Tethered to God 1 Timothy 6:6-19

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Bruno William Holmes
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1 I ve struggled a bit with what to preach today: we re in week 3 of our 4-week stewardship emphasis, and the series has been planned out for some time. And I think that today s topic is important and helpful and I don t want to give it up. But I also don t want to ignore what s going on in the world or pretend that this has been any ordinary week in our lives. So I m going to try to do both: to weave together the stewardship sermon that was already planned and some response to this week s election. It might be a stretch, but if you ll go along with me, maybe we can learn something together. Scripture lesson: 1 Timothy 6:6-19: But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called when you made your good confession in the presence of many witnesses. In the sight of God, who gives life to everything, and of Christ Jesus, who while testifying before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep this command without spot or blame until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about in his own time God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. To him be honor and might forever. Amen. Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. prayer: May the words of my mouth, the meditations of our hearts, and the actions that might result from our hearing and understanding, be found pleasing in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. 1

2 Tethered to God 1 Timothy 6:6-19 Last week I mentioned a 2010 survey in which researchers discovered that 45% of Americans don t give any money away. $0. Nothing. Almost half of us keep every dollar we earn or receive as gifts. Another 41% give less than 2% of their income. And you might think, Okay, but what about time? In that same survey, over 76% of Americans self-reported that they gave 0 volunteer hours per year. None. So all of the volunteering comes from less than 1/4 of the population; and the vast majority of the financial giving comes from about 14% of us. Now, if we limit the data set to Christians, the results are slightly better: only 20% of Christians gave $0 per year as of 2010 but that even that number is disappointing: 1 in 5 Christians made no financial contributions to any charity at all, not churches, not colleges or universities, not the Red Cross or the United Way, not Save the Whales, not your kid s PTSA fundraiser, not the local children s hospital, nothing. And the average pre-tax household income given by American Christians who do give is only about 3% to all charities combined (not just their churches). Only 9% of American Christians report giving away 10 percent of more of their incomes to charitable causes. 1 We heard last week about the biblical tithe giving away the first 10% of our income to provide for worship in the community and to help the vulnerable and marginalized in our midst. This has been a command for Jews and Christians since Moses brought the people out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. So why don t we do it? Why are only 9% of us giving the first tenth away? Is it because times have changed and God s expectation of our first 10% isn t reasonable anymore? Is it because the Israelites who had just spent a generation wandering the wilderness were better off than us and could afford to give 10% away? Is it because we re terribly selfish people who want to hoard everything for ourselves or terribly competitive people who don t want to help anyone else out, lest our own standing go down with the improvement of others? I don t think so. I don t think we give so little because we are worse off than our ancestors, or because God s call for us to give away the first 10% is unreasonable, or because we re selfish or ultracompetitive, miserly or mean. I think that most of us want to be generous even more generous than we currently are. I think most of us want to give every time we see someone in need, we want to support everyone we see doing good on behalf of others. Most of us want to give more, but we feel like we can t. Maybe we feel this way because we are weighed down by the gravity of our possessions: we re so caught up in the material life that we don t really have choices anymore. Maybe we feel this way because we re overly concerned about personal security, and we re worried that if we give, at some point we won t have enough ourselves. Maybe we just have competing financial goals and conflicting values: we want to give, but we also want a bigger house or a nicer car; or we want to be generous, but we also want to be spontaneous and not strapped down by a budget. Whatever it is, we want to give, but we don t feel like we can. But generosity doesn t happen by accident: wanting to be generous, wanting to give, doesn t usually result in generous giving. If we want to live generous lives, we have to orient ourselves toward generosity from the beginning. We have to design our lives toward generosity. We have to plan to give. We can t expect that giving will just happen because most likely, it won t. If we want to be generous, we have to plan for it, make sacrifices, set goals. We have to be intentional about being generous. 1 Data is from Christian Smith s Paradox of Generosity, quoted in Tom Berlin, Defying Gravity: Break Free from the Culture of More (Nashville: Abingdon, 2016), 54. 2

3 Maybe you and your family already have a budget if not, it s time to start one. If you already have a budget, make sure you re using it. If you re using a budget, make sure that it invests in the work of the kingdom. We can t budget for everything else and then say, Well, if there s any money left over, I ll give it away. If we want to be generous, we have to budget generously, or we ll always be offering God our leftovers (and there won t often be much left over). Deciding at the beginning of our budget-writing how much we want to give away is the only way we ll have enough to give. This is time to think about living more simply, as well. Gravity-bound people pursue consumption with abandon, thinking that more and better stuff is the path to the good life. But more and better stuff is just the path to more stuff. And more stuff to organize our stuff. And storage units to hold our stuff. A few weeks ago, when we had the Clothes for the Cause fundraiser for the preschool, every person that threw a garbage-bag-full of textiles into the trailer did so with a huge grin. Every time we take a carload of things we no longer use to Goodwill, we feel personally lighter. There s something deep within us that rejoices when we get rid of stuff. Our stuff has a tendency to pull us off course in life everything holds its own gravity and is pulling at us so we have to rid ourselves of the things we don t need if we re going to live the good life. Maybe this means reading Marie Kondo s book if you haven t already. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has sold millions of copies in dozens of countries, and while it s a little over-the-top, its premise is simple: if an item doesn t give you joy, get rid of it. It doesn t matter who gave it to you or how long you ve had it or how much it cost. If it gives joy, it stays. If it doesn t, it goes. The point is that we get rid of things that don t give us joy, because they get in the way of the life we re actually called to live. In this way, the simpler life is the good life. And then we have to set goals for generosity, asking ourselves not only what brings us joy, but what brings God joy. We re called to ask ourselves what God is doing in the world and then set goals to be part of that work. What will actually change the world isn t one or two wealthy benefactors, but millions of committed disciples who find joy in generosity. But again, it doesn t just happen by chance we have to push ourselves. This is why an estimate of giving card is so important and I want every family here to bring one back next week yes, it s helpful for the church budget, but more importantly, that card is a way of setting a goal for ourselves for generosity and then ordering our lives to make that generosity possible. It s an accountability tool that helps us set a goal and then stick to it. Not many of us are tithing and many of us aren t giving anything away. But it s not because we re miserly or mean, and it s likely not because we re poor: it s because we ve been waiting for generosity to just happen out of our desire to be generous people. But what actually makes us generous people is planning to be generous, setting goals to be generous, weeding extraneous stuff out of our lives, and intentionally practicing generosity. By doing these things, we find what 1 Timothy calls the life that is truly life. By doing these things, we find the life worth living, the one that not only gives us joy, but also brings joy to God and joy to the world. Now, how does this relate to what s going on in the world this week: I cannot imagine that anyone here suspected that this past week would go the way it did. Whether you voted for Trump or Clinton or someone else, unless you were following the one historian who correctly predicted the outcome of this presidential election, you were probably as surprised as everyone else when the returns started coming in Tuesday night. That we, as a nation, have elected a president who seems to have just kind of decided 18 months ago that he wanted to be president, a man with zero political or military experience, is pretty surprising, no matter which side of the aisle you sit on. But what s more shocking to me, even after this incredibly contentious campaign season, is the deep division that this election has exposed in our culture. I m not a statistician or a political scientist, but I ve certainly never experienced an election before that was so deeply divided by race, gender, 3

4 economic status, and education. Nor have I been part of any event in my lifetime that has caused such drastically different reactions: many people are delighted, believing president-elect Trump s policies will absolutely make the United States a more prosperous, more secure nation and that with the appointment of more conservative Supreme Court Justices, his leadership might also make us a more righteous nation. A few people seem to be ambivalent, believing politicians don t really have that much power, and things aren t likely to get a lot better or a lot worse in the next four years. But many, many people are devastated and terrified. The fact that the Canadian immigration website crashed on election night is no joke: thousands of Americans are so overwhelmed that they are looking for a way out. They are not just upset that their candidate lost: they fear that a Trump presidency will be one in which the marginalized become even more marginalized, in which the gap between the richest and poorest Americans grows wider, and in which basic civil rights are not extended but revoked from whole groups of people. And since the election results were shared on Tuesday evening, bigotry of every kind has been on public display, as non-white Americans have been shouted at to go home in grocery stores, hijabs have been pulled off of Muslim women s heads, swastikas have been spraypainted onto public property (even here in Bellevue), and even at a United Methodist youth event in North Carolina, youth who are the children of immigrants have been terrorized. Today s gospel lesson notwithstanding, 2 I am worried about us as a country and as a community. But as much as my prayers this week have been for peace and justice on a grand scale, for leaders and policies that help our country look more like the Beloved Community Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed about, and for an end to all hatred, especially that based on demographics; my prayers this week have also been prayers of repentance. Because I, like so many others, assumed that if I was a nice enough person, if I just loved the neighbors I ran into, if I tried to be generally good, if I wanted it, I assumed that community would just happen. And it didn t. I confess that I have been blind to the plight of the working-class laborer in the Midwest, who has felt so disenfranchised by an administration I deeply admire that he is willing to do anything for change. Even though I ve liked Black Lives Matter posts on social media, I confess that I ve been blind to the experience of racism that so many in our community have faced. I confess that I have been blind to my own privilege as a white, upper-middle-class, educated, heterosexual. I confess that have ignored any neighbors that don t run in all the same circles I do. I ve assumed that my desire to be in community would be enough to make it happen. Maybe you have done the same. And our assumptions have led to negligence, and our negligence has allowed these deep, deep divisions. And for that, we are called to repent. I understand now that if we want to be community, we have to be intentional about it. We have to strategize and plan and simplify and set goals for diversity and learning about experiences that are different than our own. We can t just assume that other people are thinking the same thing we are and that if they re not, they re either stupid or uninformed. If we want to know how others feel, we have to make space to listen. Just like generosity doesn t happen by accident, community doesn t happen by accident. It takes a church willing to make space for one another and for others who might do things differently or have different ideas. It takes intentional time and space to try to understand people who have different experiences or opinions than ours. It takes an intentionality to work for justice every single day, never allowing bigotry to happen in our midst, believing people when they tell us they are being oppressed, walking with our brothers and sisters who are so afraid and so weary. We build community not by simply wanting it, but by using our prophetic voice to condemn racism, sexism, misogyny, anti- Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, abuse, oppression, and mockery of every kind. Loving God and 2 The gospel lesson is Matthew 6:19-34, which includes the famous Do not worry speech from Jesus. 4

5 neighbor doesn t mean being sweet or having good manners it means calling out evil whenever we see it, and then going further to try to see the world as God sees it, to try to love others as God loves, not just to tolerate our neighbors or to be generally friendly to them, but to wrap our arms around each other, to dry each other s tears and lift each other up, believing that, by God s grace, each of us is beloved. God doesn t pour grace over us day after day by accident, or because God happens to have love left over at the end of the day. The generosity of God s love and grace is by design. It s intentional. It s built in to who God is and how God created the world. And God is calling us, as disciples, to be as intentional about designing, planning for, and carrying out our lives for generosity, for community, for justice, for love remembering that in every story we carry from the time the earth was a shapeless void and darkness covered the face of the deep all the way to that surprising Sunday morning in the garden tomb, in every story of our lives, God has shown up. And God will show up again and again as we work intentionally to be God s people in the world, as we orient our lives toward the kingdom, step by intentional step. May it be so. Amen. Rev. Elizabeth Ingram Schindler Faith United Methodist Church Issaquah, WA November 13,

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