Sermon: Good Measure, Pressed Down, Running Over

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Good Measure, Pressed Down, Running Over

By Charles Rush

November 2, 1997

we enter into the pledge season, someone sent me a cartoon from the ‘Wizard of Id'. A woman is coming out of church, side by side with her husband, saying to her minister ‘I apologize for my baby's crying in church, Reverend, but she is teething.' ‘No problem' the pastor replied, ‘but why is your husband crying?' ‘Oh' she said, ‘he's tithing'.

Clearly, the whole notion of giving to God and charitable giving in general, is causing a lot of people in this generation to cry. I called a Rabbi friend of mine last week and asked him if he had any rabbinical stories on stewardship. The phone went silent for a minute and then he said ‘in general or for this generation'. I said ‘for this generation', figuring that his 30 years as a Rabbi would enable him to make a precise point. This is what he said.

Once upon a time there was a man who had nothing. God gave him ten apples. God gave the first three apples to eat. God gave him three more apples to trade for shelter from the heat in the summer and the cold in the winter. Then God gave the man three more apples to trade for clothing to wear. The last apple God gave so the man might have something to give back to God to express his great gladness and gratitude at such divine provision. But this tenth apple looked so luscious, and the man reasoned that God owned all the other apples in the world and how could God miss this one measly apple, so he ate the tenth apple, and gave back to God the core.'

I am sad to say that the statistics bear this out. A recent study showed that this generation of Americans is over 200% richer than we were in the 30's- and that is after taxes and adjusting for inflation. Yet they are giving a smaller portion of their income to churches. The Lily foundation studies 30 million members of 29 different denominations and found that giving has steadily declined from over 3% of income to about 2.5% of income as a national average. Now I want you to stop for just a minute and think? Take your income from last year, even line 35 on your income tax, and see that number in your head. What is 2.5% of your income from last year? Hold that thought for a second.

As I mentioned, charitable giving in general is on the decline in our country. The Gallup poll has charted a declining trend for over a decade. Last month they reported that only 69% of American households gave to any charity last year- the lowest rate of giving in eight years, and down from 73% the year before. (Dallas Morning News, 10/10/96). I might point out that this comes in an era of general economic strength and stability.

Here is some good news. Folks who attend church every week or nearly every week give the highest percentage of their income to their church and they volunteer more hours of service than anyone else.

And here is some bad news. The Gallup poll reported that a full 25% of all church members in our country give nothing to their churches. They are content to simply download the free software, skirt around tech support, and never get the license. Bootlegging is one thing when you are a graduate student, but it's no way to do life.

And you may want to know this, average church pledges for the whole country run around $1300/yr. Now here is the deal. The average income in our town is about 4 times the national average income for all Americans but there are a whole lot of people in this room that give less than the national average for tithing. What would that mean for us? If everyone giving below the national average came up to the national average, and everyone over the national average stayed the same, we would have $60,000 in the budget and we wouldn't be deferring repair projects or having these annual debates between cutting mission, cutting repairs or running a deficit.

So I ask you again, what is 2.5% of your income?

Robert Wunthow, the sociologist at Princeton University, has noted recently how reluctant we are to talk frankly about money. He says that middle-class and upper middle-class Americans hold onto certain powerful, if unacknowledged, taboos. Says he: ‘What people are most reluctant to discuss are their salaries, their personal net worth, and their debts.' These matters are ‘protected in a cloud of secrecy.' As Wunthow says, ‘it all adds up to ‘not talking about money'.

We are equally reluctant to discuss our total pattern of giving. How often do we talk to anyone else (besides our spouse perhaps) about the quandaries inherent in giving? Who helps us face our stinginess? How do we become critical of the unimaginative and predictable causes that we support at the same level year after year? It is somewhat ironic that as a congregation we are often leaders in talking about so many issues from homelessness to sexuality to sexual orientation to euthanasia but on the issue of money are like Sargent Schultz on Hogan's Heroes ‘I hear nothing. I see nothing. I know nothing'. While there may be some good reasons for being so quiet, frankly the most obvious one to an outsider would be our sheer embarrassment over the paltry sum we part with.

What a contrast with our marvelous and positive passage from Holy Scripture this morning. This is one of my favorite lines in scripture. Luke is actually talking about the function of forgiveness but I think it applies to a whole range of spiritual issues. Jesus says if you forgive others, you will also be forgiven. If you bless others, you will be blessed. If you empower and lift others up, you will be lifted up. If you pray for others If you give your money to charity and through the church to God, ‘it will be given to you; good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over in your lap.' It is an image of super-abundance like Father Christmas bedecked in every good food and jolly beyond the thinking of it. A friend of mine was once hiking out west across the desert without enough water and he became thirsty and hours later very thirsty and by the time they got to the ridge of the mountain hours later sill, he was almost panicked. On the top of a ridge, they found a spring that flowed into a stream and they dropped their packs and jumped straight in clothes and all. There is nothing quite like it. Being submerged in grace, having it just poured over you, more than a container could catch, just breathtakingly washed in it.

Jesus teaches us that it takes a conversion of the heart, but we have the power to open the channels of spiritual power all around us. In a world of hostility, we can open a spiritual floodgate by loving. In a world that keeps score and settles resentment with vindictiveness, we can open a spiritual floodgate by forgiving. In a world where ‘what is mine is mine' we can open a spiritual floodgate by giving to others freely. We can always wait for someone else to pick up the ball and get things started. But we know that the world is not going to become a loving place, a forgiving place, a giving place, except that we actually do it.

We know this about the spiritual realm. We know that we have to be the ones to do it. But when it comes to money a good percentage of us stop trusting and become cynical. People think, that is not a spiritual principle, that's just a ploy to get me to support their cause. And we start to think that we can have all of the spiritual blessing that we need without really being financially responsible. Somebody else will cover it. We just don't see giving is part of spiritual grace. We just don't believe that when we let money go that it will open spiritual channels that set in motion a movement of grace that circulates around and comes back to us in profound and indirect ways.

I suspect that a lot of people in the younger generation are like someone I heard about this week. He is a very successful investor. In his late 30's, he has already accumulated a pile of assets. He was at a seminar that brought together a great number of millionaires and even some billionaires. He sat down next to a fellow, I believe he was the owner of Domino's pizza, a man who has made his million's multiples of times over. They were chatting about this and that. Naturally the young man wanted asked this very successful entrepreneur lots of questions about how he succeeded and what his life was like. Finally the older man looked at him and said ‘Jim, what kind of service work are you involved in?'

The younger man looked back and said ‘Service work?'

Right, what do you do through your church? What charitable boards do you serve on? Where are you giving your money to make a difference?'

The young man mumbled something like ‘well, I'm not really involved anywhere really like that right now.'

And the older man said ‘My philanthropy is what gets me out of bed in the morning.'

Sir Winston Churchill once said "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." Now there was quite a lot that went on at that seminar but that young man has told this story about 10 times to different people. It really made an impact, I think, because he realized (personally) that he had a great deal of life's success with very little life game plan. There are too many of us in my generation that have been so focused on the simple mechanics of success that frankly we don't have a game plan. And frankly, we will not simply choose develop a life plan that Jesus spoke about. To do that we will need a conversion of the heart. Jesus taught us that our heart and our pocketbook are intimately related. In fact, money is the alabaster box that carries the contents of our heart. And the contents only become perfume when the box is broken over the Holy One's feet. As Jesus taught us ‘where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also.' The question is not ‘how much of my money will I give to God?' The question is only ‘how much of God's money will I keep for myself?'

I am told that if you fly over the North Atlantic Ocean, and carefully examine the icebergs floating in those frigid waters, you will see some icebergs moving in one direction, and other icebergs moving in another. The explanation of this phenomenon is that surface winds are driving the small icebergs, while the huge ones are controlled by deep ocean currents.

Our lives are like that. We are driven by two countervailing forces. The shallow waters push us by the surface wind of selfishness, fear and negativity. The deeper currents pull us towards love, grace, and blessing. In the last analysis, what you do with your money is not simply about supporting some institution. It is a spiritual issue about who you are and what you are becoming. Open the floodgates of grace. Become a vessel of blessing.

Amen.