Sermon: Curing Restless Acquisition Syndrome - Sabbath and the Tenth Commandment

Exodus 20:8-11, 17

Curing Restless Acquisition Syndrome

Sabbath and the Tenth Commandment

James Sledge                                                                                       August 3, 2014

For all the attention that the Ten Commandments have received in recent years via court cases and movements to affix them to public buildings, I’ve never heard much discussion of the final commandment on the list, the one against coveting. That’s too bad because it’s one of the more interesting commandments. But it’s also understandable. What do you do with a commandment against wanting things that other people have?

Does God really get upset if I look at my neighbors nice, new Lexus and say to myself, “Man, I’d really like to have that car.”? What if someone finds her neighbor’s husband attractive and does a little flirting with him at a party? Where exactly are the lines with coveting? What exactly is the point of this command?

In truth, the command is not really a prohibition on wanting things that belong to others. The word translated “covet” refers not simply to desire, but inordinate desire, desire that leads to action and undermines the neighborly community that God dreams for humanity.

I think a lot of people assume that coveting is about people with less wanting what people with more have. But in the Bible, coveting usually works the other way round. It is about those with a lot wanting – and seizing –what belongs to those with little.

There are a number of coveting stories in the Bible. Some prominent ones involve kings, who have a lot. King David murders Bathsheba’s husband because he coveted her. But perhaps the epitome of coveting stories is the tale of Naboth’s vineyard, one of the cycle of stories around the prophet Elijah.

Naboth was just an ordinary guy who had the terrible misfortune to own a vineyard next door to King Ahab’s palace. Ahab thought it a choice spot to acquire, a great place to add a garden. And so he offered to purchase it. No real problem with the story so far.

But Naboth doesn’t want to part with his land, telling Ahab, “Yahweh forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.” Naboth invokes God’s name because ancestral land was God’s doing. It was part of God’s design for a unique, neighborly community in which the wealthy would not acquire more and more, and the poor would not become destitute because hard times forced them to sell the family farm. God’s law even required that such land revert back to its ancestral family every fifty years, insuring that everyone would maintain a rightful share of the land. But of course the powerful and the wealthy, and especially kings, could usually find loopholes and ways around such regulations.

Ahab is none too happy that Naboth won’t sell, and he begins to pout. This allows Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, to enter the narrative. Jezebel is quite the villainess. I don’t know if that’s accurate history or if her nastiness is overplayed by the men who wrote the Bible. Always nice to have a woman around to blame. Just ask Eve.

Anyway, Jezebel points out the obvious. Ahab is king and can get what he wants. She then proceeds to manufacture a scenario where Naboth is falsely accused of cursing both God and Ahab, crimes punishable by death. And so poor Naboth ends up losing his life and his land, and Ahab, with Jezebel’s help, acquires what he was after, what he coveted.

Now Ahab has been a rotten king from the get go. And Jezebel had once tried, unsuccessfully, to have the prophet Elijah killed. But it is the events of Ahab and Jezebel’s coveting that finally cause God to pass judgment. Because of Naboth, Ahab’s lineage will no longer rule Israel, and Jezebel will suffer a particularly gory fate.

In Israel, kings were supposed to be God’s shepherds, watching over and protecting the flock. They were supposed to insure that Israel’s life was organized around God and God’s neighborly community, but all too often, kings became focused on acquiring more rather than maintaining God’s curious notion of a community focused on the good of one’s neighbor.

At first glance, this seems rather bizarre behavior. Kings enjoy all manner of perks and benefits and luxuries by virtue of being king. There is no real chance that they will become destitute and not have enough, so why can’t they stay focused on being good shepherds?

It would seem that the problem of coveting is a powerful force to distort life and deflect people from their true purposes. It’s no less so today. Why on earth would someone like Martha Stewart, successful, overseeing a huge business empire, and worth almost a billion dollars, risk going to jail over an illegal stock trade that netted her about $45,000? Clearly she, along with many of us, is afflicted with something I’ll call restless acquisition syndrome. This is a restlessness that often drives people to self-destructive behavior. Billionaire Martha Stewart went to prison over $45,000. People go into crippling debt to acquire all those things they must have. Politician of all stripes want more power and will do most anything to get it or keep it. Corporations and the wealthy spend millions lobbying and cultivating politicians so that they can gain every possible advantage to feed their restless acquisition syndrome.

This syndrome, which clearly infects modern and ancient people alike, likely explains why so much ink gets spilled on two of the Ten Commandments, the one on Sabbath and the one on coveting. Together these two commands seek to tame our restlessness and inordinate desire, to point us toward towards a different sort of life and community, one organized around love of God and love of neighbor, the ultimate cure for restless acquisition syndrome.

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More than 1500 years ago, St. Augustine, an early Christian theologian and bishop in what is now Algeria wrote these words. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” (Confessions, I.1) There is a restlessness that troubles us, a dis-ease that drives us, until we find our true purpose, life organized around God and neighbor.

However, much in our society encourages us to organize life around acquiring more and more. But as the commandments and Jesus make abundantly clear, life organized around acquisition rather than around God and neighbor is a life wrongly organized. It is a disordered life.

Sabbath rest and no coveting are about life rightly organized. The disciplined cessation of restless acquisition allows us to shift gears and experience life that is not about a frantic, endless pursuit of more, but a confident, faithful trusting in God’s enough. And such faithful trusting upends the need to outcompete or outmaneuver my neighbor in the quest for more, allowing the creation of a truly neighborly community, even a neighborly world.

I’ll wrap up this sermon, and this sermon series, with some words from the final paragraph of the book that inspired both. “ ‘No-Sabbath’ existence imagines getting through on our own, surrounded by commodities to accumulate and before which to bow down. But a commodity cannot hold one’s hand… (Hopefully we will come to realize this) …but likely not without Sabbath, a rest rooted in God’s own restfulness and extended to our neighbors who also must rest. We, with our hurts, fears, and exhaustion, are left restless until then.”[1]

This is the last in a 6-part sermon series based in Walter Brueggemann’s book, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now. Each sermon is inspired by one of the six chapters in that book. The final chapter is “Sabbath and the Tenth Commandment.”

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[1] Brueggemann, Walter (2014-01-31). Sabbath as Resistance: (p. 89). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.