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Answering Phil

2 Corinthians 9:6-15
Sunday, November 18, 2007

The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who
sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each of you must give as you have made up
your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And 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. As it is written,
“He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever.” He who
supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for
sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every
way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us; for
the rendering of this ministry not only supplies the needs of the saints but also
overflows with many thanksgivings to God. Through the testing of this ministry you
glorify God by your obedience to the confession of the gospel of Christ and by the
generosity of your sharing with them and with all others, while they long for you and
pray for you because of the surpassing grace of God that he has given you. Thanks be
to God for his indescribable gift!

Now, before I get going on this sermon, I want to repeat the words Jesus says most
often in the Gospels, something you probably need to hear before I begin my sermon
today, on this Pledge Sunday—Do not be afraid. Yep, Jesus says those set of words
more often than any other in the Gospels, which says something about how the earliest
disciples—and us—live our lives in fear. But I say this—Do not be afraid—because I
know people always fear the heavy handed stewardship Sunday sermon, and I can’t tell
you how many times I’ve heard people complain that their church, or usually, the
church they used to attend, was always asking for money. Do not be afraid, friends, it
will hopefully not be that kind of sermon. The reality is that most of us have our pledge
cards filled out and I don’t think any preacher or stewardship committee thinks that you’
re going to be scratching out pledge amounts in response to some fabulous sermon or
some well-put together stewardship program. It doesn’t happen that way, and it never
has happened that way, as far as I can tell. Most of us have figured out whether or not
we want to or are able to meet the challenges of this year’s upcoming budget, and no
smooth-talking preacher is going to change our minds. Now, I don’t really think of
myself as a smooth-talking preacher, but I have often joked that if working in churches
doesn’t work out for me, I’m going to buy me a white suit, maybe get a toupee, to
supplement my thinning hair, and start a television ministry, maybe offering blessed
healing handkerchiefs for a small donation to the mighty ministry I’ll be doing over the
airwaves. Then, I will finally have that huge mansion in St. Joe that I’ve been lusting
for, that mansion that is my rightful payment for doing God’s work!

I often think that my little joke there is what people fear the church has been or has
become—a place where matters of money, and sometimes even greed, overtake the
mission of Christ’s call to share the Good News of God’s love. Money is often the
reason why churches make stupid decisions, like Protestants who, in the early eighties,
and earlier, kept passing on abusive pastors from one church to another whom they
knew had a habit of having sex with the congregants in order to avoid costly lawsuits
from the accused minister, and the Catholic Church, who kept hiding the sexual abuse
by some of its priests a secret in order to protect the buildings and bank accounts of
the church. There is a reason why people are cynical about the church, whether it’s
the church on television, or the church down the street—it all seems to come down to
money, it seems to those cynics, like everything else in this world. And I wish I could
immediately come to the defense of the church, but I can’t, at least not immediately—a
little humility before our critics would probably do us and the church universal a great
deal of good.

But Jesus and the church—which is us, really, collectively, asking ourselves to support
each other financially in our work together—Christ and the church has been receiving
criticism about asking for money for a long time, even in the early first century. Christ is
taken to task by Judas for not selling the perfume the woman puts on his feet right
before his death—the perfume that could have been sold to help the poor, is Judas’
charge, though his motives for such “high mindedness” is not so clear, since he held
the common purse, and their had been questions about how honestly he was handling
the money in the first place. In our passage, you have the tail end of a response that
Paul is giving to the church of Corinth, writing to them about their failure to give as
generously as he thought they should. Paul had been given to permission by some of
the elders of the church in Jerusalem for his ministry to the Gentiles, to the non-Jews,
those folks that he would eventually come to be associated with, in contrast to Peter,
who saw himself as reaching out to his fellow Jews. All that the elders of Jerusalem
asked is that he remember the poor, and what scholars assume is that these poor were
the believers in Jerusalem, the ones who we are told in Acts 2, sold everything and
share everything in common as a community of faith. By the time Paul reaches them,
the community is broke, or at least does not have enough work and funds to care for all
those who could not work, or give as liberally as they had done in the past. Paul
agrees, and so he issues a church wide appeal, including an appeal for money to the
church at Corinth, a congregation he had helped nurture in the past.

But the embarrassing thing for Paul is that the stronger, and perhaps more financially
stable congregation in Corinth, has not given much—the offering started off strong, but
faded somehow—you know how it goes—and that failure really worried Paul. I think its
because the Corinthians feared what many of us fear when consider what to give to
others, and that is whether or not there will be enough for us after our giving to others—
will we have enough in the bank if we are padding out the bank accounts of the church,
or our favorite charities, or our niece in college, or wherever? That is the concern, the
natural fear that they and many of us have, when we give generously to others and to
the places we care about. But Paul writes to them with boldness, with the enthusiasm
of a development or fundraising director at your favorite non-profit charity—he knows
they can do better, especially for the mother church, for the starving of Jerusalem
church, who were suffering tremendously during the deteriorating situation under
Roman rule right after Christ’s death and resurrection some decades earlier.

Paul’s belief that they could do better was probably rooted in knowing that the
Corinthians had much more than their starving brothers and sisters in Jerusalem, but it
was also rooted in his belief in the logic of the universe, a spiritual logic that has its
roots in nature. If we plant our fields with little or no seed, we will reap little or no
crops. If we live our lives with little or no generosity, we will reap little or no generosity
from the universe. And it’s interesting that the word he uses for “gift” is also translated
as “blessing” in the Greek—they are one and the same for Paul, gifts are blessings,
and blessings are gifts. And the passage also makes clear that by giving our gifts to
others in need, we are also expressing our thanksgiving to the First Giver, the Giver of
all that is. The logic is there, believe it or not—we cannot reap what we do not plant in
this world, and that is a difficult thing to hear, at least for me, because I spent a lot of
my early years in the faith not doing a lot of sowing or any sowing, at least financially, to
be honest. I mean, I gave my time, but money, at least for me, was a hard thing to give
away, because it represented security for me—if I had enough, I would be safe. For
others of you, it may not be money that you struggle with sowing in this world—it may
be time or presence—we all struggle with something, something we don’t want to plant
in the soil of other people lives. My parents had a lot of money during the seventies,
and we lived very well, but with the eighties and nineties, with the oil bust, that security
went away, and we as a family struggled with not having enough, or at least thinking we
didn’t have enough. I remember one day years ago I was sitting at our dining room
table in Meridian, MS, and my father and I were having some sort of conversation about
my future as a minister. I had finally decided to actually go through with my plans to
seek ordination and serve in a parish setting, and I remember him being supportive, but
he did say something I have never forgotten—“I just wished that God had called you to
something that would make you some money!” We both laughed and I sometimes wish
that was the case as well, but I’ve come to think over the years that God has been
pushing me beyond the experience of my early years, when my family and I felt as if we
didn’t have enough, and that God was pushing me to trust in the Divine that had gotten
us through those difficult times rather the money we thought would make everything
OK. And to be frank, I think that if I made $150,000 a year, I would be one of those
people who trusted the gift rather than the Giver, and I think it would have destroyed
me inside over the long haul.

Clare Boothe Luce was once our ambassador to Italy. While she was living in a
beautiful 17th-century Italian villa, she began to notice that she was always tired. She
lost weight, and seemed to have less and less energy. She sought medical care, and
after a period of intense testing it was discovered that she was suffering from arsenic
poisoning. Everyone on her staff was given a security check, but it was soon
established that none of her staff was trying to poison her. Which left the question:
Where was the poisoning coming from? Finally, they found the cause: It was the ceiling
of the bedroom. There were beautiful designs of roses, ornately done in plaster relief,
and they were painted with an old paint that contained arsenic lead. A fine dust fell from
the roses, and Mrs. Luce was slowly being poisoned in her bed by the dust from the
ornate roses. Now, that would be me, my friends, I would have choked to death on too
much, and I would have trusted the security rather than the one who gives us real
security in this world.

But maybe that is you as well, maybe what you think will keep you safe is also
suffocating you, killing you as well, at least destroying you inside. I don’t know—we all
struggle with generosity, worrying about we give or don’t give, worrying about what
others give or don’t give. Something is always holding us back from being that cheerful
giver that Paul speaks of here, the one who gives with no reluctance, or under no
compulsion, and with no judgment about what others can or cannot give. There is
always some challenge we have to meet when it comes to generosity in our lives—and
its not just the challenge of being financially generous with the church—it may be the
challenge of being generous with our time, with our effort, with our families, with our
prayers, with our study, whatever. What we trust in this world is a measure of who we
are, at least it is according to Paul, and I think our challenge is to look at who and what
we are trusting in this world, and to really ask the question about who is the One
ultimately worthy all the trust we can muster in this world, the one who gives us
everything, the blessings, the gifts that come our way in terms of finances, and friends,
and community, and even church, despite some of its many failures to live up to its
mission in this world. They say that you get what you give in this world, and so far, so
far, I have found that to be true, but its true only in so far as the heart is in the right
place, if the one giving gives the way Paul asks those Corinthians to give, with our
heart wide open to the ways our sowing, our planting, our giving in this world, will be
harvested, will be reaped, will be rewarded in this life. Paul is right, I think, we will be
enriched by our giving, and, in return, we will be given what we need in this world,
which, of course, is something different than what we want, different even from what our
loving fathers and mothers want for us. Even well-meaning fathers can get it wrong,
about what will make us safe in this world, but trusting the Father, this One who is also
our Mother, that makes us safe in this world, no matter the balance of our checkbooks,
and no matter how scary the challenge is to match God’s generosity with us with our
own generosity to the church and to the rest of the world that God has so lovingly
created. Amen.