Divvied Up -Sermon on May 16, 2010
May 16, 2010
Scripture: Romans, excerpts from chapters 11-13
Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God, this deep, deep wisdom? It’s way over our heads. We’ll never figure it out. Is there anyone around who can explain God? Anyone smart enough to tell him what to do? Anyone who has done him such a huge favor that God has to ask his advice? Everything comes from him; Everything happens through him; Everything ends up in him. Always glory! Always praise! Yes. Yes. Yes.
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I’m speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what he does for us, not by what we are and what we do for him.
In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.
Make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God. The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing! God is putting the finishing touches on the salvation work he began when we first believed. We can’t afford to waste a minute, must not squander these precious daylight hours in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. Get out of bed and get dressed! Don’t loiter and linger, waiting until the very last minute. Dress yourselves in Christ, and be up and about!
Sermon: Divvied Up
by Rev. Doreen Oughton
Do you know where your money goes? Have any of you ever used computer software to track your spending or even just sat with your check book and a calculator to sort out where your money goes? I’ve never really done that. I’ve worked out a budget of what comes in and what my basic expenses are, but have never thought of the overall pie and how it gets divvied up. If you haven’t figured out from the other liturgical elements, I will let you know now that today I am preaching a stewardship sermon. My second, which is unusual since I have only been here a little more than nine months. But our stewardship drive in November was only for six months since we are shifting our fiscal year to match the program year. So today I am asking you to reflect on giving, and in the next few weeks, discern about whether and how much to pledge to the church for the 2010-2011 program year.
I don’t know how all of you feel about hearing the stewardship sermon, but I admit that it is a hard one to preach. Part of it is my reluctance to be the representative of an institution asking hard-working folks for their money. I still hear my father’s voice from what I was a child, the skepticism and mistrust that he expressed towards the church. “They’re only interested in your money.” I have heard outrageous stories of religious rituals or spiritual nurture being available to those who could pay, and denied to those who couldn’t. It has always been an uncomfortable thing for me to ask people for money, even when it is for a good cause, or when the service or product is valuable. That’s why I could never be a freelance therapist. I needed to have the hospital as a middleman, getting payment from the clients or insurance, and then paying me.
But it is also hard for me to preach a stewardship sermon because I feel convicted by anything I want to say. Though that is not uncommon. I would venture that it is hard for most people to wrestle seriously with scripture and not feel convicted to some degree. But somehow it is not so uncomfortable to acknowledge to myself, to God, and even to you all that I don’t always love as Jesus loved, that I judge other people, that I am lazy and selfish and overly concerned with my own comfort. But when I have to look at my spending and admit that I don’t give enough, I feel really uncomfortable. A little defensiveness mixed with embarrassment. So let me praise God now for this A D G O (another darned growth opportunity).
So let’s dive in and grow. There is a workshop put on by the UCC that I have not attended, but I am intrigued by the title: Turning Tippers into Tithers. I thought about that term and what it might mean, and came up with the ideas that I shared in the children’s sermon. We are part of the family of God, the body of Christ. We are not meant to see our spiritual nurture as a special treat, but as a core need. We don’t pay the church or a person to provide us with a spiritual service, but contribute our time and talents and treasure as members of the family, supporting the well-being of the whole family, engaging with our whole lives.
In looking for good stewardship scripture, I found some wonderful passages in the book of Exodus about building the tabernacle to house the stone tablets containing the ten commandments. It goes on for 5 chapters, so didn’t work out as a reading, but it talked about how all these people who were on the journey to the promised land contributed what they had – jewels and metals, fabric and skills and labor – everyone contributed. For them, building this tabernacle was a way to bring God to live with them. Reading this reminded me of another way that God came to live with us, through Jesus. And I wonder, how do our offerings make space for Jesus to dwell more fully with us? There is a wonderful prayer by St. Teresa of Avila: “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which He blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet. Yours are the eyes, you are His body. Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” How well can we serve as Christ’s hands and feet and eyes and body if our commitment to and investment in our faith is an afterthought?
Let’s go back to my first questions about knowing where your money goes. And feel free to answer. My questions are not rhetorical. Raise your hand if you have ever figured out what percentage of your money goes where. Does anyone have a rough idea? How much do you pay in taxes? You know in preparation for this sermon, I figured it out for myself. I’d always figured it was around 20%. My income is around the border between 15% and 25% tax brackets. But you know what? I figured out that I paid less than 10% of my income to taxes. That was easy to figure out just by looking at my tax return. And it was easy to figure out that I spent about 35% of my income on rent last year. But the rest would take lots more sleuthing to figure out.
I found online the percentages of major spending categories from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey, though it was from 2003. I was surprised to see that transportation costs were the biggest expenditure after housing costs. Housing was about 33%, and transportation was 19%. Healthcare was about 6%, though I’d bet that’s gone up since 2003. I won’t go through the whole picture, but it was interesting to consider these averages. There was no line item for charitable giving, though that is what might be implied by the line item for cash contributions. That percentage was 3.4, and sounds in line with typical church giving.
The last stewardship letter talked about percentages and the notion of tithing. Does anyone remember what tithing is? Yes, giving ten percent of your income to the church. The idea comes from the Hebrew scriptures. There are several places that talk about tithing there, and a few indications that tithing was still practiced in the New Testament. Reactions? …..
I was very intrigued when I went to a book reading by two pastor/authors, Lillian Daniels and Martin Copenhaver. Rev. Daniels shared from her chapter on money about how early in her ministry career, when she was an associate pastor, the senior pastor preached a sermon about tithing. He did it, and extolled its virtues and encouraged others to do it also. She said she swore to herself right then and there that she would NEVER be a tither. She thought it was outrageous, that the circumstances of the senior pastor were so far removed from her own life that he just couldn’t understand the enormity of what he was recommending. She goes on in her book about the weird messages she grew up with about money, lots of secrecy about spending. she talks about how much she likes nice things, and about how hard it was to make ends meet with a young growing family on a pastor’s small salary. She stayed committed to being a non-tither for several years, but then, she had a vision. Let me share her words: (from “Money Off the Shelf” in This Odd and Wondrous Calling.)
I’m not going to ask you to give ten percent, not before or after taxes. I don’t give ten percent. I do give five percent, before taxes, and so far, so good. I will ask you though, to know what percentage you are giving. So if you want to start with a dollar amount that you are willing to pledge, you can work from there, calculating what percentage of your income that works out to be. Perhaps you will be pleasantly surprised, and wonder how it all works out. Perhaps it will be a smaller percentage than you thought, and you might want to set a goal for increasing it. Or not. Perhaps you have prayed on it, have not received the flashing 10% message from God and are comfortable with your giving. Perhaps you contribute to other causes that are important to you, so include church giving in a slice of the pie for all charitable giving. I’m just asking you to do the numbers and know.
I’m also going to ask that the church consider it’s giving in the budget planning process. I’ll never get tired of lifting up the tremendous generosity that goes on here, but as far as I can tell, the church does not do what we ask our members and friends to do, make a commitment in writing about its giving. What would it be like if the church figured out a percentage to give? Maybe we’d include things we already do, like provide lunch items for Worcester Fellowship, blankets for Church World Service, contributions to the UCC Our Church’s Wider Mission. Or maybe having money earmarked in our budget for giving would open us to new ways to give, new ways to be Christ’s eyes and hands and feet. Isn’t that part of our call?
