Sunday Sermon

"Good morning heartache. You're like an old friend, come to see me again." - Rancid


I've been thinking a lot today (always dangerous) about how everyone dances around the truth, and whether we should admit our mistakes, and whether the worldview of America is strengthened or weakened by America admitting its mistakes.

Then this afternoon I heard Mrs. Abstracted's uncle say that at the Sedalia, MO bingo night, it's not unusual for tens of thousands of dollars to move around, as people play up to four bingo cards ($60 bucks a piece) at once, play special "buy-in" games, and then buy upwards of $200 in flip-tab lotto tickets. And this is a small town bingo night. I also heard him talk about the nickel slots at a local casino making over $2 million in two months.


Everyone has gotten so greedy. We Americans have gotten greedy. My generation has gotten greedy. I have gotten greedy.

Here's an example, and a good one. When my grandparents generation marched out of WWII (why isn't it ever written WW2?) they all bought houses in the late 40's and early 50's. The American dream come true: they own a house. Many of these people still live in those homes, or only left them when they moved to a retirement community, or died. For them, the home was a rock upon which all things could smash, and the home would survive. It felt hard-won, as they had seen their parents struggle through the Depression and heard stories of people who had nothing, as many as 1 in 4 people having no job. In the mid 50's my grandparents bought their house, and they still live there. Never even considered selling, far as I know.

Then came their children, the baby boomers. For some reason, homes like the ones my grandparents owned just weren't selling. Suddenly, a Realtor made a fortune when he sold those exact same homes but instead of selling a "home," he called it a "FIRST home." All these Boomers were told "buy this starter home, it'll do until you make it big and can buy your dream home." And suddenly the home wasn't the dream, but instead a future, larger home became the dream. So the Boomers bought the old homes, and lived in them until the late 80 and early 90's, when they moved to their 1/2 acre lots with their McMansions.

The problem has escalated, as have the dreams. My generation is now pouring into McMansions as their first home, hoping in 5 years to bounce to an even larger home or an equivalent home in a better neighborhood. So my generation took shifty, dubious loans and now we're reaping what we've sown.

The problem, it would seem, was that the home stopped being a home and became an investment property. It's almost as if my generation feels compelled to end up with 1000 square feet of home for every family member currently in the family. You're single? Rent a 1000 square foot apartment. When you get married, move to that 2000 square foot suburban home. My entire generation wants to be 30 before they have kids, so around that time it'll be perfect to move to the 3,000 square foot monster McMansion. That way you can always have at least two empty bedrooms for guests, right?

That said, Mrs. Abstracted and I have resolved to live in a breadbox and make our kids suffer. We thrive on our backwards, throwback attitude towards homemaking and plan to have a cluttered, tiny house where there is no privacy.

Remember sharing a bathroom with your siblings? Around TAE's current neighborhood, most houses come 1 bath per bed.

I don't know...I keep coming back to greed and not knowing what to say about it. It just completely, totally fills our lives nowadays and it seems like a reckoning has happened (or will soon happen) because of it. Investors trying to make easy money, people trying to make a fast buck flipping houses, people trying to get unbelievable mortgages that common sense says shouldn't happen, people buying and selling stocks with reckless abandon, corporate politics, labor union strikes...it's all wrapped up in this bubble of Mammon, and frankly, TAE is sick of it.

There are times, in my young family's life, when we honestly don't know where we'll find money for our next round of bills. We pray, and worry, and stress over how to make ends meet and raise The Abstracted Daughter. I pray to God she'll never have a clue how tight things were for her folks.

So when TAE hears about Bill Gates losing $1.5 Billion in the last two weeks, reducing his wealth to a measly $55.5 billion, forgive me if I'm a little unsympathetic. When people call Barack Obama a communist for wanting to increase taxes for people who make over $250,000 a year, forgive me for frowning at the name-callers.

I heard about a guy who bought $78,000 in jewelry for his wife one day and the manager of the jewelry store asked him (because they were friends) "Mike, you're pretty wealthy. Have you ever said to yourself 'I have enough.'" Mike paused for a minute and then said "it's never enough."

Greed fills us, and we write textbooks for MBA students about how so-and-so make their millions, and you can too. We see commercials on TV about trading in our "scrap gold" for cash..."Get rid of those old heirlooms, get some cold hard cash." We hear commercials on the radio about getting a reverse mortgage from Vincent Mortgage, so the elderly can trade in that home they've owned for 55 years for a quick boost of cash. We go to wine tastings and see people with fake noses, fake boobs, and fake smiles discussing their anniversary rings and whether they should get a new one.

It's almost as though the spirit of progress this country held so dear transferred from the technology and industry and switched to money. When our grandparents were in their 20's, it was all about "living a better life, and a healthier life than your parents did," and having "things" that your parents never had. Then it escalated, and escalated, and escalated.

What we didn't realize was that by 1950, many Americans (and in this case I am only referring to white and blue collar American white people, obviously there were large social disparaties I don't have time to cover here) had really essentially reached the peak of human need: a house, 2.8 kids, a car, a church, and a good job, with retirement benefits guaranteed.

What else do we really need, but those things? Does my generation search greedily for more and more things because they've lost sight of the simple contentment found in the warm embrace of God? Have we lost the ability to say "a hug from my child is enough to get me through the day"?

So when no one on TV will simply say "we all got greedy. We need to get by with less, and stop trying to keep up with the Joneses," I wonder if we're really learning any lessons through all this. When no one on TV has the courage to say "'the least of these was Me' is how we should live our lives" I wonder how we sleep at night when there are people on this planet who still forage for tomorrow's food.