Community Church Sermons

 

May 25, 2008

Pentecost 2

 

“The Surefire Way To Prevent Identity Theft”

 

Matthew 6:24-34

 

Reverend Rhonda Abbott Blevins, Associate Pastor

 

 

Listen to this Sermon!

 

 

INTRODUCTION

I have an earworm. You know what an earworm is, right? It’s typically a catchy tune that gets stuck in your head and you find yourself singing it or whistling it and it just won’t go away. Here’s my earworm:

“They say a man should always dress for the job he wants,
So why am I dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant?
It’s all because some hacker stole my identity;
Now I’m in here every evening serving chowder and iced tea.”

I must confess I realize just how sad it is that I know every line to the jingle for FreeCreditReport.com (which isn’t really free, by the way). This stupid little song has been lodged in my brain for about two weeks now. This company has a couple of other commercials with a similar theme: be afraid of identity theft.

It seems that a lot of people are telling us to be afraid of identity theft. Citibank has a string of commercials about identity theft. In 1995 Sandra Bullock starred in a movie called The Net, a thriller in which Bullock played the victim of identity theft. The movie is a nail-biter about her plight not only to regain her identity but to stay alive.

THE SCRIPTURE LESSON

Our scripture lesson today is taken from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” In the “Sermon on the Mount” Jesus calls “those who would be his followers to radical devotion and radical dependence on God. His followers must be meek, must not retaliate, must go beyond the letter’s law to its spirit, must do what is right when only God is looking, and must allow God to be the judge of another person’s heart.”[1]  In our reading today, would-be followers of Christ must “depend on God for their needs and pursue [God’s] interests rather than their own. In short, true people of the kingdom live for God, not for themselves.”[2] It’s a counter-cultural way of life that Jesus taught, and nothing is more difficult for you and me as accomplices in American consumerism than the teachings of Jesus on materialism. Jesus lists the most basic material items, food and clothing, and then says that “pagans run after these things.” I don’t know about you, but I run after way more than food and clothing! I wonder what Jesus might call me? Don’t answer that.

Our consumer-oriented ears have a hard time hearing this teaching for what it is. . .we soften it and imagine that Jesus is concerned in this passage about our anxiety level saying “Don’t worry; be happy!” But this is hard teaching in which Jesus challenges the focus of our minds and the very focus of our lives: material things.

AFFLUENZA

I recently started reading a book called Affluenza. The title is a word coined by the authors by joining two words together: “affluence” and “influenza.” They define “affluenza” as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.”[3]

Affluenza has a host of symptoms according to the authors: 

·      “Shopping fever: We have twice as many shopping centers as high schools, and more of us visit shopping malls each week than go to church. Shopping centers are outpacing national parks as holiday destinations.

·      Swollen expectations: Our sense of what we “need” to live comfortably has expanded far beyond [both] our earning power [and] the earth’s ability to accommodate us. Since World War II, the average home has grown from 750 square feet to 2,300. In many of these homes, the garage space alone exceeds the size of an entire 1950’s starter home. There are more cars than drivers in the U.S., and despite all the extra living space, the storage business is booming. This 12 billion dollar industry is larger than the American music industry.

·      Rash of bankruptcies: We have a higher rate of bankruptcy today than we did during the Great Depression, even though Americans work more hours than citizens of any other country.

·      Chronic ache for meaning: As a nation, we are depressed, divorced, in debt, overweight, and overwhelmed. We seek solace in food, shopping, and TV; we neglect our bodies, our families, our communities, and our environment. Child suicide rates have tripled since the 1960’s.[4]

 

The authors didn’t know that the U.S. foreclosure rate would reach its highest peak ever just last month,[5] and they couldn’t have predicted that the government would pass a $165 billion economic stimulus package to feed the American consumer’s addiction and hopefully bolster the economy. They tell us it’s our patriotic duty to go shopping! Yippee!

 

Since 1950, Americans alone have consumed more resources than everyone who ever lived before them in the history of the world. Each American individual uses up 20 tons of basic raw materials annually. Americans throw away 7 million cars a year, 2 million plastic bottles an hour and enough aluminum cans annually to make six thousand DC-10 airplanes. We just can’t help ourselves!

 

MATERIALISM AND POVERTY OF SOUL

 

The symptoms of affluenza are too numerous to mention. However, affluenza is not just an economic disorder; it’s a spiritual plague manifesting itself in ways that Jesus couldn’t possibly have imagined when he delivered his “Sermon on the Mount.” There is an interconnectedness between the economic madness of our day and the great spiritual vacuum noticed by so many including Mother Teresa.  When Mother Teresa visited the U.S., she commented that the United States, “is the poorest place I’ve ever been in my life.”[6] This observation came from a woman who served some of the poorest people in the world in Calcutta, India. Her biting remark about America had nothing to do with income levels or Gross National Product, rather she was talking about America’s ubiquitous “poverty of soul.”[7]

IDENTITY CRISIS

Mother Teresa articulated the irony of a people enjoying the greatest material wealth in the history of humankind, yet sadly out of touch with the deepest workings of the Spirit. Did she see in America the very epitome of Jesus’ truth in Mark 8:36: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?”

Let’s look again at our text.  The problem isn’t money or material wealth or the lack thereof; the problem is priorities: “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money. So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

Please hear me: things in and of themselves aren’t bad, but a preoccupation with things can leave us spiritually empty.  That which is eternal in each of us is void of substance and matter.  When we are consumed with taking care of things of the body. . .material things, we tend to neglect the soul and our souls become impoverished.

It’s easy to do.  It’s easy to form our identity around that which is tangible. Houses, cars, travel or even our own bodies.  But at our deepest level, we are more than houses and cars and the like. When we begin to recognize our true identity as spirit. . .when we begin to feed that spirit, we are on the path to the abundant life that Christ promised, which has nothing to do with material things. When we begin to recognize our true identity as spirit, no identity thief in the world can take that away from us! The surefire way to prevent identity theft is to “store up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where [identity] thieves do not break in and steal.”[8] 

CONCLUSION

In the latest issue of The American, Arthur Brooks tells a story about a forty-two-year-old forklift operator from Corbin, Kentucky, named Mack Metcalf who won $65 million from a three-dollar lottery ticket. It changed his life forever. “What did he do first? He quit his job . . . in fact, his first impulse was to quit everything after a life characterized by problem drinking, dysfunctional family life, and poorly paid work.” He told Kentucky lottery officials that he was moving to Australia to totally get away. He planned to buy several houses there, including a beach house. “Metcalf never worked again. But he never moved to Australia. Instead he bought a 43-acre estate” with a big, beautiful house in Corbin for more than $1 million. Then he spent his hours pursuing pastimes like collecting expensive cars and exotic pets like tarantulas and snakes. “Trouble started for Metcalf as soon as he won the lottery. Seeing him on television, a social worker recognized him as delinquent for child support from a past marriage, resulting in a settlement that cost him half a million dollars. A former girlfriend bilked him out of another half million while he was drunk. He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and became paranoid that those around him wanted to kill him. Racked with cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis, he died” at forty-five years of age, roughly three years after hitting it big.[9]

Let me be the one to break it to you; most of us won’t ever win a $65 million dollar jackpot.  But let’s face another fact; compared to a vast majority of the world’s population, we’re all pretty well off.  Let’s be thankful that we don’t have to worry about whether or not we can afford to eat today.

Yet despite our plenty, most of us find ourselves wanting more, even though we have a nagging hunch that what we own really owns us. The fact is our thoughts are all too often consumed with the things of this world, material things. Let’s begin to unleash our true identity . . . our eternal nature in Christ. Let’s begin to “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to [us] as well.” How? Let’s start with a simple prayer:

PRAYER

Free us from our addiction to stuff, O Lord we pray. We hoard up for ourselves material things, imagining those things will make us happy or secure or respected.  Yet in all of our fullness, we are still empty.  Break us from our preoccupation and open up our spirits to new freedom found only in you. We place our trust in you, knowing that all that has been and ever will be is in your hands. Amen.