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Greed & Gluttony: "More And More"

Seven Deadly Sins Sermon Series—Greed and Gluttony
March 2, 2008
I Timothy 6:2b-12

Teach and urge these duties. Whoever teaches otherwise and does not agree with the
sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that is in accordance with
godliness, is conceited, understanding nothing, and has a morbid craving for
controversy and for disputes about words. From these come envy, dissension, slander,
base suspicions, and wrangling among those who are depraved in mind and bereft of
the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
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; but if we have food and
clothing, we will be content with these. 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. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their
eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves
with many pains. But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness,
godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold
of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good
confession in the presence of many witnesses.

This week, I’m going to continue our journey with the Seven Deadly Seasons during this
Lenten season by combining two sins that seem like natural cousins to each other—
greed and gluttony. Mostly I’m doing it because I have only six weeks to cover seven
deadly sins, so some sin was going to have to have to share the stage with another
one, and I thought these two sins wouldn’t mind the company of each other. Now, I’ve
heard that a better companion to the sin of greed might have been envy, and, if you
think of it, that might have better sin to twin up with it. Of course, if you remember from
my sermon a few weeks ago, envy is all about wanting to possess what others have,
wanting IN PARTICULAR what you have, and actually wishing that you didn’t have it
yourself, whereas greed, well, greed is a little more universal, a little bit more
encompassing: a greedy person doesn’t just want you have, but what your neighbor
owns, and everyone’s else stuff on the block. Greed is about consuming more and
more, getting more and more, and stuffing it into bigger and bigger houses, until the
walls become overrun with stuff. Buddhism often refers to greed as being like “hungry
ghosts, plagued by this insatiable greed, which could swallow the universe and still be
hungry and thirsty.” And, of course, our own Christian faith has something to say about
this matter as well, as the monk Thomas Merton shows us in his story about a monk by
the name of Serapion who tried to avoid any taint of greed by selling his New
Testament and giving that money away to the poor. He said, “I sold the book that told
me to sell all I had to give to the poor,” referring, of course, to some of Jesus’ teachings
in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 12.

Now, I must admit that I would have had trouble doing what Serapion did, to be honest.
Most of you know of my addiction to the printed word, and some of you have even
bothered to get me a sweatshirt with the words “Lead me not into
temptation…especially bookstores” on the front of it—Thank you, Mary Kugler! I love
my books, and I am sucker for a sale on books—if it’s a deal, and I am even vaguely
interested in the topic, I’ll buy that book, and many more, if I could. But I have to admit
to all of you, as I have before, that its obvious that I am not just hungry for the
knowledge or whatever that I might find in those books—its that I want more and more
of them, I want every book, and what is worse is that I obviously can’t read as many
books as I purchase in any given time. Douglas is always pointing that out to me, and I
know he is right…but I just need to have them, just in case, you know, I have some time
in the future to devout to more reading, or for research on some sermon. And what’s
even worse than not even being able to realistically read all them in the near future is
that even when I am finished with a book, I am very reluctant to give it away, or to sell
it. I just have to keep a copy of that read book, even if I don’t plan to read it again, as if
it was some sort of eternal memorial to my earlier experience of reading that book.   My
friends, that is greed: acquiring and acquiring more and more of something—books,
money, land, food, whatever—and not being able to give it away. It is the sin of excess,
of having more than what is needed and not wanting to give any of it away.

There is a television show called Clean House on Style Network, and it’s about folks
whose homes are a complete mess—clutter is everywhere, they usually can’t walk
comfortably in their homes because trash is everywhere, or stuff is up to the ceilings,
and in every crevice. The premise of the show is that a team of experts come to help
them throw away stuff they don’t need, or sell it, so that they can raise money to have
the design guru go in and give their homes a makeover. And one of the more
interesting parts of the show is when a homeowner is being asked to let go of an item
for the yard sale, and the person is resistant to letting go of that particular thing. I have
no doubt some of it is staged, especially some of the resistance by the owner, but I
think some of it is pretty real…its hard letting go of the stuff, even if you know the “stuff”
is making your life a nightmare—trying lugging hundreds of pounds of books from
Houston, Texas to southwest Michigan, and see if it isn’t a nightmare!

And, of course, there is the sin of gluttony, which is interesting one, because in many
ways, there is not a whole lot about gluttony in the Bible. There is some stuff here and
there, especially in the Old Testament, and even in the New Testament, there is a
warning or two about not being gluttonous at the Lord’s Table, the Communion Table,
because it was actually a meal, rather than what we do today. I think the reason for
gluttony’s absence from our Bibles is because the sin of overeating was something
most people didn’t have to worry about—times were tougher, and food was less
plentiful. Still, you have the church worrying enough about the sin of gluttony that it
includes in its Top 7 list of sins, and perhaps that is because eating food can be such a
pleasurable thing, and pleasure, in some corners of the church, has sometimes been
suspect. But the reality is that a lot of us kind of struggle with this little problem…I am
one of those folks who loves to eat beyond the moment I know my body is telling me
that I am full, especially if it desert, or a favorite dish, like pizza. I’ve eaten the last two
slices of pizza, even when my stomach was saying, “stop!” And those kinds of
excesses, they have real-life consequences for me, for us—I’m 40 pounds heavier than
I was 5 years ago! See these pews? Who are the skinny people these pews were
made for? How do they expect us to get into them nowadays? I was at Riverside
United Methodist Church, in their brand new sanctuary, teaching at the Lenten Soup
Suppers, and I was noticing how wide the space between the rows were…my goodness,
folks, we have grown, as a people! Now, more of us did alot more physical labor back
then, but somehow it seemed reasonable to folks in this church decades ago to space
the pews 12 inches apart!

But not everyone is happy about including gluttony in the list of sins. In 2003, a group
of French chefs petitioned the pope to remove gluttony from the church’s official list of
the Seven Deadly Sins. Their argument? That the church is using the wrong French
word in its list: While “gourmandise” once meant eating to excess, earning it a listing in
the French version of the Roman Catholic Church’s seven sins; today its associations
are more of conviviality and good living. Another word, “gloutonnerie” translates
gluttony more accurately. Essentially, the chef’s association’s president says that the
current meaning of the word gluttony is all about pleasure and even the pleasure of
sharing food with others. (“Gluttony vs. gourmet: Clearing a sin,” The Washington
Times, January 13, 2003.) I wish that was the case for many of us, that it was all about
the pleasure of sharing food with each other, but for many of us, its not about sharing—
I really don’t want to share my pizza with you, to be honest, and I certainly don’t want to
give that book away, if I can all but help it.

So, how do we deal with these two particular sins? Well, before I go there, I want to
point our that wanting to make more money is not automatically a sin. And its not
greedy to want to sock some money away for your retirement, or to keep some of the
more important books in your library, or to keep a part of your land, or have enough to
pay the bills at the end of the month. The problem is that we often confuse having too
much with having just enough—not only do we need one car, we need two cars, and we
need the best cars; not only do I need to collect my favorite antique books, but I need
the whole set, if I am going to be OK with the universe, for whatever reason. And
sometimes we use our children as an excuse to hold onto our money—we scrimp and
save, we say, because we want to leave our kids something, but is it really an excuse
for not being more generous people in the present, even generous to our kids, in the
right here and now?

The tradition of the church has said the antidote to greed is generosity, is giving away
as much as we reasonably can in this world. Greed can also be about not spending
money, about being stingy with this world, with other people, with causes we care
about. Is there any reason why we should want to become wealthy? Well, yes, and
that reason would be so that we can give it away to other people. It’s the principle we
find all over the New Testament—we are given what we are given—mercy, love, hope,
goodness, money—so that we can give them away to others. They aren’t meant to be
stored, these gifts we’ve been given, as the writer of 1 Timothy says here in this text—
“for we have brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it.” And
its interesting, these warnings about wanting to be rich for the sake of being rich, this
love of money that is the root of all kinds of evil, and how it can lead us astray. The
great gain, the thing to be greedy for, according to the writer, is to be like God, to be
greedy for godliness, and combined with being happy with what you have at this
moment—contentment, the writer names it as such—these things will give us the
happiness we grasp after in that second plate of food, or the get-rich scheme we’ve
hatched in our heads.

Again, ambition has its merits, but greed, doing it for the money, rather than doing it so
that we can give away the money to help others…well, that is recipe for disaster. But
there is something about greed that can be clarifying, in many ways—it can often show
us our true selves, and the true selves of others. We’ve all heard stories of families
being torn apart over the inheritance left behind by a loved one—if you haven’t I could
tell you some horror stories, but I assume you have your own…greed can clarify a
whole lot.   On a particular episode of the Twilight Zone called THE MASKS—truly, one
of the great television shows of all times—the theme was on greed, and it aired on
March 20, 1964. And the story goes that knowing that he has only a few hours to live,
an ailing Jason Foster summons his family, daughter Emily, son-in-law Wilfred,
grandson Wilfred Jr., and granddaughter Emily, to his home in New Orleans during
Mardi Gras. He knows they are anxious for him to die so they can inherit his wealth.
However, Foster has a final wish that they must fulfill before they can receive their
inheritance: Each must wear a Mardi Gras mask until midnight. Foster states that the
masks represent the opposite of each person’s true nature. In fact, however, he has
had the masks specially made to represent exactly the evil qualities he feels each of his
relatives truly possesses. At first they object, but overcome by greed, they agree to
wear them. At the stroke of midnight, Foster dies. The family members take off their
masks, and are shocked to see their faces transformed. They now possess features
that reveal their true natures: avarice, cowardice, vanity, and cruelty. That is what
greed does—it reveals our true natures, the shadow side of us, and maybe that is the
good thing. If greed can reveal the darkness within us, we might have a chance to
shine our light, and God’s light into that space, into our hearts.

And so I would say to people like me who struggle with greed, with gluttony, do the
things that will bring more light into our lives. If we must have that book, give away at
least 1, if not two books, from our collection. If we must have this or that, match it in
some way with some gift to someone else, to some good organization, to some person
in need. If we want more, we must give more, and that might temper some of our
enthusiasm for yet more stuff in our lives. I remember woman from my former
congregation in Houston who made her children give away one of their toys to other
children, via a charity, for every new one they received at Christmas and birthdays. It
was her way of teaching generosity, and to help them see the need of others amidst
the plenty they were receiving in that moment. Now, her two kids did get a little smarter
when they got older, and rebelled a little bit, because they realized that not everyone’s
parent was making them do that…she said she found more and more of her kids toys
hidden away in cracks and crevices…you see, the disease of greed, of wanting more
and keeping it all for ourselves, it starts early in life. The good news, of course, is that
we are not our stuff, our bank accounts, our net worth or lack of real net worth, our
book collections, our hobbies—we are not the stuff we surround ourselves, unless we
let it become “us,” unless we let it transform us by twisting the faces of our souls. We
ought to take the advice given to Timothy, which is to gain godliness, God’s own way of
being, so that we can be as generous with others as God has been with us.   Amen.