The Idolatry of Greed

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost on Saturday, August 2, 2025.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Well, man, did you all screw up tonight. You showed up for church the night the pastor was talking about money. Talk about bad luck.

You know, it's funny because it's one of the things that people get really upset about. This idea that the pastor or the church or God himself would have anything to do with our money as if money is a neutral thing. That money is spiritually neutral. How much you have is spiritually neutral. What you do with it is spiritually neutral.

That's obviously not true. And you all know this because you know somewhere in the back of your minds that Jesus once said that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

The Root of Evil

But that's how we normally quote it. It's not the root of all evil. There are plenty of things that are evil that don't have a love of money at their root.

Actually, the root of all evil is not the love of money, nor does it have anything to do with marital relations. The actual root of all evil, at least in Lutheran way of thinking about it, and I think that this is well substantiated in the teaching of Jesus, is idolatry.

Idolatry is worshiping that which is not God. And we worship idols all the time.

Now, we don't necessarily have an altar at home to the chicken God, and every so often in order to get good harvests, we sacrifice a chicken to the chicken God and all that sort of thing. That's not our problem.

Our society does not worship idols in a very obvious sort of way. Yeah, there are in some places you'll find Hindu temples where sacrifices to idols, actual idols, statues and such that represent the gods take place. But in this country, that's just not normal. That's not what we normally see.

And yet, if you drive around for about five minutes, you will find objects of worship.

Softening Jesus' Teachings

And we always get into this difficult situation because we always want to take the things that Jesus says about wealth and we want to make them softer.

We talked about this not too many months ago when we had the teaching of Jesus where Jesus says it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

And, you know, what's the very first thing we do? We say, well, he didn't mean it. Or he didn't mean it like that. And he did.

All of the explanations that we use to explain away the teaching of Jesus simply don't hold up to any kind of historical or biblical scrutiny. Money is not spiritually neutral.

The Parable of the Storage Unit

So if you will allow me tonight, I'd like to share with you a modernization of this parable. I'm going to call this the parable of the storage unit.

See, how many of you have a storage unit? Raise your hand. No, I'm just kidding. Again, it's not about the hold that things has on your life.

But once there was a guy who had a lot of stuff. In fact, he had more stuff that would fit in his house. And so he took the stuff that didn't fit in his house and he got himself. He rented a storage unit.

And then, of course, he got some more stuff and he shoved some more stuff in the storage unit. And then after that, he got some more stuff and he shoved it in the storage unit.

And by this point, that storage unit was stuffed front to back, wall to wall, floor to ceiling with stuff. Was it good stuff? Yeah, some of it. Was it valuable stuff? Eh, maybe. But it was stuff.

And if ever something were to go wrong, that guy said, "Well, at least I've got a backup plan."

And so after he filled up his storage unit with stuff, he sat back and he said, "Well, now nothing bad can happen to me. If my lamp breaks, I've got a replacement. If my sofa doesn't stay soft and fluffy, I can go get one out of the storage unit. And I've got food there and water and medicine. I have stored up all the things that I need. For the next couple of years, I will be just fine. I need nothing."

Well, one day, when trying to squeeze yet another sofa into this full storage unit, the guy had a massive heart attack and died. And he had no heirs. And they sold it off at auction. And his storage unit appeared on Storage Wars. The end.

How'd that work out for him? Well, not well.

And I've been the kind of person who had a storage unit. At one point, when we moved out of our house in central Nebraska, we got a storage unit. We didn't have enough room for everything. And we were kind of going through that slowly and trying to pare it down.

The point of what I'm saying is not having more than you need. It is always a problem. The problem is in the mindset that says, if I can just accumulate for myself all the things that I might possibly need and hold on to them forever, then nothing bad can ever, ever happen to me.

You see how at that point, it's gone from being a matter of practicality to the matter of idolatry? Because we're putting our faith and trust in what we have to protect us against the vicissitudes of life instead of putting our lives in the hands of the God who loves us in His Son, Jesus Christ.

The Foolishness of Greed

You see, the foolishness of this man whose rich land produces abundantly is not that he has so much and that he has his barn full. That's not actually the problem.

The problem is that when his barn gets full, he doesn't regard that as an opportunity for generosity. He doesn't look at that and say, "Well, gosh, my whole barn is full. Front to back, side to side, floor to ceiling. I've got everything that I need for the foreseeable future. Now with the abundance, the extra, the overflow that won't fit in my barn, that I have no use for except to hold on to it."

And frankly, let's face it, if we're storing grain for large periods of time, it's not going to last that long, is it?

Instead of saying, "I'm going to give that to support others. I'm going to love others around me. I'm going to show them the unearned grace of God by being generous with what I have been given for the sake of the people around me."

Instead, he says, "No, what I have belongs to me and I will never turn it loose. What I have is mine alone and I will never share it with another."

This is why greed is idolatry.

St. Paul's Warning

St. Paul puts it this way. He's talking about what the fruit of a transformed, saved life in Jesus is.

And he says this, "Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly."

That is not a gentle admonishment to consider maybe that you ought to be living differently. He doesn't say, "Consider for a moment if this might be okay with you." He says, "Put to death. Whatever in you is earthly."

And then he lists things that are earthly:

• Fornication and impurity are sexual sin.
• Evil desire, the desire to take things which are not yours. That's idolatry too. I'm going to focus on what I want, what I want to acquire at the expense of others.
• And greed, which is idolatry.

Idolatry is the root of all evil. Because idolatry makes us turn every action, financially and otherwise, in towards ourselves. It focuses us on providing for ourselves, saving ourselves, gratifying ourselves, prioritizing ourselves at the expense of the people around us.

For admitting that kind of attitude into our life of faith. Paul says it this way in verse 6, "On account of these, the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient."

Living in Christ

So then how shall we live? What can we do to avoid this wrath of God, which is to be poured out on all who make idols of these things, of their own pleasures, of their own acquisition, of their own material possessions?

What is it that we can do? He says you must get rid of all such things.

And then he says, "Do not lie to one another, seeing that you've stripped off the old self with its practices and you've clothed yourself with the new self."

That's baptism language. That we've removed the filthy robes of baptism, that we've been claimed in the clean white robe of baptism. The righteousness of Christ covers us.

When people look at us, they are to see that we live as Jesus does and are covered in the righteousness of Christ.

In that renewal, there is no distinction between people. There's no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free. But Christ is all and in all.

We are faced with opportunities to be generous people, to share of the extra that God has entrusted to us, that we should act as wise managers of what God has entrusted to us, instead of acting as if we are owners.

Did you hear that in the prayer of the day? The prayer of the day at the very beginning of our worship said we think of these, how did we say it exactly? "You have placed in our hands the wealth we call our own."

It's easy for us to call these things ours, but really the truth is that they are God's, that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, that God is the one who gives us every good thing that we have.

And yes, we can call them ours, but really they're God's, entrusted to us for a time to manage, not to hold on to and cling to instead of clinging to Christ.

That we do, in fact, share it. That we find ways to care for the people around us. That we don't allow the things that we own to own us.

Because ultimately, that's at the heart of all of this. To whom do we belong?

And I would like all of us to be able to say that we belong to Christ in whom we are baptized. That we belong to Christ and we have put away the old creation, with its sin and its faults.

That we belong to Christ because he has chosen us by the gospel. That he has given us his Holy Spirit to fill us with his gifts and enlighten us with his grace.

To change who we are so that we are not simply living only for ourselves and those closest to us, but we are living for one another and for the world.

May you know the freedom that comes from that kind of abundance. May you know the love that Christ has shown you, poured out for you on the cross, which you get to echo in your own small way, in your acts of generosity and love for the people around you.

And may the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord, to life everlasting. Amen.