Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's August 1, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.

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If you went home last Sunday and read your bulletin insert, Assembly in Brief, the digest of actions taken by our denomination’s General Assembly meeting in Richmond, VA last month (and there are extra copies in the narthex), you read about an array of good news items that we are about as a national and connectional church. You probably also noticed the “usual suspects” for hot button social issues were discussed once again by the commissioners from Presbyteries across the US: the issue of abortion came up, as did renewed debates about whether ordination should be a right and privilege extended to practicing gays. Not at all to minimize the Church’s discernment of what to do in matters like abortion and homosexuality, it’s interesting to me that the Bible has very little to say about either topic, and when scripture is cited on either issue, it is mostly in a proof text sort of way, which I would argue is not a preferred way to read the Bible, pulling verses out of context to support particular ideas or interpretations.

More telling than that, Jesus is himself completely silent on both abortion and the gay rights question. His position is not unlike that time recorded in Luke’s gospel when someone yells from the crowd “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” Jesus, in no uncertain terms, declines to hear the contested claims. He will not be triangulated as the judge in this family dispute. Perhaps there are many issues, troubling social issues like the ones I’ve mentioned, which it would be nice if Jesus would step in and settle the matter once and for all so that even fundamentalists and progressives could agree, but, sorry, that’s just not the way faith works much of the time.

That being said, there do remain some topics on which Jesus doesn’t mince words, like on the matter of the twin dangers of greed and wealth. Jesus and the Bible have quite a lot to say about money and justice, faith and wealth, much less to say than about the right to life or sexual orientation. Which makes it all the more surprising, at least to me, that money talk remains a kind of taboo topic for many Christians. Christians of all stripes usually prefer to study and argue over other matters such as those I’ve mentioned..

A clergyperson was once asked, “why do you think the American family is in trouble?” I wouldn’t cite Hollywood’s sex and violence in the movies, he replied. I would never think of the gay rights movement. I would say materialism. Lots of my people are literally working themselves to death, working themselves out of a marriage, out of a family. Our favorite show is, Who wants to be a Millionaire? What does that tell you?” (William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, August, 2004). Cornell University economist Robert Frank likens us to “bull elks who compete for the social advantages of having the biggest antlers. If all their antlers were reduced by half, their social hierarchy would be unchanged and they all would be safer when chased by wolves through a thick forest. Or, he adds, if all wedding receptions were half as expensive, would we not be just as happy?

If you drew a graph comparing students entering college in 1965 and students entering in 2000, asking them what’s more important, “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” or “being well off financially,” the graph lines would form a large sideways X. In 1965, a much higher percentage said develop a meaningful philosophy of life, but as that line has declined on our graph over the years, the percentage desiring to be well off financially has gone up. According to this graph, the lines of the X crossed about 1975 and are now moving in opposite directions. (cited in The American Paradox, 128).

Jesus tells a little story about greed, a parable on possessions. This parable suggests that, although abundance might not be a sin per se, it is certainly a real problem. It is the story of a man who has become possessed by his possessions, whose land was so rich and abundant that his old barns couldn’t handle the harvest, so he had to take down the old ones and build new and better ones. In this man’s day, bigger barns symbolized rising social stature, not unlike our own day when driving a Lexus or building a second home on the lake can signify the same. Wealth, especially that gained by rags to riches type of story, is perhaps the most fundamental value that characterizes our national mythology. Bigger barns and the American dream are forever linked in our collective unconsciousness.

And the church, too, has to be careful about any link we make between faith and wealth, as if one depends on the other. American interpreters of Jesus have been quite good at turning Jesus into the promoter of the Gospel of Wealth, an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Many American Christians have had great difficulty agreeing with liberation theology and its theme that “God has a preferential option for the poor and that capitalism is not necessarily God’s preferred economic system. When it comes to the American church, who really wants a Jesus who contests our greatest national value, the value of wealth? I read that the only successful heresy trial in the Episcopal Church in the United States occurred in the 1920s, with the reality of a Bolschevik Russia clearly in mind, when a priest suggested that world socialism would render the church irrelevant because socialism was a closer approximation to the teachings of Jesus and the New Testament. The priest was promptly defrocked from a church that was horrified to think of Jesus as a socialist (cited by Gomes, 303.).

Now, what you want to hear me say, and I will go ahead and say it and let us all off the hook, is that wealth is itself not an evil, it is what we do with money and possessions that matters. “Wealth is not what you have; wealth is what you have been given that enables you to give to others” (Peter Gomes, The Good Book, 309). The wealthy landowner in the parable is apparently called a “fool” on the day of reckoning because he kept things for himself and was not rich toward God.

There are two potential problems with the landowner in this story. One is that the landowner simply has too much land. Or, at least the land he owns has been so productive that he can’t put it all to good use as was his former custom, so he feels compelled now to design a bigger space to accommodate the surplus. We aren’t told exactly how or why productivity surpassed storage capability. On the face of it, perhaps we think congratulations would be in order, for his abundant land produced an abundant harvest. Why, this is efficiency and capitalism at its best, we might surmise.

One wonders, though, if his apparently large land holdings didn’t come at a severe price: the cost to him was isolation from his neighbors since more land distanced him from his nearest neighbor; the cost to others was that productive farmland could no longer be used to meet the needs of the common good.

This rich land owner reminds me a bit of a comment former Congressman Newt Gingrich made in 1995 after being named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year. He said his mission in Washington was “to maximize the creation of wealth and the acquisition of wealth rather than the redistribution of wealth.” (American Paradox, 142). One wonders, however, if on the day of all reckoning, God will say to Mr. Gingrich and all of his ilk: “You fool, this very night your life is being demanded of you, and the things you have stored up, whose will they be?”

Another problem for the landowner is the absence of any reference in the story to the idea of tithing. The word is never used, but it would have been plain to Jesus’ audience that this man had ignored the tithe, that gift scripture enjoins the faithful to give back to God by giving it to those in need. This man had apparently left no grain for the gleaners, the widows and the orphans, and the only tithe, that is thank offering he had offered, was a sigh of contentment and self-satisfaction.

As usual, we are all too ready to assume that Jesus is speaking of someone else in this parable. The scribes and the Pharisees? Any rich young rulers in the audience? Anyone out there with an oversized barn? Boy, does Jesus have a story for you!

The scandal of the gospel is, of course, that Jesus is speaking not to them but to us, the widow with her two copper coins no less than wealthy landowners, but maybe especially Jesus is speaking to we who form that amorphous reality called the middle class. Our modest homes contain hundreds of stewardship lessons, things we have stored up for tomorrow, signs of our abundance. Much of our wealth, whether in our homes or in the church, is tied up in the future – pensions and IRAs, endowment funds and savings accounts – while our neighbors near by and far away need help now. Polls suggest that American Christians tithe less than 2 percent at a time when government seems to be increasingly turning its back on the have nots.

Abundance abounds for us. The poorest among us is far richer than the average person in third world nations. You know that. The safest thing for me to say is that guilt about our abundance is less the answer than learning again, as if for the first time, how to be rich toward God.

And, I could even argue, based on my understanding of biblical theology, that neither abundance nor a gospel of wealth should be our aim, but rather its opposite. Scarcity. Scarcity as a Christian value. A scary thought, isn’t it? Maybe even heretical for those who hold the American dream dear.

Maybe, in a strange sort of way, if the choice is between abundance and scarcity, scarcity is the higher good exemplified by a man who had nothing when he died but a robe that was gambled away.

That’s what the Psalmist apparently thought, too. Let me read a portion of Psalm 107 [read Psalm 107:1-9].

Scarcity of land, scarcity of safety, scarcity of direction, scarcity of food, scarcity of water were, ironically, good things for the children of Israel, because they taught dependence on a higher good. Those who wandered in desert wastes, whose souls nearly fainted within them, learned to trust in the God who delivered provision for all their needs.

Psalm 107 is, thus, a hymn of thanksgiving to God in which the community affirms that the Lord of Israel is the source of all that makes life possible and worthwhile, that the community worships the God who brings deliverance from any hopeless situation, from whatever scarcity might threaten to bring doom or death.

While we might, with good reason, not want to live on the edge of scarcity all the time, or any of the time for that matter, such experience can form within us the spiritual discipline of thanksgiving in ways that abundance fails to do.

The refrain of the Psalmist in this Psalm and throughout the Psalter should be our refrain, too: “O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever.”

The best time we should know that we live not out of our abundance but out of a scarcity that teaches God-dependence is as we come to the table. For all intents and purposes, there’s not enough food and drink here to satisfy hungry stomachs or thirsty mouths. The perishable things our bodies crave are in scarce supply today. Just a taste is all we get. Yet, here we have the experience of abundance of any entirely different flavor, the kind of abundance that puts all of our bigger and better barns to shame.

We can call it communion; the Lord’s Supper; a remembrace of the last Supper; a holy meal. Today, we call it the eucharist, from the Greek, to give thanks. In bread and cup, we are told that we have been redeemed from trouble, gathered in from the east and west, north and south. It is not our abundance that has gotten us here, but our scarcity that has been abundantly enriched by God. Eucharist.

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; God’s steadfast love endures forever.