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"Fearless Giving in Fearful Times, part II"
Two hunters were lost deep in the wooded mountains. It was getting dark. The wind came up. It started to sleet. One hunter began to panic. “We’re lost. We’ll never get out of here. We’re going to die!!” The other hunter was the picture of calm. He put his rifle down, sat himself down against a tree, took out his pipe and lit it. He took a few puffs and said, “Relax, it’s pledge week at church. They’ll find us.” Last week we looked at the question, “Why give?” I suggested four reasons:
Today we’ll look briefly at “What does our money represent?” and then “How much to give?” What does our money represent? No one has stated it more clearly and succinctly than Bruce Larson: The true drama of money is that I have traded a part of my life for it. I have given my time, my energy, my skill, my wisdom, my training, my gifts to people who have in turn purchased this part of me. In terms of my allotted time I am enfeebled, I am weakened, I am diminished in some sense every time I earn money. So my money is in a real way my very life…Money is power and like all power it can be used for good or evil…Money is really another pair of feet to walk where Christ would walk, money is another pair of hands to heal and feed and bless the desperate families of the earth…Money can go where I do not have time to go, where I do not have a passport to go…If I take that for which I have traded my life and share it with others, I am, in a tangible way laying down my life for others as Jesus commanded. That’s one of the reasons Jesus talked so much about money, because he understood that it represents our very lives. As I mentioned last week, Jesus talked about money way more than we do around here. We’re not really being faithful to Jesus because we don’t talk about money enough! Now. “How much to give?” This is sometimes called “The Sermon on the Amount.” Some people ask, “What’s the average pledge?” I remember my boss at the Stillwater Church, Merle Strohbehn, fuming, “What’s with this fascination with the average? Nobody wants their children to be average students. Nobody wants to go to an average surgeon. Why do they want to know what the average pledge is? Are they content to be average givers?” By the way, I don’t know or care to know what anyone’s pledge is. One of my pastor friends decided to look at the giving records of her church. She saw that one couple was giving $18,000 a year. She thought, “Wow!” But then she started to think about it. “Their kids are through college. They both have good jobs. They SHOULD be giving $18,000 a year.” And then a couple weeks later she discovered it was a typo. They were giving 18 hundred a year and then she was mad at them. I’m afraid my reaction might be similar. On the other side of things, I don’t want to know who gives a big chunk of money because I might be tempted to be careful not to offend a big giver and I want to be able to offend everybody. Actually, I don’t want to offend anyone. I’m a people pleaser. But I want to feel free to preach what needs to be preached, so it’s better if I don’t know what anyone gives. I remember hearing the pastor of a large Methodist Church give a very good speech at a conference. In the question-and-answer period following he was asked what his congregation did for a financial stewardship campaign. He said, “Oh, we’re pretty low-key. Last year I just wrote a letter to everyone in the congregation and asked them if they weren’t already giving $3000 a year to do so.” I was dumbfounded! That’s fine if you’re “raising money” for the United Way or the symphony or something, but it entirely misses the point of Christian stewardship. It makes the less well-off feel guilty and the well-off feel like they’ve done enough. Stewardship is not one-size-fits-all fund-raising, it’s about faithfulness. The biblical answer to that question, “How much to give is proportionately, in relation to our means and our needs, and faithfully. Proportionately. For example, when I was a young pastor I was making a little less money than I do now, but I was single and had only one mouth to feed, now I have five, so as a percentage of my income I give less than I did then. How does the tithe fit into the idea of proportionate giving? The tithe is mentioned 32 times in the First Testament and is affirmed by Jesus in the gospels. The tithe, giving ten percent off the top, is for those who are in their earning years, either through employment or through investments. It is not a bludgeon to make people on limited, fixed incomes to feel guilty. Proportionate giving means you don’t have to hang your head if you gave your heart. A young couple in a previous congregation had no children yet and they each had good jobs. I presume they gave a significant amount to the church. Then one year they felt called to become Volunteers in Mission and went to India for a year. I presume their financial giving went WAY down, but their faithfulness did not. If anything, they were more faithful than the year before. Some of you have retired. While you were working you gave a significant amount of money each year to the ministry and mission of Oak Grove. But now you are on a fixed income and you have huge housing and medical bills and you can’t give like you used to. That’s OKAY. No guilt trips. Stewardship is not raising a budget. It’s how we live our lives! Let me spell it out clearly, though, for those of us not on limited, fixed incomes. As I read scripture, the tithe is not something to grow toward, to shoot for. It’s a starting point; it’s a floor. When scripture says to “bring in your tithes and offerings,” I used to think that meant the “tithes” were the ten percents and the “offerings” were the gifts of those who didn’t make it up to the ten percent level. But that was wrong. Scripturally, the “offerings” are the gifts above ten percent. The tithe was assumed. (Now, let me say that I’m not one of those pastors who insist that your entire charitable giving come to the church. There are a lot of organizations worth supporting. But I hope that the strong majority of your giving would come this way. Other people will support the Scouts and the American Cancer Society, but only Oak Grove members are going to support Oak Grove Church.) Here’s a thousand dollars. I stole this idea from Dave Kachel. (Roll out 100 ten-dollar bills taped together. They reach from the main door of the sanctuary to the pulpit.) It’s a long roll. Give ten percent to God (count out ten bills and put them in the offering plate) and there’s still a lot left. And remember we’re not just giving ten percent to God. We’re giving back ten percent to God, who gave us the whole roll in the first place. It’s a matter of attitude. “Yikes! God wants us to give ten percent of our money?!” or “Wow! I get to keep 90 percent of what God has given me!” If I were to hand you the thousand dollar roll and then a few minutes later ask you for a hundred bucks, you’d give it to me, wouldn’t you? God has give us our life and our health and abilities which allow us to earn money. But let’s not be legalistic and smug about that ten percent figure. Some of us have such long rolls that proportionate giving will mean 20-30% or more. At a Ministry of Money workshop I heard a business executive talk about how he and his wife were able to grow to the point where they gave away 50% of their income each year. One of the things that made that possible was a moderate lifestyle. They never “moved up;” they stayed in the same house for 25 years. An interesting statistic. Missions expert Ralph Winter states that “if American Presbyterians would live on the salary of the average Presbyterian minister, two billion dollars (per year) would be available, almost three times the present US expenditures for missions (by all denominations!) (Richard Foster, Money, Sex and Power, p. 168). Personally, I haven’t found generous giving to be all that sacrificial. In her wonderful little book, Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes, “Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one’s resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion. The more one gives, the more one has to give—like milk in the breast.” I’m not going to make the typical televangelist claim which leads to the “prosperity gospel.” Perhaps you saw in the paper this morning a preacher who claims that if you make a $900 donation to his ministry that within a year God will make you debt-free. I’m not going to do that, but I will say that if you are giving proportionately and faithfully that you will be okay financially and that, as I said last week, it will make you excited about your spiritual life. I will give you this challenge. I’ve done it in every church I’ve served. If you are in your earning years and you aren’t currently tithing, I challenge you to try it for three months, January, February, March. If at the end of the experiment you don’t like it, you aren’t making it financially or you don’t like what it is doing for your spiritual life, then tell me. I will instruct the church treasurer to give you your money back and I will pay you ten percent annual interest on your money out of my own pocket. No risk! (And there’s nowhere else you can earn 10% on your money these days risk-free.) I’ve made this offer for 25 years and I’ve had dozens of people take me up on it. How many times have people asked for their money back? Never. I have had people call me up years later and tell me how grateful they were for the challenge that changed their lives. Finally, remember what our money represents. God doesn’t want just X percent of our money. God wants 100 percent of our lives! Amen!
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