Thinking about Greed
Lately, I’ve been thinking about greed. Thinking is a dying art.
It is no longer Christmas on our calendars. Christmas Day is time past. For me, it was a better Christmas this year than usual. I meet Christmas with anxiety akin to Gothic horror. If you've been shopping on Black Friday after Thanksgiving, I suspect you've experienced the Christmas season ushered in by greed.
But greed, what is it?
Living in a 3000 square foot house (twice the size of mine).
Living in a 6000 square foot McMansion.
Not tithing to a church.
Not selling all of your possessions and giving the money to the poor.
Buying a $2.00 cup coffee in the mornings.
Buying stocks in hopes of large profits.
Spending money on books that the local library owns.
Spending too much on Christmas gifts or spending too little.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas talks about greed in this video. Be warned, he curses plenty:
http://vimeo.com/6852729. His line about owning two SUVs is classic.
Yeah, I’m greedy sometimes. Here’s one example, only one. It happened over five years ago. I was at the huge convention. A Pulitzer winner was signing books—for free, paperbacks for the taking. I was new to this book signing thing. I had a book coming out myself (
Now 65 % off at amazon.com, $8.44). I wanted to meet the writer, maybe get a book blurb out of him. I liked reading one of his books set in Louisiana. We chatted. No one was around. There were huge stacks of his books on the tables. I got him to sign 4 of them, different titles. I asked him for one of each. He signed them begrudgingly. I realized halfway through the signing that it was an act of greed. I was supposed to ask for only one, so others could have copies. This was the social code at these signings, but it was too late to say, “Stop.” He’d signed them to me personally. Needless to say, I got no blurb for the back of my book.
Now that I think about it, I should give away all of the signed copies of Mr. Pulitzer’s books. That would be the right thing to do. Or sell them and give the money to the poor.
Greed is subtle. And it’s the American pastime. See, baseball is on a long decline. Greed is on the upswing, bating a thousand. It’s one of the reasons we had the financial meltdown. It’s probably the greatest sin of the American church and American Christianity. As
Will D. Campbell said while standing in the opulent pulpit of
Riverside Church in NYC for a conference on racism, how can we free ourselves of racism (Greed is the economic engine that runs racism.) and keep all of this, the riches created by John D. Rockefeller? Campbell says we can’t.
--Dayne