| Sermon for Sunday, October 23, 2005 What Does God Ask From Me?2ND in a series “What Shall I Return to the Lord?” byRev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz |
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Scripture: II Corinthians 9:6, 8, 10-11
The USA Today headline was bold and provocative: “Starbucks Stirs Things Up With a God Quote on Cups”. The article told about the plan from Starbucks to use a quote from Pastor Rick Warren on some of their paper cups next year. The company has been printing so far this year 63 different quotes from writers, scientists, musicians, athletes and others in it’s The Way I See It campaign to carry on the coffeehouse tradition of conversation and debate. Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life, submitted this quote that will appear in next years offerings: “God has created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.” I have reproduced the whole article for you on the foyer table. I was glad to see that this quote will be included on Starbuck’s cups, and in fact, I think that some of the best parts of Warren’s book that has sold 23 million copies are his short quotes like this one. There are other parts that will give mainstream Christians great pause, one that reveal his determinism and his belief that whatever happens in the world is because God sent it and caused it, and his belief, contrary to my Bible, that says not everyone is a child of God. United Methodists believe that every person is a part of God’s family and I will take the sermon time on the second Sunday in November to do an overview of the Warren book and talk about the strengths and the reservations that some people in our Tuesday morning class have seen in our study. One other quote that I like from his book is the one that was on the front of last week’s bulletin: Jesus wants all of you. That is, when Christ invites us to come and follow him, he is asking for us to be willing to offer all of our resources for his cause. That must include our time, our talents, and our financial resources. Warren quotes Jesus’ words that we will find happiness in life when we get ourselves out of the center of our lives and put God in the center. “It is not about you,” he says early in the book. It is about you and God, focusing first on your relationship with God. Learn to serve God. Serve God by serving others. That is the way to find life at its best. Model your life on the servant lifestyle of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what people say that we will do when we join a church. Did you notice that we made those promises the past two weeks when new people became members of our church? The past two Sundays we have had 56 people join our church including our 38 confirmands! When they all joined you and I made promises. We said that we would continue to order our lives after the example of Christ so that these new members will be strengthened in their faith! “Order our lives after the example of Christ.” That is the place we all begin when we talk with each other about the title of today’s sermon on what God is asking from us as followers of Christ. I want to focus today on what God is asking in our management and our sharing of our pocketbooks, our finances, and let’s just acknowledge that this is a sensitive subject for many people because we have heard the church talk wrongly about stewardship and money and have been turned off by it. Let me ask your indulgence today because we have, in this church, been very able to talk freely together about generosity as one of the disciplines of following Christ and about the Biblical standards of giving and generosity. What is most important is that we begin where the quote on the Starbucks Quote begins, that we begin where Christ asks us to begin, with our relationship with God and with all that God has blessed us with. The Psalm we used in our call to worship reminds us that it is God who has given us what we have and has given us the ability to prosper, and what we are doing is just returning to God a portion of that blessing. That is our foundation, and if you do not start there with us, if you are not here as someone who wants to follow Christ and be like him, everything I say for the next few minutes is just going to sound like institutional shop talk. What it should be is family talk about how we respond to God’s blessings and God’s bounty in our lives. Most new Christians are surprised when we look at the gospels and find out how much Jesus talks about our possessions and our money. Jesus talks more about money than about heaven and hell. Jesus talks more about money than about prayer. More than half of Jesus’ 38 parables are about money and our mismanagement of our resources. Why would he do that? Rick Warren tells us again: he knew that the most likely, most frequent thing to come between us and God is our money. We tend to worship it, to idolize it, to base all of our decisions on money and greed. This may be a particularly unique American temptation. Judy and I saw the Arthur Miller play All My Sons Monday night at the Denver Center Theater. It was stunningly good. This play was first offered on Broadway in 1947 and it was this play that established Miller’s authenticity as a great American playwright. And even though the play is 58 years old, it is startlingly contemporary. It tells about a man whose company manufactured airplane engines during WWII and how he sold defective engines that he knew would fail because he focused on money and material success before anything else – even though he knew the engines would likely cause the death of young pilots. He set aside his ethics, his sense of responsibility and of right and wrong, to make a buck. Have we heard any other stories like that over the past few years in American industry, including even a company who made defective military armor/vests when apparently some employee in the company tells us now that he knew about the vests that were defective. Jesus asks us to put all of our lives under his lordship – all of our lives including how we approach our money. And in this church we have looked very honestly at that part of Jesus’ teaching and talked very frankly together about the generosity that God wants to instill in us. And our frank discussions have had interesting results. One woman emailed me three years ago last spring when we were making pledges for our building fund campaign that let us build this building. She was new to our church and was really uncomfortable at our openness about the spiritual discipline of generosity. She told me that we should just take the same approach that Jesus takes –just give a little when you can. Now most of you should be smiling at that because that approach of “just give a little when you can” was about as far from Jesus as you can get and just shows how little we know and how poorly we understand Jesus. We will look in a moment at some of the teachings of Jesus about generosity and being good stewards or managers of our money. Let me share one other reaction to our frank discussions in the family of St. Andrew about what God asks us to do. In our membership information sessions each month we say that we believe in tithing and in sacrificial giving here because Jesus asks that of us. And we say that this is not a dollar a week or five dollar a week church. Now, in every membership session some people always decide not to join us – for various reasons. Some people learn that Methodist theology is not what they are looking for, that they are looking for a more literalist kind of church, and they keep looking. Others have been put off by the expectations we lift up when we talk about being a high commitment church. My friend and colleague Janet Forbes, senior pastor at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church on Broadway, told me two weeks ago about a family that had been attending here and then stopped attending here at St. Andrew Church and came to St. Luke’s Church and wanted to join there. When she asked why they had left this church and wanted to join St. Luke’s, they told Janet that it was because we said that we are not a dollar a week or five dollar a week church. Guess what Janet told them? She said, well St. Luke’s Church is not a dollar a week or five dollar a week church either! And if they were looking for a place that had low expectations, unbiblical expectations, of followers of Jesus Christ, they needed to keep looking! Let’s look at some of the Biblical expectations about the spiritual discipline of generosity. Giving is a spiritual discipline, just like prayer is a spiritual discipline, Bible study is a spiritual discipline, service to others and so forth. What would it mean for us to think about giving God what is right and not what is left? In the Bible there are three guidelines for giving to God’s work. First, our giving is to be sacrificial. King David, the most revered king of Israel, had a chance to bring an offering to God that he had been given free. What did he say about that? He said that he would not dare bring to God an offering that had cost him nothing, that had involved no sacrifice on his part. Our giving to God and to God’s work is to be sacrificial, it is not to be convenient, it is to cost us something. During Holy Week Jesus is teaching every day in the Temple and the crowds are gathered around him hanging on every word. While he is there people are coming and dropping their offerings into the temple treasury box. Some wealthy people came and dropped in a lot of money. Then a poor widow comes and drops her offering into the treasury box. Jesus stops in mid sentence, he points to the woman, and he says, “This woman gave more than all of the others.” His disciples are bewildered. How can that be? People were putting in a lot of money. What does Jesus say? It is because all the others gave out what they had to spare. They gave out of their leftovers. They would not miss what they gave. But the widow gave sacrificially; she gave something she would miss. She was honoring God first even with her comparatively small offering. And she was the one Jesus singled out for affirmation and to be an example to us. Sacrifice is not a term we use very much. We would rather be comfortable, do what is convenient, instead of making a sacrifice. We need to ask people who are attending our 9:40 sanctuary service to make a sacrifice and look at attending either the 8:15 service or the 11:05 service so we can make better use of our building space and be better stewards of our current resources. We are working on offering the same children and youth programs at 11:05 as at 9:40 and we know that 11:05 will not be as CONVENIENT for some people but until we build a lot more classroom space and worship space that is the only thing we have thought of. But that will mean some sacrifice; it will not be as convenient. But I am still looking for the place in the Gospels where Jesus says, if it is convenient, come and follow me – if it is not too much trouble. God asks us to be generous in sharing with others and that will involve giving sacrificially, giving God what is right and not what is left. Secondly, according to our book, our giving is to be proportionate; we will give in proportion to how we have been blessed. That will vary at different times in our lives. What we are able to give when we are a young family and struggling to raise kids will be different from when we have had more time to prosper and our kids are educated and on their own. What is sacrificial giving will vary in different settings and God asks us to give to God in proportion to how we are prospering in various times. The third standard of generosity in the Bible is the tithe, returning to God ten per cent of our wealth and honoring God first with that tithe. This practice of giving back to God ten percent is firmly grounded in the Bible that Jesus read – the Old Testament. In fact, one of the passages in the book of Malachi is very uncomfortably blunt “If you are not honoring God with returning ten per cent to God, you are robbing God.” We don’t need to be that blunt and we ask each other, if we are not yet tithing, to move another percent or two percent or three percent toward that ten percent goal. One percent of a household income of $80,000 is $800 a year. If you are giving $800 a year in a family with median family income of $80,000 that is a one percent giving level. You can find that on the chart in your bulletin insert. Incidentally, does Jesus ever ask us to tithe? Yes, he does, in the 23rd chapter of Matthew when he is ridiculing the Pharisees for their superficial faith. He tells them they should be tithing at the same time they are concerned with justice and mercy and kindness. Many of our members practice tithing. Many of our leaders practice tithing. Judy and I have been giving away ten per cent of our income since 1972 and we have always had what we need. We have been helped in that practice to tell the difference between what we want and what we need, and that is a differentiation that most Americans need to make. What I WANT is a new Mazda Miata! I just read a road test on one of those two days ago and thought about how great I would look in one. That is different from what I need! I recommend tithing. More of you can do it than you realize. I have shared the story before that Mary Barnes shared with us. Mary’s and her late husband Jim had a long and successful tenure of serving many United Methodist churches starting out in Georgia and ending with Jim’s distinguished 17-year pastorate at Trinity Church in downtown Denver. In one of the first churches Jim and Mary served, they had made known to the congregation that they were tithing, returning to God ten percent of their small salary. And Mary says one of the more comfortable women in the congregation told Mary that she really admired what Jim and Mary were doing by tithing and then told Mary, “We make too much to tithe”!! I think that person may have forgotten what we said in our call to worship, that it is God who has blessed us and given us the chance to prosper and our offering to God is a thanksgiving offering because of what God has done for us. The three guidelines from the Bible about how to be generous are: give sacrificially, give in proportion to how we have been blessed, and tithe. St. Paul says one thing I want to close with in the reading we heard from II Corinthians when he was talking with his church members in Corinth about the moving from self-centeredness to generosity. He makes a promise: When you give cheerfully, God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance and you will have enough to share…You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity. Have you been enriched by your generosity? Do you feel enriched and blessed when you give for God’s work? I do. What did you feel if you were here two Sundays ago and you saw 38 young people in our confirmation class stand here and affirm their loyalty to Christ and promise to live by the teachings and example of Christ? Did you feel blessed and enriched? Did you feel grateful for the chance to give some of your resources toward all that went into them making that step of faith? Did you feel enriched when, on that day, there were sixty other youth in our Holy Pretzel youth choir who spent the whole morning here in all of our worship services as a way of honoring the youth who were being confirmed? Do you feel blessed when you hear that people are being strengthened and comforted as they are in our growing through grief groups with others who have shared their journey and who they can draw help from? Does it enrich your heart when you hear about the third grade child who last month was so eager to receive her first Bible from her church that when her name was called she jumped up and down and literally hugged her new Bible to her chest? Does that make you feel enriched and blessed to know that you helped that happen? Next Sunday we will bring our commitment cards to the altar table. We will receive those in worship and will have a chance to promise again our PRAYERS, PRESENCE, GIFTS, AND SERVICE to support God’s work in this incredibly vital and active congregation. We will ask you to pray this week about that so that your growth in generosity will reflect the Biblical guidelines of sacrificial giving, proportionate giving and tithing. As we bring those cards forward we will sing one of our favorite hymns, Here I am Lord. And I think I can promise you next Sunday what we heard St. Paul promise as well: when you and I give cheerfully and not under compulsion, God will provide you with what you need and you will be enriched in every way for your generosity. Amen. |
