Today, I heard a sermon by our Pastor at Church. Our Pastor is not really a very effective sermon giver as he rambles and never gets to a coherent point. Today was no different.
But today, I did get one bit from his sermon. I’m sure it wasn’t exactly what he intended but I’d still like to see if I can relay it here.
Today’s Gospel was about when Jesus went to the Temple in Jerusalem and found that it had basically been turned into a market place. Jesus then proceeded to throw a fit and throw everyone out.
Well, the interesting point that I got from the sermon centered around how we could take the same message and apply it to our world. Our world is the new Temple that God built for his people to live in – to live in love and peace.
Yet, if we look at our world, it has been turned into a worldwide marketplace where greed is the first priority to many. I’ve talked about some examples in different contexts even recently. One example is that companies are trying to trade mark words in order to make more money or make it harder for companies/competitors to do business. Another examples is to eliminate fair use and make users pay for what fits under fair use (i.e. we pay for a CD, then we would pay again to copy it onto our iPod, and then we pay again to put it into our media player in our stereo system, etc…). Yes, these are competitive behaviors but in the extreme and truthfully they are just about greed. I would also say that companies that refuse to look at the world as a living and breathing place that needs to survive for us in the future are also companies that are putting greed before humanity and the world.
It’s time for us to push the market place out of the temple or at least put it in it’s place and make everyone remember that the reasons that we buy and sell things is not to accumulate more things but rather to live and spend time with our loved ones and give back to the world.