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The Sins He Died For: Greed
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 21, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Psalm 49 Luke 12:13-21
Luke alone tells the story of a certain rich man who did not understand his situation at all. What is clear in the parable is that he thought his problem had to do with storage room. “What shall I do,” he asked, “for I have nowhere to store my crops.” It is the perennial human problem: what to do with our “stuff” as George Carlin once put it, when basements no longer suffice, closets take on a Fibber Magee and Molly quality, walls cannot accommodate the preponderance of pictures, and the baby finally needs a room of her own. To all of that the rich man says, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods.” It is a logical and familiar solution—especially if interest rates are down and unemployment high: you cannot afford not to build an addition, to add a wing, to tear down a wall or two for the sake of a sound investment in the future. If the rich man’s problem is space, then what he has chosen to do is both logical and economically responsible. But the point of the parable is simply that this rich man missed the point of his life. He thought his problem was space, and in that light he knew he could solve his problem with the help of a contractor. In fact, he even thought a barn would be the solution to all of his problems, imagining that once the barns are built and his riches safely stored away, he will be able to say to his soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry!” But before he can hire an architect and begin to draw up plans, another voice enters the story, a voice that leaves the rich man speechless. “Fool!” says God. “This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” The question is a question not of space but of possession. Not what belongs to us and what shall we do with it, but to whom do we belong and what shall we do. To wit: can we be faithful Christians and relatively fat camels at the same time? With God, says Jesus, everything is possible; and yet, as Paul says, not all things are helpful. We are about to embark on our fourth sin of seven, the sin of greed. This is the sin of Mr. Howell on Gilligan’s Island, by the way, who took a trunk full of cash for a three-hour cruise. Thomas Aquinas understood the sin of greed to be a sin directly against one’s neighbor, “since one man cannot abound in external riches without another man lacking them.” His understanding presumed the sin of greed to be in the category of those sins that cause a break in the relation between our neighbor and our selves. Some today would go on to note the economic theory of scarcity rather than abundance upon which Aquinas’ theological claim rest. Surely when the economy is booming again, there should be enough trickling down for all! As for the Reformers, for Luther and Calvin in particular, the sin in question was a “transgression of the limit set for us in the world by God the Creator, the consequence of which is a struggle over sovereignty,” says Paul Lehmann. That is to say, there is a power struggle going on over who is really in control of our lives and our future, a struggle “that effectively prevents us from discerning what really belongs to whom, and from living accordingly.” Hence the sin of greed is really the sin of “desiring a life subject to human control over a life of vulnerable trust” in God alone. Of course this is not how popular opinion would characterize our Protestant take on the accumulation of possessions. Max Weber’s analysis of Reformed Protestantism and capitalism has made the sin of greed our very own, albeit greed cleverly recast in the virtue of thrift. Weber looked at the coincidence of Reformed communities…and nations committed to the accumulation of capital…and concluded that a certain kind of theology had to under gird a capitalist economy. It had to be a theology that bred persons who in no way desired enjoyment or possession per se, but who were characterized by a desire for gain. Could this be a sin? Whereas before people worked to meet basic needs, now people worked in order to accumulate savings. Yet the reason for this seems far from the sin in question. For in Calvinism, for the first time, work is given a religious character and becomes an ethical demand. A person works not to live, but because God commands it. Weber noted that now the work of a person was a mark of that person’s election or non-election by God. Therefore, little of what is accumulated in work is spent because one is called by God to work and show evidence of productivity rather than to seek pleasure. Weber concluded that the result of this working hard and spending little is saving; and this saving will always be in search of new investments. But unlike the Calvinists of whom Weber wrote, John Calvin espoused a different relationship of human beings to the things they possess, a kind of voluntary communitarian understanding of what we have and hold. Some explain this by the fact that early on in his ministry Geneva was flooded with poor refugees. It was in this situation that Calvin preached, wrote his biblical commentaries, and led a congregation to live out its faith. Perhaps the most striking evidence of Calvin’s theology of possession involved the role deacons played 450 years ago in Geneva. Deacons were charged with the redistribution of wealth within and outside the church community. They were to keep the flow of goods and services going by calling on those who had more than they needed and, with nothing as discreet as a sealed envelope, commanding them to hand over their excess for the needs of the poor. Said Calvin, “God wills that there be proportion and equality among us, that is, each man is to provide for the needy according to the extent of his means so that no man has too much and no man had too little.” Sounds like a downright communist to me! “Let those that have riches, whether they have been left by inheritance or procured by industry and efforts, consider that their abundance was not intended to be laid out in intemperance or excess, but in relieving the necessities of the brethren.” He further believed that as the rich had responsibility to the poor, so the poor had a mission to the rich. The poor were the receivers of God, the vicars of God, the solicitors of God who offer the rich an opportunity of ridding themselves from monetary slavery, an opportunity to be saved from greed. All of this he said, because he believed we were created for fellowship with one another and with God. He joined Paul in proclaiming that we are members of one body…that we are made to live in mutuality…that another person’s need is embraced as though it were our own…that all goods are from God and are to be used in the service of others. In short, Weber was right in connecting Calvin’s thought to the rich. However, like the rich man in the parable, he missed the point. For what Calvin proclaimed in his day was not what it was to be rich in goods and so greedy, but what it meant to be rich toward God and so generous. How generous? Far from urging some legalistic calculation of human generosity, Calvin acknowledges that “God…nowhere specifies the sum, that, often making a calculation, we might divide between ourselves and the poor…but calls us to take the rule of love as our guide.” To take the rule of love as our guide. Calvin did not call the rich of Geneva to asceticism, but to love; which is to say that before we can do business with the sin of greed, we must first talk about our relationship to one another. “The one sin,” wrote poet Richard Howard, “is to believe, indeed to behave as if we own what we love.” The love and mutuality that Calvin preached was a love that sought out close quarters…required that the rich and the poor be so connected on this earth as to be one body, for that is what love requires: first, in other words, love requires your soul, your all! To live in such nearness to one another is to discover that another’s need or pain or cry is indistinguishable and might as well be your own. In the light of such love, what belongs to you? It is hard any longer to distinguish, but for a completely different reason than the reason with which we first began: not because we are anesthetized by our accumulated possessions against the other, but because the other’s need has redeemed desire itself and, in effect, saved us from our sin. At the same time and in the second place, we cannot draw conclusions about our relationship to possession and do business with our greed until we know who or what it is that possesses us…until we know the One to whom we belong. Eduard Schweizer, New Testament professor and friend of this congregation, tells the story of his daughter Elizabeth when she was three years old. The Schweizers were living in a house on a steep slope outside Zurich. “Looking out of the window of the living room,” says Eduard, “you saw the road some fifty feet down. Thus Elizabeth knew she was not allowed to look through the open window without being held by somebody. Now, one day there was a herd of cows coming along the road, all with bells around their necks, and Elizabeth had to see them. When we came down to the living room, she was leaning out of the open window in a fearfully dangerous position, but holding herself by her own collar. Is this not what we constantly do?” he asks. “We are holding ourselves with ever more insurance, armaments, safe investments…and all the time we are just holding ourselves, whereas the only decisive question is whether there is somebody else who holds us.” The only way we dare reconsider our relationship to possessions is if we trust there is somebody else who holds us. That somebody, of course, would be the one telling us this parable, the One who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but rather embraced our pain, our need, our cries as his own and so who redeemed our every greedy grasp for a great love. Faith would then be living in the trust that, because we are held by a God who has come so close, we are free to let go! Though there is one more thing to say. For it seems to be the case that, as we draw close enough to one another, no longer sure of what belongs to us because we belong to each other…and as we come to know the One to whom we belong in life and in death, then we stumble upon the heart of a life redeemed from the sin of greed. In a word, this life is a life of gratitude, gratitude for all that we have been given not finally to have, but to hold until we come to behold the face of him whose love has never let us go. Thanks be to God! |