The Reverend Seth Ethan Carey
August 31, 2008
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Introduction to the
Scripture:
In this passage, we find Jesus and Peter at cross
purposes. Jesus is intent on dying, and Peter fails to see the value in that
particular course of action. Jesus is going to accuse Peter of being
shortsighted, and incapable of seeing the bigger picture—and by implication, so are we—but is that such a terrible crime?
Scripture: Matthew 16:21-28
From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that
he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be
raised. And Peter took him aside and
began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind
me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to
me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If any want to become my
followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will
lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the
whole world but forfeit their life? Or
what will they give in return for their life?
‘For
the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then
he will repay everyone for what has been done.
Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death
before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’
Sermon:
Times are tough all around. I want to tell you about a couple of friends of mine that I’ve taken under my wing and invited into my home. They’re having some trouble finding work these days, the economy being what it is and all. Their landlord has been insensitive to their plight, demanding monthly rent payments in spite of their unfortunate situation, and their lack of opposable thumbs.
Their names are Baby and Meanie, and they are my cats. And in order to stay in my apartment, my landlord demands a monthly pet rent from each of them, $15.00 apiece.
Now I ask you, how is a Persian cat supposed to come up with $15.00 a month? I’ve helped them get their resumes in order, but their lack of job experience and poor work ethic has proven to be a real problem. I can’t even get them enlisted in a temp agency. I fear that it’s only a matter of time before they do something desperate to come up with the money. Every night I come home from work, I’m afraid I’m going to find one of them dealing catnip out on the corner.
***
Every day, crimes are committed in an act of desperation. I have a hunch that a fair percentage of the criminal underworld is motivated by simple greed, rather than a need to scrape by. I suspect this is especially true of the white-collar criminal mind.
Tonight, another crime will be committed.
7563 4545 2406 3456
One by one the digits will fall into place, the sixteenth figure completing another stolen credit card number. Somewhere—maybe in the parking lot of an OfficeMax®, or a Boston Market® restaurant—an elite computer hacker will sit in his car, siphoning credit card numbers out of thin air. A thin stream of cigarette smoke will snake its way out the open window, and the Dire Straits cassette tape in the car stereo will crank out the ‘80’s classic “Money for Nothing,” the sound quality diminished by frequent use.
The identity thief will sit with his laptop open, hacking into the Boston Market® wireless network and stealing the personal information of the oblivious dinnertime crowd. As each of them choose their entrée and the two allotted side dishes, as each of them hand over their plastic, as each of their credit cards is swiped through the cash register’s computer, the thief—this trafficker in stolen data—will catch their credit card numbers like so many fish in a net, lifting them out of a digital sea. In great enough quantities, this information will fetch a substantial price on the black market.
The best things in life are free, someone had once told him. Be that as it may, it will seem to him that most things in life cost an arm and a leg. A part of him will feel sorry for the customers he preys upon, so helpless before his criminal genius. His greater sympathy will be for the employees of that fast food establishment, earning their bread by the sweat of their faces—toiling away night after night for a pittance.
Who is this thief, this man behind the curtain? He’s not an evil man. He’s just about to get a little carried away.
***
Earlier this month, the Department of Justice prosecuted a cabal of eleven computer hackers in what has been called the largest identity theft conspiracy to ever see the light of day. By hacking the wireless networks of retail chains like OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, and Boston Market, the thieves stole over 41 million credit card numbers and sold them to the highest bidder.
These eleven individuals have been locked away for their crimes, but officials have admitted that they have barely scratched the surface of the identity theft underworld. Tonight, another crime will be committed.
Before you get any ideas, I’m not privy to any inside information, and I’m not trying to frighten you with paranoid speculation. The last thing I want to do is contribute to the fear-tactics of the media. I’m only trying to point out that this is how some people make their money. For the soldiers of organized crime families, for many of the bank robbers and drug dealers and mercenary assassins of the world, and for identity thieves, crime is a full-time job.
As for the rest of us, we manage to find legal ways to make a living. Be careful—it’s easy to draw a line here between “us” and “them,” between our honest, hard-working, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens and those law-breakers who threaten the fabric of our so-called moral society with their boundless greed.
We can divide society into heroes and villains if we’d like, but the picture we paint will look more like an old comic book than the world as it is. I think it’s more helpful to see society as a continuum that we all find ourselves on. When it comes to greed, well, thieves and criminals may be further along the road to sin than most of us, but they’re people, too—they’re just people with confused priorities.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just identity thieves or criminal mercenaries that trade their ideals for cold, hard cash.
***
When I was in high school, I was witness to a criminal conspiracy of epic proportions. Looking back, I still sometimes find it hard to believe that it could have happened the way it did. I won’t bother changing names to protect the innocent because, well, there was a single innocent soul involved.
It all began in the backroom of Caldor’s, which in the 1990’s was an east-coast retail chain comparable to K-Mart®. My fellow student, Jeremy, was a manager at Caldor’s. With the help of his partner-in-crime, Marcus, he devised a risky method of smuggling merchandise out of the store’s loading dock. By secretly packaging merchandise in large TV boxes and marking them as defective, he was somehow able to sneak them outside to Marcus, who waited quietly in the parking lot under the cover of night.
I only knew these two students as acquaintances, but rumor of their illicit activities spread quickly. No one found it difficult to believe after Jeremy and Marcus began peddling brand new Play station games in the hallways between classes, for a fraction of their retail value.
Now, one might want to believe that no decent human being would invest their money in such a corrupt enterprise. If you think so, then prepare to be sorely disappointed. The video games sold like hot cakes for weeks. It wasn’t long before Jeremy and Marcus began to expand their operation into a wider variety of merchandise. Before long they were selling game systems and DVD players out of the trunks of their cars after school. When the teachers finally caught wind of what was going on, they did nothing to stop it. On the contrary, they started placing custom orders for big screen televisions and hi-fi stereo equipment, quickly becoming the duo’s most lucrative customers.
Several months into the operation, not a soul walked the hallways of our school who didn’t know what was going on. Anyone who could take advantage of their stolen merchandise did. One day, as we stood waiting for the bus outside of school, the two of them drove by in a rented U-Haul truck filled with stolen goods, honking and waving like they were in some kind of parade.
After nearly a year of theft on an unimaginable scale, Jeremy was finally caught by Caldor’s security. He was fired and charged a hefty fine. Six months later, Caldor’s went out of business, and none of us could help but feel that he had something to do with it.
Before Jeremy and Marcus’ inevitable downfall, they enjoyed a final hour of glory. For at the annual Honors Convocation, the school awarded them both the Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence, and the student body gave them a standing ovation.
***
Do you still think criminals are cut from a different cloth? Indeed, money is a serious temptation—a “stumbling block,” to quote Jesus, and not just for thieves, but for everyone—because our bank accounts are often the measure of our success. We labor on tirelessly to fill our own coffers, usually out of sheer necessity. Sometimes, that leaves us too tired to labor for anything else.
By the time that happens, we’ve often forgotten the things that really matter to us. The necessity of earning a paycheck becomes more important, and we find ourselves at cross purposes with ourselves. We gain the world, and forfeit our own lives. Most of us just do it legally.
***
There’s nothing wrong with working hard and getting paid for it. I want to make that very clear. There is more to life than money, and the work that pays isn’t the only work that’s worth doing. I think Beth already illustrated that point beautifully this morning in her testimony. The best things in life are free, as the old saying goes.
What is best in life? Everyone will have a different answer. When asked that very question, Conan the Barbarian once replied, “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.”
I wish I could be so concise in my preaching.
While I doubt too many among us share the perspective of that ancient Sumerian, it’s still a question worth asking. Because your answer to that question, I believe, will reveal your deepest passion, and maybe even your truest calling.
In this passage from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus and the disciple Peter are essentially arguing about the things that really matter. They both have very different ideas about Jesus’ purpose on earth, each opinion fueled by a different philosophy.
Peter’s idea of success doesn’t revolve around money, but it is still a worldly sort of victory.
For five-hundred years, the Jewish people had awaited the coming of a messiah, a warrior-king who would restore the House of David and destroy the enemies of Israel forever. In Peter’s mind, success lay in the restoration of the throne, not in the messiah getting killed before the revolution had even begun. So when Jesus says that he has to die, Peter replies sharply, “God forbid it, Lord!”
Jesus is ready to die. For Jesus, success is determined by his refusal to forsake his principles. In the weeks to come, he would be mocked, tortured, and crucified. To fight back was to contradict his pacifist teachings. In his death and resurrection, he would finally break the cycle of violence. Beyond all cross purposes, the cross was his purpose. His eyes were set on heavenly things.
Peter’s eyes are flesh, set in sockets of bone. He can only
see success in a material context, so Jesus rebukes him, “Get behind me, Satan!
You are setting your mind not on divine things but on
human things… and what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but
loses his soul?”
***
So, what is best in life? I’m still working on that one.
In all honesty, I love money as much as anyone. I don’t steal it, and I don’t work a job that I hate to get it. I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t buy a couple of things from those criminal masterminds at my school. I was as bad as the rest of them. In fact, for some reason all of us acted as though it were all a big joke. We all fed off of each others greed, and in turn fed the monster that dined on our very souls.
These days, I am blessed to have been called to a vocation that revolves around faith, hope, and love—heavenly things. There’s a part of me that is still just as hypnotized by the material things of this world as the next guy. Sometimes, their spell can blind me to the things that really matter.
I’m not telling you all of this to make myself look bad. I’m
just sharing a part of myself that is at cross purposes with the nobler, more
selfless aspects of my heart. If such an inner-conflict was unique to my
personality, then I can tell you that I would lack the courage to stand up here
and talk about it. I know that it is not
unique—for in some form or other, this is a battle that rages within us all.
It’s the age old struggle between the things we want, and the things that God
wants from us.
***
As human beings, we’re all driven by a variety of motivations. Some of them are good, others downright evil. That’s one way to divide them. Like Jesus, I also want to distinguish here between human and heavenly things.
Our quests for bigger houses and better cars, our futile attempts to exert power over one another, these are the ambitions of humanity. Even our passion for justice is questionable if it stems from the prideful desire to play the hero. These human passions are perfectly natural, but they are born from within, growing in the fertile soil of our basest desires.
Heavenly things are born from above, and they’re the things that really matter—things like faith, hope, and love. They’re the things that we don’t get paid for, but we do anyway because they need to get done. This is the work of God, and in this Church I see people doing it every day. Our Sunday school teachers, our PADS volunteers, our ministry teams, all of them are following a higher calling, however much their day jobs may have left them tired and drained. It warms my heart to see so many people participating so joyously, not in the service of evil, but of good. I believe all of us are called to a higher destiny than slaving away for a paycheck.
When Jesus said to forget yourself and take up your cross, I don’t think he meant it to be a burden. For Jesus, the cross was his destiny. It was his higher calling, his purpose. We each have one, too. It’s what is best in life. It’s the cross we each carry. If you ask me—which you didn’t—dropping it in the dirt is a crime.
I know hauling it around isn’t easy, but it’s a labor of love.
Amen.