Sermon: Greed and Investment

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Greed and Investment

By Charles Rush

November 24, 2002

ke Envy, Lust, and Anger, Greed is a primordial human temptation. It cuts across all boundaries of class, social conditions. It has been a besetting issue in every generation from the foundations of time.

Leo Tolstoy tells a story about a man that is promised as much land as he can run around in the course of a single day. He starts out early in the morning, jogging steadily, but as the day wears on his circle keeps getting wider and wider, until the afternoon begins to wane and he realizes that his circle has become so wide that he will have to run harder and harder to actually close the gap by sundown. He pushes himself, more and more, until the goal is in sight over the horizon and the sun is cresting in the west. Harder and harder he runs, collapsing of a heart attack, like one of those white lab rats on the running wheel in a film from Psychology 101.[i]

Chaucer has a character in the Canterbury Tales named the Pardoner. He gathers everyone in the pub and tells them all a story about three men who find a chest of gold and quickly become intoxicated at the prospect of their good fortune. One of them departs from the find to roust up some dinner and brings back bread and wine. While he is away, the other two begin to plot together and agree to murder him upon his return, which they do. Before they dispose of the body, they decide to eat together and pour themselves a glass of wine. Little do they know that the wine has previously been laced with poison by the dead fellow who had been doing a little plotting on his own. With grim recognition, they both choke, fall on the floor, and die. There they are found, all three dead from greed, their treasure never enjoyed.

The Pardoner then turns to the audience and offers to forgive any of their sins- especially that day- the sin of greed- if they can pay him the small price of a couple of ducats. [ii] We are more sophisticated than that today. We no longer pay the Priest a couple hundred dollars to keep us out of the fiery gates of Hell; we pay the lawyers a couple ten thousand dollars to keep us out of the steely grip of the SEC… so much more for so much less.

Greed is a spiritual management issue for every single one of us in this room. We are permeated with the ethos of consumption and the capital city of the World Consumption Inc. is New York. It shapes the billboards behind our daily commute. It frames the magazines we read. It punctuates our Television. It is Cosmo beguiling us in to the sleek, the sophisticated, the latest, the overtly lustful, the decadent, masterful expression of power and indulgence.

No other culture in the world even comes close to ours on this front. Last summer, I was in a dusty little village in Tunisia where the older women still wear traditional veils, absolutely no one speaks English, and camels wander the streets with mules and Toyota trucks. Men are sitting in the café having an afternoon tea. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot this teenage Tunisian girl walking up a side street with a three quarter sleeve shirt that says on the front Abercrombie and Fitch.

Go to upscale Florence and wander the streets around the Duomo, wander up the canals in Venice, around Rome- home of the most sophisticated women's clothes in the world. The teenagers are drinking cappuccino from Italy, but their jeans are from The Gap.

From the remote parts of Sicily to the back pastures of Ireland to the Reindeer ranges in Finland to circles of school girls in Burka's in Teheran, the youth culture of the world is under the spell of MTV. Imam's can't stop it. Dictator's can't control it. They fear America so deeply, and they fear free market trade in general, because they know they can't compete with it. What the world fears is American cultural imperialism because their kids are buying it almost 100%.

And it is a culture of consumption and desire. Our marketers promote it, the marketplace encourages it, we can't help but get caught up in it, permeating as it does, everything that we say and do.

No one really notices that they are becoming greedy. The vast majority of us are too sophisticated to allow ourselves to develop without more complex duplicity. What happens to us is an increasing sense of entitlement.

There comes a point for where you are making more money than your parents ever dreamed of- kind of a giddy moment- you and your spouse splurged that year and did something expensive and fun just because… Couple years go by, it is like you've always made that kind of money.

You get more/better stuff; join a couple exclusive clubs and hang around more/better people with more/better stuff; you go to more/better charity fund-raisers and get asked to do more/better client entertainment; you get access to more/better box tickets to sporting events; you take more/better limo's home and fly more/better business class, then first class, then you get into the corporate jet that is way more/better. You eat more/better fuu/fuu food at lunch more often because you are more often dealing with high net worth clients and you are very good with high maintenance people. You make more/better connections with people that hook you up with other more/better people and you have access to famous people in entertainment and politics and you start to have serious more/better command.

You are on boards, your friends and acquaintences are all on boards and it is all at your disposal. It happens gradually and you don't even really notice it because they are no longer perq's or privileges, they just come with the territory like those toiletry kits you get flying first class. I suspect that something quite like that happened to Dennis Kozlowski over the years, the infamous former Chief Executive at Tyco International. After external audit was done, and the real corporate situation was exposed, it turned out that Mr. Kozlowski had Tyco International paying for two apartments for his use in Manhattan (cost $24 million), a house in Boca Raton (cost $29 million), other furnishings and renovations ($14 million), a travel toiletries box (cost $17,000), and umbrella stand (cost $15,000) and a shower curtain (cost $6000). I read about Mr. Kozlowski last summer because the residents of Italy were still talking about another company charge, this for a birthday party he had for his wife, on the occasion of her 40th birthday, on the island of Sardinia, near Sicily. Apparently he met her when she was a waitress at a restaurant near Tyco's headquarters. He paid for his friends, but anyone remotely resembling a client was picked up by the corporation, which turned out to be about half the cost of the 3 day soiree- total tab $2.1 million. You may recall that the center piece of the party was a life size ice statue of a nude young man, loaded with Stolichnaya vodka, so that it could be poured out to guests through his penis.[iii] File that under truth is stranger than fiction.

Mr. Kozlowski didn't get to that place over night, it was a slow transformation over a long period of unbridled success, and, in his mind, he probably can't exactly point to a place or a time when he crossed over the line. It wasn't like that.

We know entitlement is a danger. We can see it in our kids. They keep reminding us that everyone they know goes to private school. Everyone has been to Cancun. Everyone gets a car. Everyone goes to camp. Everyone's parents pay for whatever college they get into. Everyone's dad sends serious money periodically so they don't have to work. Everyone goes to college for five years because everyone needs to travel for some time. Everyone needs help getting started after college… What are we doing? Everyone is unbecoming.

Entitled children are not beautiful to behold. They are less subtle, less sophisticated, less socially integrated, less guarded and they make us realize for a moment that we are becoming insatiable ego like the character out of Star Wars, Jabba the Hut, just pulling everything within reach into our consumptive bellies and it is not pretty. What are we doing here?

You know, in the weeks and months that followed September 11th, I've noticed that a lot of us have started asking ourselves that question. What are we doing here? We've got to have a richer spiritual vision than living the entitled life and becoming a character in New York magazine or GQ or Vanity Fair.

Jesus one time told a parable for people like us. He said, there was a certain rich farmer who had massive barns and he decided to tear down those barns to make room for even bigger barns (the 6 car garage), when God came to him one night and said, “Your soul is required of you this evening?” (Lk. 12:16-21) After September 11th, a lot of us started to realize that we had just been on “More/Better Autopilot” and spiritually speaking, nobody had been flying our plane for quite a while. That's not cutting it.

Jesus taught us that the antidote to anxious greed is investment. When it comes to money greed comes from the fearful side of ego that is afraid that ego doesn't have enough, that ego will need more in the future. When Dante depicted the greedy in Purgatory, he had them stretched out and face down, clinging to the sod and the soil repeating over and over out loud the words of Psalm 119:25, “My soul cleaveth to the dust.”[iv]

We are too often like that figure in our parable, we just won't let go of our precious money. There is nothing like money quite to bring out the anxious and small in us.

I love the story that is told of Father Flynn. One day he gets a call from the IRS and the agent says, “Father Flynn, did a Mr. Curry give your Church $10,000 last year?” There is a long silence on the phone. Finally, Father Flynn says, “he will”.

I read a story recently about the Euro that was introduced in every European country earlier this year. Two of the eight Euro coins that have gone into circulation in the past year, the one-Euro and two-euro coins, contain a mixture of nickel that causes people who are allergic to the metal to develop hand eczema. In short, don't hold on to your money too long.

Spiritually speaking, Jesus reminded us that all of the things around us are leased. We can't take any of it with us. Ego is going to let go of all of it at some point.

As the author of Ecclesiastes says there is a time for accumulating, and a time for letting go. Accumulate, accumulate, sure. But,… we all have to learn how to let go of the stuff around us. Old age forces it on us and it becomes one of the critical spiritual issues if we are blessed enough to live that long. Beginning late mid-life, we have to start the process of giving it all away and eventually we go out the way we came in, with nothing. That is why Meister Eckhardt, the Christian mystic said, "Treat everything as if you had borrowed it-and do not possess it: your body your soul, your sensibility or your strength, outer goods or honors, a house or an estate….everything. "

We can doggedly try to hold onto stuff, but we can't keep it forever, even if we wanted to. Even if we hold on to it doggedly like the billionaire of the 70's, Howard Hughes, we have to let it go. You may recall that he lived in a huge house but not really. Actually he lived in one bedroom for the last few years when his health was failing. He became paranoid and retreated into one bed room. There was something sad and pathetic about the man who had so much around him and did so little with it. He held on to it too long.

Jesus reminds us that we are all just stewards. All this stuff is ours for a while. There is a season for the stuff of the world and let's face it, we've had a great deal of enjoyment collectively in this room. We got good stuff.

But spiritually, in order to grow, in order to mature, in order to develop spiritual strength for the next part of the journey, we also have to invest what we have been given. We invest, hopefully, in those values that we believe in- like Andrew Carnegie who believed in education and funded so many libraries; or one of our church members who invests in places that build qualities of leadership for the next generation.

And fundamentally, I hope that you invest in your spiritual community. I say fundamentally because I don't exactly think of the church as just one worthy charity among many and I hope you don't either. I think the spiritual community is more fundamental, not just because I'm a Minister but because I already thought like that as a Christian.

This is the principal place that our families gather for spiritual formation, for support helping us to live out of our higher selves. God knows we need it. I remind you of the Rabbinical story about a man that is sent to Hell and what he sees when he gets there are people that are all fitted out in jackets with metal sleeves, so that their arms are completely straight. In front of them is a sumptuous table full of wonderful food, but the jackets are designed in such a way that no one can quite get the food into their mouths, despite the ingenuity of their attempts. So there is one frustrating rage after another. After a short time, he can't wait to get out.

The Angel then takes him to heaven and as they enter, the man is surprised to see another person with the same jacket on. Indeed, when he gets inside, everyone has the same stiff jackets on, gathered around the same sumptuous table of food. Only this time, everyone is feeding each other. Same reality, different spirit.

This is where we come to work on our Spirit. It's where we come to learn to feed one another and grow together. I keep saying that the building is not about stones and glass, it is about the community that we are going to grow in that space. But since Churches tend to stay around for centuries, not just decades, and since they are sacred space, not just warehouses, let's design them with beauty and purpose. And let's grow the next generation to something more spiritually rounded than we are.

I know that we are already pretty deep in your pockets and I know that this is a tighter year than we've had in quite a few years, and some hard decisions need to be made. But I hope that Christ Church is one of your fundamental commitments. I hope you use this place as your occasion to invest your money, your leadership, your friendship, your talents in worship. I hope you allow your pledge to express that commitment. Writing down that number on a pledge card, write out a check, let it go. There is a certain freedom in just releasing it. You can feel yourself incrementally getting stronger. Together, we will make sure that we invest wisely in what we do around here. But we need you. And you need to give. And you know what? It's going to be okay.

Amen.

[i] For this and the other historical notes, I am indebted to Steve Shoemaker, The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome (Nashville: Broadman Press) p. 72ff. The lack of access to my books and the amount of time put in on building contribute to this dependence. However, Steve does a very nice job collecting historical sources for which I am grateful.

[ii] Ibid. p. 75.

[iii] From “News of the Weird” by Chuck Shepherd

[iv] op. cit. p. 77.