I Timothy 6:5-10; Luke 12:32-34
This is the sixth Stewardship Message in a series of seven. And this is the money one. This is going to be a three-point message. Point #1 is Tithing; point #2 is Money and Fear; point #3 is the Value of the Kingdom of God.
Point #1: I’m going to start the message off with this simple, straightforward testimony. Jan and I tithe to the local church – ten percent of our income before taxes we give to the local church. We have tithed almost our entire married life. With small children, children in college; when we earned almost nothing, and when we’ve earned more than we need – we tithed. We have lived the blessing of tithing. For those of you who believe the tithe can be distributed around between charitable organizations, and for those of you who don’t believe tithing is possible for you – I would simply, humbly say: You are wrong. The tithe goes to the local church, and what the bible refers to as “gifts and offerings” can be given elsewhere . And you can always afford to give 10% of your income to the church. I do not believe in a “quid pro quo” God. I do believe there are certain truths that carry with them an element of mystery – tithing is one of those mysterious truths. Tithing, says Michael Reeves and Jennifer Tyler in their book, Faith & Money, is at the very heart of our recognition that God provides. They write: The Bible offers one standard of measurement in our response [to the fact that] everything comes from God – the tithe. I commend it to you.
Point #2 – Money and Fear: I “focus grouped” this topic several times this week – what needs to be said in church about money? One thing that came up was the connection between money and fear. It’s why people don’t tithe! It reminded me of one of the stories my mother has told from her childhood, after my grandfather lost his leg in a farming accident. With a growing family, and bills to pay, the rumor around town was that George Allard would probably end up on the dole, costing his neighbors money because of his inability to take care of his own. My grandfather got wind of that rumor and made an out-loud promise to himself – that he would never cost his neighbors a dime. He raised chickens and vegetables and established routes in town, selling food to his neighbors and to the vacationers who spent time around the lake. My grandmother made everything the family needed, from bread to socks, from mayonnaise to dresses for the girls. They took in borders. They spent their lives to make sure no one could ever accuse them of costing the town a penny.
We hear of a man who loses his leg in an accident and the best we can come up with is the expressed worry that it’s going to cost us money? Absent that community suspicion, would my grandparents have worked as hard to provide for their own, or would they have expected their neighbors to take care of them?
Those of us who are discussing the book Breakfast at Sally’s have pondered the amazing fact that, at least in that book, the homeless people were more generous with their money and their time than the well-off. How can that be, we asked ourselves. How is it that people who have nothing give everything, while those who have so much keep so much of what they have for themselves? I think the answer is imbedded in the question – it’s really all a matter of where your heart is. For people like me, I am afraid to lose what I have. That’s the irony – that the means intended to insure us a measure of security actually robs us of what it purports to provide.
There is nothing ennobling about poverty. But, as JK Rowling noted in her 2008 Commencement Address to Harvard’s graduating class, poverty can bring us to rock bottom, a place which can become the solid and sure foundation for the building of our lives. She notes that her own poverty taught her the powerful lesson that she could survive absent so much of what the world tries to convince us is necessary.
Jesus knew this – perhaps from the reality of his own poverty growing up, or because of his capacity for imagination and empathy – that money has that potential to paralyze and encase us in fear, and the fear of “not enough” will trump so much of our better nature, even our willingness to love! Fear captures our hearts – and once captured, the heart cannot give its attention elsewhere.
Love is not yet perfected in us. But to know Jesus and to live by his standard is to take a large step toward the perfecting in us of the capacity to love which every human being is born with. St. John tells us that perfect love casts out fear. Money diminishes that capacity like sunshine wrinkles the skin. Without our recognizing it, what is best in us begins to wither under the burden of worrying and wondering how to protect what we already have, how to acquire more of what we already have enough of.
Where your treasure is, says Jesus, there your heart will be also. “Treasure” is concrete; it will capture our affections like a magnet will pull iron to itself.
We do not give because we are afraid.
My Third Point – the challenge of determining value. Our Board of Trustees has to go through the exercise of determining the replacement value of our facilities and their contents. What would it cost to rebuild this if all were lost in fire or some other disaster?
In his six-page rant, Andrew Joseph Stack III went on at length describing his personal frustration with everything from the Catholic Church to his employment situation – first in California and then in Austin, Texas, and his absolute disdain for politicians in general and his accountant and the Internal Revenue Service in particular. He posted his thoughts on line after traumatizing his wife and daughter, and just before he allegedly burned their house down and then flew a small plane into the side of the office building where 200 IRS employees were beginning their work day.
Mr. Stack is an extreme example of a corporate mental illness sweeping our land. The age of the “suicide bomber” has come home to roost, with some people willing to walk into churches and shoot people they disagree with, while others have come to see our college campuses as firing ranges where all their hostilities can be vented.
What is the value of the human life lost? What is the value of our safety compromised? When disagreement becomes disgruntlement which becomes vicious speech which becomes violent action – what has been lost along the way, and where is the tipping point?
The January 9th issue of The Economist reports that the US stock market is overvalued by about 50% based on current best long-term measures. Just what is our money worth?
Ever since human beings began to barter with each other for goods and services, there has been tension between the value of life and the value of our stuff. In the kingdom of God, according to Jesus, people trump stuff. If we are going to make the mistake of “overvaluing” anything, let it be each other! If you are going to risk losing your pension in the overvalued stock market, why not risk at least as much capital on ministries to your neighbor? It is at the very least inconsistent, and at worst, hypocritical – that most grievous of sins as far as Jesus is concerned – to invest in some overvalued secular instrument while refusing to invest in the body of Christ based on the accusation that the church doesn’t need your money or manage it well.
The worst tragedy of Andrew Joseph Stack III is not that he came to undervalue the lives of others. The tragedy is that he assigned the value of his own life so intimately to money that, in his own mind, ending his own life became a defensible way to make an economic point. In his book, The Shack, William Young says Politics, Economics and Religion are the “[human] created trinity of terrors that ravage the earth…” . I would argue that Religion alone has the potential to hold the other two accountable. Religion is the crucible within which human spirituality – the human spirit – should be taken seriously. I concede Religion is often abusive, divisive and destructive; but that concession does not prevent me from tithing to this church, because no where does my money have greater potential to nudge the world toward greater valuing of human beings than here. In truth, were all Christians to tithe we would not be sharing this message today. In truth, if we were not so afraid of losing money and so intimidated by our money, we would be sharing a lot more of our money.
My base-line hope for a return on my investment is that I will be enlightened in the ways I can live more generously, more joyfully, more meaningfully. I tithe to this church as much for its potential as for its accomplishments. If I am overvaluing the church it is because we are underperforming. No organization, no ministry, no para-church mission has anywhere near the potential that is resident in the local church! Bill Hybels has it right: Nothing works like the local church when the local church is working right. The local church can – and I believe, is – changing the world!
Perfect love casts out fear. With nothing I arrived; with nothing I will leave. But let me be perfected in love – for God and for my neighbor.
One last thought – few problems, if any, are ever solved by throwing money at them. But I wonder if Jesus, and the author of Timothy, and John, weren’t on to something. Maybe, they thought, just maybe, if we can get people to give more of their money to each other, maybe their hearts will follow! Because where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is going to be. And where your heart is, is where you change the world!