"Money Can’t Buy Me (God’s) Love"

20 11 2009

Acts 8:9-25
A Sermon preached at Southminster
November 15, 2009

Our text today takes place in the midst of both an exciting and a scary time for the new church. After the passage Ruth preached on last week from Acts 4 about testifying, the followers of Jesus do some amazing things. The authorities are not happy. These upstarts come in, working miracles and preaching of the power of Jesus. Jesus, the guy these authorities had killed.

They try to stop them.

They ask them politely to stop.

They flog them.

They put them in jail.

But none of it works. The apostles rejoice in prayer as they are being flogged. God breaks them out of jail. More and more and more people follow them.


But not everyone understands their message. And, as people are wont to do when they don’t understand someone, they assume they are wrong—it couldn’t be a problem with us?!—and they start giving negative reports about Stephen. He was full of grace and power. And he gives a fairly succinct history of the Hebrew people to the authorities when they bring him in for questioning. He probably would have been okay with that, but then he gives them one, last, paragraph. It is in Acts, chapter 7:51, if you want to follow along.

“You stiff necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors NOT persecute?

You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it!”

He literally puts them in a frenzy—they were enraged and ground their teeth at him—and they stone him. To death. And then Saul enters the text, approving of Stephen’s death. The apostles are scattered. And Saul begins ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off men and women, committing them to prison for being followers of Christ.

So, this is the context for the passage we heard this morning. But before we get to today’s text, let’s pause for a moment in prayer for those who still, to this day, are persecuted for their faith, for speaking out in testimony for what God has shown to them.

Let us pray:

God, we pray for the courage to testify, but the reality is that speaking out for you, for justice, for inclusion, for peace, for human rights, and for the other issues for your gospel compels us to advocate—the reality is that it can be dangerous. For the Christians around the globe who, even today, are at risk if bibles are found in their homes, we pray for safety and for courage to prevail. For the prophets who tirelessly call your church to remember its’ calling and face critique from within the church for their troubles, we pray for courage to prevail. Give us ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the church through the voices of your prophets. We give you thanks that we can come to worship you in freedom and peace. We are comfortable, but we seek to be alive. Give us the confidence to take your message of love, of welcome, of grace, to a hurting world in need of something only you can provide.

Amen.

So, Phillip has left Jerusalem and headed to Samaria. The crowds listened to him with great eagerness—perhaps the woman at the well had already told them about Jesus—and he healed the paralyzed and the lame and cast out unclean spirits.


And then we meet a man named Simon. He is not the same person who is Simon Peter. This Simon was a magician. He had quite a following in Samaria. They liked his magic and figured that his magic was a sign that his power came from God. And it appears that Simon did nothing to disabuse them of their mistake.

This text, at the least, should be a reminder to us to be careful of a crowd’s tendency to follow a charismatic leader. Because not all leaders are the same. Simon seemed to be gathering crowds to bring himself more power. Phillip was drawing people to Jesus. He wasn’t preaching the gospel for personal power and fame. He was preaching the gospel despite the personal risk he was facing from Saul and the authorities.

But even Simon leaves his magic show and follows Phillip. Simon knew fake signs and wonders. That was his job. When he encountered real signs and wonders, however, he left his 3 card monty on the street, was baptized, and followed Phillip to learn more about Jesus.

Phillip was so successful in Samaria that reinforcements come in to help bring the Spirit to these new converts with the laying on of hands.

Simon wanted to get some of that and he offered them money and said, “give me this power so that everyone on whom I lay my hands can have the Holy Spirit”.

Now, Simon doesn’t fare well here. Phillip says:

(Hear Beatles singing “Can’t buy me love…can’t buy me love….can’t buy me love…”)

No, Phillip actually says,

“may your silver perish with you because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money!”


And commentators through the ages don’t seem to like Simon either. Do you know what the word is for the buying or selling of church favors or offices? Simony. We even named it after our Simon of Samaria.

And maybe Simon was a bad guy. He’d been a huckster magician before Phillip showed up, after all. Perhaps he wanted to buy this power so he could use it for himself.


But I wonder if he just thought that was how the world worked. If you want something, you buy it. I mean, he has a point. There isn’t much out there that in the world that is free. I wonder if Phillip was too quick to presume Simon’s motives. Perhaps he could have said, “Simon, I know that your experience of the world is that nothing is free, that you have to buy and earn your honor, your prestige, your standing, everything. But that is yet another illustration of the power of God in Jesus Christ. The Kingdom of God functions under different rules. God’s Spirit is not something we earn. It is a gift, given freely out of the deep and unknowable mystery of God. So put away your money. Better yet, give it away, lest you think it is something on which you can rely. Money can’t buy you God’s love.”

I am sure the Stewardship and Finance Committee is shaking their heads and wondering if I remember that it is Stewardship season. And I do. I know that this may seem an odd text to preach during Stewardship season. But maybe not.


Perhaps it is good to be reminded that we aren’t pledging money so that we can have God’s power.


Perhaps it is good to be reminded that we aren’t pledging money so that we can buy God’s love or God’s favor.

Perhaps we need to be reminded, like Simon needed to be taught, that money can get in our way. That it can make us rely on our own skills and resources and keep us from relying on God.

Stewardship, while it is about building a budget, is not only about that. It is our response to this gift we’ve been given from God in Jesus the Christ.

Stewardship is what we do with what we’ve been given. We could be like Simon, pre-conversion, using our money, charisma, and talents to attract great crowds of followers and great TV ratings. Or, we could be like Phillip and the apostles of the early church, who gave all they had—including their good standing in the community and their physical safety—to follow Jesus.

Stewardship is how we say thank you to God. That is why we have the offering in the service after the sermon—because our offering of ourselves and our resources is a response to God’s word in our lives. We don’t give money in order to hear God’s Word to us. It is our response.

How different would Simon’s experience have been if he had received the power of the Holy Spirit and then offered his money in gratitude and thanks?

Maybe all the commentators are right and Simon was only following Phillip to learn his magic tricks, wanting to harness the power of God for his own ambition. If so, Phillip was surely correct to call him on his wickedness.

But I hope that he just was too new to this crazy world of grace and didn’t know any better. I hope that his prayer was sincere at the end of Phillip’s speech,

“Pray for me to the Lord, that nothing of what you have said may happen to me.”

I pray that Simon was able to get his mind around this new paradigm of grace, where the real power for change in the world is not for sale.

I pray that we can get our minds around that paradigm too. Because the lobbyists are out there buying political favor left and right. Because Hollywood and the advertising world often sell us lies about beauty, success, and power. Because we often live as if money will buy us love.

But here is the good news. God’s love does not need to be purchased or earned. It has been given to each of us, and to all creation, in the unfathomable generosity of the God who created us. How will you respond to the gift you’ve been given?


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Categories : Acts 8:9-25, Stewardship

The Word of the Lord

27 10 2009

A sermon preached at Southminster
October 25, 2009

1 Kings 17

As you may have already read in the bulletin, today is Reformation Sunday. Our Call to Worship, prayers of confession illumination, and other pieces in the service today date from the early years of the Reformation—back in the mid 16th century. Our hymns today were written by early Reformers as well.

On this last Sunday in October each year, we take a look back at our roots as Presbyterians and as Christians of the Reformed tradition. While the Presbyterian Church grew from the Reformation in Scotland, we also trace our history back to the reformers in Europe—Martin Luther, John Calvin, and many others. On Oct 31, 1517, Martin Luther had some ideas to reform his beloved church. So he nailed them to the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg. 95 ideas in a long list. And while there were people talking about reform before Luther, it is to this moment in history that we put a start date on the Reformation.


Among those ideas that changed the world and influenced our worship today was the understanding of the Priesthood of all believers—which means that we don’t believe that people like me, who are ordained to the priesthood or ministry, are holier than you are. Each of us is capable and encouraged in community to seek an experience of the Divine directly. Rather than mediating your faith through the priest (think of confessions, the selling of indulgences, etc), the reformers believed that we could pray our confessions to God. I know many of you are not fans of the prayer of confession, but try to see it as an act of liberation. Rather than have to come and speak your confessions to me, you are free to approach God yourself. This belief also led to the idea that the Bible should be read by the people in their own languages, and not just by the clergy in Latin. One of the reasons that Presbyterians are known for starting schools all over the world is because you have to know how to read in order to read the Bible. The very act of reading the Bible is a claim we make that God can and does speak to each of us.


In our Year of the Bible readings this week, we began the story of the prophet Elijah.

If you lost interest in daily bible reading somewhere back in Leviticus or Numbers, or feel as if you fell so far behind that you can’t start reading again, I invite you to pick it up with the story of Elijah, which begins in 1 Kings 17. Elijah is a pivotal figure in the history of Israel and is in the minds of many of our New Testament authors. It is to Elijah that John the Baptist and Jesus are often connected, so knowing the story of Elijah will help you understand how 1st Century Jews understood the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Additionally, the story of Elijah is just great storytelling.


As Elijah’s story begins, Ahab is king of Israel. So the united kingdom that Solomon had inherited has divided into the Northern Kindgom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

And Ahab, in the Northern Kingdom, is more evil than any king before him, which is saying something because many of the kings before him were about as evil as you could imagine. In addition to being a bad and evil king, Ahab also married Jezebel, who was Phoenician, from the city of Sidon, shown in blue at the top of the map. While there are plenty of biblical examples of foreigners being faithful and good members of society, Jezebel would not be one of them. Jezebel and Ahab are the poster children of evil, idol worshipping, unfaithful, bad, bad leaders. And Jezebel gives a face to the Biblical campaign against intermarriage. “See—we told you what would happen when you married foreign women!”

And so Elijah appears on the scene to tell Ahab, “as the Lord, the God of Israel lives, there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word”. The punishment for Ahab’s evil is a drought.

And while the drought may come because of the Word of God, note that sustenance in the midst of drought come from God as well. God instructs Elijah to a wadi, or a riverbed or canyon, where there is water. And the ravens feed him in the morning and the evening. So before we move on to the rest of this story, remember that the life of faith is not a promise that you won’t go through a drought, but when you are in a proverbial drought, God will provide. It may just be water in a nearly dry riverbed and food provided by birds, but God does not leave us alone.

Eventually even the riverbed runs dry and the Word of the Lord sends Elijah to someone for help. He goes to Zarephath, a Phoenician town near Sidon, which today would be in Lebanon. So the Word of the Lord sends Elijah to one of these foreign women the rest of the Bible keeps warning us about. And a widow, at that. Women left their own families when they were married and became a part of their husband’s family. But her husband is dead. And a woman without a man to look out for her is in trouble in that culture. This widow, as it turns out, is preparing to make her own last supper. She’s out of food and resources. She and her son are about to die from lack of food.

And Elijah asks her to bring him some water and some bread.

I’m not sure how I would feel if I were about to die and God’s prophet came and asked for my last little bit of food. I suspect my answer would not have been nearly as nice as hers.

And then Elijah gives her an answer that we normally hear from angels when they encounter humans—“Do not be afraid.” What follows the Word of the Lord’s instructions to share her food is a blessing.

Do not be afraid. You may think you are about to die, but you’re not.

Do not be afraid. You may not think you have enough to share, but you do.

Do not be afraid. God doesn’t ask you to give your last food unless God is about to do something big.

Elijah goes on to tell the woman that her jar of meal will not run empty and her jug of oil will not fail. Until the rains fall again, she will have enough to eat.

Elijah is great and all. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan. But this widow from Zarephath is my new hero. Perhaps her husband’s family would have taken care of her in normal times, but they are in a drought, the worst economic situation since the Great Depression. She’s on her own. Food stamps have been cut off.

And she’s not even an Israelite. Did you notice what she said to Elijah? “As the Lord, YOUR God, lives, I have nothing baked…” This isn’t even her God she’s helping out.

And then, in a great act of faith, she takes the last of her meal, scraping out the bottom of the jar with her spatula to get every last bit, and she takes the last of her oil, shaking the jug upside down over the pot until all of the oil has drip, drip dripped its way out of the jug, and she puts it in the oven. She didn’t have enough to sustain herself and her son, yet she trusts the word of Elijah’s God and offers that small loaf to sustain her, her son, and Elijah.

She does not say, as soon as God fills up my pantry, I’d be happy to make you some bread.

She does not say, I’d love to help you, but times are tight. Surely you understand why I can’t donate right now.

She does not say, I’d love to help you, but I don’t know you and I’m not sure what you did to end up hungry.

She doesn’t ask Elijah to explain how he got himself in this situation. He’s hungry. She feeds him. Possibly at risk to herself and her child. She doesn’t wait for proof from God either. She hears the Word of someone else’s God and she responds in faith.

We’re beginning our Stewardship Campaign and beginning to plan for the 2010 budget and the parallels are strong between this text and our lives. Our community is also in a drought. Times are tight for many people. Yet the Word of the Lord comes to us and says,

Do not be afraid. You may think you are out of resources, but you’re not.

Do not be afraid. You may not think you have enough to share, but you do.

Do not be afraid. God doesn’t ask you to give unless God is about to do something big.

Our task of stewardship is similar to what the widow of Zarephath experienced. We listen for the Word of God to come to us, even if we’re in the midst of an economic drought. Then we trust the Word of God and go out on faith to do something important. Because Stewardship happens in that order too. We don’t wait for something great to get started and then say, “okay, I’ll support that”.

Stewardship is an act of faith, of saying, “Here’s what I’ll contribute to what God is dreaming to do with Southminster in our community”. And then, once your pledges are in, the Session can build the budget.

We have to bake our loaves even before God has filled the jars with meal and the jugs with oil.

By committing to pledge to Southminster, each year you are like the widow from Zaraphath, answering God’s call to be a witness of faith in this community.

If every member of Southminster pledged what they could pledge, do you know what we could do?

Many of you have talked about wanting to help our youth program grow, but that takes resources. People have dreamed about fixing up our aging facilities, but that takes resources. Ten percent of our budget currently goes to mission work in the church. This year we’d like to increase that to support more local agencies. Think about the people in our community who could be fed, and clothed, and supported as they get back on their feet and out of homelessness. Each of us, individually, may be able to just do a little. But when we respond to God’s call, our jars will never run empty and our jugs will always have oil.

But as we read the text, we realize that the feeding isn’t the real miracle. At least it isn’t the only one. What the work of nourishment does is set in place the chance for new life.

Because the widow’s son falls ill and dies. But Elijah cries out to God, using his own words to seek a miracle. And the Lord listens to Elijah and life returns to the widow’s son.

All of our work in stewardship, planning, and administering the work of the church is not just so we can say we have planned, budgeted and worked. It is so we can be a place of miracles. Who knows what God may do yet in this place! When the widow invited Elijah into her home, her son wasn’t ill. She didn’t let him so he could heal her son. This miracle was something she couldn’t even imagine she would need.

What, yet, may God do for this place? Let us listen for the word of the Lord in the midst of our lives, so we may respond in faith. And may we be on the lookout for miracles that will result. Amen.


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Categories : Ahab, Elijah, Jezebel, Stewardship, Widow of Zaraphath

Southminster’s Got Talent!

9 11 2008

A Sermon preached November 9, 2008
Southminster Presbyterian Church

Matthew 25:14-30

Before we can really dig into this parable, we need to clear up what the word “talent” means here. It is a Greek word and was a unit of measurement in many middle eastern cultures. One talent was not just one coin. A Talent was what a laborer would earn in 16.5 years. So in ancient terms or in today’s terms, we’re talking about a lot of money. It might have been more helpful had the translators said, “A man, before going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave two and a half million dollars. To another, he gave one million dollars. And to a third he gave five hundred thousand dollars.”

Does that change the story for you at all?

It sure changes it for me.
To start with, it gives me a different appreciation of the Master. Anyone can leave people with $10 or $20 to invest. And while it would be nice to get it back, if you lose $10, you still might have some other options. But this master didn’t hand out $1, 5, and 10. He gave out, conservatively, $4 million.
That’s quite a gift. Staggering, really. It is quite a responsibility. If the investments don’t work out, the master is the one who has lost. His relationship with these servants must be unique. You wouldn’t just hand $4 million dollars over to servants if you didn’t know them well enough to know if they were going to leave town with your money. He clearly trusted these servants with something of great value.

Putting this parable in modern economic terms also gives me a different appreciation of the servants who receive the gifts. If I were entrusted with $1 million to invest, I’d be humbled by the trust that had been placed in me. It would probably make me reconsider my relationship to the master and my appraisal of my own abilities—“I didn’t know he thought I was capable of this. Wow. I wonder what else I might be capable of?”
What could you do if someone placed that kind of trust in you? Could you live into bigger dreams for yourself?

Two of the servants seemed to do just that. They took the talents they’d been given and they immediately went out and invested them. When he returned, they had doubled his money.

I confess that it has been hard for me to read this text while the stock market keeps falling. Because, I’ve been wondering, how do you DOUBLE an investment without doing something very RISKY? I don’t think you can. What did they invest in? The Damascus Stock Exchange? Camel stock futures? Olive oil? Credit Default Swaps? Housing developments on the Dead Sea coast?
Whatever it was, these servants took risks to double their investment.
We have seen these risks playing out rather badly lately. And so when we see the third servant, the one who buried his talent in the ground, we likely have some compassion for him. He may not have taken any risks, but he didn’t lose the money. Right?

I think the parable I’d like to see is the one where the man leaves his servants with the money, goes on his trip, and while he’s gone, the economy goes down the tube. How would he have responded to the servants who had gone out there and made those risky investments had the investments not made money? What if they had taken the gifts they’d been given, gone out on a limb to do something new, and then failed?
Perhaps we can see the answer in the parable we already have. Did you notice the response from the third servant when the man came back? “Master, I knew you were a harsh man—reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter seed. So I was afraid and I went and hid your talent in the ground.”
What?
Who’s he talking about? The same “harsh man” who just left him with $500,000?
The other servants didn’t say anything like that. And his responses to the first two servants—“well done good and trustworthy slave. You have been trustworthy in a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your master.”—those responses don’t seem to support the third servant’s claim.
But, for whatever reason, two of the servants seem to have a good relationship with the master, and one of them does not. The first two servants were comfortable enough in their relationship with the master to respond to his gift, to respond to the task he gave them, with confidence. Despite the risks. And, I suspect that had they lost everything when the Jerusalem Stock Market crashed, I think his answer to them might have been the same. “Well done good and trustworthy slave. Enter into the joy of your master.”
Because, of course, this parable isn’t about money. It is about these other staggering gifts we’ve been given. These talents, as it were. Interestingly, because of the usage of this word in this parable, the Greek word talent is carried over almost intact to mean “a natural aptitude or skill”. There may be other examples, but this is the only one I know of where the figurative use of a term by Jesus becomes a new word with new meaning. The word talent moves from a staggering amount of money to become a description of the gifts we’ve been given.

Let’s rephrase the parable again, in non-economic terms.
“For it is as if God summoned God’s servants and entrusted his belongings to them. To one he gave the gift of hospitality. To another, he gave the gift of evangelism, and to a third, he gave the bread of life and the cup of salvation. The one who received the talent of hospitality went out and invested the gift by being welcoming and providing safe space for those she met along the way. The one who received the gift of evangelism went and invested the gift by sharing the good news of the Gospel and invited many others to join him. The third servant took the gift of bread and wine and buried them in a hole.
When God returned, the first servant shared stories of how she had overcome her fear of being rejected and how, as a result, the gift of hospitality had made a difference in the lives of the people with whom she had shared it. The second servant shared stories of how God’s confidence in him had allowed him to overcome his fear of public speaking and how the gift of evangelism had allowed him to share the good news of the gospel with others, that they might also know the love and grace of God. To both of these servants, God said, “well done good and trustworthy servants. Enter into the joy of your master.”
The third servant came to God and said, “I didn’t know you well enough to overcome my fear, so I buried the gifts you’d given me and put them in a hole so nothing would happen to them. They’re a little dirty, but here they are.”
“You wicked and lazy slave,” God replied, “I’d given you gifts of life to share—what good were they going to do in a hole in the ground? If you weren’t going to invest them in other people, you could have at least passed them on to someone who would have.
“For to all those who have, more will be given and they will have an abundance. But from those who have nothing, who have buried their gifts in the ground, even what they have will be taken away.” (Thanks to Anna Carter Florence in Lectionary Homiletics for this rephrase of the parable.)

Friends, the good news is that God has given us all gifts beyond measure. I may not know what your talents are, but I hope you have a sense of them. And I hope you notice the talents in others. Often we don’t recognize how our talents can be invested until others suggest things to us. And I pray that you are cultivating and sharing your gifts for the betterment of the Kingdom of God.
Because, for you to not share your talents is the equivalent of burying them in the dirt.
And we all have reasons when we dig those holes. We’re busy. We’re afraid of failure or rejection. We don’t think our talents are worth sharing. We think other people are more talented. We don’t think it matters—to others or to God.
But this week, I invite you to lay down your shovel. I invite you to consider that your talents do matter—to this community and to God. Where would we be if people hadn’t shared their money and talents with this community? We wouldn’t have this building, or a choir, or Sunday school teachers, or the flower beds weeded, or bulletins typed, or any of this. Where would our community be without churches and individuals to support the homeless shelters, to provide thanksgiving dinners for children, to send shoeboxes to children around the world so that all children will receive a gift on Christmas, to offer assistance to refugees who are trying to resettle, to provide free medical and dental care to those who can’t otherwise afford it? It would be a sad world, indeed. A world full of buried talents.

I’m not, in general, a big fan of “reality” kinds of TV shows. And I don’t watch American Idol or America’s Got Talent, but after reading this parable, I think it is good that those kind of shows are on the air. Because those shows are FULL of people who want to share their talents. And they share their talents with JOY. And not all of them succeed, because in our world, we like to narrow things down to “winners” and “losers”. But I think that if God were the judge of one of those shows, God would be sitting right there next to Simon, Randy, and Paula, and would thank each and every one of those contestants for showing up and for sharing the joy. God would give a thumbs up and a high five to all of them. Because God looks at talents differently than we do. They aren’t commodities with a limited supply and demand. They are gifts. Gifts that are only of value when shared with others. And gifts that only expand once they are shared.

We are wrapping up our stewardship campaign this morning. In a little while, we will all walk forward to place our offerings, our pledge cards, and our Time and Talent forms in the baskets. I realize that many of you have already turned in your pledge cards, and I thank you for doing that. But I still invite you to walk forward. Because, really, it is ourselves we are offering to God.

“For to all those who have, more will be given and they will have an abundance.”
May it be so. Amen.


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Categories : Matthew 25:14-30, Sermon, Stewardship, Talents