Sermon on the Amount: "Cash Down" Ethics

Sermon, 8/22/10 (Sermon on the Mount, 4 of 6). Matthew’s Jesus bases his teachings on a profoundly first century Jewish ethic: Our actions shape our affections, not vice versa. Per a classic example of this ethic – “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also” – our freedom from hoarding sets us free to trust God …

Scripture     Matthew 6:19-34

The Sermon on the Amount: “Cash Down” Ethics

Within one hour of leading worship at the close of a Vacation Bible School several years ago in Ann Arbor, I found myself on the receiving end of a lesson from my son, Drew.

We were driving home when we passed one of his favorite restaurants. I knew what was coming next: “Dad, let’s eat lunch here.”

“No,” I responded, “We’re going home to eat.”

As he so often does, Drew kept the conversation going with the question dreaded by parents everywhere: “Why?”

Being somewhat seasoned in this child’s Socratic methods, I gave the most honest and broad and simple answer I could think of at the same time.

“We’re eating lunch at home so we can save money for you to have the opportunity to go to college someday,” I stated.

Silence. There, I thought. Done with that one for now.

Not so fast, Dad. The silence was but a pause. From the mouth of our seven-year-old: “Why don’t you just go on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ and win a million dollars? That will get me to college!”

So, we talked some more (!) Talked about how that was hardly possible, given a lot of things. But I don’t think I really convinced him that day.

But Drew’s response did do a number on me. For it made me aware more than ever before that there must exist some purpose behind my legendary tight-fistedness if I didn’t wish for money – or my insecurity over the perceived lack thereof – to enslave me. There must be some spiritual and social purpose – and they are of one piece, scripture assures us. There must be some spiritual-social purpose … lest I place my trust in my physical net worth, rather than the worth I am given by the one in whom I trust.

Today’s message is about two things: treasure and trust. Matthew’s collection of Jesus’ teachings known as the Sermon on the Mount now moves beyond an invocation of blessings and various communal fulfillments of God’s law and, last week, the most radical freedom of all – how we each individually live with God – to a series of teachings that one wag calls “the sermon on the amount”.

Part four of our six-part Sermon on the Mount series can be summed up by a simple question that provided the name of an old Groucho Marx game show: Who do we trust? Or perhaps, it’s what do we trust? And the most direct response to that question today, perhaps, comes in the form of a two-phrase teaching, familiar to us all: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

And yet, perhaps because of its very familiarity, we can easily overlook the true significance of this teaching.

If you were around during our financial stewardship season last fall, and paying some attention, you might recall that teaching – “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” – served as our 2010 pledge theme.

And you may recall a riff I played, based on that theme. An insight I picked up at a presbytery workshop several years ago in Detroit, led by our denomination’s Associate of Stewardship, a fellow named David Johnson.

Johnson led off the workshop with this observation: “Notice that Jesus doesn’t say, “For where your heart is, there your treasure will be also.” He said it the other way around! Too often, he continued, our financial stewardship drives read this teaching in this backward way. Therefore, we skirt the important issue of money as much as possible – assuming that it will naturally flow from where our heart, the seat of our emotions, is – rather than dealing squarely with the fact that our heart is shaped by the financial actions we take.

In short, Jesus understood money and possessions in the same Jewish way he understood all other spiritual matters: Our actions shape our affections … and not the other way around. Act as if, if need be – do what we know to be the next right thing to do – and, more often than is generally expected, the feelings eventually follow.

For where our treasure is, first … there our heart will be also. One could call this “cash down” ethics: taking actions serving God and God’s social purposes, which then brings our hearts around. Helping us all overcome what Albert Einstein once called the most vexing problem of the contemporary world: mixing the means with the ends.

Easier said than done. For how easy it is to serve wealth when we think we’re serving God! How easy it is these days, with kindly charlatans such as Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer flooding the TV airwaves, for us to confuse abundance theology – serving God’s blessings to us through the gift of money –with prosperity theology – serving money through the imagined blessing of God. How easy it is to get God’s abundance and our prosperity confused! So much of it thanks to a pernicious and daily form of fear that Matthew’s Jesus then addresses: a fear known as worry.

Amy and I each know, from our respective experiences in the Congo and Central America, and we both know from our time ministering with refugees in Tucson, of the curious, even paradoxical phenomenon that those who possess less are often less possessed by how they live. These are the ones, mind you, who eke out a subsistence living – those whom Jesus particularly has in mind when he tells them to implore, and not ask, God to “Give us this day our daily bread.” We cannot – and should not – romanticize their poverty. And yet, the dispossessed in the world are also the ones who are most prone to glorify and enjoy God by throwing all-day fiestas and three-hour worship celebrations, without regard to cost or time or other worldly calculations. (And you thought Worship was ending by 11 today …)

I have learned much from our distant neighbors to the South about how to move beyond tomorrow’s worries to a celebration of the kingdom, or commonwealth, of God today. Remember the kingdom of God – or, as Matthew’s Jesus has it, the kingdom of heaven, because as a good Jewish Christian he wouldn’t mention God’s holy name? After all, the kingdom is the Good News, the gospel, that Jesus preached – not himself.

I have also learned how to move beyond a fuzzier worry-focus to a clearer kingdom-focus from folk such as Mike, an ex-crack addict and gang member who lost all his worldly possessions in a fire at an area halfway house years ago, but remained sober through it all thanks to the community of spiritual care around him and his own faithfulness to it.

And I’ve learned more about how to move from treasure to trust and beyond worry in the process from the story of a Haitian man named Wilkens. Eager to practice his English with an American health worker in Haiti who was equally eager to practice his native Creole, Wilkens is not a typical Haitian. The fact that he has finished high school places him among the minority. Of the half of Haitian children who do attend school, fewer than one-third will complete sixth grade. Also, he is atypical because his family owns some land, and he is able, unlike so many other fathers, to stay at home and support his family. But Wilkens is typically Haitian because he has little opportunity for advancement. He also has new family burdens: caring for a father with a bad heart and arranging the details of his younger siblings’ education, for starters.

Not too many years ago, Wilkens and his American friend were sharing language lessons through the one book they had with translations in both English and Creole: the Bible. While going over the phrase in our scripture today, “Consider the lilies of the field”, Wilkens asked his friend, “Do you believe this?” Did he believe that God cares for humans the same way as God cares for the birds of the air and the flowers of the field?

“Well, Wilkens,” his friend stammered, “I don’t think it is as easy as this makes it sound. Clothing and food don’t just drop down from the sky – we still have to work for these things. I think the point is not to worry.”

Wilkens waved him off. The American had missed the point. “I know we must work. I mean, do you believe God gives everyone what they need to live?”

The American took a moment to look around at the surroundings. They could see almost the entire valley. Across from them, the hill was covered in patchwork fields and terraces, and where the peasants had recently tilled, the soil was a rich, dark umber. They could see the first traces of green pushing up in places, and knew these would become the beans and the corn that people would survive on in the coming year. Off to the left, though, there was nothing but erosion – huge slopes of red earth unrelieved by a single spot of green grass. The water run-off had marked the land with deep valleys and rivulets.

The American wondered which would prove more powerful in shaping the future of this valley – the carefully arranged terraces or the wild rivulets of erosion.

He could see people on footpaths snaking in between the fields and houses. Men were returning from their fields, their bare feet caked with dirt, their hoes or machetes slung over their tired shoulders. Women were climbing the slopes with backs held straight under huge baskets of freshly washed clothes. Children dressed only in oversized T-shirts were outside playing.

Wilkens was right, the American thought. It is not a question of work or diligence here. And yet the Haitian man’s question – “Do you believe God gives everyone what they need to live?” – hung in the hot air and in his heart and mind. Would these people receive all they needed to live?

“I’m not sure, Wilkens,” the American finally said. “What do you believe?”

Wilkens moved his finger to the title the translators had given the passage: “Place your trust in God.” He lightly tapped the sentence with his finger, and then raised his head to give the American the full force of his gaze.

And Wilkens said, “I believe in this part.”¹

Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.

¹David Williamson, “Making Do”, in “The Christian Century”, June 29, 2004, pp. 8-9.

Charge and Blessing …

Perhaps when we put our treasure in serving God we can then put our treasure toward serving God.

Go out into the world in peace – to love and serve our servant Lord.