Pride and Greed & the 7 Deadly Sins | Vices & Virtues

All right, well, welcome.
Thanks for being here on our second night.
And the first night we really kind of dig in.
And we had to pair these in order to get through our seven sins and seven virtues.
We paired them up for three weeks and we’ll do one on its own.
And the pairing was a little bit interesting,
but tonight we put together greed and pride
and we decided we’d start there.
We’ll say this maybe again,
but many monks and theologians have said things about pride,
like it’s the queen of the sins
or it’s the chief sin.
And so we thought it would be good to start there.
And greed is oddly connected to pride in a couple of ways.
And the most interesting thing as we move into thinking about pride and greed
is that culturally speaking,
in an American setting anyway,
you almost have to start by convincing somebody that these are actually sins.
In other words,
we know pride can get taken too far.
We know greed can get taken too far.
But for the most part,
our culture sort of accepts the idea that a good dose of both
is generally a good thing.
We don’t think of these as dangerous things,
as long as they stay under the radar of hurting people.
That’s a very different take than the ancient monks, the monastics had.
They were deeply concerned about any existence of pride and greed within a person.
And so it gives us,
I think, an interesting starting point.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think maybe to help us get there,
Clint, I think we have to consider the Christian conversation,
the uniquely Christian conversation about pride and greed,
to both not be a function of action,
but rather a statement and evaluation of character.
And this is, I think, an important term that we need to name at the front end of
a conversation like this,
because we will come down culturally on the person who
steals people’s money, like an Enron executive,
who was, by the way, a very regular Baptist, a tender,
the CEO was.
You know,
at the point at which someone’s greed crosses the line and does material harm,
we’ll call that out as a sin.
But the Christian conversation surrounding pride and greed is that fundamentally,
especially pride,
is the fountainhead from which the,
as Luther would say,
the inward turn of sin finds its peak.
That at self,
we’re most tempted to have the center of gravity
around our own sense of self.
But the interesting thing is,
and, you know, I think here, Willman helps us right away,
is that particularly the sin of pride is one in which we often find
ourself valuing other people’s estimation of us as our own estimation.
In other words, we think of what other people might think,
and we allow that to supply our value.
And if that’s the case,
then we immediately begin to detach the value as God’s creation,
those who are called good.
And instead, we substitute for that an image of what someone else might think.
And then that’s an
easy turn for us to make that into a false image of ourselves,
which is, of course,
one of the Ten Commandments to not make graven images,
but the other harkens all the way back
to Scripture to Adam and Eve.
When they come to take the fruit,
fundamentally,
they’re taking another’s estimation of them.
They’re resisting the identity as creation,
which was called good
by God.
In fact, very good.
And they substitute that for another idea.
When they do that,
we see pride in the earliest part of the scriptural narrative.
So there’s two words that live under pride that I think are helpful too.
One is suburbia,
as in the word superb.
And it’s the idea that I claim myself superior.
I believe myself to be good,
to be better than.
So suburbia is the sin of estimating oneself too highly.
The other avenue that pride takes is an old word called vainglory.
And vainglory is seeking the attention, the attraction, and the opinion of others.
And we probably don’t have
time.
I think we could spend a week talking about vainglory and social media.
But vainglory is that
wanting to appear.
So pride,
suburbia believes something is true of me.
Vainglory wants to convince everyone else something is true of me.
But they both lead to this same place,
which is to put myself in the center.
And the crazy thing about pride,
the monks had a very good saying
about pride that most of the deadly sins attack us at our worst.
We feel we’re having one of those days.
So we overeat.
We drink too much.
We yell at someone.
We let our anger.
Pride is the only
one of the seven that really attacks us at our best.
When we’ve done well,
we open the door
for pride to come in.
So I had a very personal experience with this this week.
Some of you may
remember in in 2011,
Pastor Matt and I had done a series on the seven deadly sins.
And so I pulled
those sermons out to look through them.
And the sermon on pride was done on Palm Sunday.
And so I had I had preached this bit about Jesus being the king who rides a donkey and that kind of contrast
of the risen, not the risen one,
but the holy one, the Messiah,
but the humility of being on the donkey.
And I had said,
as I read through this,
I said,
we all want the parade,
but we don’t want the donkey.
And I read that in my office the other day,
and I thought, Oh, that’s good.
That’s a really, that’s a really good line.
So just to keep track,
I’m sitting in my office,
patting myself on the back for a sermon about pride from 12 years ago.
And then I think,
Oh, man,
I’m done for.
And pride,
one of the dangerous things about pride is that it does attack us,
not when we’re weak,
but when we feel good.
It’s that voice that says,
not only have you done good,
but somehow you are good.
And then you get quickly to you are better.
And we live in a moment culturally,
where America is pretty comfortable with that sort of self esteem,
make people feel good about themselves.
And I’m not insinuating feeling good about yourself is not a good thing.
But it is, it is a tempting thing.
And it can go the wrong way very quickly.
And that makes it,
I think, a dangerous thing.
Yeah. So well, there’s a few points,
I think, tributaries that come out of
this.
I want to share this with you.
It really struck me.
This is a quote that comes from Thomas Aquinas.
You might remember that we named Thomas as a very important figure in both medieval
theology, but also the formation here of the sins.
And this is what he said this said the penitent sinner,
who knows that he sinned in lust,
sloth or gluttony is as it were,
inoculated against the greatest, more dangerous sin of pride.
Think about that for a second.
The very fact that you have
thought and cared about some of these other sins you’re going to find on the list is unto itself
evidence that you’re more likely to be tempted by the sin of pride.
But Wilhelmin goes on in this
book to make the case that one of the reasons pride lives so well in the church is because
the church is filled with people who truly care about following in God’s way that the church is
literally a group of people who is populated with this idea that we can and should follow in God’s
way that there are some ways that will lead us closer than others,
which means we’re the most
tempted to compare how we’re doing to someone else or most tempted to look at our own progress
and to evaluate that as intrinsically good,
which by its own nature,
values our own action and not
the one of God working within us.
So that’s the temptation of pride is as Clint says,
it lies in weight in some of the best motives.
It’s always sitting there ready to turn itself around.
And often couches it in positive terms.
So an example of this, I think,
which is really helpful is have
you ever thought of the telling of when Jesus goes into the wilderness to be tested?
He’s tested three times.
And only in reading for this have I ever heard it framed in this way.
But Wilhelmin makes the case that as Jesus has tempted,
he’s objectively tempted with good things.
So the first temptation is to turn a bread or turn a stone into bread.
You remember this?
His point was that
would be objectively incredible for every hungry person.
If you could regularly turn stones into
bread, that would solve a massive problem in the world.
The next step,
Satan invites him and tempts
him with this idea of political power,
I’ll make you chief.
And when he says that he gives to Jesus
the temptation that he could fix the political issues that keep people hungry.
And then he goes
on to the temple,
the idea of those who misplace religious power,
they give people ritual instead of God,
Jesus, you could change that.
The response that Jesus gives every time is to turn it away from himself.
Instead of accepting what could be an objective good in the world,
Jesus says, no, it’s not for mine for me to take,
but rather for God to give.
That is, I think, the amazing challenge of pride is because we are intrinsically as people who care,
especially as Christians,
we are seeking to follow in God’s way when we get it right.
We’re even closer to the doorstep of temptation to make it about us.
So our constant call is creature,
then is to invite God to reshape our imaginations
to become the kind of people who can see God’s work in us instead of our own work
functioning unto itself.
There’s a really fun quote about pride in which the author said,
pride is the only illness
that makes everyone sick except the person who has it.
So that,
and if you’ve dealt with a narcissist
or a truly arrogant person,
you know the truth of that,
right?
That you encounter that personality
locked into itself that can’t take itself out of the picture,
can’t take himself or herself
out of the reference point.
It is a persistent self-focus.
And we’ll move on to the antidote in a moment.
But so what does that look like?
Concretely speaking,
what are manifestations of pride?
Well,
people who are unduly prideful tend to interrupt a lot.
They tend to insist on their way.
They tend to be hard on the mistakes of others,
but explain theirs away.
They tend to give themselves a grace because they feel like they deserve it.
And this is the connection.
This is part of the problem.
And the connection with our second sin,
greed, is that proud,
greedy people believe they deserve what they get.
And if they take it from you,
it’s okay because they deserve
it.
They are worth it.
And you are just the mechanism that feeds that.
The same is true.
Again, we could go on forever about social media and that whole business of needing to be seen,
of needing to get likes and do whatever that takes.
But the sadness of pride is that it reduces
us to kind of our smallest self because it makes it essentially impossible to look beyond self
to others.
And unchecked pride is very dangerous.
I think for most of us,
the reality is we battle
pride like the game where the things pop up and you have to knock it down.
It’s that voice that
sort of comes in and says,
“Oh, that was really good.
Not everyone would do it that well.
Oh, you took the time to do that.
A lot of people wouldn’t.” And again,
there’s a world of difference
between some positive self-talk and pride.
And it can be difficult to carefully parse, which is which.
So not surprising,
the antidote for pride,
the virtue that corresponds to pride, is humility.
The idea humus is the word for dirt.
Humility historically means to bow, to lower oneself.
So the way around pride,
and this was the tact of the monks service,
it is to put others ahead of self,
which the prideful heart deeply,
deeply struggles to do.
And so the path of humility we see in Jesus who kneels to wash disciples feet,
the path of humility
is to serve others,
not to take from them,
not to take adoration,
not to believe that I deserve something,
but to choose to serve others.
And it is a choice.
We often think of humility as a trait,
and we underestimate how often humility is a discipline.
I love working with confirmation students because confirmation students ground me in a really
helpful way.
You ask a confirmation student,
well, let’s start with adults.
You ask an adult, who is God?
The adult knows how to put words together to give some answer to that,
right?
Maybe we all don’t feel comfortable,
but a confirmation student is just scared to be in
the room with you.
So you ask who you think God is,
and they’re just reaching for any word,
the first word that comes to mind.
And the thought that comes to mind most often when I
ask that in the beginning of the confirmation season is the big stuff.
God made everything, so God is strong.
Sometimes they know the words like omnipotent or omniscient,
all powerful, all knowing.
Sometimes they’ll know that,
but most of the time,
God’s everywhere,
God knows everything.
And I’ve never once,
never once have I had a confirmation student tell me
that God was humble enough to take on flesh or that God was willing to leave heaven
to be with us in the dirt,
right?
We always think of the high.
We always think of the lofty,
the strong, the superhero kind of image.
But in Philippians chapter two,
if you remember the
Christ hymn, as it’s called,
we’re told that Jesus Christ lowered himself.
He did not think of
equality with God as something to be grasped,
but rather he takes on flesh.
In fact, he’s lowered even to the depths of the earth.
Then if you notice in the Christ hymn,
what happens is he’s raised up, but not by his own strength by who’s,
but by God’s God raises Jesus up.
This is the powerful antidote that is humility,
the recognition that you don’t need to grasp,
that you don’t need the knowledge of good and evil,
which was the very thing that Adam and Eve reached for, right?
All you need to do,
and this is much like what we’re going to discover when
we come to charity,
once we come to greed,
is we have to let go of our desire to pull ourselves forward.
And instead, like Jesus to recognize that true humility looks like being willing
to lower ourselves, to allow less of ourself in any circumstance so that God might be made greater in that circumstance.
C.S.
Lewis has a great sentiment about this.
He talks about how the
of Christians is not to think lowly of ourselves,
because fundamentally,
that would be like thinking lowly of Jesus,
who was the one who took on flesh.
There’s nothing about being human,
which is low.
And by that, I mean a lower status.
God raised humanity in
the choice to become human.
But instead, Lewis points out,
it’s to think of ourselves less,
to make our lives not an end unto themselves,
but to recognize that we are ultimately conduits
through which God seeks to serve the world.
If God,
the master, was willing to take on flesh
to die for our sake,
then surely the servant will not be greater than the master.
We, too,
will be used in whatever way we can,
if we’re following God,
to serve and care for others.
This is biblical humility.
It’s not to beat ourselves up.
It’s not to have a low self-image.
It’s not to sit on the couch and eat cereal all day, right?
It’s not that we don’t have a drive.
It’s rather that we use all that we’ve been given as stewards so that God might work through us for
the sake of others.
That is what we understand biblical humility to be.
And like any spiritual practice,
humility is something we can endeavor to learn.
So humility is a discipline.
It is something we can work at.
We can push back against that idea of pride when
it tries to sneak in.
In some ways, I think pride is the hardest of the sins,
the most difficult of
the sins to self-diagnose,
because by definition, it’s the one that blinds you to it the most.
You know, when you chase lust and anger and greed to where they lead,
that’s not that hard to spot.
Pride is much more subtle.
And therefore,
I think much more important
that we become aware of it.
G.K.
Chesterson said, “If I could preach only one sermon for the rest of
my life, it would be a sermon against pride.” And I mentioned that the monks,
the people who came up
with all this business,
they considered pride the queen of the sins.
In fact, in one list of
the seven deadly sins,
as we mentioned last week,
they didn’t put pride on it because they said,
“Pride runs through all of those sins,
and it shouldn’t be thought of as its own thing.”
But then later on,
it got back on the list.
And I think it has a fitting place there.
But we start with it because it is, in some ways,
our favorite idol is usually the person staring at us in the mirror each day,
in my experience.
It’s really interesting reading ancient stuff.
You know, the idea that some monk in the middle of the desert in a monastery who is wearing a brown
robe and getting up and gardening and then going to bed,
the idea that they begin to struggle with pride.
But the monks reported that that was the most common thing.
And it was the thing they
worried about the most.
You know, again,
you tend to think,
“Oh, lust, I bet they’re really worried.”
No, they worried about pride,
that how easily one could become intoxicated with self,
how easily one could come to compare themselves favorably with others and hold themselves above
others in their own mind.
And, you know,
if very spiritually-minded,
intentional people can do that in a monastery,
it’s maybe not surprising we can figure out how to do it in our existence,
our experience as well.
Well, then we move on to greed.
Get a double whammy tonight.
Greed is tough.
Greed is very interesting.
I think you probably know this,
but I don’t know if you’ve
thought about it this way.
Greed is Jesus’ most condemned sin.
So the sin that Jesus condemned
most often is greed,
not murder,
adultery,
all the rest of that bad stuff.
When Jesus talked sin,
it was probably the sin of greed.
And that is very humbling.
That is very telling,
particularly from the perspective of a materialistic, capitalistic society,
which,
if not rewards, at least supports the idea of more,
our culture.
I’ve said this before,
but for those of you who grew up with a television,
particularly from the time you could pay attention,
some very, very smart people were spending their days convincing us how to buy stuff,
why we needed it,
how to convince us that we should have their product.
Now, that’s only exacerbated with the way that media algorithms work,
with the way that
cookies in your browsers work.
They can put before you the stuff you think about and look at
all the time, and they are really,
really good at it.
And so greed, again, is an inward sin.
It’s that desire to possess.
It’s that desire to have.
Not simply for status,
though status is often a part of it,
but particularly when it connects to pride,
but just that idea of deserving,
of having more.
And greed culturally is pretty well tolerated.
In fact, I hesitate to tell you this because I promise,
and never mind, we’re going to skip that.
I’ll tell you that some other time.
I’ll tell you that some other time.
But greed is,
it is accumulation,
and at its core,
greed wants more.
It’s just never satisfied.
They asked John D.
Rockefeller one time, near the end of his life,
they said, “You have everything.” He was arguably the richest person
in the world at the time.
He said, “How much does a man need?” Anybody know his answer?
Just a little more.
That’s what he said.
Just a little more.
And John D.
Rockefeller was a great humanitarian,
gave a lot of money,
did all that stuff.
But when it came down to it and they asked
him, “How much do you think a guy needs?
You got 20 houses and mansions?” He said,
“Just a little more.
Just a little more than I have.” Which is, you know,
greed is sneaky.
All the sins are sneaky.
So as an example of this,
I’ll be really brief,
but Augustine wrote what we have now is a book
called The Confessions.
If you’ve not read,
I highly recommend it.
It’s a classic and Christian thought.
And he tells in that book a story of a time when he was in high school.
And he had told
in some previous chapters,
he lived a pretty loose life.
He’s pretty willing to admit later on in his
life as a bishop of the Christian church,
a very respected individual at the time he wrote this.
As a kid,
he kind of did whatever he wanted and he did some stuff that young boys might want to do.
And he did all of it.
But the story that stuck out to him was a story about a time that he and his
friends went into a,
essentially a neighborhood person’s garden and stole pears from the pear tree.
And he looked back on that as the greatest sin he could remember committing.
And in fact, that sin became for him a moment of turning.
It actually transformed his life looking backward.
The thing that made that sin for him so heinous was not because the pear was that valued or
priceless or because the damage that he did in that act was so substantial.
It was the fact that
he took it though he had absolutely no need for it.
He wasn’t hungry.
He wasn’t going to bake a pie
or he wasn’t going to give it to somebody else.
He wasn’t even going to eat it right there.
They just threw it down the alley for the sake of having something to throw.
And reflecting back, he realized that he took it for no other reason than to acquire the thing.
And then he wrote what
is one of the most famous lines ever written by a Christian theologian.
He wrote that all of our
people describe the affliction of greed.
It’s restlessness.
It’s us looking and seeing things
that we subtly come to believe if only we would acquire it or if only we could bring it into our circle,
it would do fill in the blank.
It would make me happy or I would enjoy it or it would
help pass time or it would mean this to other people.
The range of possibility is endless.
It’s unique as we are as people.
But the only one who will give stillness to a restless soul
is the one who made the soul.
And greed is described in literature.
Charles Dickens maybe gives us the best example if you think of the Christmas Carol.
Greed is described as being miserly,
of being solitary,
almost wretched.
That image of the person who has allowed themselves to
consume so much for the sake of filling their soul that there’s nothing good left in it but
the stuff that they’ve tried to cram in.
That is the dark danger of greed.
And, you know, Wilman makes the point to circle back around to how you led this off.
I found this really helpful.
Advertising in our culture,
which is the mechanism by which we convince ourselves and others that
they need more stuff to fill that hole,
advertising is not simply information but it is formation.
And Rochelle and I just have been trying an experiment.
We put an ad blocker on our
internet at home so it blocks advertisements before it even gets to your computer.
And
I cannot tell you how many times we try to click.
You can still see the little advertisement at the
top but when you click on it,
it doesn’t go anywhere.
How many times we try clicking on the advertisement?
I never knew.
I didn’t think I was one of those advertisement people.
I never click on those things.
Turns out I click on them all the time.
That’s how subtle the formation is.
It’s been time and time and time again for years been put in front of me in subtle ways so that
I’ve gotten used to clicking the button and thought,
“Well, I’m clicking the button.
I want to click.” That is the kind of instant access to fill that hole that I think makes today greed particularly troublesome.
Now, it’s not to say that we haven’t always been trying to have
that car in the driveway or go on that vacation.
It’s not that greed is new or in some ways worse
but I think the tools that provide the mechanisms for formation that we might fill our hearts with
something other than God are operating in a far more subtle and impactful way than most of us realize.
And this is one of the sins I do think we have to talk about.
There’ll probably be another
one of these conversations but I do think we have to talk about the place in which we live.
We are so blessed and privileged to live in a place of plenty,
to live in a place of freedom.
Most of us the benefit of an education system, a training system,
family system.
We have a lot of
things in our corner as Americans and the result is that makes us,
it gives us a fairly good chance
of success.
The downside is that we measure success partly by how well we do,
where we live, what we live in,
what we own, what our hobbies are and our sort of possessions.
And it is very
difficult I think to talk genuinely,
seriously about being an American without being willing
to entertain a conversation about greed.
It is tough.
In the last 30 years, 40 years,
people study houses.
Can you guess the two aspects of houses that have grown the most?
In other words,
the places in a house that have gotten the most,
the largest proportionally?
Garage.
You’re on the right track.
Closets.
Garages and closets have grown the most proportionately.
Now,
you don’t have to be
architectural to,
what’s that mean?
We need more places for our stuff,
right?
20 years ago, almost 20 years ago now,
Jane and I moved into our house and some of the houses on the street had three
stall garages and we thought,
what in the world would you do with three stalls in your garage?
Now we wish we had four.
We got two and we can’t shove all our stuff in there.
We’re carrying stuff to the basement in the wintertime because it can’t be in the garage.
So it’s easy to do.
You can keep up with what you think is a very modest progression in America and still have more than you could possibly justify.
And we have to take that seriously,
I think we have to have that conversation.
There was a group from First Press several years ago that went down to Guatemala and worked on houses.
Ron was there.
I remember coming back and I remember kind of wrestling with this.
I can’t remember what the number was,
but it cost X number of dollars to build a home in Guatemala.
And that was, you know, there was a family.
We helped do that.
And I came back and it dawned on me,
I have several possessions that cost more than that home.
I own multiple things that cost more
than a family’s home in Guatemala.
And that was kind of a gulp moment.
Like, ooh,
I’m not sure that’s what it was.
Because we live in such a different place from most of the rest of the world.
It’s easy to think that our way is normative.
And our way is,
I won’t say based on greed,
but it’s certainly friendly to greed.
It doesn’t mind a little greed here and there.
America’s,
we’re pretty good with greed.
It’s in the works.
So in some of our conversations this week,
Clint and I were talking about tonight and,
you know, what track you take,
pride, greed, or big topics.
So what ground do we try to walk?
And we were discussing how, how it’s hard to read books about pride and greed in particular,
because any relatively self-aware author would have to recognize that as they write about the Christian
sin of greed, they’re writing a book that they’re hoping is going to be bought.
That fundamentally,
two pastors who have been given lots of blessings in life are sitting and
talking about greed, but has to be known that we’re included in the circle, right?
That is, I think what makes greed so very difficult is because in a context in which agency,
in which the acquisition of not just stuff, but experiences,
when these things that we reach for
have so much power culturally,
we are almost inevitably not going to be able to exterminate
that sinful place of beginning,
but rather we will find it in different places and need to
address it.
That more likely than being able to keep the seed of greed out of our lives,
we’ll need to be able to identify when that plant starts growing and it’s time to start weeding that garden.
I think fundamentally we have to begin moving to the positive.
We need to begin practicing charity because there is not a scenario,
I don’t think, in which greed does not lay in wait.
I think the idea that fundamentally as Christians,
we are tasked with opening our hands to others is maybe the firmest foothold we can take in our step against greed.
So again,
think for a moment practically.
How do we identify greed?
How do we get an inkling that greed may be trying to work on us?
We become obsessed with the next thing.
We become unenamored with whatever the last thing was.
We just had to have.
It loses its meaning.
It loses its value.
We don’t appreciate those things.
We don’t find ourselves grateful.
We compare our stuff with others and we will sometimes use what other people have as a way
to either pursue or justify pursuing more stuff.
We have a ton of stuff that we don’t use,
that we don’t need,
but we think getting rid of it,
we’d miss it.
It would somehow reflect on us.
And the answer to greed is fairly similar.
I think if you asked everybody,
“How do you think you fight greed?” They’d tell you, “Well,
generosity,
charity,” which is the
discipline where the discipline biblically of tithing.
And I’m not arguing that you should or
shouldn’t do the 10% thing,
but historically the idea was that’s big enough to make it work,
to make it difficult.
The idea is that that was a significant enough commitment
that it was going to cut into our ability to pursue greed a little bit.
I think another
aspect of generosity or charity is,
as Michael said earlier,
it takes our hands and moves them
from taking to giving,
both physically and spiritually.
And that act of giving,
that symbolism of saying, “I hold what I have loosely.
I enjoy it.
I appreciate it.
I’m blessed by it,
but it doesn’t define me.
I may have stuff,
but my stuff doesn’t have me.” If we can get to a
point where that’s mostly true for us,
I think that it is a healthy marker.
Michael and I were
talking this week when I was in seminary,
it was very interesting.
They had a Catholic brother,
a monk come in and he did a workshop on family spirituality,
which I thought was
very strange, but he did a great job.
And I don’t know how it happened,
but I got tagged to go pick
him up at the airport.
So Brother Samuel,
I went and picked up Brother Samuel.
Brother Samuel was a great guy.
We got to visit.
I got to show him around campus.
And from then on,
which wasn’t often maybe three or four times in my seminary career,
if Brother Samuel was coming past Louisville or in Louisville,
he would call me.
And if he was coming to campus,
I’d go get him or we’d meet for lunch or whatever.
And I remember a conversation,
which he was talking about the monastery.
And I was fascinated by the idea of living in the monastery.
And he had, you know, he brought a laptop and I said,
“Oh, your laptop.” And he said, “Well,
it belongs to the monastery.” And then he
talked about the TV.
I said, “You have a TV in your room?” He says, “Well,
it belongs to the
monastery.” And the monks,
the desert monks set this pattern and monks to this day continue to use it.
They intentionally own nothing.
They have a common closet.
If somebody’s traveling,
they go get clothes they want to wear.
They don’t own any.
Their books are shared.
They
literally communally own those things.
And the idea is that helps them battle the temptation of mine.
And it’s a very interesting way to live.
And I’m going to be honest,
one I don’t know that
I want to try.
But I think that,
again, the beauty of it is they don’t think of their stuff as theirs.
And I’ve tried to embody that.
I have stuff.
But I hope that if it was a choice between my stuff
and someone else’s needs,
I would be able to be charitable.
That I would be able
to be giving and generous.
And the day on which I don’t think I could do that,
that stuff has me.
And I need to
think very seriously about getting rid of it.
Because that then is setting the direction in
my life.
I’m not.
And that’s dangerous.
And again,
the idea that monks in the desert who didn’t own
anything worried about greed,
I think is a fascinating development.
And I think it gives
us a lot to think about as we struggle with it.
And I mean, we know it’s everywhere.
It’s all around us.
We know intrinsically,
we’ve heard it in a class or we’ve read it in Scripture.
We know that we’re
stewards of the things that God has given us.
We know that.
But functionally,
we don’t,
we struggle to remember that when the retirement account quarterly earnings report gets mailed in.
Right?
Because when you’re looking at dollars and cents,
the question in front of us is,
do I have enough agency in my life to live?
Can I put bread on the table?
Can I go on that trip
with my kids?
Or can I go do this thing that I think is valuable?
That to return to the original conversation about greed,
that’s what makes greed so powerful is it convinces us that it is for a
higher goal.
It’s to a better end.
If I but could acquire or to have this power or this thing,
then it would be good.
That’s the very temptation that Satan used against Jesus.
Fundamentally, the only way to live our lives in such a way that that greed does not control us,
that we are not the
puppets and it the puppeteer is fundamentally for us to not need to hold on to it,
which requires that we are willing to allow God to lead us.
I think Willman says this better than I’m going
to be able to summarize.
This is the question as he offers it.
Might I,
even I,
forego my greed,
my foolish attempt to secure my life through the abundance of my possessions and learn to live,
not by my bank account and pension,
but by faith.
He says, what a miracle that would be.
Now,
that’s not like, you know,
climbing Mount Everest in a day, right?
Not none of us can
find the path that that cancels greed tonight.
But fundamentally,
that image of living our lives
with open hands is,
I think, a very helpful image,
because whenever you find yourself pulling in, you’re conserving,
you’re, you’re, you’re circling the wagons.
And the only reason we do that
is the fear that we won’t have enough,
that we won’t be good enough,
that our life won’t be what
we hoped it could be.
And when we do that,
we’ve given up the faith that God might be the one to
give us agency and to give us that life and to lead us into the promised land,
the fundamental hope of the gospel that Jesus has already done that.
And we’ve instead substituted that with something of earth,
something that will pass,
something that will rust and be destroyed, as Jesus says.
And, and the only way for us to be formed against that cultural image,
and not just our culture, not to beat up on our culture,
but that human temptation,
this innate sinfulness is fundamentally for us to practice the habit that that helps us learn to let go and to discover
that in the letting go,
God’s providence and care will be displayed.
There’s a really interesting if you’ve ever watched little
kids,
right?
It is a rare kid that
has a toy and gives it to another kid.
It is the far more common kid that sees a kid playing with
a toy and wants to take it,
right?
We, we come naturally to greed,
not because they need the toy
because they want that somebody else seems to enjoy it.
Now I want it.
I want to take and,
and this is greed and it doesn’t have to be money.
It doesn’t have to be stuff,
but most common, it probably is, but it’s whatever we think is going to fulfill us and whatever we think is
going to complete us,
that isn’t grounded in spiritual truth.
Just leave you with this.
I listened to a podcast not too long ago.
It was an actor who is as of late doing really well.
And this was talking about his experience and they were asking him about it.
And he said, well,
I, I grounded out for 10,
15 years.
I’d try to act.
I’d, I’d go be a waiter,
try to act that I’d
work construction.
I’d get a commercial.
He said, and then this thing happened, this part.
And he said, all of a sudden I had it.
I had a major deal.
I had money, more money than I thought I’d ever
have in my life.
I had everything I wanted.
And when I realized there was nothing there,
it crushed me.
And I went through a depression because all those years he believed the next
thing was going to be the thing.
And when he finally got the top of the mountain that he wanted,
he realized he didn’t feel any better.
It didn’t change who he was.
And that’s when he had to do
serious soul searching.
And that’s the danger of greed is it,
it, it keeps the shiny carrot just
out in front of us so that we’re chasing it instead of,
as Augustin put it,
resting our souls in God.
And, and the, the path out of that is to think less about that.
And again, more about how do we serve?
How do we give?
And as we’re able to do that,
I think that we will find ourselves
able to push back on greed,
both cultural and personal in our, in our walks,
in our discipleship.
Just, just very briefly,
we talked at great length leading up to this conversation.
This is really tricky.
The topics of pride and greed,
we could spend much of the night exemplifying people who
could fit these categories for us culturally really easily.
Like I could give you a handfuls
of examples without even researching of an extravagant example of greed or someone who
clearly passed the line and was really arrogant.
But the danger of doing that is we make a
caricature of what’s truly the problem,
right?
Is we make it a tool that we would leverage against
other people to say,
well, look at that greed, isn’t that horrible?
And then we completely miss
the ladder climbing that we’re doing underneath them.
Because fundamentally,
everyone who’s beset with greed is looking up the ladder just a little bit, right?
Well,
I clearly have not gone
to excess because they have a little bit more,
right?
And that happens all the way down the
ladder.
So it’d be easy to look up and see people are,
well, that’s just excessive until we’re reminded that fundamentally,
this is about a daily practice.
This is about self-awareness,
that if we’re willing to look inward and allow the reflection upon pride and greed to be something
that is an internal conversation with the help of God,
with the help of the Holy Spirit within us,
then we can make steps forward that truly do look like humility and charity.
But if we instead look
outwards and we start using these as an evaluation tool against others,
we’re inevitably going to be
afflicted by the boomerang of the thing itself.
And so my encouragement is,
as hard as it is to sit
with these two things,
maybe the only way to find our way out of that difficult seat is the
willingness to sit there until the Spirit leads us forward.
And in the same way that Christ allowed,
that just allowed, He actively chose to be humbled in that God raised Him up.
And that’s the promise.
If we’re willing to be humbled,
if we’re willing to give and let go,
then the hope and promise of the Christian gospel is that God will give and that God will raise up.
And that is fundamentally the best news that we could hear.
So we realize kind of a tough night,
rough start,
um,
a couple of heavy hitters right off the bat.