Sermon February 19,2006

The Faith Full Family:
The Idol of Selfishness
Luke 12:13-15

Introduction: We have had several newborns come into our family in the last few months. What a joy that is to see those babies in church and their proud parents. We love babies but there is one thing we know about babies, they are selfish and as a result the parents’ lives come to revolve around the baby and his or her needs. Selfishness is an infantile characteristic described by that maxim, “I want what I want when I want it.” We all started life in the same place but maturity is growing beyond the infantile selfishness that we begin with.

On Sunday, June 13, 2004, Matt Starr was at Ameriquest Field in Arlington, Texas, watching the home team Rangers take on the St. Louis Cardinals. When a foul ball was hit toward where he was sitting, the 28-year-old landscaper leapt over the seat in front of him. Even though the ball had landed at the feet of 4-year-old Nicholas O'Brien, Starr knocked the boy against the seats and pounced on the ball. The boy's mother, insulted by the aggressive behavior, swatted him with her program, while fans chanted, "Give the boy the ball." But, clutching the ball to himself, Starr returned to his seat unwilling to part with his new souvenir.[1]

I. A Selfish Culture
It is pretty easy to see selfishness in others but much more difficult to see it in ourselves. We look at actors who play selfish, self-centered characters such as Bill Murray in “Ground Hog Day” or “Scrooged”. We laugh at such characters and their foolish choices but we also see ourselves in them.

In essence selfishness is putting our needs, wants and desires ahead of everyone else. We live in a paradoxical society where we see acts of generosity alongside acts of greed and selfishness. The corruption story of the week concerned Katrina government relief where people used relief funds for gambling and strip clubs. Compare that to the giving of private organizations that continue to provide for the needs of those who lost everything.

Why are people selfish? I don’t know if we can always answer that question. I believe one factor is that we believe we will become less if we don’t get what we want. Sometimes people feel like their life is over when they don’t get their way. The man who asked Jesus to arbitrate the inheritance with his brother made this mistake. Jesus said, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Lk 12:15). The same could probably be said of the prodigal son who demands his inheritance from his father in Luke 15. The selfish person thinks only of himself until everything is lost.
Of course it is easy to find examples of selfishness “out there” but the focus of my lessons is our homes and our families. In one sense selfishness is an individual idol, not a family one. And yet, it is a family idol, one that often gets passed from one generation to the next. A story I read described a man explaining why he wouldn’t marry a woman he was dating- she just wouldn’t make him happy. The man listening then wrote this,

“Finally I interrupted and asked, "What kind of wife would make you happy?" The more he described what he was looking for in a wife, the more convinced I became that what he really needed was not a wife. He needed a goldfish, the pretty kind with the long tail that floats around, or maybe a Golden Retriever—but even a dog will make demands on you emotionally. A goldfish, though, just sits there and looks pretty and doesn't ask you to communicate. It doesn't ask you how your day was or expect you to listen to how its day was. The last thing he needed was a wife, because his whole understanding of why the world existed was to meet his needs.”[2]

Men often are painted with the brush of selfishness and we probably deserve it. But the push in our society to look out for your own happiness, to look out for your own needs, is not just a male weakness. Both men and women have walked away from years of marriage and all its promises, obligations, and responsibilities in order to find that elusive bird of happiness, ‘If a person, a marriage is not meeting your needs then walk away, be true to yourself.’

As parents we see and understand that children come into the world selfish and part of our task is to help them move beyond the narrow world of self because a selfish person is a lonely person. When we read the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) we see the end result of selfishness is a life cut off from everything good. Even if the young man had not lost his fortune the result would have been the same, a life cut off from meaningful relationships and love.
We fight, we scrap, we do everything we can to get our own way, to impose our will, to win. The result is what James described, “But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such ‘wisdom’ does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, of the devil. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice,” James 3:14-16. It is the life we see around us every day and it is life that is filled with unhappy, lonely, dissatisfied people.

II. A Different Way
As pervasive as selfishness is in our society and in ourselves, it is difficult to see how we can cast out this particular idol. Some religions teach followers denial of desire, to treat the body with harshness. But Jesus showed us a different way when he said, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it,” Matthew 16:24-25. This is the exact opposite of what our instincts tell us.

Jesus tells us if we live selfishly we will lose. One writer put it this way,

“If we look at our life as some precious treasure we must hoard, the demands made by others of our life are like losses. And death is a final loss, a final failure to hold on to our life. But if we look at our life as a treasure we must share, every service we give to others is a fulfillment of our life's purpose. And death is the final giving, the total giving.”[3]

Jesus understood that this was the biggest obstacle to people following him. Life is not made up of possessions, of getting our way. That is true whether it is big things or small, a selfish life causes us to fill our stomachs with husks so we starve to death with full bellies.
It is not just that we give, but to whom we give. You have probably given yourself to something or someone and come away disappointed. Jesus is the only one who promises you that you will find what you desire when you give yourself to him. He is the only one that can keep that promise.


Livonia Church of Christ: February 19, 2006
[1] Greg Asimakoupoulos, Naperville, Illinois; source: Matt Curry, "Man Will Give Foul Ball to Boy Who He Knocked Aside, AP Sports
[2] Craig Barnes, from the sermon "Learning to Speak Multiculturally," National Presbyterian Church, Washington, D.C., (10-3-99)

[3] Edicio de la Torre, Leadership, Vol. 7, no. 4.