Colossians 3:1-11
Luke 12:13-21
“So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves
but are not rich toward God.â€Â –Luke 12:21
I want us to reflect together this morning about what it means to be “rich toward God.†But in order to do that, we have to begin by exploring the nature of greed. Greed is one of those words, like forgiveness, that we trivialize. We tell our children not to be greedy and grab all the doughnut holes at coffee hour. But we don’t notice how our whole lives in this world are founded on greed.
The calamity of the oil spill in the Gulf has brought this home to us. It is not just the negligence of British Petroleum, its greed for corporate profit. It is not just the failure to enforce government safety regulations, our naïve hope that the greedy self-interest of the marketplace would make government oversight unnecessary. We are each of us involved in this environmental catastrophe – and all the others in the world that don’t make the evening news – because in our greed we demand cheap and abundant fuel to sustain our consumerist lifestyle.