November 11, 2007 – 24th Sunday after Pentecost
Luke 12:22-34
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Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus. Amen.
The late Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti was once asked how he came to decide to be an opera singer. This is what he said: "When I was a boy, my father, a baker, introduced me to the wonders of song. He urged me to work very hard to develop my voice. Arrigo Pola, a professional tenor in my hometown of Modena, Italy, took me as a pupil. I also enrolled in a teachers college.
“On graduating, I asked my father, 'Shall I be a teacher or a singer?' My father replied, 'Luciano, if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair.'
“I chose one. It took seven years of study and frustration before I made my first professional appearance. It took another seven to reach the Metropolitan Opera. And now I think whether it's laying bricks, writing a book, whatever we choose – we should give ourselves to it. Commitment, that's the key. Choose one chair."
Focus, commitment, intentionality are vital if life is to have a sense of direction, of purpose. “Choose one chair.” For centuries, an amended version of that bit of wisdom has been at the heart of countless Christian believers’ journey of faith. We might call it “choose one path” – the path of spiritual discipline.
Just as athletes adopt and follow a physical discipline to keep themselves in shape and ready for their events, many Christians adopt and commit to a set of spiritual disciplines that has a two-fold purpose – to draw them closer to God so that God may more fully use them in the world.
Disciplines often have the ability to shape our identity. For example, I have a friend who is a writer. She’s a writer because she does the things that writers do. She sets aside time every day to sit down and write. Whether she feels like it or not. Some days, she says, the ideas and the images and the words just flow effortlessly. Other days, she feels as dry as a desert. But whether she feels like it or not, whether her effort is productive that day or not, she still sits down and writes. And because she has committed to that discipline, she has, over time, become a writer.
Likewise, spiritual disciplines have the capacity to shape our identity as people of God who live by faith. And these disciplines are remarkable for their ordinariness and their importance. I’d like to point out just seven classic Christian spiritual disciplines (and you can find these on the Sermon Points to Ponder sheet in your bulletin).
- Worship, where we gather regularly to thank and praise the Creator of all that is.
- Prayer, where we regularly intercede with God for the needs of our neighbor, both near and far.
- Study, where we read Scripture for ourselves and enter an entire world of stories that help us better understand our own story.
- Invitation, where we are sent into the world to live our lives in such a way that those who do not have a conscious understanding of their relationship with God are invited to enter that relationship and appropriate and embrace that relationship for themselves.
- Encouragement, where we help and speak well of our neighbor, both near and far.
- Service, where we act as God’s hands and feet and voice in this world as we serve the needs of the neighbor.
Each of these spiritual disciplines certainly deserves a sermon all its own, but because we’re focusing on stewardship and our INSTAR program, I want to concentrate in this sermon on the seventh discipline, the spiritual discipline of giving.
Let me set the focus. I recently heard of two men shipwrecked on a desert island. One of the men surveyed their surroundings and shouted, “We’re doomed! There’s nothing on this island, not a rescue ship in sight, we’re going to die here!” He looked over to see his friend, stretching out under a palm tree, getting ready to take a nap.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said, “can’t you see how desperate this is? We’re going to die here!”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” his friend said, “I make a million dollars a year.”
“So what?!” his friend said, “there’s nothing here to spend it on; we’re going to die here!”
“You don’t understand,” he said, “I give 10 percent to my church. My pastor will find me.”
That pretty well captures our thinking about stewardship, doesn’t it? Before I became a pastor I spent a lot of years out there in the pews, and no matter where I lived – Billings, Phoenix, San Francisco – it was always the same when October and November rolled around. You could almost hear the congregation sigh, “Oh God, here it comes again: Stewardship time.” And the pastor found it just as distasteful as we did. It was like we all just gritted our teeth and waited for October and November to roll by so that life could get back to normal. Can you relate to that?
Man, we completely missed the boat, pastors and congregations alike. Maybe it’s the word, “stewardship.” Maybe that word has so much baggage attached to it that there’s no way we can infuse it with new meaning. Maybe we need to junk that word in favor of a new term; but what we’ve missed along the way is the fact that stewardship is not primarily about money, or about time, or about abilities. Stewardship is first and foremost about identity, about who we are. What we do flows from who we are, and we need to understand that priority clearly. This is about identity, about your “north star” or your “center of gravity,” whatever you want to call that reference point from which you draw your primary meaning. The spiritual discipline of giving has a great capacity to shape our identity.
All the Christian disciplines I’ve mentioned – worship, prayer, service, all the others – carry with them certain qualities or characteristics that flesh them out, give them life. There are four Biblical qualities of the discipline of giving that I’d like to highlight (and you can find these on your Sermon Points to Ponder sheet as well).
First, the discipline of giving is marked by intentionality. We devise a plan, then work the plan. As the Apostle Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind.” The understanding here is that we have indeed made up our minds. The pledge cards that you have received and, hopefully, have filled out are devices to help our intentionality, to help you devise a plan that is workable for you.
I know of a Christian congregation in India where during the Sunday morning worship service the congregation members all come forward with their offerings and place them either on the altar or on the floor in front of the altar. The remarkable thing about this is that very few of the worshipers bring money. The reason is simple: the congregation is very poor, and few people have money. So the majority of the parish members bring bags of rice. It works this way: every night during the week, each family sets aside a handful of rice when it prepares dinner; on Sunday morning the family gathers up the small individual amounts into a larger bag and brings it as their offering. Then, on Monday morning, the church opens a store and sells the rice to the public. In that way, every family indirectly contributes financially to their church’s work of God in the world. That’s intentionality.
The second Biblical quality of the discipline of giving is generosity. Our generosity in giving to others is rooted – must be rooted – in God’s generosity in giving to us. Again, Paul says it in the second Corinthian letter: “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.”
In God’s view, we receive not so that we may keep; we receive so that we may give. The reason for our abundance – whatever your abundance might be – is so that we may abundantly bless others.
The third quality of giving is what the Bible calls “First Fruits.” We receive our guidance here from the Hebrew Bible, the book of Deuteronomy, where God addresses his people just before they go in to occupy the Promised Land, what will become Israel. He tells them that as they settle the land and raise their crops, they are to bring the first tenth of their harvest – tenth, that’s where we get the word “tithe” – to the place of worship. The first tenth, not the last, or somewhere in the middle. The first.
The comedian George Carlin is absolutely merciless in his depiction of God. In one of his routines, he says something like this: “Here’s God, he knows everything; he exists everywhere; he’s all-powerful, can do any sort of miracle you can imagine. And, he needs your money. He’s desperate for your money!”
Call it cynicism, call it satire, but it misses the point. God doesn’t need our money, and the church has never claimed that he does. God did not raise Jesus from the dead because he had enough cash to pull off the miracle; he raised Jesus from the dead so that he could confer on you and on me the kind of abundant life he was about to give to Jesus when he defeated the power of death. Abundant life not only in the world to come, but right here and now in this life! What God desires from us in return is our best effort at a faithful life. Our willingness to give first of all – first of all – to the work of God in the world is our way of living out that faithful life.
The fourth quality of the discipline of giving is proportionality; we give in proportion to what we have received. That’s going to be different for each of us. Nowhere in the Bible does God say, “OK, everybody here needs to give $10, or 20 cents, or $1,000.” The Bible simply says that from whom much has been entrusted, much will be expected. That’s it. We give in proportion to what we have received.
John D. Rockefeller once said, “I never would have been able to tithe the first million dollars I ever made if I had not tithed my first salary, which was $1.50 per week.” There is no limit at which proportional giving is to begin. In Mark’s gospel, Jesus praises a poor widow – remember the story? – who comes to the Temple treasury and drops in two copper coins. He praises her for giving out of her poverty. Whether we give out of our poverty or out of our abundance (regardless of what abundance means for you), God honors and values each and every one of our offerings.
Giving that is intentional, generous, of first priority, and proportional – these are qualities of a spiritual discipline that helps shape our identity as people who live by faith.
I hope you have been using this devotional booklet that’s been compiled for our INSTAR project. The devotionals were written by Advent, Atonement and Kaw Prairie members, and I’ve been blessed by them because of their down-to-earth spirituality and genuineness. I’d like to share an excerpt from one of these devotionals. This one is by Sara Pham of Atonement.
“For me, living with gratitude is not about the big stuff in my life; it is a way of being; it is walking in God’s will in all things, and allowing him to fulfill the promise he has made to me to prosper me, provide for me, and give me all I need. When I allow God to work his will in my life, I am filled with abundant reason to be grateful, because that is his promise.
To quote one of my favorite movies, You’ve God Mail, ‘I lead a small life. Valuable, but small.’ In our acquisitive and materialistic secular culture, living a small life is associated with a lack of success, and most people would resent being characterized this way. However, I do indeed have what most people would probably consider to be a small life, and with it, small blessings. I am also fortunate enough to know it is those same small blessings that change my life, that determine the difference between a good day and a bad one, that humble and strengthen and give hope. It is small blessings that are the building blocks of my faith, and so, I suspect, it is with most people.”
A small life? I don’t know about you, but this sounds to me like a big life.
My prayer for each of us this morning is that we would adopt and commit to the spiritual discipline of giving, and let that discipline shape our identity, to the glory of God.
Amen.
