Beware of Greed!
Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost Church of the Good Shepherd
Text: Luke 12:13-21 The Rev. Ross M. Wright
Two brothers are in a dispute over the family inheritance, and one of them approaches Jesus with the following request: “Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” The man feels that he is being cheated and wants Jesus to take up his side in the dispute. To this request, Jesus responds archly: “Man, who appointed me to be a judge or arbiter over you two?” He hears in this request, not a plea for justice, but covetousness or greed. Therefore he says to the brothers and to us, “Watch out, and be on your guard against every form of greed, because a person’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
What exactly does this word, covetousness, mean? What is Jesus warning us against? The Greek word, pleonexia, means “to strive after material possessions.” The covetous person is in the grip of a power that is greater than he is, even though he may not be aware of it. Covetousness is a condition in which we fall under a demonic spell, which separates us from God because we are serving an alien power. This is why St. Paul refers to covetousness as a form of idolatry: “Put to death therefore whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity passion, evil desire, and pleonexia, which is idolatry (Col. 3:5).
Jesus reveals the power of material things to enslave us when he says: “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon” (Mt. 6:24). “Mammon” means a god, that is, anything to which we owe our ultimate allegiance, that which gives us security or a place to stand. By referring to money and possessions this way, Jesus is saying that, contrary to the wisdom of the world, material things are not inert or morally neutral. In a fallen world, possessions push people around. They direct things. We can become possessed by our possessions.
Covetousness or greed is a danger for anyone who intends to follow Christ. The early church recognized pleonexia as special threat to the new life of the Christian, “because it brings [believers] under an ungodly and demonic spell which separates [us] from God.”1 If this was true in antiquity, how much more so in our own culture, which is increasingly under the spell of acquisitiveness. Moreover, it is not only material acquisitions which can possess us. There is such a thing as gluttony for knowledge or information. Anyone who spends time in the academic world will immediately recognize this. Last year, I attended the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, the professional guild for theologians and teachers of religion. Anybody who is anybody is there, and it is clear who the stars are; who is on the fast track; who has published the groundbreaking articles and books. All the major publishers are there. This is where you interview for jobs. When you walked into the convention center, you could sense the posturing, the competition, and the anxiety. As Professor Chris Seitz says, someone should create a huge banner with the words, “Thou shalt not covet” and place it over the door.
Karl Barth, who wrote the longest and most influential systematic theology in the 20th century, knew something about the dangers of acquiring knowledge. At the very beginning The Church Dogmatics, which runs to 14 volumes and occupied him for over 30 years, he wrote:
Absolutely any theological possibility can as such be pure threshing of straw and waste of energy, pure comedy and tragedy, pure deception and self-deception. Even the most zealous amassing of theological treasures is certainly mere folly without that being “rich toward God” (Lk. 12:21) which none can manufacture for himself and none maintain.2
Barth lived a long, productive life. Toward the end of his life, he quipped that when he arrived at heaven, the angels would say: Here comes poor Karl lumbering up to heaven’s gate with all 14 volumes of his Church Dogmatics in a wheel barrow, and he has to leave them all outside. Barth understood that all human knowledge is passing away.
It is hard to recognize covetousness in our own lives, but we are quite adept at spotting it in others. For this reason, Jesus tells about a wealthy land owner who had a really good year:
The field of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully. And he began to say to himself, “What will I do, because I do not have enough room to store my crops?” And he said, “This is what I will do. I will pull down my barns and build more barns and will gather there all my grain and my goods.”
What is the problem with this man? What is wrong with creating more storage as your wealth increases? Didn’t Joseph store grain during the fat years in Egypt so that there would be enough to eat in the lean years?
The kicker of the parable is the last sentence:“But God said to him, ‘Fool, this night your soul is required of you. And the things which you acquired – whose will they be?’” Life is a loan from God. God gave it, and it is his right to take it away. Sooner or later, someone else will possess the house you have worked on so hard; the yard you have slaved over; the books; the bike; the car; the boat; and the job that you have poured yourself into. The parable faces us with the question: To what extent do we look to our possessions or anything that we have acquired as a form of protection or security? The landowner in the parable is a fool, like the fool in psalm 14 who says in his heart: There is no God. You don’t have to be an atheist to live as if God did not exist. It is a matter of going about our business without taking God into account, of living without regard for God’s business and the interests of his kingdom.
However, this parable is not simply a warning that death may come suddenly and unexpectedly. Jesus is talking about something much bigger than your individual life or mine. He is talking about the future judgment of God which will come upon the entire world. When Jesus says, “this night,” he means the world’s last night. This parable, like most of Jesus’ parables, is eschatological, that is, it points to the end of all things. This world and all that is in it is passing away. The kingdom of God is rushing to meet us, and his kingdom is on a collision course with the present world order. The message of the kingdom of God is not just soothing thoughts or moralism. This is earth shattering news. We should wear crash helmets when we come to church, as Annie Dillard says.3
Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is not only a proclamation of salvation. It is also “the announcement of judgment, a cry of warning, and a call to repentance.”4 He intends to open our eyes to the urgency of the crisis that the world is in, and that we are in as inhabitants in the world. But there is more than an urgent warning here. There is a shaft of light in the darkness, and it is found in the very last phrase: “rich in God.” What does it mean to be rich in the things of God? God is rich. He is the giver of life. God eats, drinks and is merry whenever we find our way back to the Father’s house. When Jesus Christ returns to judge the world God will gather into his barn everyone who belongs to him. God gives to our work and our efforts the life and meaning that we can never give them ourselves. When this happens, we are rich in the things of God and store up treasure in heaven.
O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy; Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy, that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.
BCP, 180.
1 Gerhard Dellling, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 5, trans. and ed., Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), 271.
2 CD I/1, 163.
3 An American Childhood.
4 Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of the Kingdom, 2nd edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1972), 160. For his discussion of this parable, see pp. 164-65.