Hilton Head Island, SC – Nov. 18, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 24:1-10; Luke 12:13-21
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And he said to them, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” – Luke 12:15 (RSV)
It seemed like an innocent enough question. There was a man in a large crowd who had come out to listen to Jesus speaking. “Rabbi, bid my brother divide the inheritance with me.” Apparently the brother wanted either to keep all of the inheritance for himself or not to have their inheritance divided up at that particular time. We may deduce from this question that “the brother” had to be older than the man asking the question, because only the oldest son could delay the division of an inheritance, should he choose to do so. Most oldest brothers probably would not want to do that, because there normally would be no reason to prolong the distribution. Probably the greedy sibling wanted to keep the whole bundle for himself; Luke didn’t explain it.
Not wanting to get drawn into a family squabble, Jesus gave a deflecting response. “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” In other words, “What makes you think I’m going to allow myself to get pulled into your squalid little family quarrel?” But also, wanting to refer to the motive which caused this man to try to drag Jesus into the fraternal fiscal brouhaha in the first place, Jesus said to everyone in the crowd listening to him, but especially to his questioner, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” Then Jesus told the parable of the rich man and his barns.
According to the Bible, everything on the earth, everything that exists, belongs to God. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof,” it says in Psalm 24:1. God owns everything --- everything. If this is true, and I believe it is true, then it means you and I own nothing. Everything we have is on loan to us from God. Thus all of us are stewards of whatever God has entrusted to us. We are to be like trust officers in a bank; the assets are in our keeping, but they are not ours to keep. God has given them to us to invest on His behalf, not ultimately our behalf.
Nine days ago I drove from my cousin’s home in New River, Arizona, a half hour north of Phoenix, to the national parks of southern Utah. It was one of the most glorious days in my life. There was not a cloud in the sky. For seventy-five miles I paralleled the Vermilion Cliffs, which run east and west at the Utah-Arizona border, in the Grand Staircase National Monument. Then I went to Bryce Canyon National Park and to Capitol Reef National Park, and then to the Bear’s Ears National Monument. Then I drove back to my cousin’s house in New River.
All of southern Utah and northern Arizona is part of the geological formation known as the Grand Staircase. At one time it was under the ocean, and red and white sandstone was formed from millions of years of compaction. Much later this vast layer of rock became part of the western North American continent over more millions of years. Fifty million years of erosion turned it into what it is now. I’m sure many of you have been to Sedona, Arizona. The Grand Staircase has hundreds of miles of Sedonas all along its roads. There are thousands of miles of Sedonas in the Staircase where there are no roads. It was the most scenic drive I have ever taken.
Unfortunately, I miscalculated the total distance of this one-day excursion --- by five hundred miles. Nineteen hours and twenty minutes and a thousand and forty miles after I started, I finished. I wasn’t sleepy, but I was so stiff I almost had to pry myself out of the car when I finally made it back to New River. I don’t recommend anyone to try to duplicate this odyssey.
The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. As the song says, “And I say to myself, ‘What a wonderful world!’” God is remarkably generous toward us in making us the trustees of His world. All He asks of us in return is a tithe: one-tenth of our income. Trust officers in a bank do not get to keep 90% of the income of the trust funds entrusted to them, but God wants us to have 90% of whatever income we have. In return, God encourages us to give back 10% of our income to Him, or in other words, a tithe. God doesn’t demand it, but He encourages it. I suspect God instituted the tithe for two main reasons: one, it is fair to us, and two, it is simple to calculate. If your income is $500 a week, your weekly tithe is $50. If it is $4000 a month, your monthly tithe is $400. If your annual income is $64,200, your annual tithe is $6420. Always knock off a zero and you have a readily-calculated tithe. It’s a piece of arithmetic cake.
Tithing is very straightforward for anyone who decides to tithe. You choose to do it, and then you do it. Since I was a freshman in college, I have always given away at least 10% of everything I ever earned. In a few very flush times, I managed to contribute over half of my taxable income to various charitable organizations, although most of it went to religious institutions. I don’t do that anymore, because I can’t do it anymore. But Lois and I still give away 10% of our income.
Why do I tell you this very personal information? I do it to assure you that everyone is able to tithe. That’s what the story of “the widow’s mite” illustrates. After watching very well-dressed people putting well-heeled offerings into the Temple treasury, Jesus saw a poor woman drop in two small copper coins. Jesus lavishly commended her to his disciples. “These others have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living.” I can promise you from personal experience it is easier to tithe when your income is higher than when it is lower, but I can also promise it is possible to tithe whatever your income may be. You just decide to do it, and you do it --- period.
And that brings us back to the man who wanted Jesus to convince his tight-fisted brother to divide their inheritance. So Jesus told his short, pithy parable about the rich man whose crops produced so bountifully that he tore down his barns and built bigger ones in which to keep his bulging bounty. That night the rich man died, and God said to him, “Fool! Your soul is now required of you, and all these things which you have amassed, whose will they be?” Then came the messianic zinger: “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
If God owns everything, and if we are all stewards of His assets, then all of us can give away to all good causes at least 10% of whatever income we have. But in the process, we ought to go lightly on the acquisition of stuff, because the more stuff we acquire, the more stuff we think we need.
I cannot substantiate the hypothesis I am now going to propose, but I am convinced it is generally accurate nonetheless. It is my conviction that tithers are far less likely to be materialists than non-tithers. The reason is logical, if not immediately obvious: they are used to spending 10% less of their income than many other people. When people learn to get along with less, they come to realize that their desired quality of life is not only not jeopardized, but in fact may be exponentially enhanced. In other words, it is good not to acquire all the stuff we might otherwise want, because by not doing that, it leads us to value more highly the fewer things we do have. Besides, if God owns everything anyway, what we have we don’t have; God has it. So why should we try to manage more of God’s assets than God wants us to manage? Stewards shouldn’t want to control more than they are capable of controlling!
A few years ago they had a major political dispute in Southampton, Long Island. As you probably know, the Hamptons, on the eastern end of Long Island, are one of the most ostentatious playgrounds for the rich and famous. The average house in the Sagaponack section is between ten thousand and fourteen thousand heated square feet. Summer cottages these are not.
Well, a certain multigazillionaire got approval to build a forty-two thousand square foot house on sixty acres of what had theretofore been a potato field. The Sagaponack Homeowners Association petitioned the town’s zoning board to prohibit this extremely large house from being built next to their merely very, very large houses. (Does this remind you of anyplace else?) If the man had tried to get approval to build a tiny house, say one of a measly four thousand square feet or so, he wouldn’t have had a prayer with the zoning board. So why should people with very, very big houses object to an humongously gigantic house? They did. But they lost. They had anticipated keeping five thousand square foot crackerboxes out of their neighborhood, but they had never contemplated the need for an ordinance to negate a forty-two thousand square footer, which most of them considered both garish and gauche. There’s just no justice in Southampton!
On the other side of this issue there was the case of Thomas Monaghan. He was the founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain. How a man named Thomas Monaghan could start a pizza empire is anybody’s guess, but he did. When he sold Domino’s years ago for a billion dollars, he put all the money into a charitable foundation he formed to build Catholic parochial schools all across this country. And he did it because he had read a book by C.S. Lewis called Mere Christianity. In that small book, which has been read by millions of people, the great Oxford don talked about pride. Thomas Monaghan decided he had pride in abundance, and he needed to get rid of it. So he got rid of a billion dollars. And then he felt much better.
God owns everything, and if we have more of everything than we need, we may need to divest ourselves of some of it in order to diminish our pride for thinking that we acquired it by earning it. We didn’t. God loaned it to us.
Something wonderful happens when affluent people voluntarily learn to give up at least 10% of their affluence. Many of them experience a peace they never knew before. It comes from realizing that what they thought was a sacrifice is really no sacrifice at all, but is simply the expression of Christian stewardship which God expects from all people at all levels of income. And that’s why biblical stewardship is fair to everyone, because it is the same proportionate level of generosity for everyone. If anyone wants to give away more than 10%, that’s fine. But everyone is capable of 10%, even poor widows with a poor widow’s mite. Jesus said so.
However, stewardship is about more than just money. Preachers tend to forget that, but it’s true. There is also the stewardship of time and talent, “talent” meaning ability. That’s why Christians and Jews should be involved in community service of various kinds, and in doing good to all the people around them. God has shown us what is good. “And what does the Lord require of you,” asked the prophet Micah, “ but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
The Junior League has a long history of community philanthropy, raising money for all sorts of good causes. There is the story of the busload of Junior Leaguers who were on their way to their state convention. The bus skidded on an icy spot in the road, slammed into a bridge rail, and plunged over the rail into a stream far below. All the women were killed. They arrived en masse at the Pearly Gates, but St. Peter happened to be on an extended vacation when they got there. A fill-in saint named Ralph met the ladies. When they gave him their names, Ralph said, “I’m sorry; you’re not on the list of arrivals for today. You’ll have to go to hell.” “But St. Ralph,” said the suddenly terrified Junior Leaguers, “we are all upstanding women. We’ve raised lots of money for all kinds of worthy causes, we’ve done good in ever so many ways, and we are all devoted wives and mothers!” “Sorry,” said the bureaucratic Ralph, “if your names aren’t on the list, you have to go to hell.” Which is where, greatly saddened, they went.
A few weeks later, St. Peter came back and asked Ralph about the busload of Junior Leaguers who had been expected. “They weren’t on the daily manifest, so I sent them down to hell.” “You what!” said St. Peter, whereupon the celestial gatekeeper made a swift journey down to the nether regions to talk to Satan. “You got a whole busful of women from the Junior League by mistake. We want them back, and immediately.” “You can’t have them,” said Satan. “Why not?” asked Peter. “They don’t belong here!” “But we’re going to keep them here,” said Satan. “Our residents love them. Already they’ve raised $21.2 million for air conditioning for the south wing, and by now they’ve hit up half of the east wingers for their project!”
Giving away money and raising money and doing good works are all parts of Christian stewardship. I want to urge you to do all of those things to the greatest degree you can.
But I also want to express a concern I have regarding the stewardship of those who consider The Chapel Without Walls to be your primary place of worship. Since our inception fifteen years ago, the number of people in attendance has been very, very slowly declining. We probably are older than the average congregation, and older people tend to decline --- in more ways than one. Most of you are very faithful in your attendance, and I am greatly encouraged by that. However, the fiscal fact of the matter is this: we are averaging only about $20 per person per Sunday in contributions. That means that we are able to meet our expenses, but we have virtually nothing left over to give away. And that means that as a congregation we are not being good stewards. We are meeting our own needs, but no needs at all for anyone else.
I do not expect anyone to give an entire tithe to The Chapel, nor necessarily even half a tithe. However, I suspect most of us are financially able to give more to this congregation than we currently give. From today on, I urge all of you to increase the amount you contribute to The Chapel Without Walls. When you do, your parson will not feel so ethically compromised for being the pastor of a flock which is able to maintain its own fleece but which does not sufficiently fleece itself to help clothe and feed others whose needs are far greater. A congregation which provides solely for itself is not engaged in proper institutional stewardship.
I don’t want anyone to feel guilty, and I don’t want anyone to feel required to fill out an annual pledge card. We are by no means sufficiently institutionalized to warrant such ordinary churchly behavior. But I will admit that before we even engaged in our first service, I very naively envisioned that eventually we would be giving away 50 to 90% of all the money we received, because I thought our attendance would be much higher than it is has ever been. Clearly that was far too optimistic. Nonetheless, I believe that in order to keep faith with God for our very existence, we need to give away a significant percentage of our monetary receipts. Otherwise we are serving only ourselves, and not God or others.
Affluent folks are not affluent for no reason. This is a rather pedantic, gentle stewardship sermon compared to those I preached when I was young and foolish. But I hope you will heed it anyway. If you do, The Chapel Without Walls will have taken a major step forward toward becoming what God wants us to be. So be it; Amen!