I want to start off by laying out my own baggage with this text. From the time I left for college at eighteen, until I moved to Michigan at age thirty, I changed residences at least once, sometimes two or three times, every year. The result of all that moving was for twelve years of my life, everything I owned could be, and regularly was, condensed to a single car-load. Toward the end of this period, after I graduated from seminary, while waiting for a call from the synod about whether any churches might want to interview me to be their pastor, my cousin got reflective about this transient period of my life. “It must be such a freeing feeling,” she remarked, “to have everything you own fit in your car, knowing you could just up and go anywhere in the world you wanted at a minute’s notice.” I, unemployed and with no job prospects, mired in student debt, having just moved back in with my parents while all my friends were buying houses and starting families, wasn’t in the mood for reflection. “No,” I quipped back. “You know what’s a freeing feeling? Owning more than one towel. Being able to commit to a toaster without having to worry if it will fit in the next move. Toast whenever you want it is what freedom feels like.”
All this to say, this is not going to be a sermon in which I encourage you to sell everything you own and set yourself free from worldly possessions. I have spent enough of my life in transition to know that owning nothing is not in and of itself the pathway to freedom. I now own seven towels, and I’m legitimately grateful for and appreciative of every one of them.
The other reason this is not going to be a sermon about the virtue of selling everything you own is the risk of glorifying poverty. Because here’s another thing, I have never been poor. Yes, for twelve years I owned next to nothing, but I have never been poor. I come from a background of relative generational wealth and I knew at any time I had an escape route. I could move back in with my parents, I could put my multiple degrees and robust resume to work at any number of white-collar professions, I could settle down and buy a toaster. The transient life-style I lived for twelve years was my choice, and my choice alone. And to make the choice to live without a virtue is to diminish the struggle of those for whom going without is not a choice but the result of unjust systems.
This passage places us in the same struggle as the one two weeks ago about cutting off one’s hand, where we need to resist the temptation to reduce Jesus’ hyperbolic teaching style to the realm of metaphor. Because as we saw two weeks ago with the cutting off of hands, the more hyperbolic Jesus seemed to be, the more serious the teaching. And Jesus was definitely talking about wealth in this passage, about the damages and dangers of money and possessions. Money, by the way, is one of the most frequently mentioned topics in Jesus’ teachings. Jesus talked about money more often than he talked about the law, or forgiveness, or heaven and hell combined. In fact, money is second only to the Kingdom of God in how often Jesus spoke of it. Money, possessions, and the role they play in our lives is hugely important, and it was hugely important to Jesus. As Jesus is quoted as saying in both Matthew and Luke, “No one can serve two masters… You cannot serve both God and money.” So while this passage is neither a glorification of poverty nor an obligation to sell everything we have and embrace a life of austerity, it is absolutely a calling to us to take a careful look at ourselves, our lives, our wealth, and our possessions, to see what outsized role those things may be playing, how they may, like the rich man, be keeping us from recognizing what we truly lack.
For twelve years, and still today, all too often the things that I thought I lacked kept me from seeing what I still had and what I still had to give. Because though I owned next to nothing and my back account regularly hovered around zero, I was never truly poor and I was never without the power that comes with being white, middle-class, and well-educated. I always had something I could give.
The other thing I learned, and am learning, is that just because someone else has less then me, does not mean I should not ask them also to think of what they have, and what they can give. Because giving of yourself, being able to contribute, that too is a gift and a privilege. And it is unfair for me to decide who is worthy of that privilege, to decide someone has less than me so I get to give my things to them, because then I get the reward of feeling good about how generous I am, and they get the obligation of being grateful for my generosity. And we both lose. I lose the opportunity to receive; they lose the power of being the one who gives.
Fall is stewardship time at Trinity, and it is also annual budget time. And while we talk about how the two are separate, how we are giving not to the budget but to our mission, and how our budget is not based on pledged giving but on a sense of God’s call, and that is true, the two seasons do overlap, and both the receipt of each individual’s estimate of financial giving to the congregation and our congregational budget are about stewardship and about addressing the question that Jesus gave to the rich man, the question of what we lack, and what we are willing and able to give.
The individual financial giving part is the easier one actually, because what we are willing and able to contribute of our own wealth is a question only each of us can answer for ourselves. I can tell you, and I will, how much that amount is for me and how I make that decision. I learned 10-10-80 as a general rule somewhere, 10 percent saved, 10 percent given away, 80 percent lived on, and that makes the math super simple. So when my paycheck comes, I move the decimal place over one, round up because I like round numbers, and done. Actually, 10-10-80 means I don’t even actually do the math, I just see how much money Bob withholds for my retirement contribution and write a check for the same amount. I guess one of those numbers is post-tax and the other pre-tax, but I’m clergy, which means my taxes are calculated by a formula only the IRS understands anyway, so I don’t get all that worked up about net vs. gross, or whatever. I go with what makes the math simple.
So that’s how I figure it out. Of course, the caveat on that is I have no dependents, my expenses are low, and I paid off my student loans while I was working under the much higher cost-of-living based salary guidelines of the Southwest California synod, so 10-10-80 is a rule that works for me. It may not work for you. Maybe you are not at a financial place where you can set aside 10 percent of your income, or maybe you’re at a place where you can set aside more. Our Muslim brothers and sisters have a different system entirely. Rather than a tithe, or ten percent of their income, they practice zakat, which means they figure out their total net wealth overall and then give two point five percent of that. The idea being if someone is living paycheck to paycheck, they may not be able to set aside a percentage of income, as that is the money they’re living on. But someone could give of their wealth, that which has moved from subsistence to sustainability. There are pros and cons to each system of course, but our Muslim siblings method may actually be more sacrificial for those of us who have accumulated generational wealth.
I offer all this as food for thought as you think about what your estimate of giving will be, when we collect estimate of giving cards during worship on the twenty-eighth. But as I mentioned, fall is also budget time, and deciding how we manage those our congregational resources is probably harder, because more of us are involved in, and affected by, the outcome. Basically, the stakes seem higher. I can more or less calculate my own income and expenses, and what I can reasonably give. I’m certainly apt to lean more on the side of caution than I probably should, one can always be more generous, but it’s still an individual decision. With the church budget, I get more antsy. Because that’s not an individual decision, and the ramifications are larger. If our money is mismanaged, either intentionally or unintentionally, and we cannot sustain ourselves, it is not just my income that suffers; it is all of us, this neighborhood, and everyone who’s given money to support our mission and ministry. I want us to be here because this is my job and I like being paid, yes. If I stop feeding him, Cat might decide to just eat me. I also want us to be here for you all, because I love watching us as a congregation grow in our faith, I love worshiping with you each week, I love visiting with you, learning from you, working with you, I love being your pastor. And I want us to be here for the people who are in and out of this building all week, who have never, and may never come here on Sunday, but who also call me pastor, and who are also a part of our faith community. What we do here is about us, but it’s also bigger than us. It drives me absolutely crazy that yet again it’s budget time and I don’t know how we’re going to make the numbers work. That you all are generous and frugal and creative, and yet we still haven’t figured out how to crack the code of the difference between your generosity and our neighborhood’s need. I don’t know what the budget numbers are going to look like, but I know that we will be looking at what we can cut. I’m tired, and I’ve only been doing it for four years, some of you have been doing it for forty.
But here’s what I do know. Jesus told the rich man to sell what he had because he lacked on thing, because he loved him. Verse twenty-one, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him…” And here’s something you probably didn’t know, the rich man in this story is the only person in the whole Gospel of Mark that Jesus is said to have loved. Jesus talked about love, but this is the one and only person whom Jesus specifically looked at, and loved. The command of Jesus to sell what he owned so that he could get what he lacked came not from a place of obligation, but from a place of love. This was Jesus trying to fill a need the man didn’t even know he had, a need that couldn’t be met by wealth, couldn’t be met by keeping the law, couldn’t be kept by discipline or observance or belief, but could only be met by Jesus. And the man couldn’t do it, and he went away grieving, for he had many possessions. At least, he went away grieving in the story, but here’s the wonderful open-endedness of Mark, we don’t know what happened after that. What we know is what Jesus then told his disciples, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”
So here’s the thing friends. It’s budget time again, and I can already tell you, the numbers don’t work. But the fact of our continued existence is proof that if God wants us here, the numbers don’t really matter. If you all had turned in the towel every time the numbers didn’t work, I wouldn’t be here. Pastor Herdman wouldn’t even be here. There was a time in the 1940s when you were down to six; your roughest time as a congregation predates both of us. So in two weeks, when you’re writing a number on that pledge card, I’m going to reiterate what you’ve been saying for years, we are not giving to fulfill the budget. We may lack something, but that thing is not money. No, we don’t have much money, but the story of the rich man assures us that the only thing we can lack is a thing only God can give, and God has given and is giving it to us in abundance, the sustaining presence of the Spirit in this place. We will be here until God decides our work here is done, and then we won’t be. The Bishop keeps assuring me the church needs us here, so as long as we are needed, I guess this is where we’ll be.
So it’s stewardship time, and I invite you to give, and to give generously. Not because the church needs your money, but so that you may experience the grace that comes from being a part of something that is bigger then all of us, the work of God in this place. And also, please don’t give me a toaster. I got one for Christmas a few years ago, and I love it. Thanks be to God for all the many gifts we receive, and also for toasters, because sometimes freedom really is as simple as a delicious piece of toast. Amen.
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