This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
Titanic Possessions
DATE: June 21, 1998
SERVICE: Pentecost III
TEXT: Luke 8:26-39
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

I have been thinking a lot lately about the Bahamas. You do that when your wife wins a trip to Nassau. Reading up on the place, I discovered it was in the Bahamas that Christopher Columbus first stepped out onto the pristine beaches of what became known as the New World. As he did so, he greeted the native people there with words that would shape the force and direction of European expansion into all the Americas for the next 400 years.
Extending his clenched hand to the curious crowd gathered about, he asked (in Portugese of course), "You got any of this?" Columbus then opened his fingers to reveal a small variety of gold coins and trinkets. With all the beauty and wonder of a new world standing right in front of him, Christopher's first thought was "Show me the gold!" History now records that Columbus had come to the new world completely possessed by a singly powerful demon: "Show me the money!"
Our appointed reading from Luke is about a man possessed by not one, not two, but a whole "legion" of demons, a man possessed with such desires that they completely controlled his own mind and personality. It was only when the man allowed Jesus to confront his demons, that he was able to rid himself of his possessors. Luke includes this text in his gospel to serve as a paradigm, an illustration for all of us. Have we not all felt at times possessed by powers beyond our control? The latest demon possession seems to be "road rage," a feeling of being personally attacked by someone else's car if not the person inside it. But there are other demons that possess us as well: fear of such things as aging or being alone; consuming self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement; the certainty we know everything or we are always right or we know nothing or have nothing to contribute. Are we not each of us possessed with our own set of demons, our minds and entire personalities twisted as we recklessly and ravenously seek to placate our personal demons.
Perhaps the most classic parable of our modern day experience of demonic possession is the story of the Titanic. The maiden voyage of the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic was another ocean excursion that met with about as much success as Columbus' quest for new-world gold. The swift sinking of that symbol of "unsinkable" modern technology and "untouchable" ostentatious wealth has remained a mesmerizing horror story for the entire twentieth-century. Last winter's Hollywood block- buster was only the most recent and most expensive replay of the Titanic disaster. Ironically, we only have to look at the movie Titanic to find an example of our worship of possessions.
"To talk about Titanic is to talk about money" is the way Newsweek introduced its coverage of the "Most Expensive Movie Ever Made:" the three hour, 14 minute Titanic. "With fine irony," the article notes, the director "has spent more dollars than any other filmmaker to make a film that denounces the rich; he has employed the most state-of-the-art technology to issue a warning about the hubris of Technology" ("Rough Waters," Newsweek, December 15, 1997, 64).
In case you missed the movie and have only a hazy recollection of the event, the Titanic was sailing on a placid sea when it struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, April 14, 1912, and sank early Sunday morning. At the time of her sinking, the Titanic was 882.5 feet long and 93 feet wide. The ship weighed 103,774,720 pounds. She was the largest moving object in the world. Titanic was virtually a floating city. One could easily become lost on board; she had a swimming pool, gymnasium, squash court, verandas, a darkroom, a Turkish bath and a special compartment for storing automobiles. The ship was an early example of humanity's worship of wealth and possessions.
Our culture is still consumed by possessions. To have and to hold the latest fashion or commodity has only grown to include our need to possess the most recent CD, the smartest, hippest car, the newest game-boy, the fastest computer processor. Many will go all out to have the best camera, the most technologically advanced rod and real, the newest gadget for the kitchen. And will we spend it to get it. Maybe spend isn't the right word. Perhaps charge is a better word. To illustrate my point, the amount of consumer debt in this country has doubled in the last ten years. According to The Federal Reserve, consumer debt has reached over $1 trillion. The average US household has run up a credit card bill of $3,400, compared with $1,600 a decade ago, according to Standard and Poors. By the end of 1996, a record 1.1 million Americans, roughly 1 in every 100 US households, will have declared personal bankruptcy. We are so possessed by our need to have that many of us are literally held captive.
For example, let us assume you have the average household consumer credit card debt of $3400. Let us also assume you decide to never charge another thing on your credit card until you pay it off. Finally, let us assume that you plan to make the minimum payment of $60 per month. Anyone want to guess how long it will take you to pay off that credit card? Nine years. My fellow consumers, the reason why we can't seem to payoff our credit cards and loans is because the interest on our credit cards keeps getting added back to the unpaid balance which results in the interest we have to pay being compounded in the bank's favor. We have been possessed by our demon desires.
The National Consumer Debt Escape Network lists several warning signs of a Bottomless Debtor: 1) You spend above 20% of net income on consumer debt; 2) You do not know or control the enemies of your finances; 3) You don't care to zero your credit card balances; 3) You do not pay more than the minimum due each month; 4) You easily omit paying certain creditors in order to pay others; 5) You have little guilt about borrowing money from family and friends to pay bills; 6) You fear knowing your total consumer debt load.
Of course, what the Titanic is most remembered for is being a $10 million casket. All of the passengars believed that nothing would or could touch them. They thought themselves protected by human ingenuity. However, more than 1500 people died in the sinking. Only 705 were rescued. As was made clear in the movie, the primary reason for this high number of casualties was the fact that the owners did not feel it necessary to invest in one of the most basics of safe-guards: enough life-boats to rescue the 2200 plus passengers aboard in the event of a disaster.
Today, even as we enhance our lives with all the enticing toys of this new world, we must keep in mind what was essentially Titanic's greatest and most fatal flaw. Her builders were so convinced of her "unsinkability," her owners so determined to make her nothing but luxurious, that Titanic was equipped with far too few lifeboats. They had invested in the trappings, in the technology, in the structure rather than in the people. If they invested instead in as simple unadorned, low-tech, back-to-basics as simple wooden rafts, all of those people would have survived. Rich or poor, learned or simple, young or old, if you didn't get a seat on a lifeboat, you didn't survive the icy death grasp of the North Atlantic waters.
John Jacob Astor died on the Titanic; so did Benjamin Guggenheim, engineer Washington Roebling, and a host of other industrialists and luminaries. But while it is true that some very wealthy and powerful people perished aboard the Titanic, far more of the sinking victims were found among the lists of the second- and third-cabin passengers. Sixty percent of the first-cabin passengers lived, compared with only 25% of the steerage passengers (not to mention the even more severe toll on the cooks, dishwashers, waiters, cabin boys, stokers, etc.) -- including two-thirds of all the children booked in steerage. While the Titanic was happy to carry second- and third-class passengers and take their money, she was clearly a ship built to accommodate those living the most luxurious, privileged lifestyles. She catered to the very rich, meeting all their possible needs -- including their need to be the first to survive any potential shipboard disaster. Oh how demonic our demons can be.
After the Titanic disaster, there was tremendous backlash against the inequality of accommodations, the ranking of some persons over others. It was the beginning of the end for privileged, luxuriant travel. In the aftermath of the Titanic, travel accommodations increasingly became generalized. Instead of dividing travelers into first-class/second-class, upper-deck/lower-deck, everyone began to be lumped into one category of travelers: "tourist class."
But if the Titanic disaster temporarily fostered a popular resistance to public class systems (excluding those based on race, of course), the shipwreck did surprisingly little damage to our sense of social status for long. Who boards a airplane today without walking through the first-class section with its extra-wide seats, its better dining fare and personalized service? Who hasn't found themselves standing in line only to see a smartly dress young man or woman flash some kind of "gold or platinum card" and be ushered around the rest of the rif-raf to the head of the line. Now 86 years after the Titanic, the signs are growing that we in our present postmodern culture are beginning to see a real return to the old class systems that divided the Titanic passengers into the treasured upperclasses and the "expendable" in steerage class.
My friends, my message is simple. To escape being possessed by our possessions, to safely navigate our way through the entombing entanglements and enticements of this Information Age, to prevent going down with whatever ship of fools we happen to be on, we must first see to keeping our own simple, back-to-basics lifeboat always close at hand. And what is that lifeboat?
The lifeboat that our God has constructed out of the rough, splintered, blood-stained wood of the cross. Only by keeping afloat in our faith in Jesus Christ's redemptive love and sacrifice can we escape the Titanic Possessions that threaten to overpower us. Only by keeping our focus on the face of Jesus can we navigate the uncharted waters of the twenty-first century. Is your ship headed for disaster? Or do you have hold of that old rugged cross?

AMEN