Episodes
Sunday Feb 10, 2013
generosity: the journey
Sunday Feb 10, 2013
Sunday Feb 10, 2013
Rev. Dean Snyder Matthew 6:19-21, 25-33
We call this commitment Sunday so let me make sure everybody knows what we do on commitment Sunday. Commitment Sunday is when we ask you to make your financial commitment or pledge to support the mission and ministries of Foundry Church.
In every pew there are commitment cards and at the end of the service I will ask you to fill one out if you have not done so already. All the mission and ministry that happens through Foundry Church is only possible because of your financial support as well as you giving your time and energy and prayers. We are not an endowed church. If you stop giving we will not be able to pay our bills in a few months. If you decrease your giving, we cut ministries and programs and staff. If you increase your giving we do more.
Because we ask you to make a financial commitment on commitment Sunday I tend to usually talk about money on commitment Sunday. This is not hard to do because Jesus talked a lot about money.
I haven’t counted it myself but here is a report from someone who has. You’ll find it at wikianswerrs.com.
Jesus talked about money more than He did Heaven and Hell combined.
Jesus talked about money more than anything else except the Kingdom of God.
11 of 39 parables talk about money.
1 of every 7 verses in the Gospel of Luke talk about money.
Jesus talked a lot about money.
It is very hard to be a follower of Jesus without thinking about money and finances … personal, corporate, national. If you want a religious experience that does not include having to think about money, Jesus will be a hard teacher to follow. A Christian that tries not to talk about money will have to avoid paying too much attention to the teachings of Jesus.
There is a section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which is the major summary collection of Jesus’ teachings, which focuses on financial issues. You find it in chapter 6 of the Gospel of Matthew.
Jesus talks first about giving alms to the poor. When you do it, you should not do it for applause. You should not do it to get your name listed in the patron section of the annual report. ‘Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,’ Jesus says.
Then Jesus talks about not storing up treasurers on earth but in heaven. One of the most important verses in my life: “Where your treasure is there you heart will be also.”
Then he says that we cannot serve God and money. You can’t serve two masters.
The Jesus goes immediately form this discussion about money to a discussion about worry.
I never quite noticed this progression before.
Jesus goes from an extended discussion about money to say, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink or about your body, what you will wear.”
And he offers two examples. The birds of the air do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly parent feeds them.
The birds of the air do not have impressive resumes, they don’t have advanced degrees, they do not have political connections, yet they always have enough to eat. God has created a world in which they always have enough to eat.
Birds don’t starve to death. This doesn’t mean that the world can’t be a dangerous place for birds. We have a bird bath in our side lawn, it is not really a lawn - we get more sun, it is more a patch of mulch and bushes. We put out a bird bath and planted bushes that the internet said would attract birds. In spring I love to watch the robins and the cardinals come and drink in our bird bath and eat worms from our mulch and berries from our bushes.
Every spring a nasty neighborhood cat will leave two or three dead birds right outside our side door.
The world can be dangerous for birds but they don’t starve to death. I saw a sparrow eating a crushed potato chip on the side walk of Thomas Circle walking into church this morning. Even here in the city, there is enough for the birds to eat.
Not that the world isn’t dangerous, but there is always enough to survive. So don’t worry or at least worry about the right things.
The other example Jesus gives about worry is the lilies of the field. Why do you worry about clothing, Jesus says. Consider the lilies of the filed, they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all of his glory was not clothes with such beauty as a lily, a wild flower.
Here Jesus’ point is a little different. The point here is that if you are not inherently beautiful, shopping at Neiman Marcus isn’t going to make you beautiful.
Jesus point isn’t that we shouldn’t worry, but that we should worry about the right things, not what we will eat or wear, but we should worry about the kingdom of God. Strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, God’s justice and everything else will take care of itself.
So what I want to suggest this morning is that there is a relationship between money and worry. And the relationship is this – worrying about money is the enemy of generosity. Worrying about money causes greed and destroys generosity. And if we could learn to trust God and the universe about money we would be much more likely to store up treasures in heaven rather than in our bank accounts and Goldman Sachs managed accounts where thieves do break in and steal.
The more we worry about and strive for the kingdom of God and God’s justice where everyone has enough to eat and everyone has a place to live and everyone has access to a decent education and everyone has decent health care, the less we will worry about our own personal financial security and the more generous we will become.
The more we ignore the unjust inequalities of our world in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the more insecure we will become and the more selfishly worried we will become and the more personally greedy we will become and the more stressed and unhappy we will become.
I’ve been thinking this week about a young couple I met 17 years ago. I knew them for three weeks and have not spoken to them since, although I have occasionally followed them on the internet.
I was working on the staff of the bishop of Central Pennsylvania and the Susquehanna River flooded and the bishop sent me to a small town that had been devastated by the flood to help organize the United Methodist Church’s disaster response. The town was named Trout Run and the town’s response to the flood was organized out of Trout Run United Methodist Church which fed people three times a day, seven days a week, provided cleaning supplies and space for people to cry together and laugh together and pray together.
There were teams of local people who did various efforts – worked with the children, assessed damage, visited door to door, buried drowned animals, cooked meals. There was a team of local people that spent 10 hours every day shoveling mud out of houses for three weeks, Sundays included.
Part of that shoveling team was this young couple who I spend some time getting to know.
They were originally from Boston. Both his parents were university professors. His mother, I believe, taught at Harvard. Her parents also had advanced degrees.
He had known from the time he was a boy that he wanted to be a farmer. He got tuition remission at Harvard so he was the first Harvard student in decades whose went to Harvard whose major was agriculture.
After college they worked on farms until they had a down payment for some land near Trout Run. They farmed maybe 9 or 10 acres and grew lettuce for restaurants in Williamsport, a small city a few miles away. Latter they also sold lettuce and other vegetables in a farmers market in Williamsport.
They attended Trout Run United Methodist Church faithfully. When I got to know them well enough, I asked them about their faith. They told me they didn’t know a lot about the God thing, but they believed in community.
They started out farming with a tractor. But they were committed to farming without chemicals and without irrigating which they believed were not good for the plants or the soil.
Then they became convinced that tractors were not good for the soil. They were too heavy. They compacted the soil too much. They squeezed out the air needed for the plants to access the natural nutrients in the soil and the spoils capacity to naturally retain water.
So they sold their tractor and bought horses. Horses tread lightly upon the earth and instead of producing fumes that poisons the air they produce compost that returns nutrients to the soil.
And they traded their heavy farm equipment for light equipment that two people and two horses could manage. They began farming in such a way that their farming minimally disrupted the soil.
They only grew vegetables on 2/3 of their land every year. On the other third they grew green fertilizers that would compost back into the soil and enrich it.
They adopted a very important principle for them. The principle is “Feed the soil. Not the plant.”
They were convinced that if they focused on the quality of the soil, the soil could be trusted to produce the harvest they would need to feed themselves and others and make a living.
If they got greedy for a bigger harvest than the soil could naturally produce, so that they fed it chemicals and used big machinery to produce more and more, they would ultimately deplete the soil and have less. If they got greedy for bigger and bigger harvests in any one year, they would ultimately impoverish the soil and future harvests.
I think a lot about the principle: Feed the soil, not the harvest. I think it applies to more than farming.
If we sacrifice justice within the larger society because we are worried about our own personal financial success and security, ultimately the entire society will become impoverished, including those of us who thought we were secure.
Points to consider:
- It is time to make our commitments to the General Fund for the day to day ministries of Foundry Church
- You may have already made a pledge to Mission Possible back in November for this capital project
- This will be a second pledge/estimate of giving
- If you are a visitor with us today, I encourage you to take this time to consider your treasures and if you belong to another church where you are putting your treasures there. You may even want to come to the altar this morning not to bring a pledge card but to pray for Foundry and the ministries God is calling us to.
- This week you received a letter with a pledge card/estimate of giving card in the mail. If you brought that with you, I invite you to get that out now.
- If you did not bring one with you a pledge / Estimate of Giving Cards can be found in the pew rack in front of you or an usher can provide you with one if you will raise your hand.
- You are invited to prayerfully consider what God is calling you to give for 2013 and indicate that on your card.
- In a few minutes I will invite you to come forward an place your card in one of the baskets up front
- There are also baskets in the balcony or you are welcome to come forward to the altar if you wish.
- There are some of our leadership who have already made their pledges ahead of time for a total of $265,000.
- I would like to invite those who have already made their pledge to come forward for a prayer at the altar
- I then invite those who have completed their card to bring it forward and place it in the basket
- Once you have done so you are welcome to stay for a prayer or be dismissed to join us for cake in the Fellowship Hall.
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