Rev. Kevin Pleas

Matthew 6:19-21 Stewardship Sunday, November 8, 2009

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

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A story is told about a beggar sitting by the roadside one day who asked for alms from Alexander the Great as he passed by. The man was poor and wretched and had no right to ask for anything. Yet the Emperor threw him several gold coins. One of the courtiers who saw what happened was astonished at Alexander's generosity. He said, "Sir, copper coins would be more than adequate to meet the needs of a beggar. Why give him gold?" Alexander responded in royal fashion, "Copper coins would suit the beggar's need, but gold coins suit Alexander's giving."

I have no idea whether or not this story is true. Like a lot of things you find on the web, it's hard to know what to believe. But I like that line, "Gold coins suit Alexander's giving." This being Stewardship Sunday, I've been thinking about what it is that suits our giving.

I remember a few years back reading one of my father-in-law's sermons on stewardship. He was great at bringing the subject of money down to earth in ways that made giving to the church easier for everybody. On the Sunday in question, he said to his congregation, "I have on a very special tie today. This tie has little money bags on it. Little bags with dollar signs on them. I found this tie in the Thrift Shop about a year ago, and I set it aside for today. But money is not the most important thing in the world. Love is the most important thing in the world, and that's a good thing because, fortunately, I love money."

We usually don't come right out and say it, but the truth is, we all love money, don't we? We love the things we can do with it. We love the freedom it gives us. We all know what the Bible says, that "the love of money is the root of all evil." And it's true that if we're not careful, we can become completely wrapped up in it. We can become anxious, greedy and selfish about money in ways that cause our souls to shrivel up and die.

Do you remember the old cartoons about Scrooge McDuck. He was Donald Duck's favorite penny-pinching uncle who never saw a dollar he didn't want to hoard. I remember one cartoon which showed him dialing the combination of his vault. When he got the door open, it led into a vast, cavernous room filled with money. There was even a swimming pool filled with it with a diving board. In an obvious state of rapture, Scrooge dove into the pool and literally swam around in all his wealth. It made for a funny image, but if anyone did something like that in real life it could only be tragic.

We do love money, but we don't love it for itself. We love it for what it makes possible. We love it because we see through it to the good things it lets us do. We feed, clothe, shelter and educate our children. We entertain ourselves and those we love. We travel, provide for our future and keep ourselves healthy. And we use it to support all kinds of wonderful programs that help other people and the planet we all live on. What's not to love?

The thing is, with all of the myriad possible ways there are to use our money, it can be hard to find a balance that helps us use it wisely. We need some good solid financial principles to guide us, and, being the financial wizard I am, I'd like to offer you a couple. The first principle that comes to mind is one passed down by my parents, as well as most of their generation. Mom and Dad believed in a principle of thrift, which meant that they didn't buy what they couldn't afford. Thriftiness, I believe, is one of those older core values that needs to be picked up and dusted off. I've actually been pleased lately to hear that people are beginning to pay down their credit card debt and put more money in the bank. I know it slows the economy down in the short run, but I can't help believing we'll all be better off for it eventually.

As important as it is though, if being thrifty is the only value we apply to our money, it won't end up being enough. You might say that Scrooge was the soul of thriftiness, but he took it to an unhealthy extreme. In order for our thriftiness to be healthy, it has to be balanced by another great financial principle; the principle of generosity.

Most of us know how good it feels to give money away. Most of the people who are committed to the church have already been introduced to the principle of generosity. What's been interesting to me in the last few years has been to watch how the super-rich have begun to learn this principle as well. They've begun competing with one another over how much they give. Back in 1996, Ted Turner gave a now famous interview in which he complained that the super-rich were being corrupted by the Forbes 400 list. He said, "the richest Americans weren't giving their money away because they feared falling lower on the net-worth rankings. He hoped the mega-wealthy could be induced to compete instead at giving away their fortunes."

The next year Turner gave away a billion dollars to support the work of the United Nations, and ever since then, a competition has grown up among his wealthy peers to see who can be the biggest giver. Thus far, according to Forbes magazine, as of this last August, of the 793 billionaires in the world, eleven have made it into the billion dollar donation club, with Bill Gates topping the list at something over 28 billion dollars and counting.

It's kind of amazing isn't it. Most of us normal earth dwellers can't even imagine ever having that kind of money, much less giving it away. But the thing I find fascinating about all this goes right back to that interview with Ted Turner. He was smart enough to realize that people are ego driven, and that the people in the circles he travels with had some of the biggest egos on the planet. You can always ask for contributions based on a philosophy of rising above your normal ego needs; appealing to a person's better nature, their virtuosity, the goodness of self-sacrifice, things like that. But Turner's insight was that you can get more out of ego driven people by appealing to their egos. That's fabulous! And clearly it has worked famously. When people begin trying to outdo each other in being generous, rather than in simply trying to make the biggest pile of money, the whole world benefits.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to rise above ourselves, or that most of us here are nearly as ego driven as the "billionaire's club," folks tend to be. What I'm saying is, it's a process. Generosity is something we have to learn, something we have to grow into. It doesn't come naturally to us. What comes naturally is to look out for number one, and if people are ever going to grow beyond that into a real generosity, we have to give them reasons to give that make sense to them. As Turner knew, people who are new to the idea of generosity are often asking the question, "What's in it for me?"

Now, here this morning, Stewardship Sunday in beautiful Camden, Maine, there are a lot of ways we can answer that question. The church provides comfort and inspiration, a meaningful touchstone for our lives, community and fellowship, education for children and adults, and a wide variety of ministries to people in need. It's often a fun place, energizing, challenging. It's a place that helps to enable and guide our journeys of faith and spirituality. And we're connected into a great history that traces it's origins back to the dawn of time.

When I think about it, there's an almost endless list of good reasons that the church is of direct benefit to every single one of us personally. If you ever find yourself asking the question - no, I encourage you to ask the question, "What's in it for me?" Because, if you take into account everything that we do here, everything that this church means, not only to us, but to the larger community and to the world, I believe you will find that there's a great deal in it for you.

But personally, there's another reason to be generous that I find even more compelling. Those who live by the principle of generosity very quickly discover the law of giving. And that law of giving is just this; the more we give, the more we receive. Jesus talked about laying up treasure in heaven, where the ravages of time can't touch it. But how we go about laying up treasure in heaven is something he talked about in another place. "Give, and it will be given to you." That's the law of giving. "Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back. Clearly, Ted Turner wasn't the first one who ever thought about appealing to people's egos. Why do we give, because in giving, we always receive back more than we give away. Always. That's the law of giving.

Of course, you don't have to give to the church. There is an endless procession of worthy charities that both need and deserve our contributions. But this morning, I want to make a special appeal for the church. I believe our First Congregational Church is at a critical time in its history and it's going to require people who really care about it and are prepared to sacrifice for it to assure its survival in the future.

The budget we've prepared for the coming year, as you've been hearing, has been jumped up over last year in order to make up for some of the cuts we had to make during the recession. It may interest you to know that, if we have 200 individuals or families who pledge this year, it will take an average pledge of $1600 to meet that budget. $1600 is a healthy chuck of money. No doubt about it. Believe me, I do know that many people are struggling to make ends meet and that, for some, $1600 is way beyond what you can reasonably afford. But that's true every year. We don't charge for our services. We offer them freely to everyone regardless of their ability to give. And we will continue to love you and welcome you no matter what kind of gift you're able to make.

On the other hand, for us to continue to be the church you know and love, we need to ask all those who can to practice the principle of generosity. We may have some who will be moved to give $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 or more. Who knows, we might even have someone who is dying to get into the billionaires club, and if that's the case, we'd like to do everything in our power to help them with that. Bottom line, in a few minutes we're going to ask the Stewardship committee to come forward with blank pledge cards for those who need them, and to collect those pledge cards you've brought with you this morning. We do this every year to keep the church alive, but also to give us all a great opportunity to practice the law of giving.

Let me close with one more story. St. Paul's church in London is the second-largest church in the world. It's a magnificent building, designed by Sir Christopher Wren and though I've never seen it personally, I understand it's magnificent. There's a marvelous story about St. Paul's that comes from the time of the bombing of London. During the Second World War, the church was hardly damaged at all by the bombing, although all the buildings around it burned to the ground. The reason St. Paul's survived was that hundreds of volunteers accepted responsibility to help that church survive in a time of crisis. Those people went up on the roof of St. Paul's Church during the bombings. Each one had a little bucket of water and threw it on the fire. As a consequence, St. Paul's survived the war intact. Can you imagine the courage it must have taken, to be on the roof of that church with bombs falling all around? Little incendiary bombs falling all around you; but they loved their church so much that they risked their lives that it might survive.

My friends, that's our job today. We need all of us to be something of a fire brigade to put out the fires of fear and doubt, and anxiety about the future. We need to put out those fires by practicing the law of giving, knowing that what we give will blossom into what we receive. Because no matter how much we give, we can never outgive God.

Amen