“Greed”
Colossians 3:5
Matthew 6:21: For
where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Isaiah 55:2a: Why
do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that
which does not satisfy.
Philippians 4:11b: I
have learned to be content with whatever I have.
Colossians 3:1: So
if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where
Christ is seated, at the right hand of God.
Anne Graham Lotz in “As Evangelicals, It’s Time We
Focus on Our Own Sins” (commenting on Isaiah’s call):
Woe to me for my ingratitude in my
abundance. [and] Woe to me for my materialism in the midst of
desperate poverty.
Rick Ufford-Chase: Doing
well is not to be confused with doing good. [and] Never forget that we are people of privilege.
Eugenia Gamble’s List of Wrong Notions:
·
More is
always better.
·
Security
rests in possessions and financial resources.
·
The tithe is
outdated and we are exempt from it.
·
Our stuff
belongs to us.
·
There’s not
enough to go around.
·
We are
entitled to God’s blessings.
A Teenager’s Response to a Mission Trip to
I
found out while on this trip that Americans have too much stuff.
Ashleigh’s Sure-fire Way to Get More Than You Want: Want less.
C. S. Lewis: …
if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the
standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably
giving away too little. If our charities
do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.
Tony Campolo’s Definition of Affluenza: The American epidemic of shopping, overwork,
debt, and the pursuit of the American dream.
[prayer]
What
is the New Testament definition of greed?
The Greek word translated as “greed” in today’s text from Colossians
means: “insatiate desire, ruthless
self-seeking, desiring what we have no right to desire, and an evil desire to
get more than we ought.” William
Barclay translated it thusly: “the spirit
which makes a god of gain.” The
Message paraphrases it like this: “grabbing
whatever attracts your fancy.”
With the first verse of the third chapter of Colossians Paul exhorts
his readers to seek the things that are above.
In the fifth verse he advises them to put to death five worldly, or
overtly carnal, attitudes or practices.
One of those is greed. He then
equates greed with idolatry. To be
greedy in the biblical sense is to make an idol out of one’s possessions.
The
following quotes from various sources do a much better job of explaining this
than I can on my own. The first three
are from William Barclay: “Everything
that would keep [us] from fully obeying God and fully surrendering to Christ
must be surgically excised.” [and] “… the man
whose whole life is dominated by the desire to get things, has set up
things in the place of God… he worships things and not God – and that precisely
is idolatry.” [and] “A man worships what he loves, no matter
whatever his profession of religion may be.”
Then
there are these words from Henri Nouwen: “…
where my sense of self depends on what I can acquire, greed flares up when my desires
are frustrated. And from A
Theology of Stewardship: “Our
material possessions are not divine to be worshiped. They are not evil to be despised. They are God’s good gifts to be used for the
glory of God.”
Greed
is a form of coveting closely related to envy.
When we covet we explicitly break one of the foundational laws of God –
the Tenth Commandment. When we covet we
also implicitly break the First Commandment, the one about having no other
gods. Greed is a sin. Not just a personality defect. Not just a sign of an out of control ego. A sin.
What the Westminster Shorter Catechism calls “any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of
God.”
Greed
does not conform to God’s will. It is
not one of those things above the Apostles Paul urges us to seek. It is a transgression of God’s law – of God’s
Word – of God’s will. In spite of what
the 1980’s movie character said about it, greed is not good. There are valid reasons why we list it among
the Deadly Sins.
We
American Christians probably don’t think of ourselves as greedy. In many ways we are among the most generous
people in the world. There are, however,
some statistics that might cause us to question our assumptions. In terms of percentage of gross income modern
American Presbyterians give less than they did in the heart of the Great
Depression. While our amount of
disposable income has increased exponentially since 1950, the amount we give
away has remained fairly constant. In
1980 the average corporate CEO made 42 times what the average worker made. By 1990 that had doubled to 84 times. By 2000 the number was 531 times. In a recent survey of Americans whose net
worth totaled $5,000,000, they, on the average, said that the amount of money
it would take to make them feel secure was $20,000,000.
Maybe
ours is a culture that believes that greed is good. Maybe greed is more rampant in our society
than we want to believe. Maybe, for all
our generosity, we’re less willing to give than we think we are.
Maybe
we have turned our money and possessions into idols. As Christians, maybe we’re looking elsewhere
for a security that can only be found in Christ. Maybe that unnamed teenager was right; we
Americans do have too much stuff. Maybe
we need to take Ashleigh’s advice and want less.
Maybe
we need to pay attention to C. S. Lewis when he tells us that we’re giving away
too little and that our gifts to charity are too small. Maybe we are afflicted with the “affluenza”
rampant in our culture, a culture that in the words of psychologist Jesse
O’Neill is “on a mindless, selfish binge
to see how much money we can accumulate.”
Maybe we are spending our
money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not
satisfy.
It’s
not easy to be a Christian in this culture.
In the words of Walter Brueggeman, “We
who are now the richest nation are today’s main coveters. We never feel that we have enough; we have
more and more, and this insatiable desire destroys us. Whether we are liberal or conservative
Christians, we must confess that the central problem in our lives is that we
are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God’s
abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity – a belief that makes us
greedy, mean, and unneighborly.”
Scripture tells us to not be conformed to this world, or to use a different
phrase, to be in this world without being of
it. That’s easier said than done. No matter how strong we are in our faith, we
still face the situation Isaiah faced at the moment of his call to be God’s
prophet. We are men and women of unclean
lips living among a people of unclean lips.
For all our calls for and claims of a superior holiness in the arenas
of sexuality and orthodoxy, we who refer to ourselves as evangelical
Presbyterians aren’t always as holy as we like to think we are. Why else would someone with the evangelical
credentials that come with being Billy Graham’s daughter confess in writing her
ingratitude in the midst of abundance and her materialism in a world where many
live in desperate poverty? “Woe to me,” she writes. And if we are totally honest about our
attitudes toward our money and possessions, then we should probably be on our knees
crying out to God, “Woe to us!”
Are we all inherently selfish or greedy? Only to the extent that all human beings have
sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
We modern American Presbyterian Christians are for the most part not
consciously greedy. We are, relatively
speaking, quite generous. But all too
often we unconsciously buy into the greedy habits and attitudes of our culture,
in the process becoming more of this
world than we realize.
There is only one way to be less of this world in which we must live. That way is Jesus Christ. The more closely we follow in his footsteps
the less apt we are to succumb to greed.
The more apt we are to obey Paul’s exhortation to seek the things that
are above while putting to death the idolatrous greed that festers within
us. The more apt we are to seek first
the