Greed

 Friends, we’re now in the second week in the season of Lent, and the second installment of this sermon series about the seven deadly sins! The sin we’re talking about this week is greed.

First, one thing I wanted to follow up on about last week: we talked about how a 4th Century monk by the name of Evagrius Ponticus first suggested the notion of eight evil thoughts, which Pope Gregory I followed up on two hundred years later, as seven deadly sins. The question came up: if this list of fundamental evils, from which all other bad things flow, was originally eight, then what was the eighth sin? What was taken off?

Here’s the answer: Ponticus taught that the eight evil thoughts were:

Pride

Avarice (or greed)

Gluttony

Sloth

Lust

Wrath

Vainglory

And SADNESS

A few changes happened two centuries later when Pope Gregory I revisited this idea. He combined “pride” (the notion that you’re better than other people) with “vainglory” (the notion that your image and popularity are super important), because he thought those were very similar. He took “sadness” off of this list, and I think very appropriately, because he didn’t think it was fair to call a feeling a sin. And then he added “envy” to the list. But, ultimately, sadness. Sadness was the eighth. It’s not an evil to be sad. Can we make some bad decisions when we’re sad? Sure. But God wouldn’t shame us for having sensitive hearts and reacting to life.

On to today’s sin: greed. It’s the sin you can confidently argue Jesus was more concerned about than any other–roughly 15% of all the words of Jesus as recorded in the four canonical Gospels are warnings about greed, wealth, and hoarding. One out of every ten verses in the Gospels is about the evils of greed. Looking at how Jesus lived, how John the Baptist lived, and how Jesus commanded the disciples to live paints quite the picture of what Jesus thought about greed and money: voluntary homelessness, living off the land, only eating and wearing what others generously gave, and handing out free food and healthcare. Jesus didn’t believe in a “Wolf of Wall Street” mentality of vacuuming up all the money around you to live the most opulent lifestyle one could buy. He didn’t even want his disciples to earn income at a job or carry money in their pockets, much less try to have more money than anyone else. Jesus espoused an economy of radical hospitality and generosity.

But boy howdy can this be one of the hardest topics to broach from an American pulpit. Because here in America, we like money. We swear by capitalism, and a free market. We borrow and lend at super high interest rates. Our personal debt categories–student loans, mortgages, credit cards, auto loans–are collectively in the trillions of dollars, with every one of those sources of debts being linked to wealthy, publicly traded businesses. We privatize schools, healthcare, and even prisons, because we want to own anything that can make us money. And though it may turn our stomachs on a personal level, this society welcomes capitalist enterprise and praises the richest among us as folks who played the game and won. And these are big winnings: the richest 10% of the world owns 75% of the world’s wealth. As of right now, Elon Musk holds the trophy for “world’s richest man”, with an estimated net worth of as much as $850 billion dollars, depending on how his stocks and brand values are doing on any given day. We need to compare that to the extreme poverty faced by the poorest 9% of the world’s population, around 700 million people, who live on $2 a day. Unfortunately, when you look at a broader picture, the numbers don’t get any better: 3.5 billion people, 44% of the world’s population, live on less than $7 per day.

The thing about being an American and trying to talk about the sin of greed is that we’re very optimistic in this country. We don’t want to bum out about those poverty numbers. We’d much rather believe that we live in the Land of Opportunity, where if you dream big enough, and work hard, you’ll make it. And even if you don’t have a ton of money now…well, it doesn’t mean you won’t win the lottery or start a viral social media account or invent the next Labubu tomorrow. We like to think that we could strike it rich at any moment, and therefore we want to protect our thoughts around the ultra wealthy, because maybe that could be us! Our optimism in this country is deeply touching. But it’s also out of touch. We are always much closer to being homeless than we are to being billionaires. It doesn’t benefit us to protect the rich. It’s in the whole world’s interest to do all we can to protect the poor, and create a world where sharing by all means scarcity for none.

But…sharing means giving things up. Something else that Americans really don’t want to hear about. We’re consumers in this country, and we like it that way. Americans spend $2 trillion a year on the purchase of nonessential goods, “just for fun” items. We also use a ton of resources: we’re 5% of the world’s population, but we use 25% of the world’s oil, and 23% of the world’s coal. And I could keep naming statistics all morning, and it won’t be fun for us to hear because we’re naturally going to start feeling defensive of what we have. And hey, I’m right there with you. Lord knows I don’t need a doll collection that can fill up an entire room in my house in order to sustain life, but am I willing to give them up? Yeah, fat chance, you’ll pry my Polly Pockets out of my cold, dead hands. 

We also get defensive because, even living in such a wealthy nation, many of us still struggle very much to get our bills paid, and it’s hard to feel “rich” when you can barely afford groceries. Y’all might be sitting there thinking, Hey, I get that I live on more than $2 a day, but I sure don’t have anywhere near Elon Musk’s $850 billion, so surely I’m not the problem here, right?

And no, the problem of first world greed can’t be narrowed down to individual choices (although we can all choose better, and there’s a few people I’d really like to see make different decisions). But ultimately, no, the problem is not that we bought the new iPhone, or that we pursued a higher paying job, or that we traded in a good car for a better one when the old one still drove fine. The problem is this bottomless appetite for acquisition that we have. Getting to the root of this sin of greed, the problem is that, no matter what we have, even when we know for a fact that we have enough, our brains yell at us to go get more. It starts as a good instinct to provide for our families that spirals into full-on hoarding when we don’t keep it in check.

Jesus warned his followers about this behavior in this morning’s Gospel reading, using the very relatable First Century image of a farmer with a whole lotta grain. He needed to be responsible, and make sure he met a certain growth quota, but he more than met that quota once he had so much that his barn was overstuffed. The responsible decision after he met the mark of sufficiency would have been to donate all the excess to farmers who came up short that harvest, knowing that the survival of their families was on the line. But instead of being compassionate and generous, he leaned into greed, and tore down his perfectly good barns to build bigger ones, just so he wouldn’t have a storage problem that would have forced him to give crops away. He was overgrowing, overusing, and overconsuming to the point that he was going to starve his neighbors and deplete the nutrients in the soil, and for what? He’d never live long enough to need all that grain. Why keep it? 

Jesus’ advice toward the hypothetical farmer in his parable, to be “rich toward God”, sounds holy, but vague from one point of view. What is “rich toward God?” How do you measure that? I can see what I have in my bank account. I can see what I have in my fridge. I can see my house, and my cars. But can I “see” my collateral with God?

Well, in a sense, yes. The reason Ponticus, Pope Gregory I, and Thomas Aquinas taught about these essential sins was because they wanted to encourage others to change their behavior. With every one of these sins, there’s a clear road to redemption, a path of behavior that we can all see, works that show others how to love one another, and grow closer to God. In the case of greed, Aquinas taught the cure was charity. When you have more than you need, give to those who lack. Don’t charge, and certainly don’t upcharge. You’re taken care of already, you don’t need to prophet off of someone else’s needs. We all know what good charity looks like, and we carry it out beautifully here in Honeoye Falls, with our blessing box and our Taco Tuesdays. Jesus teaches us, stay on that path, and keep giving. Richness toward God means serving one another. Richness toward God means keeping our priorities in check. It means knowing that we live on food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare, not on a big bank account balance, and that we could never gather up enough stuff to fill a spiritual void that only God can fill. If we’re in need today, we need to be able to trust our neighbors to help us. And if we have enough today, that means it’s our turn to be the helpers.

May it be so.

Amen.