“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
Hours per year the average American Youth watches TV: 1500
Minutes per week that the average American child ages 2-11 watches TV: 1,197
Minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children: 38.5
Percentage of children ages 5-17 who have a TV in their bedroom: 52
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
Number of TV commercials seen by the average American by age 65: 2,000,000
Percent of Americans who believe "most of us buy and consume far more than we need": 82
Number of ads aired for "junk-food" during four hours of Saturday morning cartoons: 202
Percentage of American children ages 6-11 who were seriously overweight in 1963: 4.5
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.
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