Weed Out The Greed

 

Text: Luke 12:13-21

Focus: greed

Function: to help people have a proper attitude about money.

¹³Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” ¹⁴But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” ¹⁵And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” ¹⁶Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. ¹⁷And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ ¹⁸Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ ²⁰But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ ²¹So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

I interviewed at a Church and they said to me during the interview: “We don’t want a pastor who will tell us what we want to hear, we need a pastor who will tell us what we need to hear. We need a Pastor who is not afraid to step on our toes.”

And I did that rather well and it was accepted by the congregation, unless I preached passages like this one that deal with our relationship to our wealth and greed.

So, I beg your grace this morning as I try to be true to the teaching of Jesus and how we should apply them to our lives.

The story, we read, starts out with a man interrupting Jesus during a sermon and asks Jesus to set things straight financially between him and his brother.

The man feels cheated by his brother and since he believes that there is something Divine about Jesus, he begs Jesus for justice, just as we would beg God for justice.

We read last week that sometimes it takes persistence in our requests for justice and we should not give up praying.

And Jesus’ answer to him could be taken like this: God is not as worried about your future as you are. God provides circumstances in life to let us have opportunities to trust God our ourselves for our future.

What Jesus actually said was that it wasn’t His place to be that judge between people. And that begs a question, if it isn’t God’s place to judge between people, then where is the justice that God promises?

Was God condoning the unjust actions, if indeed it was unjust, of the elder brother by God’s inaction? And does that mean that we do that same thing? Forgiveness is a sacrifice of obedience to God.

And the question leads Jesus to a teaching moment about wealth and greed.

So, after telling the man that His mission is not to solve the financial and personal problems between siblings, he redirects the entire audience to ponder their own relationship to wealth.

He is telling this, mind you, to a crowd of people, most of them are living in crushing poverty.

He speaks of the woes of the rich and tells us not to be jealous of them, or to compare our worth to them.

Jesus makes it clear in the parable that it is God who has given the rich man his increase, not the rich man’s cleverness or ingenuity. He may have worked hard, but God did it. God has given to him the increase and it is implied that since God has been generous to him, he should be generous to others.

Brian McLaren once pointed out in a sermon that this man, by building bigger barns and hoarding the wealth for himself was breaking Jewish tradition.

If you remember the song “If I Were a Rich Man” from the Fiddler on the Roof, you would hear Tyvye dream of being able to sit at the city gate, in with the elders, contributing to the welfare of the community.

The rich man should have shared the blessings that God has given him. But he like us, was living the American dream and struck it rich.

Jesus is not condemning riches, Jesus is condemning hoarding riches.

This man had every “Right” to build bigger barns and dole it out to himself year after year and accumulate wealth. We, as Capitalists, would say that the man has a God given right to accumulate wealth. We know that the bible even suggests wise investing in several places so that we can prepare for the future. There is nothing wrong with having a retirement account.

But the passage is warning us about our relationship to our own money.

And from the perspective of the Kingdom of God, Jesus calls him a fool.

He was rich in material things and sorely lacking in the spiritual realm. And that was proven by the way he hoarded his wealth.

Our culture, what the Bible calls the culture of the world around us, or “The World,” is a value system that is contrary to the value system of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The value system of the Kingdom of heaven is for us to be generous today and trust God for the future. Rest in the promise from the Lord’s prayer that God will indeed give to us our daily bread.

I see the biggest problem of the rich fool as him not having faith to trust in God.

And riches can do that to us.

I confess that while I was writing this sermon, I stopped and went out to my car to check my Mega Millions 1.025 Billion dollar prize ticket. I didn’t win.

I am not trying to be greedy, but I have to tell you that winning would panic me because I am afraid that I would get rich and forget God.

The rich man didn’t think he needed God anymore. And therefore, he refused to be generous with his grain, or even sell it at market value. Instead, he hoarded it, therefore driving up the price and bringing harm to his community.

But we have to understand that it was not the accumulation of wealth in the first place that was this man’s sin. The wealth, remember, was the work of God.

It is what he did with the wealth that was wrong and caused God to label him as a fool.

He placed his trust in his wealth instead of in God.

And God showed him the error of his ways.

All that he planned to do with his wealth was taken away because he did not trust God with it.

Look at this part of the Sermon on the Mount from The Message. It is Matthew 6:24, 30-34:

²⁴“You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.

^30-33“If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

³⁴“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.

Seek first the kingdom of God and God’s justice and all the necessary components of our lives will be given to us.

The answer, God shows us, is to live by faith daily in the provision of God.

Resting

Text: Luke 11:1-13

Focus: prayer

Function: to help people see the expression of Faith and trust the Lord’s prayer represents

11:¹He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” ²So he said to them, “When you pray, say:

Father, may your name be revered as holy.
    May your kingdom come.
³     Give us each day our daily bread.
⁴     And forgive us our sins,
        for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
    And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

⁵And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, ⁶for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ ⁷And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ ⁸I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

⁹“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. ¹⁰For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? ¹²Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? ¹³If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

This is a sermon about the Lord’s Prayer. The passage is given to us by Jesus in response to their request for Jesus to teach them the correct way to pray.

About the only religious practice that we repeat every week is when we pray together the Lord’s prayer.

I confess, that at times when we are praying, my mind is in automatic mode and I am merely repeating words instead of crying out with my heart to God.

I used to feel bad about that, except, it is important for us to remind ourselves on a daily basis the Spirit of the person behind the prayer that is being offered.

I titled the sermon “Resting” because several phrases in the prayer remind me of our dependence on God.

“Thy Kingdom come” gets to me because it reminds me that things on earth are subject to things in the heavenly or spiritual realm and we can rest that God knows what it happening.

At Annual Conference, we talked a lot about the decline of the Western Church and that we are not exempt from the decline that is happening across the West.

At the same time, we celebrated the planting of over 13 new churches, some of them are already grown into the hundreds, by the American Hispanic, and Haitian churches.

The Church is in decline in the West, but is growing in third world countries. We wondered why.

And when we pray that prayer, and we see that God is in control in heaven, we can rest in the fact that God is aware of the decline of the Church and for some reason or other is allowing it to happen.

It isn’t a mystery to me why it is happening. I believe that the Western Church has exchanged the good news of Jesus Christ for Christian Nationalism. It is a form of Christianity, but it abandons the whole concept of peace and Justice that Jesus was killed for proclaiming.

We have to remember that the Kingdoms of men killed the Lord of Glory. And when we pray that prayer, “Thy Kingdom come,” we acknowledge that we are members of a greater kingdom and our first allegiance belongs to God’s Kingdom.

Remember, Brother Paul said that we now belong to Jesus, we were bought with the price of His blood and our lives are no longer our own. We are servants of God in the kingdom of heaven as believers.

And although he tells us to reckon ourselves as enslaved to Jesus Christ, it does not come without benefits. Instead of explaining the importance of unconditional forgiveness for salvation as Jesus does after He gives us the prayer in the gospel of Matthew. Here, He tells us that now that we belong to God, we are reckoned not as slaves but as children and God will grant to us whatever we ask according to His will.

The promise is for us to live by faith resting in the care and protection of God.

Then we get to the part of the prayer when we ask God to give us today our daily bread.

Some translations, and older manuscript copies have record it as “give us bread for tomorrow.”

Either way, it is an indication that we trust God to provide for us.

We rest in God’s provision. I remember the Jewish people traveling through the desert and every day God rained down on them bread for heaven.

He brought down twice as much on Friday so that they could collect enough for Saturday, the Sabbath and not work that day.

And a few miracles surrounded it. If they collected too much for any other day but the Sabbath, it went bad. They could not hoard or be greedy. Every day they had to rest in God’s provision.

And there is a miracle in it around greed. It was a gift from God, given by God and some people got up early and tried to collect it all and then sell it to their neighbors at a profit. If they did, again, it went bad and the little bit the latecomers were able to collect somehow increased in size to be enough. God prohibited their profiteering off of God’s gift to them.

And it reminded them to love their neighbor, look out for them and not worry if we have enough because every day we are praying that God provides for us.

There was a lesson there, greed and hoarding are a sin. God wants us to live in community caring for each other as we would for ourselves.

Of course, that isn’t easy. And it is a hard thing to preach. It is an essential part of the teaching of Jesus and we have to remember, the powers that be, the powers that control the wealth had Jesus judicially murdered to try to silence Him from preaching about communal caring and living. And remember, the sin is hoarding with the fear that we will not have enough. We aren’t living by faith.

I believe that one of the reasons people hoard is because they have known hard times and do not want to experience them again. I get that. But the lesson that Jesus taught is for us to rest in Him.

One church I pastored sat right next to the Interstate exit. I mowed up to the ramp. The head deacon live across the street and never locked his house or his barn or his garage.

The keys to his cars were on the wall of his garage, and if you needed to borrow a car, a tool, or anything, the policy was just to help yourself and return it in the same condition you got it in. The only caveat was that you were responsible for breakage, which, of you borrowed the backhoe could get expensive!

They lived by faith and trust in God’s promise to provide for them. God blessed them and they were generous with God’s blessing back to everyone who was in need.

That is just one example of what Jesus is talking about here.

The Lord’s prayer reminds me that God has called us to live by faith and to rest in the fact that God provides for our daily need.

Refreshed

 

Text: Luke 10:38-42

Focus: spirituality

Function: taking the time to invest in our spiritual lives.

³⁸Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him. ³⁹She had a sister named Mary, who sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to what he was saying. ⁴⁰But Martha was distracted by her many tasks, so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her, then, to help me.” ⁴¹But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things, ⁴²but few things are needed—indeed only one. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Well, It is good to be home. I had a great time at Annual Conference and taking a mini vacation. Thank you for the opportunity.

As always, the music at AC was refreshing and beautiful. A few times we sang a chorus by Mark Hall and Matthew West from Casting Crowns that Tara Harnbacker taught the Seminary folks and the title is: “We Were Born to Thrive.”

Here is the beginning of the chorus: “We were made for more than ordinary lives, it is time for us to do more than survive, we were made to thrive.”

The theme of that song came up over and over again at AC conference as we spoke about the fact that the Church in the West is in deep decline. We heard the story of Dan West, the Sea-Faring cowboy who was told by one of the deacons in the Church to “Have Faith” when he was talking about a way to send real live livestock to our former enemies, the Germans right after WWII was over because of the mass starvation in the land that the war had caused.

His project was one of faith in what God can do and it began what is now known as the international mission that feeds millions across the planet known as Heifer Project International.

We are small, but as the Chorus goes on to say, Love unstoppable will give us the power to overcome.

I can say that Conference was a worthwhile experience and it build my faith. Thanks for sending me.

And all of that is a great introduction to our theme this morning.

There was a difference between Mary and Martha and their spiritual gifts and passions. Mary sat at the feet of Jesus, but she would not have done that if Martha had not first welcomed Jesus into her home.

Martha obviously had the spiritual gifts of service and hospitality. Those are not to be taken lightly. Throughout the OT, we see people who are proven to be righteous and just in the eyes of God simply because they were the ones who welcomed the stranger.

Ezekiel 16:49 tells us the reason God judged Sodom and Gomorrah is this: “’Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.

Contrary to the preaching on the right that tries to point the finger at someone else, their sin was not their homosexual activity, it was the lack of concern for the poor and needy.

Because of that, God rained down fire and brimstone on them.

And we know enough of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to know that there was also a case of sexual assault demonstrating the wickedness of their actions.

And we also know enough of the story to know that three people were saved from destruction. And the thing that we see here is the proof of the righteousness of Abraham’s nephew, Lot.

The two angels, disguised as ordinary humans came into the city and Lot was the only one who invited the strangers into their house.

In a reference to the proof of Lot’s righteousness, the NT commands us to welcome strangers (Hebrews 13:2).

In Matthew 25 Jesus says that we will be either judged unworthy or worthy of the Kingdom based on how we welcome strangers. Jesus says the way we welcome strangers is the way we welcome Him. We can’t get our heavenly reward without this kind of generosity. That is why I am so passionate with you all about the US border policy. If we do want God to bless us, we will build a bigger table instead of a taller fence.

For example, I spent last week in a hotel without any maid service because there are not enough workers to fill those low end jobs. And yet, there are thousands sitting at our borders who would do that work in a minute if we would just follow the scriptures, obey the Lord, and welcome the stranger.

Anyway, I digress, but just a little. The point is, Hospitality is key to our Christian witness. It has been paramount to our Brethren history and witness as a peace Church. Without hospitality, we will not see the kingdom of God.

So Martha, in our passage is fulfilling her God given ministry while her sister, Mary, who shares responsibility for hospitality, is simply sitting at the feet of Jesus hearing the Word of God, Jesus, share the good news of God’s kingdom.

Mary’s deep spiritual hunger is exposed in this passage. She is transfixed on something that she deems much greater than any earthly needs. Jesus promises living water, and she is drinking it.

Both of them are being spiritual. Martha, in her gifts of service and Mary in her deep thirst for the words of God.

And then, we get to the conflict in the story. Martha complains to Jesus.

Martha seems to me to be projecting the importance of her spiritual gift (and remember, it is an essential spiritual gift) onto Mary.

So she complains to Jesus. I think that it is hard for Martha to see things from someone else’s prospective. I get this. I have done it often. When I have a deep passion for something, it seems crystal clear to me and then, I can’t for the life of me, fathom the logic of someone on the other side since it seems so obvious to me.

We all get this way and social medial makes it worse because it leads us to confirmation bias instead of the intellectual honesty that leads us to at least hear and understand the other point of view.

Martha was so caught up in her work that she couldn’t see the importance of what Mary was seeking after.

And Jesus lovingly explains to her, without a rebuke, that Mary also, is not in the wrong.

I titled this sermon “Refreshed.”

I gave it that title because I can identify with Mary and her spiritual thirst for the teaching of the one who embodies love in human form.

My plane companion on the trip from Omaha to Charlotte was Burt Wolf from the Oakland COB. He asked me what my favorite part of Conference was and I wanted to say it was simple the singing of our Hymn #495: Oh Let All Who Thirst.

When we sang that scripture song, I could feel the Spirit of God move in our midst. It was refreshing.

And Mary, was being refreshed by venting the passion of her spiritual thirst. Martha, was doing the same thing, but seems to have lost the benefit because of her complaining.

Remember, Mary and Martha are both deeply spiritual women. And they were women that Jesus trusted. The way the scripture records it, Jesus had three friends, Mary, Martha and their brother Lazarus.

Friends to Jesus, what a way to be known.

I hope the world around us can also see the impact Jesus’ love makes on us.