Mark
12:38-44
Timmy didn’t want to put his money in the offering plate Sunday morning,
so his mother decided to use some hurried creative reasoning with him.
“You don’t want that money, honey,” she whispered in his ear. “Quick!
Drop it in the plate. It’s tainted!”
Horrified, the little boy obeyed.
After a few seconds he whispered, “But, mommy, why was the money tainted?
Was it dirty?
“Oh, no dear,” she replied. “It’s not really dirty. It just ‘taint yours,
and it ‘taint mine,” she replied. “It’s God’s.”
Today is Stewardship
Sunday, probably everyone’s least favorite Sunday of the year. And I want to let you in on a secret: it’s
most pastors’ least favorite Sunday of the year too. Stewardship tends to be the one Sunday of the year when we talk
about money. We are uneasy talking about
money, it feels like a taboo subject in many ways and each year we have to have
this uncomfortable conversation. But, as
Rev. Michael Piazza points out, stewardship really should be a year round
conversation. As he puts it, “(The real issues is)…how we change the
culture. Because the church has talked about money only when we wanted some, we
have abandoned our greater responsibility to shape the value system of a
culture in which people are systematically and relentlessly metamorphosized
from Human Ones into consummate consumers.”
He continues, “We
pious types can rant and rave about greed, and pollution, and poverty, and
income inequality, and all the other evils that arise from "the love of
money," but what we really need to do is repent. The church has treated
money the same way we, for decades, have treated sex. We never talked about
(it) unless we were ranting against it is some form, and we never talk about
money unless we want some of it. In both these areas, the church has utterly
failed to inspire transforming values. …money…
(is a) powerful gift.. from God, and the church should have taught us how to be
better stewards of (that gift). … people come wanting to know how to raise more
money. Frankly, fundraising is easy compared to teaching society how to be
better stewards of all the gifts that come from God.
“Another reason for our impotency around this issue is
the third topic the church avoids: death. Oh, we talk plenty about
resurrection, but we seldom have the courage to remind us that we all are going
to die. If we lack a powerful sense of our own mortality, we can pretend that
we earned what we have and that it is ours to keep. It isn't. You ARE going to
die and leave it all behind. That is why it is called ‘stewardship.’”
His points are really
good ones: the money that we have been entrusted with is exactly that: money
that we have been entrusted
with. We haven’t earned it. I want to say that again: we haven’t earned
it. We may have worked for it, but we
know that the amounts people are paid have very little to do with how hard they
work. For example, some of the hardest
workers in our culture are wait staff.
They are also some of the least paid.
In contrast, most of our wealthiest people have inherited at least a good
portion of their wealth, and we know they play much harder than they work. We have different amounts of wealth, not
because some are better people and certainly not because God loves those folk
more or cares for them more. But we all
have at our disposal some resources, and no matter how we’ve come by them, they
aren’t ours. They are Gods, and we’ve
been entrusted with our wealth to use for the work of God and God’s people in
this world.
So, with that information, what are we really called to
do with our resources? Well, as I’ve
said before and will no doubt say again, the way we spend our time, money and
talents is a clear indication of what we value.
So I invite you to think for a
minute about what you value, truly and deeply.
If it is God, then the question remains, what is the best use of your
resources? What is the best way to serve
God with those resources? I realize that
there are many areas that each of us care about. Housing, the hungry, immigrants, children, refugees,
racism, LGBTQ+ rights, the environment… there are many, many ways that we help
God’s creation and that we serve God. Church is only one of those and I recognize that. While we do a great deal of mission through
this church and in this church, sharing your resources here is only one way in
which we act as stewards of God’s church.
At the same time, to be real and honest about what that
means in this place: our budget this last year was about $285,000. With that
money we provide worship, education, care for one another, counseling for some,
and give a great deal to mission both through our time, talents and our
money. We have about 100 members. What that works out to is about $2850 per
member per year. Or, $240 per month per
person, not per family. Not everyone can
pay that, so that means some are paying significantly more. Our Old Testament encourages giving (to all
the causes you give to) by a tithe of 10% of your income: that’s gross, not net,
by the way. The New Testament goes
further, and suggests that if we are giving out of our abundance rather than to
the point at which we feel it, we are missing the point of giving. But I give you these numbers in the hope that
it helps us all to be realistic about what it costs to keep our programs and
our church community the way it has been.
I also give you these numbers because I think it is easy sometimes to
not realize the cost of what we do in this place.
All that being said, my intention this morning and every
Stewardship Sunday is not to guilt trip folk into giving more.
As Michael Piazza said, giving, stewardship, should be a
way of life. It is not about just paying
those who deserve to be paid, or paying your dues, or about being giving people.
It isn’t about trying to assuage guilt,
or it shouldn’t be. It is about remembering,
at all times and in all things that all we have is not “ours” at all. And that out of gratitude for what we have
been entrusted with, we are called to use those resources for the good of God
and God’s people. But that is a pretty
foreign mindset in this culture. When I
read financial pages, they all encourage saving: but saving for what? They encourage saving for our future, for
retirement, for our children’s education.
They encourage delaying gratification of “now” in exchange for gratification
later. Never have I read a financial
site that encourages generosity of giving, that acknowledges that with
privilege comes responsibility, and that with resources comes the gift of being
able to contribute to the world in a real and meaningful way.
Changing our mindset, converting our thinking from “this
is mine and if I give any of it away it is because I am being generous” into
“this is God’s and I’ve been entrusted to use this money, this talent, and this
gift for the highest good for all people,” is not an easy thing to do in a
culture that says otherwise. I sometimes
wonder, actually, if so many of our problems as a society don’t stem from this
basic confusion over what is really ours.
What is yours and really yours is only that which you take with you when
you die. And that does not include any
of the resources of this world at all.
So what do we want to leave behind?
Do we want to die known as successful by cultural standards, having
raised the bar of what it meant to be wealthy, that we collected so much of the
world’s resources to ourselves? Or do we
want to leave behind a legacy of caring for others, making the world better,
contributing what we have for the good of the world? How
would we want our loved ones to describe us after we have passed on? Who do you want to be in the world?
But perhaps even more, a deeper question to ask
ourselves, who do we want God to see us as?
I’ve asked you at times to think of what gifts God has given you: what
are your talents, what are the things God has blessed you with that God gave
you to use for the good of God’s people and God’s creation? But now I’m asking you, if God were to write
a sentence describing who you are, what would you want that sentence to
be? What would you want God to say about
how you have been and who you are in the world?
Do those desires match your actions?
Do they match how you walk and how you act and how you move on this
planet? What could you do to be more the
person God calls you to be? What could
you do to be more the person you want God to see you being? What is the best way for you to serve God in
this world?
When 9/11 happened, money came pouring in to the Red
Cross in order to help. Apparently, they
received a total of about $547 Million in response. But at first, Red Cross put all the money into
their general fund and weren’t going to designate that money for the purpose of
helping the 9/11 survivors. The public
outrage at this decision, however, forced the Red Cross to change its mind and
they decided that every penny given towards that cause would go towards that
cause.
In the same way, perhaps, God calls us to use the money,
talents, time and resources with which we have been entrusted to serve and help
God’s creation. Not easy, and God
doesn’t take away in the same way that those who donated to the Red Cross could
take back their resources. But God is
putting a sacred trust in us and calling us to live that out.
As I wrote this sermon I found myself thinking about
J.K. Rowling, a woman who was hugely successful not only because she wrote
wonderful books but because she intentionally gave up being a billionaire by
giving so much of her wealth to charity especially to the Multiple Sclerosis
society and to a group called “Volant” that supports women, children and young
people at risk in Scotland. She has
chosen to use her resources in service to other people. That is a legacy worth leaving behind.
None of this is just about money. Caryl Aukerman and her husband felt called to
work with the very poor in Albania. They
took with them into Albania their three young children, who were sad because in
living in such poverty, they found they could not continue to do the things
that they loved the most: art, music, and dance, especially. They felt cheated and the Aukerman’s began to
be concerned that they were depriving their children of the opportunity to live
into and use the talents that God had given them. As they found ways to help their children
still use those talents, they discovered that the neighboring kids also yearned
for these kinds of experiences. So they
began classes out of their homes: they found a way to not only teach their own
kids, to allow their own kids to live into their gifts, but to share those gifts
with other children as they taught art, music and dance at home. The children they served were still poor, and
their work was still focused mostly on creating ways for these families to have
enough. But they also brought the arts
alive into this community and enriched the neighborhood children far beyond the
meeting of basic needs. There are things
all of us can do with the gifts God has given us. It may take time to figure out how to use
those gifts, but they are there to be shared, they are entrusted to you to be
used for the good of all.
Studies show that most people feel they would be fine if
they only had twice what they currently have.
It doesn’t actually matter how much a person has: even billionaires feel
that they would be fine if they only had twice what they have now. Humans “needs” seem to expand with what we
have. At the same time, those studies
also show that having more does not equal being happier. We think we will feel more content, more at
peace, more okay when we have more. But
the reality is something else. What DOES
increase happiness is helping other people, and feeling gratitude. These can make a huge difference in how we
feel in the world. So I wonder if,
instead of feeling poor and focusing on getting more for ourselves, we focus on
the gratitude of what we have and explore how we can give more to those around
us. Again, I’m not just thinking
monetarily. I’m also thinking in terms
of our time, our talents, and our other our resources.
Stewardship is about all of these things. But the bottom line is that stewardship is
actually about your well-being, your
wholeness. We are happier, we are more
whole, we are more connected to God when we can remember that we are stewards
of what we have and that we are called to use God’s resources to help those
around us who have little, who have less, who are in need. We will feel more content and more full when
we are generous with what is not even ours to begin with. Stewardship is an invitation to remember that
all we have and are come from God, are God’s and will return to God in the end. Thanks be to God.
--
The church council met to discuss the pastor’s
compensation package for the coming year. After the meeting the chair of
council told the pastor: “We are very sorry, Pastor, but we decided that we
cannot give you a raise next year.”
“But you must give me a raise,” said the pastor. “I am
but a poor preacher!”
“l know,” the council chair said. “We hear you every
Sunday.”
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