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Foundry United Rev. |
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God and Things Sunday, November 19,
2006 |
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Matthew 6: 25-34 Rev. |
The
British writer D.H. Lawrence wrote this in a poem in 1929: “Money
is our madness, our vast collective madness. if I
have no money, they will give me a little bread so I do not die, Money
is our madness, our vast collectiveness madness. I
suspect many of us are not fully sane when it comes to money. Years
ago I was mugged and stabbed and hit on the head with the bud of a gun. It
was partly my own fault. I was walking home after dark after a thunderstorm
wearing a three piece suit, carrying an umbrella and a briefcase. Two men
jumped out from behind a bush. One held a gun at my head; the other a knife
behind my back. I was
so eager to surrender that I raised my arms up in the air as quickly as I
could. In the process I accidentally slammed the briefcase into one man’s leg
and whacked the other with my umbrella. They thought I was trying to fight
back. The
wounds weren’t serious and I was out of the hospital in a few hours. But I had
psychic wounds that took longer to heal. For a time I was afraid to walk the
city sidewalks early in the morning or after dusk, which I guess in
retrospect is understandable. But I also experienced for a time almost
irresistible impulses to buy things…anything. I still don’t understand what that was about. There were times
during the weeks after I was mugged that I was driven to shop. I tried
to deal with the impulse by buying newspapers from neighboring cities. They
didn’t cost much, had no calories, and I love newspapers. What was
this about…this strange, almost visceral need to spend money, to buy
something…to get something? I still don’t understand it all these years
later, except I suspect deep down I am not fully sane when it comes to money.
This
helped me to later better sympathize, I think, with a woman who used to pound
on the door of a church I served in an impoverished neighborhood in She
would ask me over and over again for money. She wouldn’t take no for an
answer. When she finally became convinced I would not give her money, she
would ask me for a Bible. When I’d tell her that I had already given her two
Bibles, she would ask for a hymnal. When I would not give her a hymnal, she
would ask for my pen. When I would not give her my pen, she would ask for a
pencil from the pew rack. When I would not give her a pencil, she would ask
for a bulletin, which I would give her. Then
she would leave. If I would not give her money, she desperately needed me to
give her something, even if it were only a piece of paper. I
suspect we are not fully sane when it comes to money. James
Hudnut-Beumler says that one of the most interesting questions to think about
in our society is the question: What are you worth? He says
the average middleclass American, when asked this question, adds up their
stocks, bonds, and personal and real property and subtract their debts owed
to others and that is, in their mind, how much they are worth.[ii] But
suppose, he says, we were to see our lives through the eyes of children. To a
young child, a mother’s or father’s or aunt’s or uncle’s net financial worth
means not a thing. But the parent’s or aunt’s or uncle’s presence at a school
performance or at story time…that’s worth a lot. We
think we are worth what we make or accumulate but the things that are really
priceless in our lives often do not have a financial bottom line. I
suspect we are not fully sane when it comes to money. Money is our madness,
our vast collective madness. Then we
who are Christians have Jesus to deal with. To many of us, Jesus seems less
than sane to the other extreme when it comes to money. Did you
hear the passage from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew this morning?
Consider the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into
barns, yet your heavenly Parent feeds them…Consider the lilies of the field,
they neither toil nor spin. If God clothes the lilies of the field so
beautifully, will not God much more clothe you? Do not
worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we
wear?’ …Indeed your heavenly Parent knows you need all these things. But
strive first for the Sounds
very bucolic and romantic – until you look at it more closely. I have
been part of several discussions about this passage lately in which people
have gotten upset when they really stopped to pay attention to what Jesus is
saying. “Don’t worry about what you will eat, drink or wear? God will provide
it?” someone said, “I hate to disagree with Jesus but this is not only
foolish but irresponsible. What was he thinking?” “Consider
the birds of the air?” someone else said, “I’ve seen dead birds all over the
place. Is this a part of the Bible that is attributed to Jesus that he never
really said?” he asked. Well,
it is not only what Jesus apparently said but the way he apparently lived. During the years of his ministry at least,
he never worked for money. Yet he seems to have eaten well – they called him “a
glutton and a drunkard.” (Matt. 11: 19 and Luke 7: 34) He seemed to go to a
lot of parties. (Matt. 9:10; Mark 2:15; Luke 11:38; Luke 14:12; John 12:2,
for example). He told a lot of stories about banquets. (Matt. 22:2; Matt.
25:10; Luke 14:8) And in at least one case he picked someone out of the crowd
he’d never met, an affluent corrupt tax collector named Zacchaeus, and invited
himself to the man’s house for dinner, after which the man promised to give
most of his money away. (Luke 19: 1-10) Luke
says that a group of women, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of one of
Herod's stewards, and Susanna, and many others, provided for Jesus and his
disciples out of their resources. (Luke 8: 3) Jesus
apparently practiced what he preached, living from day to day, trusting in
his heavenly Parent to care for his needs through the generosity of others. And
he appears not to have been shy about asking for what he needed. It is
hard for us to fathom this as
normative. “What if we all lived this way?” we ask. What
Jesus taught and the way he lived doesn’t make sense to us. We ask questions
like: “What about the good decent people around the world who are starving…innocent
children who are hungry? What about them?” “They
were striving for the The
only problem for me with these questions we want to ask Jesus is that it is
my experience that, when I have traveled to Zimbabwe and Liberia and Central
America, it is the poor people of these countries who are actually living on
the brink of starvation who seem to really truly believe the words of Jesus
most deeply…that God really does provide for them. Why do
we, who relatively speaking have so much, find it so much harder to believe
in God’s providence than they do? I
suspect we are not fully sane when it comes to money. Money is our madness,
our vast collective madness. I
suspect our need for money is as much emotional as it is economic. “If I
have no money, they will give me a little bread so I do not die, So how
do we begin to get saner when it comes to money? Well,
as I tried to tell the children this morning, stewardship is a big topic. It
has to do with how we take care of everything we have: the earth we live on;
the air we breathe; the bodies we inhabit; the money we use or accumulate. Even thinking
just about the money part is very complicated. It has to do not only what we
give away to church or charity, but how we use all the money we get hold
of. I
attended a service of the Methodist campus ministry at Most of
us choose to live in the money economy. The Methodist students at AU remind
us that, not just what we give away, but how we spend the rest is a part of
our Christian stewardship. What do
we invest in? This is part of our stewardship. How do
we handle our accumulated assets? The appreciated homes we live in? When
Jesus said “Strive first for the I think
churches do their people a disservice when they ask their members to pledge
to support the church’s ministries in the year ahead and then act as thought
the issue of Christian stewardship were dealt with for the year. The
issue of stewardship is to ask myself the question: Am I using my money and
all my assets and resources in a way that is consistent with my true and
deepest values? Part,
but only part of this question, has to do with our giving to ministry and
mission through our church. This is
Stewardship Sunday and we ask you to make a pledge…an estimate of your giving
for the year ahead…so we can plan our ministry. I share
with you every year how Jane and I think about this decision. We try to give
proportionally – that is a percentage of our income. We try to give 10
percent, a biblical tithe. In our case this year a tithe has been $320 a week
for us. If I
could rewrite the Bible, I would actually make the tithe graduated like
income tax is. I think the more money we have, the higher a portion of it we
should give away. If someone earns $20,000 a year 10 percent is much more
sacrificial giving that if someone earns $200,000 a year, all other things
being equal. Our
encouragement to you is to pick a percentage to begin at and to think about
growing your giving percentage-wise each year. We are
asking our current pledgers who are able to do so to increase your commitment
for next year by 10 percent. We know some of you are not able to do that.
Some may be able to do more. Also,
Jane and I try to practice the biblical principle of first fruits – that is
we give to ministry and mission in God’s name first, not what is left over. And we
try to prioritize God in our giving. But the
commitment we are asking you to make today is only the tip of the iceberg of
the discussion about stewardship. It is only the tip of the iceberg when it
comes to thinking about the way we use money and our assets in our lives of
discipleship. We probably ought to be inviting you to think about a formal
commitment of your time as well, which for some of us is more valuable than
money. Yet
money is a special case for us.
Money is our madness. So to begin to tame money in our lives, even partially,
through our giving to God’s ministry and mission is a good thing. So we are
going to ask you to think about your commitment to giving to God through www.foundryumc.org |
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