Genesis 32:22-31
Matthew 14:13-21
On a muggy July evening eight years ago, nursing student Stephen Smith was found murdered on a rural road in South Carolina. Smith, who was openly gay, was romantically linked to the older son of a prominent local attorney. The case would go cold quickly and be neglected for six years.
Less than three years later, that same attorney’s longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield, died as the result of severe head trauma. It was reported that she had fallen from the front steps of the wealthy family’s estate, Moselle. There was no autopsy and the death certificate would fraudulently list “natural causes.” An insurance settlement of $4.3 million dollars never reached the family, instead being stolen by the attorney.
One year later, in 2019, the younger son of the attorney was drunk driving a motorboat late at night when it crashed, killing one of his close friends, Mallory Beach. His blood alcohol level was .286, more than three times the legal limit. The family attempted to blame another young man for the crash, and it was weeks before the younger son was arrested. Even then, he received special treatment.
Facing civil suits related to the boat accident and a forensic review of his financial records, attorney Alex Murdaugh murdered his wife and younger son at the kennel of the family’s 1700+ acre hunting estate on the evening of June 7, 2021, shooting his son with a shotgun, and his wife with an assault weapon.
Years of fraud and embezzlement began to unspool. Alex Murdaugh, conspiring with his surviving son, Buster, attempted to sell and hide assets. In early September of that year, Alex was supposedly shot in the head while changing a tire on a rural road. A cousin was later arrested for conspiracy to assist a suicide, though it is not clear that Alex Murdaugh’s death was actually intended. The cousin was also Alex Murdaugh’s partner in narco-trafficking, providing him with Oxycodone for personal use and distribution.
You know much of this story, for it was in the news for months, especially during the trial earlier this year which resulted in Alex Murdaugh being convicted for murdering his wife Maggie and son Paul.
Some of the financial crimes have been adjudicated, while others remain in various stages of litigation and prosecution. Investigations into the deaths of Stephen Smith and Gloria Satterfield have been re-opened, and there are allegations of other crimes. Netflix, CourtTV, and podcasts aplenty have been all over this, of course, because humans love a good scandal. Always have.
I can just imagine the people of Jerusalem gossiping as King David’s family was torn apart by rape, murder, and rebellion. Then again, King David was a murderer too.
We could just wrap Alex Murdaugh’s behavior up in a box called drug addiction, and put a label on it, and drug addiction is a terrible thing. But the American scourge named Sackler shares something fundamental with Alex Murdaugh, and with citizen Trump as described in his niece Mary’s book “Too Much and Never Enough.”
Ancient humans convinced themselves of scarcity, sometimes real, more often imagined. We have hard-coded that idea of scarcity into our economic system as a sort of sub-cerebral instinct, to the point that life is seen as a competition, a winner-take-all battle royale, and even murder is okay if done with a corporate charter.
It is a sermon for another day, maybe an adult faith formation topic to be explored in depth, but it is worth noting that what is actually happening is this: we mimic the desire of others, so much so that two young children, put in the same room filled with dozens of equally good toys, will often fight over one.
How we deal with this mimetic desire, and how we have ritualized and declared sacred the scapegoating and evil that comes from managing mimicked and competitive desire, is the subject of the work of the late French theorist Rene Girard and the legions who continue in his tradition today, in the academy, and in the pulpit.
Let us also bracket, for this morning, the extraordinary sense of entitlement and power that made the Murdaugh family, even those who would eventually become victims themselves, believe that the lives of others were expendable, for they clearly viewed the lives of Stephen, Gloria, and Mallory as expendable, and Alex even saw the lives of wife, Maggie, and son, Paul, as worth less than the money and crimes he was trying to hide. For this was also about the cancerous effect of unearned privilege on our souls.
But let’s focus on the money, for as Mr. Clemens said, “Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.” And by Lowcountry standards, the Murdaugh family had great wealth.
We are all wrestling, like Jacob, for blessing, as if blessing were in limited supply.
The sun was going down, but there were so many who needed healing. We can imagine, based on other gospel encounters, that the crowd included folks born with disability in an age when disability was seen as a curse. That the crowd included some who were possessed by demons, the way those ancients understood psychiatric and neurological disorders. That some in the crowd were tired of teachings that made them feel worthless, like they deserved their suffering, and had come to hear a word of hope.
So many people were gathered, and the disciples, while embracing the good news and holistic transformation Jesus preached, were probably getting a little peckish too as the day stretched on. Maybe Peter was even outright hangry… Peter being a little mercurial and all.
You know hangry, when your hunger hijacks your mood and bad things happen.
There was, they believed, not enough.
Jesus believed there was enough. And there was.
Now, if you want magic, fine, have your magic. I am a miracle agnostic. The world is full of the mysterious and inexplicable, even today in an age of science and cynicism.
But I also like the idea, floating around for a long time and even making it into the Danny Boyle film “Millions,” that the miracle wasn’t magic bread and infinite fish. There always was enough. The miracle was Jesus convincing people to move from scarcity thinking and fear to abundance thinking and trust.
In other words, as St. Peter explains to young Damian in the 2004 film, they all had a little something squirreled away, something they pulled out as the baskets went by, sharing and taking as they needed.
Now, it is absolutely true that Jesus was not operating in late-stage neo-liberal capitalism. But he was also operating in a time of scarcity and consolidating wealth, where the ability to manufacture fear and desire created power.
We have war in Ukraine and climate catastrophe, the latest Tik-Tok challenge and corporate greed. They had Rome, drought, and locusts.
Ancient Israelite culture had been based on small-holding, families owning land that they used to produce food with enough surplus to trade for other needs. There were, of course, pastoralists and fisherman, but by and large, security was based on land.
Stories like Jezebel’s theft of Naboth’s vineyard were more powerful than we realize today, for they went directly to the heart of your family’s security. People didn’t buy and sell real estate and move for a new job. The family land was the family land. It was where you belonged.
Kind of like the recent story out of South Carolina, where land developers are trying to expropriate the black-owned land of 93 year-old Josephine Wright, a member of the Gullah Geechee tradition, all so they can build more luxury second homes for the super-rich.
Of course, the amount of arable land was finite in the region, so there was always going to be a limit to how many children you could have, how large the population became, before conflict became inevitable, never mind the large and aggressive empires to the southeast and northwest..
The Mosaic Code included debt forgiveness and economic restoration, but by the time Jesus came along, Rome was in charge, and the Romans were proud to be bullies. If there had been an ancient Truth Social, they have been posting about their brutality. And there had always been some Israelites who abused the system, who invoked the ire of an Amos or a Jeremiah, but it really was the taxes demanded by Caesar that finally tipped the scales, throwing the region into chaos, for there was never enough to quell the insatiable need and greed of Rome, and the wealthy Israelite elite were taking advantage of the instability, buying up the property of tax delinquents, not at all unlike our land auctions today. As people lost family small-holds, more moved into cities, became more dependent on an exchange economy that was largely controlled by those who owned more and more of the land.
But it was not macro-economics at work on the shores of Galilee when Jesus blessed and broke loves.
Never enough is the first and last commandment of our real religion, of our social Darwinism, of our systemic justification of greed. It is the anti-gospel.
Alex Murdaugh would never have enough. He had made millions. The hunting property was over 1700 acres, not so far from where Josephine Wright is fighting for her land.
Never enough is the rallying cry of corporate America. People are spending money to drive miles to pay too-much for an energy drink created by a social media influencer who is famous for being famous, because apparently clicks are in short-supply too, though I’m not sure how since billions of teens and young adults are facedown in their phones and sadly not facedown in a book.
People are fighting over an energy drink with dangerous levels of caffeine, because apparently there is never enough of that either, caffeine, or gas for the car, beanie babies or baby formula, or Logan Paul’s Prime energy drink. What we seem to manufacture best is scarcity.
I mean, I love my morning coffee, but kids are ending up in the hospital after drinking Prime…
And I’ve clearly become that crazy old man on the porch yelling about “kids these days.”
Enough! You can buy all the “Prime” in the world, and it still won’t make you love yourself. Tik-Tok filters will not make you pretty if you believe you are ugly. What goes down that gold-plated toilet in Manhattan isn’t that different than what is going down my toilet on North Main Street, though God-help-me, I hope I have a healthier diet.
We can get carried away if we try to follow the teaching of Jesus too literally, all becoming latter-day versions of St. Francis laying our worldly possessions at the feet of the authorities. We can’t all trust in God to provide like the birds in the field, can’t all drop our nets, abandon our tax-collecting tables, and let the dead bury the dead. I’ve seen enough movies to know that the dead do not actually bury each other. They’re too busy lurching around looking for “braaaaiiiinnnns.”
And given what people are paying for that energy drink, brains may actually be in short supply.
Someone has to sell the Slim Jims at the corner store. Work is honorable and necessary. But we have got to do better than we are doing, better than we have historically done.
What faithful people can do and must do if we are to be in right relationship with our sisters and brothers and gender-queer siblings, if we are to be in right relationship with this amazing and living planets we call home, if we are to be in right relationship with that Holy Mystery and Source we name as God, is stop whenever the gaping maw of “more, more, more” opens up in our spirit, pause, and ask if we have fallen into the trap of “too much and never enough,” never enough stuff, never enough sex, never enough attention, never enough you.
There is enough. Let us bless and break the loaves. Let all be fed, at Christ’s table, and in God’s good and abundant creation. Amen.