Materialism Series

If you have your Bibles and you want to follow along, please open them up to the book of Luke 12:13. It will take us a few minutes to get there, but we will get there pretty shortly. As you know, we have been going through the series “Do not conform. Be transformed.” It is based on a passage found in the book of Romans 12:1-2. It says “Do not conform to the pattern of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” The idea behind this series is that we would look at various patterns we would see out there in culture. Patterns that try to shape us into the culture’s way of doing things and examine some of the consequences for following those patterns and then provide a bridge to some sort of a biblical response. Today, we are going to look at a pattern that I think most of you should be aware of. It is called the pattern of materialism. I want to stop right here because I know that when I put up a word like materialism, some of you are holding your wallets and thinking there goes Chuck. He is going to do another sermon on tithing. He is going to try and strong arm me into giving more money. I want to calm your fears right now. I am not going to do that. I am not even going to put pictures of kids up that are going away to camp and you need to sponsor them. I am not going to put videos of the kids in Africa that need water filters and that sort of thing. Although it was a good thing. In fact, we raised over $3,000 for those kids for the water filters. That is a good thing. But really I am not here today to try and strong arm you into giving more money. But if after the sermon any of you are feeling this conviction to drop an extra buck or two into the offering plate, don’t worry. Chuck is not going to stand in your way. Don’t worry about that whatsoever.

Today, we are going to look at the pattern of materialism. I think that most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, we know that materialism exists in the culture. Especially in the culture of America. When I was trying to think of a video or media thing or an image that would really help us to understand that materialism and the emphasis on the more is very prevalent. The commercial that came to mind was the AT&T commercial with the little kids talking and the little girl starts saying “we need more, we need more, we need more”. Anybody familiar with that particular video? It is a cute one. But just in case you haven’t seen it, I thought I would let Eric play it for us right now. I love that commercial and I like the little kid that is sitting on the right going like this the whole time very distracted. We laugh at that commercial because it is funny but really because it is true. When it comes to life, we want more and more and more. AT&T has figured it out and Verizon has figured it out and every major business in America figured out that for Americans more is better. We are a very materialistic culture by and large. I want to talk about some of the evidences of the fact that we are a materialistic culture.

Before I go there, what I want to do is give a working definition of materialism. I think this is from Webster’s Dictionary. It says “materialism is a preoccupation with or emphasis on material objects, comforts, and consideration with a disinterest in or rejection of spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values”. That is a long definition and kind of a complicated definition. I thought what I would do is shorten it and give it Chuck’s definition. Materialism is simply a preoccupation with stuff. That is all it is. We go out of our way to get stuff and when we get the stuff we try to hold on to the stuff. To me that is what materialism is. When I thought about the evidences of materialism in the culture, so many things came to my mind I didn’t know where to begin. So many examples I could use. What I thought I would start with is just simply my own house. Some of you have been to our house and you see that the Gohn family has a lot of stuff. Probably too much stuff. Really, it hasn’t always been that way. When I left Oregon in 2001 to go attend seminary with my two lovely children, Austin and Natalie, I liquidated my house, sold my house, got rid of a bunch of stuff and actually was able to put pretty much all my belongings into a mid-size U-Haul. I moved to Johnson City, TN where I spent three years in seminary and then it so happened that I met my current and wonderful wife, Debbie. Debbie had some stuff. She had a lot of stuff. She had about three times my stuff. Instead of moving to Pittsburgh with a mid-size U-Haul, we ended up with two large U-Hauls coming into Pittsburgh. That was nine years ago next month when we came into Pittsburgh. What was nice about it was that when we came into Pittsburgh up on Highland Place, there were so many people from the church there ready to help us unload our stuff. Some of you were there. I was thinking about that. A few weeks later I was talking to somebody in the church saying wasn’t that nice. People showed up and they just were so gracious. I am just so thankful that they were willing to come and help us unload our stuff. The lady said to me don’t be too thankful because most of them really weren’t there to help you. They just wanted to see what kind of stuff you had and how much you had of it. It is true I think. We have a lot of stuff and most of us have too much stuff. If you are like me, you are not satisfied with the amount of stuff you have so you go around on Monday night and look around the neighborhood and you see what kind of stuff people are throwing away so you can take more stuff home even if you really don’t need it.