Hungry Greed

Jeremiah 7:3-12; Colossians 3:1-10

Rev. Chris Harbin, Rocks Baptist Church—Pamplin, VA

09 October 2005

There are many faces to hunger—currently about four billion faces around the world. Hunger is a starving baby in Ethiopia. It is a pregnant mother in Sudan. It is a family in the mountains of Mexico living on a diet of tortillas alone. Hunger is a family who must choose between eating and paying an electric bill. Hunger is a political issue. Hunger is a social issue. Hunger is an economic issue. It is an issue of greed. Is it not also an issue of faith, theology, and love?

We are used to hearing stories of hunger from around the world. Statistics are easy to deal with, for they are not faces whose eyes we meet. We can easily brush aside numbers referring to thousands of children who will die today of starvation. We can ignore it, for none of our friends or family is in such a plight. It is comforting to take a portion of our excess and assuage our responsibility for others by making a donation. We have helped and will do so again. It is harder to accept a larger burden of responsibility, addressing the underlying causes of hunger.

Jeremiah’s words remind us that God takes our responsibility toward the powerless much more seriously than is our custom. This was true in the days leading up to the Babylonian exile. Is it just as true today. The people laid claim to a temple bearing the name of Yahweh, but did not heed the will of the God they reported to serve. They did not live up to their claims of loyalty, worship, and service. God had shown interest in caring for the outcast, powerless, poor, and oppressed. The people in position to address these issues proclaimed their own worth and ignored the plight of the poor, hungry, and less fortunate in their midst. They would rather treat them as cursed by God than accept their responsibility to share God’s abundance.

We read stories of large retail outlets putting small merchants out of business. Is the corporate establishment responsible for the demise of the mini-merchants? What of the consumer’s greed and will to ignore the implications of paying only the lowest possible price? We decry the loss of manufacturing jobs to low wage-earners around the world, yet is it not our own greed that fuels the shift to third world production? Are the wealthy and powerful to assume all the blame for catering to our own greed, exploiting a weakness as much ours as theirs?

My great-grandparents did not concern themselves with vacations, health insurance, travel and the conveniences available in their day. They worried about setting enough food on the table to nourish and help their children survive. Abundance meant that no one went to bed hungry. How our expectations have changed! A century ago our society dealt with survival issues. Today we focus on comfort. We fought against sweat shop enslavement in this country, granting quality of life for our lower wage earners. We never dealt with the greed driving the disparity in our economic system. Our corporate structure exports the very sweatshop system we extinguished here over the last century, for the greed that gave it impetus is alive and well.

In today’s passage, Paul writes the Colossian believers of living according to a wholly different mindset. He wants them to focus completely on Christ Jesus and the things that are of heaven, not of earth. It ought to be such a simple lesson to take in. Why is it so hard a rule by which to live?

In tackling the issues of disparity between earthly and heavenly living, Paul stresses that greed is not just one more example of a lesser way of living. Paul calls it idolatry. It cuts to the heart of what salvation would rescue us from. Greed is living for self at any expense. It comes in various forms and degrees, but is essentially the will to esteem self at any cost. Greed places self at the center of the world, shoving God aside. It need not negate God, but replaces God at life’s center.

Paul says nothing could be further from the gospel message. God came down to earth to live among and within our hearts. We are given access to the throne of heaven, not for self-seeking reasons, but as an expression of God’s love and generous grace. The arrogance and selfishness of greed destroys the meaning of salvation. We might go so far as to say that it is greed from which we are saved. Christ released us from lives lived for self in order that we might please God and be free to love one another. If Christ is our new life, Paul says we are to seek the things of God.

We send teams to work with those suffering severe crises, and yet there are others around us who live in a more permanent critical state. We bring our offerings to aid those who cannot feed themselves sufficiently. We contribute to those whose lives have been disrupted by calamities like the tsunami, Katrina, earthquakes in Kashmir, and mudslides in Guatemala. We contribute to meet the needs of families who cannot support themselves due to the ravages of war, famine, and economic oppression. We set aside some of our abundance to meet the needs of others. Of 33 million hungry people in the United States, some of them live in our own community. We struggle against our greedy desire for more in order to share with those whose needs are harsher.

FEMA issued a stand-down on preparations to receive evacuees from the New Orleans area. That stand-down has been reversed as those recently allowed to visit the sites of their former homes in the New Orleans area recognized that moving back immediately is not an option. Even this week, several families have in Virginia to be aided in relocating and rebuilding their lives. As Baptists reflected on our efforts to prepare to aid hurricane victims, several mentioned the plight of our own poor we too often overlook.

We do a great job of responding to crises. They awaken us to the realities and futility of greed and the search for material wealth. It is much more difficult to allow our lives to be refashioned by putting on Christ. The gospel calls us to so much more than we readily accept. We are not called upon to give alms, but to allow Christ to radically change our lives. We are called upon to give God such complete authority that we treat any semblance of greed as idolatry.

We have begun the journey of faith well. We gave 13% beyond our budget receipts last year to causes beyond ourselves. We have a legacy of missions support, giving 31% of our budgeted receipts to mission causes. Greed is about more than money, however. Our challenge is to place God in the center of our lives. The gospel compels us to lay our all at the feet of Christ, serving others as God has served us, giving His very life on our behalf.

Will we replace our greed with a different hunger—a hunger for God? This is the only way that we can truly tackle the heart of the problem of world hunger. It is only when we replace our own greed with a hunger to please God that we begin to address the real issue. Will we trust that God will care for us if we give Him our all? Such is the challenge of faith.

—©Copyright 2005 Christopher B. Harbin

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