Doxology, Depravity and the Dow
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
September 21, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
Joel 2: 22-30
I Timothy 6:6-19
“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….He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords: it is he alone who has immortality and
dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.”
Is there a word from the Lord for such a week as this? No doubt we enter the sanctuary poorer in pocket than we were on this Sunday last and therefore
anxious for our future. But that is not the heart of the matter. As creatures made in the image of God and so made for holy conversation, we enter poorer in
soul, diminished and shamed in the knowledge that collectively we have squandered this good gift of life on a mess of potage; have, as a nation, sold our
birthright…leveraged the common heritage of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness afforded some in this land…on the immediate sating of a desire for
more.
Look up the word “sate” and you will see that in the second place it means “to provide somebody with more than enough, to the point of exhaustion or
disgust.” Surely there is none in this place who is not exhausted and disgusted by the display of unbridled self-indulgence which now has plunged many into
the ruin of homelessness, unemployment and despair. The situation can only be captured by sentences that speak in double negatives! Sub-prime loans, sinking
real estate values, buying short on the market name a few means to the end of providing a small number of somebodies with more than enough, to the point of
exhaustion and disgust. We, on one hand, know ourselves as mere pawns of these somebodies when we open the latest report of our invested assets and gasp. On
the other hand, we have been gleeful participants in a massive pyramid scheme that has privileged the rich literally at the expense not only of the middle
class but even of the working poor, people like you and me whose desire to catch the ring has caused them to be merely the first among multitudes to fall.
The word that comes to mind and has appeared in print more often than any other this past week is an old and familiar word to people like us, people who
persist in the quaint practice of the worship of God to hedge our bets against the instinctual worship of mammon. “Greed” said Gordon Gekko to the
stockholders of Teldar Paper in the 1989 movie Wall Street, “for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts
through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed in all of its forms: greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the
upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.” This is
the gospel, the good and necessary news of free enterprise that, in excess, has enslaved us unawares.
The word of the Lord for such a time as this from the sixth chapter of First Timothy begs to differ. It was a word addressed to Paul’s young apprentice as
he set out to lead the early church in Ephesus. At issue throughout the letter is the difficulty of fitting the hoi polloi of the city into the structure of
the house of God. They claimed that riches gave them the right to run things. They said (I kid you not) Timothy’s youth did not fit him for leadership. “Let
no one despise your youth” his mentor counters, “but set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.” Likewise he reminds
Timothy in the next letter that he need not cave in to those who would equate wealth with God’s imprimatur because he has not received a Spirit of timidity,
but rather of power, love and sound thinking. It is a good word for all who would lead the people of God, young or not so young!
The words written to Timothy in this sixth chapter sound to us, in the first place, like an almighty “I told you so”: “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 wondered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”
John Calvin said as much in his exposition of the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer:
Yet those who, not content with daily bread but panting after countless things with unbridled desire, or sated with their abundance, or carefree in their
piled up riches, [those who] supplicate God with this prayer are but mocking him. For the first ones ask him what they do not wish to receive, indeed what
they utterly abominate—namely merely daily bread—and as much as possible cover up before God their propensity to greed, while true prayer ought to pour out
before him the whole mind itself and whatever lies hidden within.
Put another way, when life is ordered by an insatiable desire for money—and mind you, this need not be for millions but even for enough in our barns to
take our ease apart from the rest of the madding crowd—we anesthetize our minds and hearts against the ache of life lived East of Eden which is our need for
God. Thrown out of the garden for which we were made because God was not good enough…or perhaps we should say simply, on this Sunday, God was not enough…we
live in search of anything to fill the emptiness or silence the longing. Presently neither alcohol nor sex nor crack cocaine will do: money is our substance
of choice. Numbed against the limits imposed by righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness toward our fellows, anesthetized against
finitude and death, we finally were unable to find any more poor folks to rob to feed our habit. Crashed, we wake to the tremors and terrors of lives
diminished crying “Foul” while God shouts “Fool!”
In the context of the gospel that is the gospel of Jesus Christ, this is curiously good news and turns us, in the second place, to open our ears for the
more hopeful and even helpful word of the Lord written in the first letter to Timothy. Addressing not the rich but this young Christian as an example, our
ancient correspondent offers fatherly advice that comes down to one word: contentment. “Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with
contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it (could we pause on those words for a moment, a season, a
lifetime?), but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.”
Look up contentment and the second definition suggests a circumstance that gives rise to satisfaction. How strange in the story by which we mean to live
that the Lord God--who removed God’s people from the fleshpots of Egypt and sent them into the wilderness, who later ousted God’s people from the promised
land and sent them into exile--God acts again and again to bring about circumstances—dire circumstances--that place God’s people in a position to trust God
alone. To wit, writes one of the towering teachers of the Old Testament James Muilenburg:
Amidst all the feverish preoccupation with riches and power and comfort and pleasure; all the bustling commercial activity and the ever-rising prices; the
building of fortifications for defense and of fine houses for the privileged; the elaboration of cultic observances with their sumptuous festivals and
celebrations, their pilgrimages and rites, their music and choirs, and, withal, the syncretism with the cults of nature and prosperity—amidst all there was
one voice that was stifled and repressed. It was the voice of Israel’s covenant-making and covenant-keeping God. But was it stilled? Not quite! For there
were prophets in the land to sound the cry of protest and outrage, repeating with the urgency born of faith and memory and holy awe, God’s categorical and
insistent “thou shalt not.”
This “thou shalt not” is surely God’s regulatory role in lives driven by the desire for gain. Stifled and repressed for a season by the free reign of market
forces, this week is evidence that the voice of the same God made known to us in Jesus Christ has not been stilled. Against our will, the events of the week
have placed us in the circumstance where we may pray honestly if not contentedly, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
In fact were there prophets in the land today, they likely would suggest in protest and rage that we had missed a similar circumstance offered us by God on
the days following September 11th. The terrorists brought down the towers in an act so evil as to defy the imagination of leaders elected to protect us from
such ruin; but in these intervening years we have brought down the very same towers upon ourselves because we, in our loss, would not pause long enough nor
could we keep still enough to hear the word of the Lord: “be not haughty or set your hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on the God who richly
provides you with everything….Do good, be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up the treasure of a good foundation for the
future, so that you may take hold of the life that really is life.”
Unfortunately, the word of the Lord likely will continue to be stifled by the plaintive refrain that “We are depraved on account of we are deprived!” The
market will rise again; our coffers will fill again; our souls will take their ease again; our life East of Eden will resume. For those of us who have
gathered to worship God as a hedge against our worship of mammon, we will return to the excesses of our common life with, at most, a chastened conscience.
For a while, we may will ourselves to be better—a kind of “unbothered, oversimplified Pelagianism” says Walter Brueggemann which is the belief that even if
we are depraved on account of our congenital fall from grace, we are also capable of picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off and choosing to be good in
God’s sight.
Brueggemann counsels us instead to consider the last and best word Timothy’s mentor has to offer. The word is doxological: “He who is the blessed and only
Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords: it is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see;
to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.”
In this difficult struggle against commodity, Brueggemann writes, “…it is the bodily act of doxology, the sheer lyrical, unembarrassed yielding of an
unguarded self to a prerational claim that matters most in taking the ‘or’ of faith rather than the ‘either’ of love of money. The very concrete physical
act of doxology is a social, personal, public ceding of self over to realities that the world will not honor and that I, in my fearful calculation,
strident morality and settled creedalism, often find silly and trivial.”
If you need coaching in this regard, a doxology comes to mind that was so great as to be called magnificent. Voiced by a peasant who had ceded her self over
to the God whose Son she would bear, she sings of One whose mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation…who has shown strength with his
arm and scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts…has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the of low degree…has filled
the empty with good things and sent the rich empty away.
For the sake of our restless selves, may our praise of this God resound in the land as we cede ourselves to him whose life, death and resurrection
reveal our true circumstance and our final destiny; for we were made to be restless until we rest content in Him. Thanks be to God!
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