. It has become for many people a kind of rhetorical overkill to continue harping on the elemental fact that as Jesus says in the gospel, “one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." And yet we see all around us and even in our own lives to various degrees, the continual allure of gaining an over-abundance of possessions. Surely all those people who accumulate needless McMansions, or squander their moral credibility by succumbing to corruption and venality in the financial and political worlds, know that their success in accumulating possessions will not bring them ultimate happiness. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology or the fullness of a lifetime to have experienced the emptiness of a life lived solely in the pursuit of more and more possessions. We know in our bones that wealth cannot protect us from the failure of love, or tragic accident, or the death of a loved one and even the greediest people know this fundamental truth. Perhaps their inner knowledge of this truth leads them to double-down on their pursuit of trivial possessions because they will do anything to hide the truth from themselves.
And this creates a great quandary for our religious faith in the world today. How do we exercise a mission to the world to get it to recognize what at heart it already knows is the futility of the greed-driven life? To be sure there are some so-called philosophers who are brazen enough to extoll greed as the driving force for life because it drives the market and the market is that to which we must sacrifice all our most important life decisions. But such philosophers, I believe, are a clear minority in our society. Even those who publically espouse the virtues of greed and the evanescent pleasures of surrounding themselves with the best stuff money can buy, do know that this stuff will not bring inner tranquility or a sense of ultimate fulfillment. They know that the superficial life greed enables is as hollow as the houses they purchase simple to resell for a higher price.
Perhaps the best we can do, as a religious community and as individuals, is not so much to ratchet up once again into hyper mode the bewailing and reviling of the greed that drives all of us from time to time, since such rhetoric has grown stale by over repetition. People are simply tuning it out. Instead, perhaps the key to the work of mission to the world is to remind it of the truer pleasures and deeper satisfactions that come from living with less. By living more fully by the grace of God; by living in total trust that God will provide all that is needful when the basic meaning of our lives is at stake. What the greed-driven life needs as an anti-dote are compelling counter-examples of what a good life can be in practice. Attack the life built on the never-ending accumulation of stuff, not by the old rhetoric of denunciation but by actually living lives that are built on a quiet and unshakeable trust in God and the indescribable delights of mutual love, compassion, moral integrity, and a willingness to serve others who are truly in need. These are the things that bring full and satisfying life. Paul says to his hearers, “you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self”. We haven’t given this new self to ourselves by clever manipulation of the elemental forces of the universe: Instead, it has been given to us: we didn’t acquire it through greed or a desire for more possessions: it was freely bestowed on us as a super-abundant gift from God. And this is what we have to offer to the greed-obsessed world: a new self, a self-grounded in God, a self at home with God because God gives us all that we need to be whole, healthy, flourishing, and ultimately filled and fulfilled. God gives us all that makes life meaningful and in the process enables us to live abundantly and fully through the only possession that truly matters: the grace and love of God and in community with others and in service to the world.