Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's September 26, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.

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I can still remember my parents telling me and/or my siblings at the dinner table: “Now, clean your plate. Remember, there are starving children in China who don’t have anything to eat.” I must confess I sometimes thought to myself, “well, here are my leftovers. Why don’t you mail it to them!” That wouldn’t have been such a good idea – either the saying or the mailing – but I now know my parents spoke out of a desire to foster the virtue of frugality in their children as well as furthering a sense of compassion for the welfare of others.

Being made to feel guilty or ashamed about wasteful habits is a time-honored parental technique, even though only rarely, at least in my case, did the boiled carrots and peas get completely consumed!

We all know that guilt can be a powerful motivator.

One of the texts in scripture that has evoked some guilt-feelings over time is this well-known parable, “The Rich Man and Lazarus.” In my youth, the itinerant evangelists who visited our little country church in the fall used this parable to stress the imminent, irrevocable danger of hell and damnation. When death came to both men, the humble beggar Lazarus found himself in heaven and this finely dressed rich man found himself in Hades where it was so hot that he begged father Abraham: “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.”

First, the evangelist reminded us, there was the problem of death, for it could happen at any moment, and second there was the problem of the second death, the eternal torment facing the unrepentant. There would be no second chances once you died. Thus, a decision now was crucial, since there was a “great gulf fixed,” as the old King James Version put it, between paradise and those never-ending flames. The humility of Lazarus got him into heaven, borne there by the angels, while the stubbornness and selfishness of the rich man landed him straight in hell.
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In retrospect, I now realize that the traveling evangelist never mentioned the this-worldly problem of poverty and wealth, scarcity and abundance, nor anything about the kind of guilt that his American listeners should probably have felt, for the central issue in the parable is that a rich man with the means to relieve the suffering outside his door has chosen not to do so.

The story, then, wasn’t so much about the afterlife as it was about this life, and what we do or don’t do with our abundance. It seems to imply that if you ignore the poor, then hell will be your destination, that to follow Christ you are forbidden to indulge yourself behind closed doors, that to follow Christ you have to get excited about the redistribution of wealth. As one commentator has noted, the age of Luke’s Gospel was one “marked by an inequitable distribution of wealth similar to our own [age and] Jesus knew that money mattered and that money-talk could be used to speak vividly of the clashing priorities of the culture of God with those of the present age” (Christian Century, 9/21/04, 20)

I doubt that any of us can imagine what it is like to be Lazarus, this beggar whose body was covered with sores, who was unclean both by virtue of the fact that the dogs licked his sores and made them worse, but also because, in the eyes of the religious status quo of that day, Lazarus was getting his just reward, for it was believed that poverty verified God’s displeasure and punishment for sin. Lazarus, forced to beg for mere subsistence from the crumbs usually given to the dogs, is inherently guilty, and his poverty proved it.

“This was a popular view in Jesus’ day, especially among the rich, who had no trouble finding passages of scripture to back them up. Deuteronomy 28 promises fertility, prosperity, and victory in war to those who obey the Lord. Psalm 1 makes it very clear that the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but that the way of the wicked will perish . . .Those who obeyed God were blessed with material rewards and those who did not were condemned to poverty, which worked out nicely on two accounts: It not only allowed the rich to enjoy their riches; it also allowed them to walk past the beggars who slept by their garbage cans without even looking up. Who were they, after all, to interfere with the punishment God had arranged for those poor souls? The best thing was to leave well enough alone. Let the poor pick themselves up and dust themselves off. . . . Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and the poor was not anyone’s fault. It was God’s doing” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “A Fixed Chasm,” 110).

Thankfully, we all know enough about Jesus and enough about theology to know enough to disagree with the view that poverty and divine punishment go together. We do not know what it is like to be Lazarus, out there begging on the streets, but we do know that God cares for and loves Lazarus just as much as God cares for and loves anyone else.

But neither, on the other hand, do we know what it is like to be this rich man – all stuffed up, prideful, keeping his money to himself, fancy clothes and sumptuous feasts, disdainful of Lazarus’s crying need for help.

This parable does not have to be read as a morality tale on the dangers of wealth. We are not the rich man, for otherwise we wouldn’t be here in church, participating in the redistribution of wealth every time we put some of our money in the offering plate.

I like to think that we are all, at some level, like Millard Fuller, who went to the Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia, there to be confronted by the founder of that interracial, justice community, Clarence Jordan. Millard Fuller went to Americus as a wealthy man, and he said to Clarence Jordan, “I feel a tremendous heaviness on my chest.” Wryly, Jordan purportedly responded, “ a million dollars can weigh awfully burdensome on a man.” He suggested that Fuller was a money addict, that he loved and craved money above all else. Clarence Jordan was fond of declaring: “What the poor need is not charity but capital, not caseworkers but co-workers. And what the rich need is a wise, honorable, and just way of divesting themselves of their overabundance.” Millard Fuller heard that, and went on to found Habitat for Humanity. Fuller divested himself honorably, banged down a huge door separating the rich and the poor, and began hammering on new door frames as he founded a ministry engaging thousands of volunteers in building over 100,000 homes for the working poor in America and around the globe. (quoted in “The Opposite of Poverty,” James Howell, Pulpit Resource, 9/26/04, 55).

I believe that the DNA of Habitat’s philosophy on the Gospel is quilted into the fabric of who we are as the Church here at Bethel Presbyterian. We don’t know poverty, nor do we know great wealth, but we are always looking for ways to be better disciples and stewards of what we have. We are not millionaires, but still, used in the right way, combined with the resources of others, our resources are vast, indeed.

Nonetheless, few things raise our anxiety level like money matters.

If asked at a cocktail party to respond to the question, “How much are you worth?” you would likely hear that as a question about your financial assets, pension plan, and real estate holdings. Since disclosure of one’s income or “net worth” is the great taboo topic in our society, you would decline to give an answer. For all the glamour associated with high stakes TV games shows and exposes on the lives of movie stars, we demur when it comes to talking candidly with others about our own more modest portfolios.

It is one of the great ironies of our time that we can go to purchase a car at a auto dealer and in 15 minutes they can obtain financial information about you that I, as your pastor or even your fellow Christians here, would never be told by you in a lifetime of relationships. We talk about the ideal of intimacy and trust and sharing burdens in the church, but we often bracket out any talk of the huge role anxiety about money plays in our lives.

I doubt it would even occur to us to answer the question “what are you worth?’ with reference to our spiritual value in God’s sight or our volunteerism in the life of the community or our value to a particular family or our place of worth in the Church or, for that matter, any other number of criteria that play such a critical role in defining who we are.

Jesus repeatedly teaches us that equating wealth with worth is wrong. Thus, the rich man in the parable is condemned, not because he had wealth, but because he couldn’t take his eyes off of his own “stuff” long enough to see the beggar at his door. He saw Lazarus every day, but didn’t pay him any attention.

For Jesus and scripture, money is the great conundrum, the problem that will not go away. The reading from I Timothy reiterates the dilemma that wealth posed to the rich man and so many others Jesus encountered, especially in Luke’s Gospel. This pastoral epistle states that “we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it . . . for the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (I Timothy 6:7,10). There is great truth in the hackneyed phase, “you can’t take it with you,” and I dare say that we have never seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. Or, as I am told, there is a saying in Holland, “that there are no pockets in the burial gown.”

That we don’t talk about money doesn’t mean we don’t worry about it. Most Americans worry about money constantly. Are we saving enough? Will social security be there for us when we are old? Will our aging parents in convalescent care centers clean us out just in time to make it harder for us to send our children to college? Will our children take care of us as we grow older? Can we afford a new car? Can we afford repairs on the old car? Where will next month’s mortgage payment come from?

I imagine, that despite his wealth, the rich man had insecurities just like the rest of us. Perhaps he, too, lay awake at night and wondered, “how is the economy doing?” “Will my business survive these market fluctuations?” “Can I afford to keep living like this?”

The antidote to his insecurity and, I believe, an antidote to whatever insecurities we have about our own financial situation, is found in our willingness and commitment to cultivate in ourselves and in one another, the virtue of generosity.

Generosity is the single most powerful corrective to money’s destructive grip on our lives and spirits. Generosity is a spiritual disposition, not a quantifiable percentage of income. Generosity emerges from gratitude; it is contagious, and the practice of generosity goes right to the heart of the gospel.

The rich man had not a generous spirit, and thus there seems to have been no hope for him.

If a congregation like ours has any one task that I would consider primary, it is to affirm and built up the body in acts and attitudes of generosity. Abraham Lincoln once said that he had found that people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. In similar fashion, churches will be just about as generous as they make up their minds to be.

Whether, here at Bethel, it is choosing to move ahead with the initiatives from the visioning process such as doing more to support outreach ministries in the community or making the necessary changes and repairs to the buildings to fit our program needs, or whether it is in cultivating a wider vision of our partnership with the Church in Africa as we welcome Samuel and Monica Wombugu next Sunday, we will be just about as generous as we make up our minds to be.

The crucial and always difficult thing in the Church is to know when to conserve our money and when to expend it without reserve. Lest we forget, the church is sui generis, that is, it is a one of a kind institution different from corporations, government agencies, social clubs, or other volunteer groups: the Church is neither a for-profit-business nor is the Church a financial savings institution, hoarding God’s money while there is human need all around. On the other hand, the Church is not to spend God’s money recklessly or without a real sense of discernment. It is an ongoing process to figure out how best to match our resources to what God is calling us to do and be as a people.

Suffice it to say, the answers on money matters will not come easy, and perhaps it will be doubly difficult to come to a common mind for a financial way forward for the church. But the decision to take God’s call to be generous stewards of all that we are and have demands that we do find a way forward.

The national average for giving in Protestant churches is between 2.5 and 4 % of income. According to the survey that we did several years ago as part of the visioning process, Bethel’s average giving is a little over 3% of income. Many people give beyond the church to other charities, and these charities continue to carry a heavy burden in light of government withdrawal of funds and new distributions of tax revenues. More and more, we see that people, especially baby boomers, want to attach strings to their gifts, to make sure it goes for a particular cause. In the future, the passing of the offering plate will be more and more perfunctory as people in the pews prefer to give by bank draft or credit card. Meanwhile, higher education and not-for-profit groups are creatively asking retired donors to turn over assets now with the promise of providing the donor with a lifetime income. The marketplace is a buzz with ever-multiplying and creative opportunities to tap our generosity and extend support to a cause of our endearment. If the church is going to keep pace, we too must be creative, without losing theological integrity, in answering the call to finance God’s work.

In the book Generous Saints: Congregations Rethinking Ethics and Money, the author talks about the necessity of the church raising, what he calls, “serious money.” By that phrase “serious money,” he means that our gifts of money to the Church should not be raised by guilt or by gimmicks, but rather “from a serious consideration of what we as individual Christians and as groups want to do with our time and our resources. . . If going down the Jesus Road is important to us, then the amounts we gather to do the work of the church in the world ought to be substantial.” The author also says that “seeking after this kind of serious money necessitates that our congregations be worthy of serious support.” That is, congregations need to be doing and visioning things that are worthwhile, theologically viable, worthy of proclaiming the reign of God (pp.56-57). In other words, if we are to be generous as we all are supposed to be, then we need to know that our generosity is being translated into gospel faithfulness.

That traveling evangelist of my youth had it right – sort of. It is a parable about death. It is a parable about a time of reckoning with God. It is a parable that asks us to ask questions about whether we have been generous with all that we have been given.

What would it be like to write of our lives from the future backward?

Imagine, projecting yourself forward to the day of your retirement, or anticipate reaching another milestone in your life such as a 75^th birthday, imagine yourself writing a letter to a loved one in which you look back over your life and you tell what you have done as a generous saint in the household of God.

What would you write about who you have been? Did you find your work satisfying, something that enhanced the common good, or did you do it merely for the money? Did you make time to help others: build a habitat for humanity home? Transport someone to the doctor? Stop to interact with a child? Did you pause long enough to be grateful for the little nameless acts of kindness that came your way? Did you give out of your financial resources generously and gladly?

I challenge you to find the unique story that you can live. Discover your story, share it with others in this congregation, and be transformed by it as you live. Then, though challenges surely await and insecurities will threaten to derail you, be prepared to take your place among the generous saints we are called to become.