George A. Mason Thanksgiving Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 24 November 2013 Dallas, Texas Deut. 26:1-11; Phil. 4:4-9 First the news. At this moment the United States national debt stands at $17.2 trillion. Terrible. Total U.S. household debt which includes credit card debt, student loans, and home mortgage loans currently stands at $11 trillion. Terrible. The debt of Wilshire Baptist Church stands at ZERO. Wonderful. It s a remarkable achievement. Glory to God in the highest. Well done, Wilshire. Some churches never get out of debt. I m not saying we will never take on debt again. Who knows? The church may feel called at some point to borrow money for a project I can t envision right now. But for right now it s just good to say that our debt is paid. Notice I didn t say our debts are paid. We still owe debts of gratitude that we will spend the rest of our lives paying in one way or another. And the question this morning is, How do you pay debts of gratitude? When Israel was getting ready to enter the Promised Land and possess it that is, when they were preparing to take over the stewardship of the property called the land of Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey, Moses gave them direction on how to pay their debts of gratitude to God. Deuteronomy 26 records those instructions. It s interesting to note how the Israelites is told to rehearse how they moved from being indebted slave people to being indebted free people. It wasn t that they moved from being in debt to being free from debt; it was that they moved from being slaves to oppressive masters to being slaves to a gracious God. Only when you are a slave to God are you truly free. The always incisive writer, Frederick Buechner, puts it well: We have freedom to the degree that the master whom we obey grants it to us in return for our obedience. We do well to choose a master in terms of how much freedom we get for how much obedience. 1 1 Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (Harper & Row, 1973): Freedom.
There s an old prayer that speaks of God in whose service is perfect freedom. And that is true. We are never really free unless we are completely indebted to the God who has delivered us from every human master whether a pharaoh or a financial lender or an addictive substance. We are free when we serve the liberating God who makes us truly and fully human. The move Moses wants us to make is simple: first, meditate on and frequently retell the story of God s deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land. Tell it in the language of giving. God gave. God gave us freedom from a debt we could not pay back and freedom for a debt we could only pay forward. This is true of our life together at Wilshire. The story of our church s beginnings was one of deliverance from a spiritual slavery that our founders felt in their previous church. They brought their grievances about the powers that be to the church, but they were turned away handed their walking papers. In the old language, they were churched. They counted this development a gift. Rather than live under the weight of those masters, they were given their freedom. They formed themselves into a new people soon to be called Wilshire. God gave them the land on which this church sits today, a land we now officially possess. You can also tell our story as one of Texas self-reliance, if you wish. You can say that our band of brothers and sisters pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and worked their way to this little Eden. You would never hear our founders tell it that way. They would tell it as a story of grace. God gave them, they would say. Everything they gave to make it happen was merely a gift of gratitude back to God. Giving necessarily connects to the storytelling of our thanks to God. Thanks and giving go together, don t you know? The two acts together make up the one word thanksgiving. The principle of first fruits that Moses lays out is the way we keep ourselves from falling into the trap of believing we have achieved our own freedom and prosperity. He tells the people that they are to take the first part of the harvest and give it to the priests, who represent the 2
community and conduct the exercises of worship. In so doing they are putting God and their spiritual community first in their minds and hearts. They give of the best of their wealth. We were with Bob and Janice Newell the other night at Phill and Gloria Martin s house. They were telling us about their good work with Albanian immigrants in Athens, Greece. You will hear more from them about the work tonight. Jim Smith of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Foundation then gave a pitch for us to ante up in support. He asked us to consider how we give to something like this. And the image that stuck with me came from this story. A woman called the Butterball Turkey hotline just before Thanksgiving one year. Who knew there was such a thing? Butterball is there to help with all things Butterball. This woman had called to ask about the turkey she had discovered in the bottom of her freezer. She wondered whether it would be any good. The man on the hotline asked her how long it had been in the freezer. Oh, a few years, she said. Maybe six. The man paused and said that it was probably going to be really dry, because even if it were still frozen, the moisture would be gone after that long. But you re saying that it can still be cooked and it won t make anyone sick? she asked. No, it should be okay, he replied. Like I said, it ll just be really dry. That s all right, she said. I don t plan on serving it to my family; I m going to give it to the church. Truth be told, that s the way many of us give to God not the first fruits but the last fruits. We give our leftovers, our unwanted stuff the dried and forgotten turkey from the bottom of the freezer. We mostly don t even realize we are doing it. We think as long as we are giving something, that s enough. But if we were to ask ourselves how we might give that would reflect well on our debt of gratitude for all God has done for us, we wouldn t give that way. We would pick up on the language of first fruits and give off the top; we d give from our bounty before we started spending on ourselves. Going forward as a church, we will go forward as a church only if we pay our debts of gratitude to God from our first fruits. We are in a position now to think not about how to get unshackled 3
to the debts of the past but to do the work of unshackling those who live under such debts. We are not talking here about how we can now maintain a debt-free position by spending less and living within our means. We are talking about how we can evaluate anew what our true means are and give accordingly. Over the past seven years, we have averaged giving just shy of $6 million per year. That includes the building fund and debt-reduction gifts, special missions offerings, and the annual operating budget. Our basic ministry fund is $3.8 million. So what are we going to do with our debt dividend, the two million dollars per year that we have been giving over and above the budget? What if we gave only half that much more a million more per year that we know we are capable of? Imagine! If we were all to begin giving a tithe that is, 10 percent of our income off the top which is what the principle of first fruits entails, we could be one of the most transforming agencies of God in our community and beyond. One way we might do that is to help one another get out of debt. The church is out of debt, but many individual church members are not. The average American is carrying $15,000 of credit card debt. As a rule, you should not use your credit card to buy something that you can t pay off within the month in order to avoid interest. But if you are already there for whatever reason, the interest you are paying is at least an average of a whopping 14.95 percent. Some of you can t tithe or give generously because you are still in slavery to debt. I m not going to preempt our Vision 20/20 planning here, but I have heard of a church that took this seriously and created a fund for just this purpose. Members could use the money to pay off their debts and work out a payment plan that would include an invitation to give an additional amount after it is paid in order to reseed the account for others. I don t know all the agreements that would need to be made and how to structure it, but the point is, we should learn something from the freedom from debt our church now knows and be creative about helping one another find that freedom, too. 4
Our missions minister, Heather Mustain, and I just returned from Atlanta, where we met with leaders from other Baptist churches from across the country as part of the New Baptist Covenant. Wilshire has an opportunity to model a new working relationship with a sister church, a black Baptist congregation in Dallas, Friendship-West Baptist Church. We are going to get to know one another better and work on a community-transformation project together that will affect the lives of many debt-enslaved people for good. Predatory lenders in our communities are preying upon people in ways that keep them enslaved and make it impossible for them ever to succeed. These are not legitimate bankers who assess people s ability to borrow and look out for them as well as for their own lending risk. The effective interest people end up paying on their 14-day loans that have huge unregulated fees attached to them can exceed 500 percent. These companies prey on the most vulnerable, including in one case targeting the mentally ill outside the MHMR offices. One company, Cash America, has greatly harmed our military men and women. Gratefully, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has just levied a $19 million fine on them: $14 million for imposing these unscrupulous practices on them, and $5 million for their shredding of documents to cover up their practices. Payday and auto title lenders make 75 percent of their income from the 48 percent of the borrowers who have more than 11 of these kinds of loans per year. It s a cycle of debt slavery that keeps people poor. We can work to educate people better, to advocate for more just laws to protect against this kind of usury, and seek to provide alternatives that create a healthier system for lenders and borrowers alike. A lot has already been done in Dallas about this practice, but more can be done. It will be an exciting new venture for us in the arena of partnership, creating a healthier community and providing hope for those who want to work to get ahead. These are just a few of the ways we can pay forward our debts of gratitude to the God who has paid it all for us through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. What an exciting prospect. 5