| Sermon for Sunday, May 15, 2005 Following God’s VisionBy Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz |
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F Scripture: 2 Corinthians 9:6-8, 10-11
We have just been working with Dr. Clif Christopher the past few weeks as our consultant to help us continue to have the financial resources we need to expand our ministries at St. Andrew Church. Clif is a United Methodist minister from Arkansas and the father of four adult children. One of his sons has been working for the Bechtel Corporation the past year in Africa, in Equatorial Guinea and had an interesting story to tell his father. The son had found a church to attend recently. It was pretty far away. He had to ride the bus for an hour and a half to get to church and when he got there he learned that some of the people had walked there for a longer period than his bus ride. The service was a couple of hours long, and afterward this son rode the bus another hour and a half to get home. He told his dad that church is a big deal for the people he is with. It is important to them to be together for church—important enough to take a couple of hours to get there. Clif’s son wondered if we American Christians need to learn something from our third world sisters and brothers about making faith a priority for us, about taking time for the nourishment of our souls when it is so much more convenient for us and we still have trouble fitting it in. We can learn some things from them. Church should be a big deal; it is really important to set some spiritual foundations for life. And it may be that people in some other countries could teach us about becoming committed disciples of Christ. They know that if they are going to be like Christ, if they are going to become disciples, that there are some disciplines involved. Disciple and discipline are from the same root word. We talk about seven habits or seven spiritual disciplines in our church: study with others, worship with others, service to others, sharing our faith, putting God first, praying regularly, and becoming more generous. The practice of generosity is a spiritual discipline—generosity with our time, our talents, our energy and our money. Our congregation is very serious about all of those practices. That is, church is a big deal for us too! And the way we encourage people to see generosity as a spiritual practice has meant that our volunteer involvement is very high and that our financial giving here is very high. This is a very generous congregation and part of our culture is that we talk just as frankly and openly as Jesus does about managing our money. Now because I have just mentioned Jesus and money in the same sentence, there is a large number of listeners who have just gotten very defensive and worried. They have seen TV evangelists be manipulative about money. They have been in churches that have not been honest about money and have not gained the trust of a congregation. And they, like all of us, are very protective about their pocketbooks. Someone said the nerve between our heart and our pocketbook is the most sensitive nerve in our bodies. We get protective about our pocketbooks. So we get uneasy when the preacher talks about giving and generosity. And there is another reason for our nervousness. When we have said the words that our new members will say today—that we want Christ to be the center of our lives, that we trust Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior—then our pocketbooks are involved in that promise. But if we have just mouthed the words but have not really given our hearts, then our pocketbooks are not going to follow either. I remember people asking me over the years when the church talks about generosity and stewardship if we should be talking so much about money. I usually ask them, “Do you think we should talk about what Jesus talks about?” How much does Jesus talk about being materialistic and the management of our resources? He actually talks more about that than about prayer. Jesus is aware that our money can control us or we can be in control of our money and usually we are being controlled and seduced by money instead of seeing it as a tool for service. Money talk, for Jesus, is a very spiritual subject and he spends much time on it as our call to worship says. The problem is that most of us are so ignorant or uninformed about Jesus and his teachings that we are shocked and surprised by what the Bible says about money. I remember a woman who emailed me three years ago when we were securing commitments for being able to build this building. She was new to the church and was uncomfortable with our frank money talk. We were saying then that we are not a dollar a week church or a five dollar a week church. She wrote that we should just do what Jesus did—say to people they should just give a little when they can. We would be a lot more comfortable if Jesus said that but he did not. He said, you cannot serve two masters; you cannot serve God and wealth. He said, if you treasure money more than me, you cannot follow me, because where your treasure is that is where your heart is, and I want your heart to be with me. He said, “Of those to whom much is given, much will also be expected.” He said of the wealthy man who just accumulated riches for himself alone that this man would die and it would not go well for him and he said what counts most is being rich in God’s eyes. He said, “Give and it will be given to you. The measure you use for others is the measure you will get back.” Jesus talked more about being good and responsible and generous managers of our money that we realize. And that is why this church has been so open about this subject for the past ten years and while this openness has made some people uncomfortable and angry and even caused them to leave, it has done something else. It has created a congregation of people who are so committed and so generous and who know that church is such a big deal that our giving here in the past ten years has increased by 500%!! Our income has quintupled! -- With even fewer members on the roll than we had ten years ago. And our worship attendance has more than doubled. We have told prospective new members that we are a high commitment congregation—because that is the kind of commitment that Christ asks of his followers. We talk about what it means to support God’s work with PRAYERS, PRESENCE, GIFTS AND SERVICE. We say that in the Bible, there are three guidelines for giving. Our giving to God is to be sacrificial; it is to cost us something. It is not to be convenient or easy according to the Bible. Jesus praises a poor widow who puts two small coins in the treasury box and he says that she gave more than all the others. Why? The others were wealthy and gave a lot of money but they were not going to miss it. Their giving was comfortable and not sacrificial. They were giving what was left and she was giving what was right. Her gift was going to be missed. It was sacrificial and he praised her and not the others. In the Bible we are to give in proportion to how we have been blessed. That will vary in each household and that will vary depending on the time in our lives. And in the Bible, every Christian is asked to tithe, to return to God ten percent of our resources. Judy and I have been tithing—giving back to God ten percent—for many years. We have always had what we need. This may be the year for you to tithe and to trust God to see that the other things you need fall into place. That is the promise when we put God at the center of life. This will likely mean some changes if we decide to tithe. There will be some changes when we decide to fully follow Jesus Christ. We will not be able to hold on to grudges and refuse to forgive. We will not be able to live selfishly or be arrogant and proud. Following Christ means letting him set the pattern for our life including the way we spend and manage our money. Generosity is one of the habits, the disciplines of following Christ. There are some other motives in becoming more generous people. 650 of us who were at the dinner last Tuesday saw an inspiring video about how your church is touching so many lives. We will have that video in the foyer between services. I commend it to you and you will be grateful for what we are doing together. Giving to God’s work has some benefits for us as well as others. And, if we do a good job in reaching our targets of $3 million plus over the next few days it just means that our mainline Methodist theology will get a good hearing from people. The Religious Right is very well funded. United Methodism is the religious center. The folks who want to say that you cannot believe in evolution and also believe in God are very well funded. They also want to say that women should not be equal leaders with men, that women should be subservient and submissive. United Methodists do not stand for those things, but so many people hear that literalist approach to the Bible and do not know there is a more thoughtful alternative and decide that they cannot be Christians at all. We need your support to be sure that our voice is heard as effectively as the more rigid voices. This is a generous church. You have heard the McNealy’s and Ormiston’s announce that with just the first 70 commitment cards in, we already have an average three-year pledge of almost $20,000 per household. I believe that will be contagious. I believe that generosity will spread because generosity is contagious. Did you know that? When the Green family was vacationing from the US in Italy about ten years ago they were driving in the Italian countryside and they somehow got between some mobsters who were in a gun battle on the highway. And in that gunfight seven-year-old Nicholas Green in the backseat of the car got shot in the head. He was taken to a hospital where they told his parents his head wound left him with no brain activity. His parents were faced with the difficult decision about donating Nicholas’ organs to children in need. They did not hesitate. In the midst of their grief, they chose for his organs to be taken and to be given to Italian children who were had been waiting for a heart or liver or a cornea transplant. So Nicholas’ life continued to make a difference. That was particularly important in Italy because in that culture organ donation was fairly rare—not near so common as in the US. But when the story of the Green family’s sacrificial generosity reached the Italian newspapers, do you know what happened? Requests all over Italy for organ donation forms went up 500%! One family’s generous example made a world of difference. We have some wonderful examples from our own congregation of putting God at the center of our lives and trusting in the promises of Christ and deciding to give sacrificially so that our balanced Methodist theology of head and heart, spiritual transformation and social transformation may be just as strong as the other voices around us. I pray that each of us will follow that example and live up to the high calling of being committed disciples of Jesus Christ. Lord what do you want to do through me? How can you and I together, Lord, make a difference? |
