Pentecost IX, Proper 13, Year C

Ecclesiastes 1:12-14, 2:1-7,11,18-23
Colossians 3:5-17
Luke 12:13-21

+In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

One of the achievements of the 1980s was making greed so much more respectable. In C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape, an experienced demon, explains to his apprentice, Wormwood, that one of the devil's premier strategies is to convince people that he doesn't exist. The devil also wants to convince us that sin is not sin, that greed doesn't exist. He had big success in the go-go '80s when greed became a quality that ambitious people should cultivate without shame, and my estimate is that greed has become even more respectable, and certainly more institutionalized in recent decades.

While I was at college in Berkeley in the mid 1980s, the Wall Street tycoon Ivan Boesky gave a commencement address at the business school. I hope that invitation netted the school a hefty donation, because it certainly cost them some embarrassment. Boesky came to the lions' den, the 'Peoples' Republic of Berkeley', and boldly proclaimed the worldly gospel of becoming richer than you can imagine, of having more money than you could ever spend, of being a master of the universe. Boesky appreciated the value of greed to achieve this nirvana. Boesky said, "Greed is all right, by the way... I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself." ⁽¹⁾

Boesky received a bit of criticism for his remarks, but he pegged us. He expressed the prevailing belief. Boesky's right that we can be greedy and still feel good about ourselves, but only if we're living in a dark fantasy. Greed separates us from reality and distorts the world. We live in an age of tremendous anxiety and weariness. We are ever setting new goals for consumption and accumulation and chasing after more achievement and recognition. Greed stokes our anxiety and makes us perpetually dissatisfied. It coarsens our hearts. What are we doing with our lives? Piling up possessions, acquiring things, amassing worldly power and comfort - these things are not what matters.

Christianity is the way to reality and sanity and virtue. Christians know that the only thing that matters are our relationships, with God, with one another, with ourselves. We are here to love, to serve, to sacrifice, to give. That is the way of Jesus Christ. When we follow him, imitate him, the image of God grows more intense in us.

I wondered then what I was to make of Zell Kravinsky, who I read about in a piece by Ian Parker in last week's New Yorker. In the last few years, Kravinsky has given almost his entire $45 million fortune to charities. He put some aside in trust funds for his wife, children, and nieces and nephews, but otherwise he kept no assets other than his home, on which he has a large mortgage. Initially, he had retained about $80,000 in stocks and cash, but quickly gave that away because, according to a friend, "he had it and there were people who needed it." ⁽²⁾ He lives exceptionally frugally, austerely. He has "a single thrift-store suit that cost him twenty dollars." ⁽³⁾

An Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, has posed an ethical puzzle known as the Shallow Pond and the Envelope. Parker summarizes it:

In the first case, a child has fallen into a shallow pond and is drowning; Singer considers saving the child, reflects on the inconvenience of muddy clothes. In the second, he is asked by the Bengal Relief Fund to send a donation to save the lives of children overseas.

To ignore the child in the pond would be despicable, most people would agree; to ignore an envelope from a charity would not be. (And the law supports that view.) But Singer's contention was that the two derelictions are ethically alike: "If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it," he has written. To allow harm is to do harm; it is wrong not to give money that you do not need for the most basic necessities. ⁽⁴⁾

Ouch! That's a tough argument, a very high bar. I think that it would probably convict each one of us. At least after a few moments of thought, I could think of nothing in our Lord's words that would disagree.

Kravinsky seems to have bought this argument about the Shallow Pond and an Envelope - even to the extent that in the last year he sought out and donated one of his kidneys to a stranger, and he did that to the great consternation of his family and friends. Chuck Collins, a great-grandson of Oscar Mayer, gave away his inheritance. He says, "Of course we have to respond to our immediate family, but, once they're O.K., we need to expand the circle. A larger sense of family is a radical idea, but we get into trouble as a society when we don't see that we're in the same boat." ⁽⁵⁾

That's very much what the Church teaches us: that we are brothers and sisters in Christ. That's the argument S. Paul and S. Barnabas used when they collected money from their mission congregations for the suffering church in Jerusalem. According to Acts, the early Church shared all things in common and distributed them according to need. The Church is a family. God our Father loves each one of us; each one of us is lovable. We ought to share God's love for every person, to welcome every person into God's family, to sacrifice for one another. Celebrating the mass - the most important thing the Church does - shows us our fundamental unity, that our unity transcends all of our differences. The mass, the sacrament of unity, shows us we are one body, one family. The Church wants us to understand all Christians as being members of a family, and even all human beings as being part of the same family.

But we have to balance this point of view with other realities. We can get too caught up in "generalized altruism." We can become so involved in trying to help the masses that we don't live up to our responsibilities for individuals in our midst. We need balance. Colin McGinn argues that Singer and Kravinsky's way of thinking devalues "spending one's energies on things other than helping suffering people in distant lands . . . Just think of how much the human race would have lost if Newton and Darwin and Leonardo and Socrates had spent their time on charitable acts!" ⁽⁶⁾

In today's gospel, Jesus says that a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. I am loathe to pass judgment, but it may be that Kravinsky still has not let go of that way of thinking. Kravinsky says, "If you do good, you become better. With each thing I've given away, I've become more certain of the need to give more away. And the end of it maybe I will be good. But what are they going to say - that I'm depressed? I am, but this isn't suicidal. I'm depressed because I haven't done enough." ⁽⁷⁾

A friend of Kravinsky's asked him, "But shouldn't there be more joy in this?" Kravinsky said, "I don't think of it as something that's joyful. Why should I feel joy?" His friend responded, "I just feel that if you really were on this path to enlightenment, whatever it is, you would feel joy." Kravinsky explained, "It's not enlightenment. It's the start of a moral life." ⁽⁸⁾ To which a Christian can say, "The start of a moral life is a joyful thing. Ordering our lives to please God gives us great joy and peace and hope and strength. The surest way to combat depression is to live for something more, something bigger than yourself."

Kravinsky himself says that he aspires to 'ethical ecstasy.' He points out that the word 'ecstasy' comes from the Latin ex stasis, standing out of the self, freeing ourselves from self-absorption, self-centeredness. ⁽⁹⁾ God intends ecstasy to be joyful, and it is joyful. Holiness and moral behaviour often entails great suffering, but even in suffering there can be the deep joy of loving, of doing God's will. Much of suffering comes form standing outside of ourselves, from empathizing with other people, from being moved and hurt by the misfortunes of others. That is ecstasy.

I find much to admire in Kravinsky, but ultimately my sense is that he may be as obsessed with possessions as Boesky - a kind of inverse greed, but it's the same consuming anxiety. Kravinsky's friend says, "He decided the purpose of his life was to give away things." ⁽¹⁰⁾ A man's life is not about possessions. When we focus our lives on possessions, we naturally become depressed.

The point is that we are not to put our confidence in anything other than God. Kravinsky is placing his energies and confidence in obsessively giving away possessions. He's placing his trust and confidence wholly in himself, in his own efforts, not in God. For the vast majority of people, the temptation is to put our energies and confidence into accumulating possessions. We fear vulnerability. We want security, but it does not come from our efforts. Jesus tells us that real security only comes from God, from placing our trust in him and following his ways. Greed is misplaced faith, a sin against faith.

One of the ways we conquer greed and grow in faith is through generosity, through giving, freely and joyfully, what has been given to us. We cultivate generosity not only because it's good advice about how to live freely and joyfully, but it prepares us for what heaven will be like.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. Commencement address, May 18, 1986, School of Business Administration, UC Berkeley. Not long after that speech the Feds, led by Rudy Guiliani, finally busted Boesky for trading on inside information. He spent a couple years in prison and paid a $100 million fine, a portion of his illicit profits

2. Ian Parker, 'The Gift,' The New Yorker, 2 August 2004, p. 58.

3. Ibid., p. 54.

4. Ibid., p. 59.

5. Ibid., p. 60.

6. Ibid., p. 59.

7. Ibid., p. 58.

8. Ibid., p. 63.

9. Ibid., p. 58.

10. Ibid.