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It is the Midas Disease, not Christianity [1]

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Date: 2025-01-26

What follows is the sermon I delivered this morning in the local Episcopal church where I serve as a deacon. For reference, the bible selections, the “Lectionary”, for today are for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10, Psalm 19, 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a, Luke 4:14-21) if you want to check my sources.

I am not asking anyone to convert to “Christianity” or even to believe in the Easter Bunny. I know that there is a well earned hostility toward anything “Christian” that can only increase given the current climate. I commented on The “False White Gospel” Exposed earlier in the week if you want to know how I relate to the mega/MAGA church in our midst. I am posting this today to let folks here know what those of us who are trying to do the good work are saying in the face of the current epidemic of faux “Christianity”. BTW, you benefit from links I could not share with the congregation this morning ...

For the record and full disclosure, I was ordained to the Diaconate in the Episcopal Church in December 1988 and I have delivered more than a few sermons over the years that have more afflicted the comfortable than comforted the afflicted. It is our job on Sundays. The rest of the week, we feed the hungry, visit the sick, and do what we can to protect the vulnerable. The pay over those decades has sucked but the work is never done...

This has been a hard week for many of us. In our own patch, Bishop Boode of Washington D.C. has been attacked for simply proclaiming the Gospel in National Cathedral. This was Inauguration week and the good bishop was not the only one to speak out. Bernie Sanders put out a podcast about his experience attending the Inauguration in which he noted that, “Three individuals own and control more wealth than half of the United States.” He then pointed out that those three individuals sat in the front row just behind the President and in front of all the elected officials during his speech. So unless someone here is hiding wealth that could easily help to plug some growing holes in our parish budget, that bottom half of the country includes everyone in this room, both All Saints and, especially, Todos Los Santos (our Latino congregation).

That is disturbing in itself but something else came across my screen that really gets to the point, especially in what the Lectionary assigns for today. It is a piece entitled “American Corruption Goes Back WAY Further Than You Realize”, a podcast interview with Sarah Chayes who started out as an NPR investigative reporter. In 2003, she went to Afghanistan for 11 years, not in the safe foreigner’s compound but in an ordinary house in Kandahar. Yes, she slept with an AK by her bed. When her mother, obviously worried, asked what she would do if the Taliban came for her she replied, “I’d get up on the roof and start shooting.” This is one tough, no B.S. lady. It is what she said about the start of corruption that struck me. You and I both know the story, the myth of the “Midas Touch”. Midas was a king, a mythical figure. But we must be very careful here. In today’s pervasive materialist and so-called “reality based” or “rational” culture, the term strongly hints of meaning “fictional character”, someone in an entertaining story, a children’s story, something really not serious for serious, educated people.

Well, Midas was, in fact, real as the archaeological evidence shows. He lived and ruled in Anatolia, what is now part of Turkey, in the region where the Persian and Greek cultures inter-mingled. He ruled in the 7th century BCE which is a significant time in history because money was invented at that time in that region.

We all know the story of “Midas Touch”. Midas did a favor for a god and the god, in repayment granted one wish. Midas asked that everything he touched would turn to gold. It did not take him long to regret his wish. Turning an apple to gold was excellent but then he touched his daughter and she too turned to gold. Bad move and the obvious lesson we have learned is, “greed is bad”. But Chayes discovered in her study of corruption that this is not a story about greed but about money. That was a revelation. As she explained, back before Midas, there was trade and really only kings could hoard wealth because when wealth is a herd of camels or sheep, you had to take care of them. Everything about that kind of wealth requires serious effort to maintain it which limits how much you can horde. For example, how many shovels do you need and how many peasants do you need to clean up after a thousand camels? Selling an apple, or your daughter, is turning them into gold – literally.

However, if you now have money, i.e. gold or silver, something hard to duplicate or counterfeit and is easily transported or stored, you solve the peasant and his shovel problem. The invention of money is the key to the story because money now makes hording of wealth easier – the Midas Touch. It is even easier now. I have my IRA accounts with **** *****, the company that bought out the company that bought out the company that I first opened an account with decades ago. Our wealth is not even a pile of gold; it is a set of records in a database somewhere that point to records in other trading databases where the current price is set. Hording is now almost trivial to those who are addicted to the pursuit of wealth. The myth of “Midas Touch” is an ancient truth in story form that has resonated for almost three millennia, right up to the present in the Rotunda of the Capital.

There is a lesson for us here that carries to today’s readings. I have spoken many times before about the importance of Myth, a seriously important part of human experience, culture, and history. As I have said before, Myth is also devalued, often ridiculed in our culture, especially by those who consider themselves better educated than the rest of us. Our culture does like stories but only as entertainment. However, myth has not disappeared but continues right under the surface occasionally biting us while we remain blind to the power of stories. And, more important, all of our “rational” and “scientific” discourse is based on Philosophical Materialism, itself a three hundred year old myth developed at the beginning of the “Enlightenment”, in retrospect, more marketing slogan than truth.

The first point I want to connect is in the word “fulfilled” in today’s Gospel from Luke. Jesus reads a passage from Isaiah, sits down, and then starts to speak saying, “This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen”. When I was a kid, I was taught, or more accurately my child’s mind heard that Isaiah “foretold” Jesus in this and other passages. In other words, since Isaiah was a prophet, he could see the future and saw Jesus say this or other things. No, that is error. Prophets don’t fortune tell. They tell a story of truth in the present about the past in a way that the future consequence becomes obvious. This is the lesson of Midas Touch. Money enables the addictive behavior of greed and when it does, it never ends well. That is “fulfillment”, the result in the present of something in and from the past. That is what Luke means when he tells this story. And what does he quote?

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

This sounds like one of the key sources our Bishop Boode used in her homily. The quotation that Jesus used is from Isaiah which continues with what everybody in the room knew by heart:

“... a day of vengeance for our God, to comfort all those who mourn and to give them for ashes a garland; for a mourning robe the oil of gladness, for despondency praise. … They will rebuild the ancient ruins, they will raise what has long lain waste, they will restore the ruined cities, all that has been lain waste for ages past.”

Isaiah is talking to the captives, the deported, in Babylon. He is saying, “Rejoice. You will soon go home”. Our reading from Nehemiah is from the time soon after they were able to return and rebuild the ruined temple. The book Esra is reading is what we now call Deuteronomy.

Jesus uses this passage from Isaiah at the start of his ministry because that story of displacement, deportation, and loss resonated in his time just like Midas was on display this week.

My last point relates to Paul’s admonition to Corinthians. In researching money and greed, I came across the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. Note the order in which Lust, Gluttony, and Greed are the first three. Also note that Lust isn’t all sex. Underneath is unbridled desire, such as for money or power. And Gluttony is overindulgence or overconsumption of anything to the point of waste. And, of course, Greed is the inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs, especially with respect to material wealth. These are three closely related malignant traits of a culture fixated on billionaires and their extravagant lifestyle that is causing destruction of our environment for their own gain. The last in the order and the deadliest is Pride. Compare that to what Paul says:

“For in the one spirit we were all baptized into the one body… and we were all made to drink of the one spirit…Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many … If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

This is the exact opposite of what we have seen on display not only this week but for at least the last four decades. To be clear. These three deadly sins are completely antithetical to what Paul is telling these proud Corinthians about the Body of Christ. You cannot have the body, the whole of the members, while at the same time tolerating the self centered narcissism on display, not only then, not only in this week, but all around us in these times.

Now this might be a real bummer to hear. If we read further in Luke — beyond what is in today’s Gospel, you will find Jesus bringing up Elijah’s cure of the Syrian Naaman of leprosy instead of the thousand lepers in Israel. Elijah ignored Israel because they complacently expected God’s favor because they were Israel when Naaman, a foreigner, begged in faith. Recalling that story was an affront to the local important people resulting in the townspeople chasing him out of town. But that is just the downside of pushing against the grain. Everybody was happy with what he said — until he got to the fine print.

The stories told about Jesus here every week lead us to the truths that lead us where we need to go and be. Sometimes we don’t like where they lead us at the start or even at the middle but in the end they lead us where we need to be.

May we have the trust to hear and strength for the journey.

AMEN

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