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"Greed is Idolatry" Colossians 3:1-11 Luke 12:13-21 Yr. C, Proper 13

by Clancy Nixon

August 5, 2007

Church of the Holy Spirit

Ashburn, Virginia

www.HolySpiritAnglican.org

If you own stock, how have you been dealing with the steep losses in the stock

market this week? Have you lost any sleep over it? Made any rash decisions? I'm not

asking only about what financial planners call your risk tolerance. The famed financier,

J.P. Morgan, was once asked for advice on asset allocation by a friend who was losing

sleep over his losses in the stock market. Morgan's famous advice was to "sell to the

sleeping point" sell just enough stock and buy safer investments like bonds with the

rest, sell enough risk so that you can sleep at night. Not bad advice, as far as it goes.

Notice that Morgan's advice, like most financial advice, assumes that our security comes

from our trust in the assets we have amassed. Nobody trusts in Social Security anymore,

and few of us have true pension plans, so we are now far more concerned about our

401(k) plans, our 403(b)s, our IRAs and annuities. If our stomach churns when we have

losses, we may need to look beyond our risk tolerance and look at the spiritual issue of

where we place our trust.

I have a serious question for you to consider today. Are you more concerned with your

portfolio and your stuff than you are with your relationship with God? Before you

dismiss that question as importunate, consider this. That's not necessarily an easy

question to answer, because our felt priorities may be different than our real priorities.

Here are some ways you might look at finding an answer to that question. How much

time do you spend on each? Are you counting on your 401(k) to rescue you, to sustain

you? Jesus tells us that storing up things for ourselves, and not being rich toward God,

results in tragedy.

This last week I witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of generosity in time and

love at our Vacation Bible School. I am so proud of you, church! You did a great job.

That gift shows richness toward God with your time. I'm also proud of you for how

you've helped Don Williamson in his time of need....[Don gives his testimony]

Greed is part of the air we breathe in American culture today. The downward

slide in sexual morality that we have witnessed in our culture in the last 40 years seem

obvious by comparison, because many of us can still remember a time when things were

different. Greed has been so embedded in our culture for hundreds of years that it can

seem invisible to us. Many of us have made things into an idol and we are ignorant of it!

It is possible to be both generous and greedy at the same time. As I meditated on these

scriptures last week, the Holy Spirit convicted me of the sin of idolatry. I've had several

major expenses lately practical things like a new dishwasher since our old one broke. If

I were to list them for you, you and I could easily rationalize all of my recent expenses.

Even so, in light of this Scripture, I realize that I have been rationalizing my own

covetousness, my lust to improve or at least keep up the lifestyle to which I have become

accustomed. As a practical matter, I've treated it as a minor thing - a little sin - a

problem of focus. Now that I see it as idolatry, I am repenting and returning to the Lord.

This is not a new problem for the people of God. Have you ever wondered just

what it was about the Israelites in the Old Testament, or about their surroundings, that the

Israelites always seemed to forsake the true God and indulge in idol worship? As a

people, they found their identity in worship of Yahweh God, yet they often deny their

very identity. In my daily Bible reading, I've recently read through First and Second

Kings, and First and Second Chronicles. In every generation from David to their

captivity in Babylon, the pull of worshiping idols made of gold or wood, of building

Asherah poles or altars to Baal, reads like a default setting for both the Kings and for the

people of God at that time. You can point to the fact that these other gods were always

worshiped in the Promised Land, and that Joshua's generation failed to obey God's

command to remove them completely. The source of my wonder, the question I ask is,

what was it about those idols that made them so attractive on a human level?

People set up idols because they desire to get something from God. The gods of

the land before Joshua came, Baal and Ashtoreth, were gods of fertility. It was an

agricultural society, so their chief form of wealth was crops and herds. Baal worshipers

believed that through ritual sexual acts with temple prostitutes on earth, the fertility gods

in heaven could be persuaded to themselves have sex, which would result in rains in

season and fertility on earth. If ever there were a religion that was invented by

unrestrained men, this was it! An Asherah pole is a totem pole, which became a symbol

around which people worshipped through acts of sexual license and orgy. Worship of

Baal and Ashtoreth addressed the people's great need for fertile land for their crops, and

appeared to provide an immediate outlet for men's sexual desires. Idols are tangible,

concerned most of all with immediate needs; whereas the true God is invisible and

intangible, concerned more with intangible things like character, like honor, like eternity.

The God of Israel is not unconcerned with our immediate needs, but he makes it clear

that that what we eat and how much money we have are not to be our chief concern.

Idols are perennially attractive because 1) they are tangible; 2) they claim to give us

power over our future; and 3) they appear to address more urgently our basic physical

desires and needs. The irony is that pursuing idols in fact gives us less power over the

future, and reduces us in stature from the inheritance we enjoy as sons and daughters of

the King, to mere creatures who are driven by our basest desires.

While our idols have new names and forms in 21st century America, their

attractiveness has not dwindled for God's people. It is a fact of life for us that our media

bombard us with the allure of sex and money, money and sex, apart from any

consideration of God.

Open your Bibles to Colossians 3:5, page 1167 of your blue pew Bibles. In Paul's

letter to the Colossians chapter 3, verse 5, he is addressing believers, and tells us that

sexual immorality and greed are forms of idolatry that believers can fall into. Paul

reminds us in verses 1 and 3 that we have died with Christ in our baptism when we went

under the water, and we are new creations since we have been resurrected with Christ.

Paul tells us to put to death both greed and fornication. This is violent language. The New

Testament, like the Old, never shirks to uses violent language to speak of the complete

elimination of everything that is against God. (Barclay's commentary on Colossians, p

150) This call to avoid idolatry is a radical call to holiness for God's people. Brothers

and sisters, we are to disown, we are to regard as dead, those parts of ourselves that keep

us from fully surrendering to Christ.

In verse 4, we read that Christ is our life! What a great picture. To live is Christ,

to die is gain. Christ in me, the hope of glory. For Christ to live in us, our idolatrous

desires must die, and you and I must kill them ourselves.

What is the big deal about greed, also called coveting? It seems a subtle sin, a sin of

thought more than action. Friends, actions follow thoughts. Covetousness goes back,

way back in time. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that one third of the angels fell from

Heaven, as they joined Lucifer in his rebellion against God. Why did they fall? They

coveted something better than worshipping God and serving Him alone. They were in

Heavenly Paradise, and it wasn't good enough for them. They coveted, and it went badly

for them, and us. Then our first parents, Adam and Eve, in Earthly Paradise, they also

had everything they needed, and then some. But they coveted the one thing that was

forbidden to them, the forbidden fruit. They coveted, and it went badly for them, and us.

Coveting is at the root of a lot of other problems. Think about it: wars; adulterous affairs;

murder and more, coveting more than you need is at the root of many of these crimes.

Jesus says, "A man's life does not consist of the abundance of his possessions." The

reason God made us is not so that we can amass wealth. We know this intuitively, but

often we don't act like it. Let's say this value statement together: "Our chief end is to

glorify God and enjoy his Presence forever." It's not a quote from the Bible, but it is

Biblical to the core. This purpose is the #1 value in Church of the Holy Spirit's

Statement of Values. It's not about money, or about stuff, or even finally about family or

friends. It's about God.

Jesus tells the parable of the rich fool as a warning, a cautionary tale. To summarize, a

farmer becomes rich, and plans to spend his surplus on himself to retire in style. He dies

before he can retire, and can't enjoy his wealth. Jesus tells us that the rich fool stored up

things for himself, but was not rich toward God. The rich fool in the parable does not

stop to praise God, or even to thank God. His first thought is to stress out about what to

do with all his stuff! You see, it's all about him. No mention of family or God; no

mention of sharing. He has made an idol of his own comfort and greed. Farmers were

required by the Torah to set aside the corners of their fields to feed the poor, but this man

shows no concern for them now. He is a self-centered fool, for he has hoarded his

wealth, and probably spent most of his time on his business, and forgot God, until it was

too late.

There is freedom in being set free from the idol of greed. I've struggled with it from time

to time all my life. In college, I refused to make my studies and my life center on making

money. As a young lawyer, I found myself enticed to take the highest paying job I could

find, with a Wall Street law firm, even though it left me almost no time for my wife or

ministry. Going into full-time ministry was a recovery of my highest ideals and a

response to God's call. Even so, I'm not immune from putting my trust in money, or in

worry about money, and I imagine that you might not be either. I've found only one way

to break the power of money in my life just give it away. Give it away to the sleeping

point. Give enough of it away so you are sure it is not an idol in your life. There is

freedom in being set free from the idol of greed.

Jesus tells us to be rich towards God. Are you rich toward God? Ask yourself this: Is the

pursuit of unnecessary wealth taking you away from prayer? From ministry service?

From Sunday worship? From enjoying God and his creation? If it is, you need to act, to

repent, to die to something in yourself, or to give something away. Perhaps you spend

more time managing your stuff and your investments than you do on your relationship

with God. Beware covetousness. Maybe someone here is like the rich fool who has

neglected God, and made an idol of his own comfort and greed. If that describes you,

don't delay, repent and return to the Lord. Ginger had an auto accident just yesterday, and

I thank God that no one was hurt. But auto accidents result in death every day. Don't

delay - your life could be demanded of you this very day. Are you overspending, and if

so, why? Are you placing your trust in something other than God?

Let's take some time of silence before the Lord to ask him to show us if we have made an

idol of something in our lives.

Our prayer ministers will be waiting at the kneeling rails here in front to pray with you

during this next time of worship in song. They would be glad to lead you in a prayer of

commitment to Christ or to hear your confession to renounce any idol. God wants to set

you free from bondage to stuff so you can be free indeed!