greedy sermon

“Well, I've been thinking about how to talk about greed.

Yes, I've been thinking about how to talk about greed...

Greed is a strain of the American dream

Having more than you need is the essential theme

Everybody wanting more than they need to survive

Is a perfect indication, greed has settled inside

Maybe you don't really know just what I mean

Maybe you don't want to know about your and my greed

You may wonder whether you're infected by greed

If you have to ask, then the scriptures you need

Greed is sneaky, and hard to detect in myself

I see it so clearly in everybody else

I can see it you

You can see it me...

I can see it in my neighbor

it really shows up clearly

You, and you and your greed.”

These words by Sweet Honey in the Rock get at the perniciousness of gluttony and greed. It is such a slippery concept. How much is too much. I can go to someone's house and see a 41' T.V. screen with 1300 channels and ask myself, is that really necessary? Isn't that a bit gluttonous. And then when you come to my house and see my 400 gig hard drive and AMD64 processor, you might think to yourself, either he is trying to send someone to the moon with his computer, or he just is a glutton for processing power. We are pretty good at seeing each other's greed, and horrible at seeing our own.

I say pretty good, because I think that it is getting harder and harder to recognize greed in this time and place. We are not programed to recognize it. A Stanford study suggests that we receive more information in 1 day, than someone in the middle ages would have received in their lifetime. And what is this information? Buy, buy, buy. We are creatures of habit. I would argue that we are what we do. My Grandma listened to hymns constantly. I truly believe that over the decades, those hymns shaped her character in a different than if she had listened to Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken all day. Likewise, many of us teach or kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews how to pray. When we see them marveling over a bird, we put in a plug for God's great creation. But again, I believe there is strength in numbers. What you do over time shapes you. Consider these facts, available at the Presbyterian's website...

Hours per year the average American youth spends in school: 900

1. Hours per year the average American Youth watches TV: 1500

2. Minutes per week that the average American child ages 2-11 watches TV: 1,197

3. Minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children: 38.5

4. Percentage of children ages 5-17 who have a TV in their bedroom: 52

5. Percentage of children ages 4-6 who, when asked to choose between watching TV or spending time with their fathers, preferred TV: 54

^{Number of TV commercials seen each year by an average child: 30,000}

1. Number of TV commercials seen by the average American by age 65: 2,000,000

2. Percent of Americans who believe "most of us buy and consume far more than we need": 82

3. Number of ads aired for "junk-food" during four hours of Saturday morning cartoons: 202

4. Percentage of American children ages 6-11 who were seriously overweight in 1963: 4.5

5. Percentage of American children ages 6-11 who were seriously overweight in 1993: 14

Children spend about 28 hours per week watching television. Over the course of a year, this is twice as much time as they spend in school. ²⁵

CUE: Rise

Rise in per capita consumption in the U.S. since 1970: 62%

CUE: Happy

Share of Americans reporting that they were "very happy" is no greater now

than it was in 1957.

CUE: Black

We consume more and are less happy. We are bound to catch up with this reality sooner or later. Right?

Well? Madison Ave. psychology about the links between consumption and happiness are catching up to what the scriptures have been telling us all along. And it is not good news for us. In the olden days of advertising, if you wanted to sell beer, you would show people having fun while drinking beer. In more recent beer ads, the common theme is a group of guys drinking beer, enter unobtainable beautiful woman, something wacky happens- maybe he says a corny pick up line or maybe he mistakes her suggestive wink as being directed at him instead of someone or something else. In the end, the guy does not get the girl. The guy does not get the girl. Have the experts in the ad industry lost their mind? How does failure, rejection and embarrassment sell product. No, they haven't lost their minds. The discovery that they are playing on is that discontentment and gluttony go hand in hand. The source of gluttony is greed and the source of greed is discontentment. Ironically, not only does having a lot of stuff not make you happier, it makes you even more discontented, more desperate to find your next fix. Which leads you into more consumption and then more discontent, until you become less and less a human being filled with the imago dei, the image of God, and more and more a consumer. We are a nation of haves and have nots and all of us are discontent.

While the wealthiest individuals count their assets in the tens of billions, the lowest classes are falling. Americans’ earnings are more unequal today than they have been any time in the past 60 years. This is evidence of gluttonous behavior

Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said of Greed: "it is a sin directly against one's neighbor, since one man cannot over-abound in external riches, without another man lacking them... it is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man contemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." (2, 118, ad 1)

CUE: JAMES

The book of James says, "What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions (4:1-3)."

CUE: BLACK

Long before Sinai and the giving to Moses of the Law, there was Noah and the seven laws or mishpathim that are presented, one by one, incident by incident, in the first 11 chapters of the book of Genesis. Known as The Seven Laws of Noah, they were the governing principles of Judaism before the Ten Commandments, and sketched in the first parameters of Jewish moral and religious thought.

In order of their biblical occurrence, the first of these seven mishpathim is blasphemy; the second is idolatry; the third, theft; the fourth, murder; the fifth, illicit sex; the sixth false witness or duplicity in adjudication; and the last, the eating of flesh torn from a living beast. Many rabbis came in time to teach that theft was the greatest, because all the others come from it: To commit adultery is to steal another’s partner. To blaspheme is to steal the name of G-d for human purposes. To commit murder is to steal another’s life, etc., etc. And theft comes out of greed.

CUE: GREED

When you live in a capitalist culture, one that holds as a central principle that people are greedy, and if they were to stop, life as we know it may collapse- it is easy to come up here and rant and rave about how far gone we are- how hopelessly mired in the sins of gluttony and greed we are. It is an easy case to make, and I suspect that all of us could make it equally as well in our own ways.

CUE: BLACK

But that is not why we are here this evening. For us, Lent is the time to recant our sins, to look inward, and then to look toward God to see how we might better do God's will. So is it our job to take on the world, to point our fingers in contempt and disgust. If it is, it is only a small part of what we must do. The larger part is to change ourselves.

Can we brazenly face the world and say- enough, I do not want what you are offering? Sadly to say, I do not think that we can. I think that every single one of us here tonight is too enmeshed in our culture to escape. Do we simply give up hope? Do we go home and finish off the Valentine's candy and wash it down with a super-sized chocolate shake?

No, there is hope. It doesn’t come from rejecting the sirens of this world, but from using our finitude to our own advantage. This is what I have been skirting around this whole time. We, as humans, only have so much time. We only have so much time to think certain thoughts, so much time to do certain things, so much time to say certain words, and so much time to spend with one another.

CUE: TIMOTHY SHORT

1 Timothy 6:6-19

Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment;

for we brought nothing into the world, so that it is certain thata we can take nothing out of it;

but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.

But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

CUE: p177

If we spend our time in prayer. If we pray unceasingly- that is the only way to cure ourselves from gluttony.

sermon 2-20-05

This Easter, we will be accepting new members into the church. For the unbaptized, we will be offering the opportunity to be reborn of the spirit- to be fully accepted into the family of God. For those that are not church members, the opportunity to fully become members of this church family.

But, lest I get charged with false advertising, let me begin with a story.

{Tiger story}

I love this story because it takes the sentimentality and certainty out of the conversion experience. When I read the Bible, it is so easy for my to tsk, tsk those whom Jesus chides. Poor, foolish Nicodemus. Here you are in the presence of Christ, he tells you that you need to be born athenos, which in Greek can mean either from above or again, and you silly man are thinking that it means again and that you need to crawl into your Mother's womb. Poor foolish Nicodemus.

When I read the Bible, and I read the text from Genesis that Deb read for us where God says, 'pick up your things and go' and Abram picks up his things and he goes. When I read this, I like to think that is what I would do.

Well those who saw Pastor Cole preach in Lee Center last week know that the most powerful tool in Satan's arsenal is pride. Pride makes us see ourselves through a rose colored haze- making us reinterpret our sins as virtues and the piety of others as foolishness.

When I read the story of the three men and the tiger, I think to myself- What an idiot that third man was! I think that most of you would agree with me. This is why I love the story. It allows us a refreshingly honest glimpse of ourselves as we truly are. On our best days, we are like Nicodemus. But rarely, if ever, are we like Abraham. By our own will, we will always trust in ourselves. We will always go by our own judgment, our own presuppositions, our own volition. Yes we will always trust ourselves, even over God.

But,

“Ye must be born again.”

Our founding father, John Wesley, tells us

If any doctrines within the whole compass of Christianity may be properly termed fundamental, they are doubtless these two, -- the doctrine of justification, and that of the new birth: The former relating to that great work which God does for us, in forgiving our sins; the latter, to the great work which God does in us, in renewing our fallen nature.

http://gbgm-umc.org/umhistory/wesley/sermons/serm-045.stm

Yes, in renewing our fallen nature. In reassessing who we are at the fundamental core of our being. Yes of fully dying and being reborn. In the earliest records of baptism that we have, the candidate for baptism would have never seen one before. So imagine his or her surprise when the priest would literally trip them into a pool, and hold them down until they started to drown. Until they really got the sense that they were about to die.

This is dangerous stuff we are talking about here! Once you go down that road, you may never come back.

But we must go down that road, because there are but two roads, the one that leads to life and the one that leads to death, and we had better choose wisely. We were born to seek life. We receive this life when we are reborn. When we are reborn, we find out who we really are.

“Nicodemus came to Jesus because Nicodemus knew that Jesus knew the answers. However, Nicodemus did not know the questions.” http://www.day1.net/transcript.php?id=225

Nicodemus' questions are all along the lines of 'how could this be?' Jesus knew that the questions that he really wanted answered were, "Who am I? Why was I born? Where do I belong? How can I be at peace with who I am?" These are the kinds of questions which keep one up at night. That make us get out of bed and seek solace somewhere, hopefully in the tent with Jesus. These are the questions that Jesus answers.

Who am I? I am no longer a descendant of Adam, I am no longer fully bound by his sin. Rather, I are given the pure gift of new life through Jesus Christ. I am born from above, born of the wind, born of the spirit. I can't see it, but I can see its effects in our own lives and the lives that we touch. I see the world as it truly, as loved, as so loved by God that God would give God's only begotten son that I should not perish but receive eternal life.

This love is available to all and when we accept this love, an amazing thing happens. We get a piece of that love. We too so love the world that we are willing to give our all. We lose our condemnation of the world, as Jesus did not come to condemn. Where we saw hopeless pain, we now see transformation. Where we saw only our limitations, we now see that we participate in the infinitude of God.

Nikos Kazantzakis preaches that there are three kinds of souls, each with their own prayers.

1. I am a bow in your hands, Lord, draw me, lest I rot.

2. Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break.

3. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break.

(Report to Greco. New York, Touchstone 1975)

This latter is the kind of reckless faith of Father Abraham, the kind of reckless obedience to God's will that our spiritual heir had. This is how people wake up one morning and find themselves in a Leper colony in India, a warehouse in Louisiana, or at the house of a friend who hasn't yet found Jesus.

This latter type of faith is nothing less than the recognition that when we participate in God's plan, we become love itself.

Similar to Nicodemus, we may ask, “How can these things be?” (v. 9). The answer is simple. God loves. Jesus saves. Amen. So be it.

postmodern sermonizing

q: does the world need another blog?
a: no

q: so, what is the purpose of this one?
a: i have been feeling rather constrained by the traditional sermon format. in any given week, i read a couple hundred pages of theology, biblical critisism, news, and devotions and condense it down to a 15 minute sermon. i fear that the density of this approach causes indigestion to the hearers of the word in the congregation. i hope that this blog can serve as an area where, rather than my role being one who emparts 15 minutes of truth, i can take on the more biblical road of one who is journeying with others as we seek God's will for our community.

q: say again
a: this blog is a log of texts read, sites visited, thoughts thougt, and alleys not pursued in the sermon preparation process.

gluttony

this wed. is my turn for the rotation for preaching on the seven deadly sins. my sins are gluttony and greed. some initial questions to explore are: if you are going to limit a list of sins to only seven, why the seeming redundancy? is there a significant difference between gluttony and greed? what is the word for myself and the community of franklin grove?

experienced a brilliant sermon by Rev. Cole on pride and envy yesterday. it seemed like a similar pairing. pride leads to envy as greed leads to gluttony. but i wonder if we lose something about the special nature of envy and gluttony when we limit it to simply being an instance that displays the rule. one thing from yesterday's sermon that i intend on reiterating is that all sin leads to death, making the '7 deadly sins' both limited and redundant. however, the major shift from Rev. Cole's approach and mine will be the locus of sin. that is, i find in the Bible record an emphasis on communal sin, or at the very least, a notion that sin permeates well outside the flesh of the individual. in the hebrew law, there is the notion of the ground puking if there is sin in the midst of the people, when something is made unholy, it is contagious. etc. etc.

so, what about eating. is it a sin if the only one it hurts is oneself? how do we know where the line is between sustanence and gluttony?

it is clear pride and greed fit the 'internal emotions' view of sin. but gluttony (and envy), may make us a little more uncomfortable. gluttony has historically been associated primarily with food. eating too much chocolate clearly seems to fall into the 'non-of-your-buisness' category. the only one that is being hurt is themselves. no harm, no foul. so where is the harm in sin if it is not communal?

so, here is the tension

1. sin is not just about the individual
2. sin is about broken relationships, specifically, between humanity and God.
so, if 1 & 2, what is the harm of gluttony?

preachykeen

hello world.