Sermons

Faith and Money

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  October 12, 2003                                        Mark 10:17-31

Next Sunday will provide us with some focus on an issue that is important to this congregation - hunger. You will have the opportunity to send a letter to a U.S. Senator regarding hunger legislation. You will also have the opportunity to attend a meal at which you probably will not get very much food, but will be fed by experiencing how much of the world lives. Please do participate as you are able, as we seek ways to broaden and deepen our very important outreach commitments.

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"How hard will it be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God"? My, how I wish he hadn't said that.

There is nothing particularly nuanced about today's sermon title. Part of it is my own problem, or at least is an occupational hazard. Ministers don't talk about money very well.

There are, I am sure, deep psychological reasons for that. We simply do not. We will talk about "treasure," as if we would toss a gold doubloon into the offering plate each week. We now will speak of "financial resources," sounding rather like a commercial during a football game. We even have embraced a word, "stewardship," that gives us a bit of permission to speak not so directly about what needs spoken directly.

Stewardship is a profound concept. It suggests that a sovereign God has placed into our human hands a trust, all of creation, and that we are to take care of it as if we were sovereign.

We are stewards. We must remember that vocation. And yet we hide our indifference or awkwardness at talking about money under that banner as well. One time at another church, a wise member had made the comment that "stewardship isn't about money." Several minutes later, he confessed: "OK, stewardship is about money."

As a youth, I would travel from church to church on Sunday mornings with my father, whose job it was to help congregations develop approaches to stewardship. He had a regular sermon he preached; after a while I swear I could have preached it for him. That's what we do; we invite someone else to come in to talk about the "M" word.

And yet Jesus will have none of it. Jesus does not talk about many things. But he does talk about some things quite a bit. Money is one of them. We should pay attention to that. By including so much about money, the gospel writers are telling us that Jesus thought this to be important. We should, too.

Now, delivering so much truth in advertising, we may be thinking that today is Stewardship Sunday. It is not, so we may relax a little. Or not. That comes in a few weeks, when we have read our stewardship letters and watched our video and prayed, I hope, about how we will respond to our current very real need.

Today's gospel lesson seeks to put all of that into context, and does so through an extraordinary encounter. Let's remember: Mark's gospel has Jesus moving from place to place, interspersing teaching with dire warnings about his future - which the disciples usually do not get.

He is in a provocative mood by the time we get to him this morning. He has just ruffled feathers, twice, no doubt, taking on the hard issues of marriage and divorce and then turning convention upside down by blessing a child.

He is prepared to move on, and a man runs up to him, anxious, I think, most surely seeking and searching. "Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" It is a bold and somewhat brazen question.

We are taught to read the Bible on two levels, and rightly so. The blind that Jesus heals are both physically and blind; the prisoners are imprisoned by literal chains but also by self-imposed chains.

Eternal life is like that. And it must be for us. This young man is concerned, it would seem, about issues of ultimate destiny. He is asking that "Am I saved" question that serves to drive so much the anxious parts of the religious enterprise.

It is an important question, but our tradition has answered in much the same way that Jesus answers it. Grace, we call it, the notion that we are accepted into God's kingdom, into God's realm, not by anything we say or do, but because God welcomes us.

At the end of this whole encounter, the disciples ask him: "Then who can be saved?' His response: "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

There you have it. Being saved and having eternal life are distinct, not separate, but distinct things. Jesus did not respond to the young man's questions with a "don't worry' kind of response. That must mean that eternal life has something to do with the eternal, yes, but the eternal that began long before us and that will continue long after us, but that includes us, this very minute in which we live.

I think of it as a qualitatively different kind of life that matters now, a life lived in relationship with God, to God, in community with other people, whereby the things we believe and say and so, the very soul of our living, has been transformed. I think the young man is looking for both, for some sort of assurance about his salvation, but also for something different in the way he lives his life.

I don't know if Jesus knew him. Perhaps he had been hanging out on the peripheries of Jesus' teaching sessions. Perhaps his wealth, even, was obvious. And perhaps if we had presented ourselves to Jesus, with a different set of life circumstances, perhaps Jesus' response had been different. That's what some commentators suggest, and to which we cling. "Jesus, we are different than that rich kid. We certainly must have some different criteria for eternal life." That may be the case. If so, listen hard to the answer you are receiving. But it may be the same answer.

It surely will be the same answer in its broadest sense - be a good steward of all that God has given you. Be a good steward of the time you have been given. Be a good steward of the relationships you have been given. Be a good steward of the ideas you have been given, the energy, the commitments. Not to make full use of all of the resources, all of the gifts, that you have received because God is a gracious God, well, that most certainly will prevent you from living the kind of life you seek and God intends.

This is not some kind of self-improvement seminar about maximizing your potential, harnessing your creative effectiveness, unleashing your "potential steward." It is about looking deep inside, and I would add, best done in community, and sensing where God is leading you, and by what means you will get there.

It is, to be sure, about that tried and true dance of time and talent and treasure. How are you, how am I, how are we together, claiming and celebrating what God has given us - time and talent and treasure. How are we doing at this steward thing?

These are all the right questions, and the answers seem to be all around us. But this kid, this rich young man, asks a question and Jesus gives it answer, and it, too, must become a part of our ongoing conversations. A primary piece of the stewardship pie, or quilt, or puzzle - pick your metaphor. "What must I do?"

We would have certainly welcomed this young man into our congregation, and not simply for his "giving potential." Pretty good credentials. He has followed the commandments - no murder, no adultery, no stealing, no lying, no fraud, honors his elders, his parents. Not bad. I have done all these things since I was a youth.

And Jesus knows that he speaks with the truth. And Jesus looks at him, with a look that certainly goes to the very core of his soul.

And then this odd thing, this little phrase, that always says to me that Jesus' business is the welcoming business, not the excluding business, a mistake the religious business so easily misses. Jesus looks at him, and he loves him. He loves him with an eternal love, a challenging love that connects what he sees in this man's soul with how he would have him be in the world.

"You lack one thing." And we surmise he already knew. "Sell what you own and give it to the poor. You will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me." And we are told that the rich young man was shocked and sad, knowing how true it was what Jesus said and how difficult it would be to do what Jesus commanded.

And perhaps the response would have been different for each of us. It would have had something to do with stewardship, about our response to God's gracious activity, about our caring for this whole earthly enterprise - the environment, the family of nations, our neighbor.

But we know that wrapped up somewhere in there is that "M" word, money, and the ways that money gives shape to our ability to be stewards. Perhaps it is your own money - that is for you to determine in the inventory you must perform about your own stewardship.

The choices we make about our financial resources are among the most important we make. This is not Stewardship Sunday, unless we would say that every Sunday is. You will be asked to think more concretely and more directly about your financial response to the needs of this church in a few weeks, about how we together will seek to be faithful stewards of this church, its resources and its vision.

But the money question is broader than that. It is, in a sense, about what we do with every penny we have - the choices we make to spend and the choices we make to give away and the choices we make to save. Faith and money are inextricably linked at this moment.

But faith and money are inextricably linked in other ways, and we, as stewards, remember, are called to do something about those as well. They are as evident as this morning's news.

They have to do with the way things are marketed to our children, and how we will nurture them into making good decisions, when so much of their worth seems tied into what they have and what they look like. They have to do with how we, as Christians with means in a North American context, relate to a globe where people of all faiths have little means - globalization, it is sometimes called. They have to do with how we as a church in upstate New York, in Rochester, New York, respond to what is happening in our region.

We are not economists, as a whole, or entrepreneurs. But we are concerned citizens and more so concerned people of faith, and I believe that our response to these issues can make a difference.

Ethicists like Daniel Rish Finn and Douglas Hicks insist that we are called to bring a moral dimension to questions about the market - "economics as if theology mattered." And it does matter. That young man knew it. We know it. Economics as if theology mattered, if not the other way around as well.

What must we do? Where must we begin? Like our rich young friend, we begin with a question, posed best to Jesus, "what must I do," and then posed to ourselves, to our communities. The answers will take on many forms, as varied as the voices that ask the question.

But what we take away from this morning, the "deliverable," as it were, has something to do with the choices we make about what we have received to care for. Or, as the old prayer suggests: "We return to thee but a portion of what thou hast given." That's what we must do, that our handiwork may add to the true bounty, and that we all may prosper in God's good grace. Amen.