Freed from Greed

[This message was shared yesterday morning with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Luke 12:13-21

A few years ago, I watched an interview conducted by a talk show host with a musician. “I’ve never understood what was so bad about greed,” the musician said. “Neither have I,” the talk show host agreed. The talk show host agreed with greed.

I think that most people would do the same. They may not feel comfortable with overt expressions of greed, like the character in the old movie Wall Street, who said, “Greed is good.” But their behaviors and attitudes speak volumes. 

A woman I knew was dying. Her daughter sat down beside her deathbed and said, in what was to be their final conversation on this earth, “Mom, if you’ve got any money hidden, you’d better tell us where it is now.” (Isn’t that heartwarming? A real Hallmark moment.)

You’re familiar with the old quote, sometimes attributed to Henry Ford, other times to John D. Rockefeller, who was supposedly asked, “How much money does the average person need to get by these days?” The reply: “Just a little more.”

In today’s gospel lesson, Luke 12:13-21, Jesus underscores how destructive, how fatal greed is. 

Greed, the constant desire for “just a little more,” is a violation of the first commandment: “You shall have no other gods.” 

Jesus and God’s written Word don’t tell us to refrain from having ambitions in life. Christians are allowed ambitions. 

Paul’s ambition was to plant the gospel throughout the Gentile world. 

Martin Luther’s ambition was to reform the Church and set people free from sin and darkness with the gospel word about Jesus. 

The ambition of Gregor Mendel, a monk, was to understand how God engineered life, becoming the father of modern genetics. 

William Wilberforce set out to see slavery outlawed in the British Empire and it happened, thirty years before it happened in America and without a Civil War. 

Mother Teresa’s ambition was to serve the dying in Calcutta. 

There’s nothing wrong with the ambition to maximize the talents and gifts God has given to us. 

And there's nothing wrong with the ambition to take care of our families. 

These are all holy, God-blessed, and I would say, God-prompted, ambitions.
And, it should be said that human beings are ambitious by nature. It’s part of how God made us. 

“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it,” God told the human race at our creation. “Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” 

God made us co-conspirators with Him in nurturing and, where needed, making better the life of the world, in the power of His love and grace. That is an ambitious undertaking! 

But when our ambitions revolve around self-worship or the worship of the things of this dying world, they become expressions of greed, false gods, tickets to hell. 

Greed is rooted in fear. 

Fear that the God Who provides daily bread won’t provide it for us. 

Fear that the Christian message that this world isn’t all there is to life is untrue. 

Fear that the God Who promises to be with us always will abandon us. 

Fear that the God Who promises an eternal world to those who trust in Jesus won’t come through and that we need to grab for the good things we can enjoy in this world.

Greed is rooted in fear. Jesus warns us against in today’s gospel lesson. 

Let’s take a look at it, starting at verse 13: “Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’”

Jesus has been teaching the crowd about the Kingdom of God, the eternal kingdom that belongs to all baptized believers in the crucified and risen Jesus. In the previous twelve verses of Luke, chapter 12, Luke tells us that Jesus: 

• warned the disciples about the false teachings of the Pharisees;
• encouraged them to live without fear, knowing that every human life is precious in God’s eyes, so valuable that Christ came to die and rise to set all who trust in Him free of sin and death;and 
• told them--and us--that we must fearlessly and publicly follow Him, Jesus, as our Savior, and not keep our faith hidden from the world.

But there’s a guy in the crowd who clearly isn’t interested in learning about being part of God’s eternal kingdom. He has something that he considers to be “more important,” "more practical," than having a life with God. He wants Jesus to be the mediator between his brother and himself in a family squabble over their father’s will. The man in the crowd wants Jesus to use His authority in the best way the man can imagine, to line the man's pockets. 

Greed, you see, makes us forget what’s important. It makes us chase the things that are here today and gone tomorrow, rather than following Jesus for life with God that never ends.

Verse 14: “Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’” (Luke 12:14-15)

Jesus' response here is ironic. 

We know, of course, that Jesus is the judge of the world. 

That’s the point of His portrayal, in Matthew 25:31-46, of the final judgment in which Jesus the King separates the sheep from the goats. 

And we’re told in 1 Timothy 2:5, “...there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus…” 

Jesus Christ is the judge and mediator of the universe. But the man in the crowd in our lesson is only interested in using Jesus to get what he wants. If we were to boil his request of Jesus down to a prayer petition, it would be something like, “Lord, my will be done.” 

But Jesus tells him and the crowd that life, the gift of God to those who believe, doesn’t come to those who set their ultimate ambitions on the things of this world. “Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” 

Jesus' words echo those He spoke to Martha, the anxious hostess greedy not for money but for attention, affirmation, and compliments, resentful of the different role to which God was calling her sister Mary. “‘Martha, Martha,’ [Jesus told her], “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42) 

In today's gospel lesson, Jesus effectively tells yet another resentful sibling, “Choose life over death. Choose life with God over death by things.”

To undergird His point, Jesus then tells one of His parables. 

You know it well. A man is blessed with a particularly fertile piece of land. It grows so abundant a harvest that the farmer has no idea where he’s going to store all of it. (This was obviously in the days before those sprawling self-storage units you see everywhere today.) The farmer decides to build bigger grain silos to store it all, take care of himself for life, and then just chill, happily self-sufficient, happily heedless of the will of God or the needs of others. “But God said to him, [Jesus tells us] ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’” (Luke 12:20) Someone was paraphrasing Jesus here when she or he famously said, “There won’t be a U-Haul trailer hitched to the hearse when they take your earthly remains to the cemetery.”

The things of this world, including money and stuff, will not bring us life. And when the call of greed takes hold in our lives, nothing we do, nothing we own, nothing in our investment portfolios or bank accounts, will ever be enough. Greed will compel us to want “just a little more.” God, the life He offers through Christ, and other people will be crowded out of our lives and our concerns. Jesus says: “This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” (Luke 12:21) 

Greed is a killer, a creation of Satan designed to make us think that the God we know in Jesus Christ isn’t enough. That is a lie.

There is a better way to live. God has created it for us in Jesus Christ. It’s the life of certainty and security in God’s love and provision, the life of freedom to love God and love neighbor and to share with one another, the life that Jesus makes possible for those who trust in Him, for those who daily fall into His arms and seek God’s will for our lives. 

We can live in the kingdom of God, no longer viewing life as a zero-sum game where if someone else gets more, I get less. 

In the kingdom of God, we know that in the God we meet in the crucified Jesus, there will always be “daily bread” and there will be more grace, love, and security than we can imagine, in Jesus’ words, “good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over” (Luke 6:38). 

Jesus gives those who trust in Him so much of Himself that their lives can be spent in finding ways to share our blessings, not hoarding them!

As God’s ancient Hebrew people were about to enter the land He had promised them, God told the people: “...This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life…” (Deuteronomy 30:19). 

Each day, as we come to God in repentance and faith in Jesus, we choose life. We choose God’s kingdom over our greed and over all of our sins. We choose to rest in God’s grace rather than stewing in the anxiety and futility of self-worship.

One New Testament scholar says this of Jesus’ words to us today, “The kingdom of God is, at its heart, about God’s sovereignty sweeping the world with love and power, so that human beings, each made in God’s image and each one loved dearly, may relax in the knowledge that God is in control.” 

That’s Jesus’ message for us today: Relax and live in His grace. Amen


[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

3 Good Reasons for Getting People Mad at You

Everybody knows that home teams have the advantage when playing games on their own courts or fields. Home teams more frequently win.

The explanations usually offered for this seem reasonable. You know them: the home team feels comfortable in its own "friendly environs," the away team is frazzled by travel, the home team is encouraged by homers in the stands.

But according to authors Tobias Moskowitz and L. John Wertheim, writing in their book, Scorecasting, the conventional wisdom represented by those explanations is wrong.

The reason for home field advantage, they say, is the officiating. Competent, honest referees and umpires tend to give the close calls to the home team. More often than they think, the people with the whistles are cowed by the crowd.

But let's not be too hard on referees and umpires. None of us wants to get people upset with us. (I know that I hate it.)

And frankly, people who go looking for trouble are generally narcissists. They want the world to revolve around them. This attitude springs, I believe, from the inborn default mode of every human being, what the theologians call original sin.

That doesn't mean that we should avoid offending people at all costs.

As a Christian, I follow Jesus Christ, Who I believe was and is God in the flesh. Jesus got Himself into trouble with people who weren't interested in letting God be their King and Savior. And though forcefully invited to change His way, Jesus never changed His course.

For His steadfastness, He got a cross. It's fortunate for us that this happened. Jesus' death on the cross was the way He took to resurrection on the first Easter Sunday.

Because Jesus resisted the temptations offered by the crowds and the world, keeping His face on His mission of dying and rising for us, He won new and everlasting life for all who repent and believe in Him.

What about us? We're not God. But Jesus promises that all who endure in believing in Him are the ones who will be saved from their own sin and from the death sentence every one of us deserves (Matthew 24:13).

Be warned: Belief in Christ will sometimes get you into trouble.

But when you know that you belong to an everlasting Savior and King, what the crowd says doesn't matter as much.

The apostle Paul experienced rejection because of his faith in Christ. It didn't stop him. "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us" (Romans 8:18).

I can think of several good reasons for incurring the anger of others.

1. It's worth making others mad at you by standing up for the despised, neglected, or helpless.

Christians are called to stand up for the well-being of others. Psalm 82:3 says: "Give justice to the weak and the orphan; maintain the right of the lowly and destitute."

And Proverbs 31:8-9 says: "Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy."

2. It's worth making others mad at you by doing the right thing.

We're all going to endure the anger of others in our lives.

Sometimes, their anger will be justified. When we hurt others simply because of something we want to do, we deserve anger and condemnation.

But there also will be times we get people angry with us for doing the right things. Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. are three people who incurred people's condemnation because what they were doing was right. So too are the countless Christians around the world trying to share the saving good news of Jesus who are thrown into prisons or executed for their allegiance to Christ.

The apostle Peter wrote to Christians in first-century Asia Minor: "For it is a credit to you if, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly. If you endure when you are beaten for doing wrong, what credit is that? But if you endure when you do right and suffer for it, you have God's approval. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in His steps." (1 Peter 2:19-21)

3. It's worth getting others mad at you because you're sharing Christ with others.

We all know Christians who spout Bible verses and Christian cliches and think that in doing so they're witnessing. If they're really intent on sharing Christ, they'd be better off praying and studying their Bibles. Look in the New Testament to see how Jesus and His first followers invited others to faith in Jesus:

• They met people where they were
• They asked questions, including how they could help those they met
• They sought to understand the people with whom they spoke and, while never changing the content of the message about Jesus, tailored the "packages" in which they gave the gift of Jesus to them

But even if, as a Christian, you exercise tact, love, and consideration for people as you let God guide you in telling others about Jesus Christ, there will be times when you'll still incite people's anger.

Is it worth the hassle?

A guy about to get himself clocked in a bar fight might rebel as you drag him away from certain injury. That's OK. Taking him to safety will be its own reward.

When we Christians share Christ with others, we may have to share tough stuff with them that they don't want to hear.

• Like "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). Or, "your sins [mine too] have hidden [God's] face from you." 
• Or, that despite our sin and separation from God, which inevitably lead to death, God has created a way for us to be right with Him and to have eternal life with Him, a punch in the gut of human pride.
• Or, that way is Jesus: "...there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, Himself human..." (1 Timothy 2:5). And, "...God proves His love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). 
• People may not even want to hear it when you tell them the good news that can change their lives today and in eternity: "...[I]f you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9).

If you share these truths with some people, they'll react like the guy you pulled from the bar fight. They'll be mad. But sharing truths like these is all part of loving others. And if it makes them mad to be loved, so be it. 

As long as Christians live this life, we will be pushed and pulled to make the wrong calls, to have our actions and thoughts dictated by the crowd, to go along to get along. The Bible says that we are "aliens and strangers" in this world (1 Peter 2:11).

We should never seek anger, confrontation, or controversy, of course. But if we make people mad because we're

• doing the right thing, 
• standing for the despised, neglected, or helpless, or 
• seeking to faithfully follow and share Christ, 

we should be able to look ourselves in the mirror without guilty consciences.

We should live with humble confidence in God and His love for us, knowing that we always have a home in His Kingdom.