(Psalm 49:5-9; Mark 8:34-38)

As we’ve spent the last several weeks considering what Jesus has to say to us about money, we’ve talked about a number of things; among them are the effect of money on our worship, and the ease with which money can become an idol; the question of our priorities, and what our financial habits say about what really matters to us; whether our trust is in money or in God; and what it means that everything we have comes to us from God. This has not, I realize, been the most typical sermon series on stewardship; I haven’t gotten into any of the financial-planning-type stuff, or talked to you about the importance of tithing—or even made it clear that tithing means giving 10% of your income. (You may well have all known that, but I know there were folks in my last church who didn’t until I told them.)

As it happens, I think the question “Do Christians have to tithe?” is a dubious one; the attitude of the New Testament seems to be that we should be so inspired to generosity by the work of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit that we don’t need to be told to give only 10%. To ask, essentially, “Do we have to give that much?” isn’t the question of someone looking to honor God with their money—it’s the question of someone trying to justify giving as little as possible. Which, granted, is where we all are at least some of the time; but it’s not where Jesus wants us to be. Rather, he wants to pull us out of that mindset, to teach us to see our lives not from a worldly perspective, but from a heavenly perspective. As a writer, Isaac Asimov talked about the importance of “the backward look”—that you have to look at your story from the end to know how you’ll get there; we need to learn to look at our lives in much the same way.

That, I think, is the implicit question underlying our passage from Mark this morning, and the implicit challenge to us: what do you want out of life? What do you want to accomplish, what do you hope to gain? What’s worth living for—and what, if anything, do you believe is worth dying for? In financial terms, you take the money and time God has invested in you and invest them in turn in various ways; what profit do you hope to make off your investments? Logically, whatever goal you set determines the path you take to get there, and the choices you make along the way.

And here’s the kicker: when you get right down to it, we only have two choices. We can go all in on following Jesus, or not. This isn’t to say that anyone whose commitment to Christ ever falters or anyone who ever sins is therefore not saved—that would eliminate all of us, for none of us ever follows him perfectly for any great length of time. It is, however, to say that our fundamental commitment must be to following him and him alone, to taking his road and no other. Yes, we drive off onto the shoulder sometimes, and we often don’t do a good job of staying in the right lane, but those are all things which are correctable and recoverable. Trying to drive two different cars on two completely different roads going two very different places, isn’t. No one can do that; no one can serve two masters. You have to make a choice.

Now, some of you might be sitting there thinking I’m exaggerating; but just look at the text—Jesus puts this in even starker terms, almost paradoxical. He says that to follow him means, first, to deny yourself, to renounce yourself, to set aside your own claims and your own interest and your own agenda. It’s the state of mind Paul describes in Philippians 2 when he tells us that Jesus didn’t see equality with the Father as something to hang on to for dear life, but set it aside; he traded in the worship of angels who knew exactly who he was for the company of human beings who refused to recognize and acknowledge him, but instead treated him as a slave and a threat. To follow Jesus, we need to do as he did; rather than insisting on our rights, on our due, on our own way, on what we think we have coming to us—rather than designing our life to make things come out, as much as possible, the way we want them to be—we need to let go of all that and seek to serve others before ourselves.

More, we need to take up our cross. Our culture tends to use the phrase “cross to bear” to mean some irritation or annoyance, some unfair burden—but that’s not what Jesus means. This is the British judge pronouncing capital sentence: “that you are to be taken from the place where you now are to the prison whence you came, and thence to the place of execution, there to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.” The man carrying his cross was a dead man walking, disgraced and humiliated, shamed and debased, condemned not only to die but to supply his executioners with the very thing they would use to kill him. Jesus did it, surrendering his right to defend his life and voluntarily accepting death so that he might be faithful to serve God; and he calls us to do the same. If we want to follow him, that’s the road he walks, and that’s what following him looks like.

This, Jesus says, is the path to life—the only path to life. I should note, the NIV has a couple different words here, “life” and “soul,” but it’s all the same word in Greek—the word psuche; it’s most often translated “soul,” but what we usually mean by that is less than what the word really means. Jesus isn’t just talking about salvation in the sense of going to Heaven here, he’s talking about true life in every sense—the full and eternal life of God, which we have now in this world by his Holy Spirit, though we don’t experience it in the same way as we will when Christ returns. He’s talking about being fully who he made us to be. If our highest priority is preserving our own life—and along with it, our wealth, comfort, reputation, worldly success, and other things of that sort—then we may well have a longer and easier life in this world, but we will lose Jesus; and along with him, we’ll lose our true selves, and everything that makes life worth living.

And to that, Jesus asks, is it worth it? Some people think it is, and make their decisions accordingly; indeed, there are many who are perfectly happy to trade in the future to get what they want in the present. Like Wimpy, they would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today—and never mind what Tuesday will cost; like Esau, they will trade their birthright for a bowl of stew, because they’re hungry now, and what good is a birthright to satisfy their hunger? Without faith, if you don’t believe that birthright’s really worth anything, this makes perfect sense.

By faith, though, we know better—and because of faith, we have felt the blessings of God, and we have experienced his life. We haven’t fully received our reward in Christ, but we have tasted the firstfruits, and we have seen the faithfulness of God even in the midst of this lost and broken world. We’ve been given every reason to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And yet—it’s easy to love the world, and it’s easy to let it distract us; it’s easy to focus on what’s right before our eyes, and lose sight of the bigger picture.

And so the key to stewardship isn’t percentages and budgets and duty; the key to stewardship is, as they say, to keep the main thing the main thing. It’s to change the goal toward which we invest our time and money and abilities, the organizing principle that sorts out all our priorities; in the end, it’s a very simple and very profound change in the way we look at life. The essence of biblical stewardship is to say, “I see the world, and I see Jesus, and I want Jesus.” Nothing more; nothing less.

(Matthew 25:14-30, Luke 12:42-48)

“To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, each according to his ability.” A talent was a unit of weight, perhaps 80 pounds or so; when used without reference to anything specific, it was understood to mean a talent of silver, worth about 6000 denarii. Since a denarius was the usual payment for a day’s labor, one talent would be nearly 20 years’ salary for your ordinary working-class bloke; if you want to put this in terms of the current minimum wage in this state, $7.25 an hour, 6000 8-hour workdays at that rate would add up to $348,000. In other words, the master in Matthew 25 hands his servants a huge amount of money and tells them to have at it; and when he comes back, he judges them based on what they’ve done with it. And this, says Jesus, is what the coming of the kingdom of heaven will be like.

What do we make of this? What do we make of this related parable in Luke 12, with its bleak depiction of the judgment of the faithless? What does this tell us about the kingdom of God? Certainly Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God and its blessings are not to be taken for granted, that we can’t simply do whatever we like and get away with it; he makes it indisputably clear that God expects certain things of us, and has the right to. Everything we have is God’s, entrusted to us until he comes to reclaim it and to see how we’ve used it; there is nothing that is really ours to do with as we please. Everything is God’s, and he’s given some of it to us to use according to his purposes. Part of that, yes, is for ourselves, as this is one of the ways he provides for our needs; but he isn’t going to come back and ask if we had fun with what he gave us. Instead, he’s going to ask us what sort of return he received on his investment.

And bear in mind here, we are his investments. It’s a striking story that Matthew gives us. The master is a very rich man, but in a time and place in which land was the primary form of wealth, he had a lot of money lying around—but he doesn’t stick around to manage it. Indeed, he doesn’t even leave specific instructions as to what is to be done with his money while he’s gone. Instead, he distributes it among his servants—and note this, he gives each a different amount according to what he knows they can handle—and leaves it to them to determine how best to use it. Those who take this as an opportunity go out and double his money, and are blessed for it; the one who responds with mistrust and fear—not trusting the master’s gift, fearing his judgment, not being willing to risk doing anything—buries the money and goes off to do his own thing, and is judged for it.

In the same way, God has given us everything we have: life, to begin with, and the gift of each new day; our material wealth—and we are rich indeed, as even the poorest person here is richer than over 95% of the people in this world; and all of our many talents (a word taken by the church from this parable in Matthew to describe all the abilities and skills God gives us), which we use to make our way in life. He has given us all these things, with no visible strings attached. And more than that, not long after Jesus told his disciples this parable in Matthew 25, he would give them the greatest gift of all—the gift of the gospel of salvation by grace alone through faith alone through Christ alone—and leave them with it to use for his purposes.

He left them as his greatest investment in this world, as the beginning capital out of which his church would grow. He left them to use all the other gifts he had given them, of money and abilities and each new day as it came, in the service of that greatest gift of the gospel. To be sure, he didn’t leave them to do that work alone, but gave them his Holy Spirit to guide them and to give them power; nevertheless left the work in their hands, to be passed on from generation to generation, and now to us and through us to our children. We are God’s investment.

Think about that. Each one of us is a gift from God to the church, which in turn is his great gift to the world; each one of us is an investment by God in his great plan of redemption. We have each been given a particular set of gifts; we have been given the money and the abilities we have and placed in this particular time, given this day and each hour, in order to do the work he has given us to do that we may bear the fruit he intends for us to bear. We have not been given more than we can handle, or less than we need, but each according to our ability—and God knows our ability far better than we do; and we won’t be judged on the basis of another’s gifts, but only based on what we do with what God has entrusted to us.

We are God’s investments, fearfully and wonderfully made, each of us created and gifted in his infinite wisdom to be a very particular blessing to his people and to the world; he knows us for all of who we are, our weaknesses as well as our strengths, and he uses both in our lives and in the lives of others. We don’t need to be afraid that we aren’t good enough, because he has given us his Holy Spirit; we can’t serve him faithfully in our own strength, but by his Spirit he is able to do in and through us everything he gives us to do, and he doesn’t make any mistakes about that.

This means two things. In the first place, we have no reason to be afraid; we don’t need to follow the third servant, who buried the talent he was given out of fear that if he tried to do anything with it, he’d blow it. We can take all the talents we’ve been given and use them boldly in God’s service, giving away our money and our lives with faith-driven generosity, trusting that he will bless us and provide for us; we can take risks as we feel his leading, secure in the knowledge that God is at work and he is in control, and that even when we do blow it, he is capable of redeeming our mistakes.

Second, it means that giving is not an onerous duty but a life-giving opportunity. God has blessed us each with a part to play in his plan to redeem the world, he has invested us in his work here on Earth, and he has empowered us by his Spirit to save and to bless others. He has given us work and opportunities of eternal, life-changing significance. When we choose to use the time, talents and money he’s given us merely to please ourselves, we turn away from the great adventure of discipleship he’s offered us in favor of something smaller, perhaps more fun in the short term but far less satisfying in the long run. In giving our money and our time freely to his church in all its ministries—many of which, to be sure, are outside what we think of as “the church”—rather than keeping them for ourselves, in using our skills and abilities in his service rather than what we perceive to be our own, we aren’t really denying ourselves, though we may often think so. Rather, we are opening ourselves up to receive greater blessings than we could ever manufacture in our own strength. Giving is the path to blessing.

I encourage you, therefore, my brothers and sisters: whatever you’re giving to God, give more. Give lots more. Give until you don’t see how you could give any more—and then look for more opportunities yet. Invest your money wherever you see the gospel proclaimed and the ministry of Christ at work—and yes, if you participate in this congregation, I do think this is the proper place to start giving more, but don’t stop here; and where your money goes, let your time follow. Take the talents God has given you and use them to serve him, in your work—whatever it may be, whether it seems “Christian” to you or not, for you are his minister wherever you may go—and in the church as you see opportunity, and in all the other things you do. Live as God’s investment, so that you may fully experience his reward, for his reward never fails.

(Joshua 24:14-15, 1 Kings 18:20-21; Luke 16:9-17)

In the latter part of my time in Colorado, one snowy February, the summons went out for a special presbytery meeting. From the letter, it was clear that something significant had happened, something bad, and so I made it a point to get down across the mountain to be there. I was glad I did, because it truly was a major deal: the presbytery treasurer had embezzled a significant portion of the presbytery’s reserves, and so it was necessary to discuss the financial ramifications of his actions—particularly the effect on new church plants—as well as the legal situation.

The treasurer, it should be noted, didn’t take the money for himself, but for his company—he was an executive in a small Denver corporation; in fact, he always insisted that he hadn’t done anything wrong, that he had merely found the presbytery a better investment opportunity. It might have been a more convincing argument if he’d asked permission first instead of doing it underhandedly; but while I don’t know about interest, he did repay all the money in the end.

Still, what he did was wrong, because he lost track of whom he was supposed to be serving: he used his position with the presbytery not to serve the presbytery but to serve his company. He had been entrusted with money by the presbytery for a particular purpose, but chose not to be faithful to that purpose—instead, he took it on himself to use the money for a different purpose, to serve his own ends and his own plans with it instead of those of the presbytery. This is true even if he really did believe he could make the presbytery more money by going his own way, because that wasn’t properly his call to make—not on his own hook, anyway. It was not his place to make his own plans for how to use the presbytery’s money, regardless of what he thought he could do with it.

Understanding this is the key to understanding Jesus’ message in Luke 16:9-13—which is not, by the way, an explanation of the parable of the crooked steward in verses 1-8; actually, it points forward to the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that concludes this chapter. We tend to think of money as something that’s ours, that we have the right to use as we see fit; but Jesus wants to bring a radical change in the way we think about money, and so he challenges that view in a couple different ways.

First, note that he talks about two kinds of wealth. The NIV reads “worldly wealth,” some of your translations have “unrighteous wealth,” and I recall seeing someone translate this “dirty money.” Literally, what it says here is “money of unrighteousness,” and I think the NIV’s on the right track in understanding this: it’s not that money is itself unrighteous, but that it’s so woven through all the evil things we do, and there are so many evils done for money, that it’s contaminated. Jesus sets this in contrast to “true riches,” and also to “the eternal dwellings”—there’s something better for us, and our purpose should be to use the wealth of unrighteousness, which will eventually fail, to gain that something better. We should seek to use the money we have not to bless ourselves or keep ourselves secure, but to bless and serve others, and to carry out God’s will and purposes, not our own.

Second, in conjunction with this, Jesus describes money as a test. On the grand scale of things, he suggests, money isn’t all that—it’s just a little thing, of no enduring importance; and if we can’t even be faithful with such a little thing, if we can’t be trusted to handle it with integrity and in a way that benefits others, then why would anyone give us anything better? Money is less important for what we can do with it—even for the good things we can do with it—than for what it reveals about us, about our character and the state of our hearts. God has far better things to give us than money, but as a rule, he won’t give us the greater blessings if we misuse the lesser ones, or turn them into idols.

We always need to test our hearts on this. I’ve wondered at times, as we’ve asked ourselves why this congregation isn’t growing the way we’d like it to, if perhaps God is waiting to pour out greater blessings on us because we can’t quite be trusted to be faithful with the ones we have. It’s as tempting for churches as for individuals, after all, to put our trust in money rather than in God; if increasing our numbers, both in terms of people and in terms of giving, would lead us to trust even more in money rather than to give God praise for his provision and trust him even more recklessly, then why would he give us more? One wonders if that was the problem with the Pharisees—if their rise in importance had gone to their heads, had turned them to love money more than God.

If we want God to bless us, we need to take our eyes off the blessing—whether the one we want, or the one we already have—and just focus on him; we need to trust him that all will be well whether he blesses us or not. “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then—then when you’re not really worrying about all these things anymore—only then will all these things be added unto you, because then it won’t be the things that you’re after.” If we want God’s blessing, we need to want him more.

As we’ve talked about before, this matters a great deal because the core issue isn’t how we spend our money, but why—what matters most to us, what or who we love most; it’s about our worship. Jesus comes back to that point again here, asking us this time not where is our heart, but whom we will serve. We tend to think we have the choice to serve God, to serve someone else, or to serve ourselves, but Jesus says no: if you think you’re living to serve yourself, all that means is that you’re a slave and don’t even know it. If your life is directed toward money—making it, spending it, investing it—then it’s really money that’s calling the shots; it’s not serving you, you’re serving it.

And here’s the kicker: that’s absolutely incompatible with serving God and following Christ. You cannot serve two masters, because the time will come—probably quickly—when they’re pulling you in two different directions, and you’ll have to choose between them. You’ll have to decide which one you truly love, which one you actually trust to take care of you, and which one you’re really committed to following; and you’ll have to cast your lot, one way or the other. Following Christ will mean being called to do things that don’t serve your money, as it will mean giving up certain pleasures, as it will mean letting go of power and control—for the same reason that for Abraham, following God meant putting his son Isaac on an altar on Mount Moriah: to force us to choose, in the starkest possible terms, whom we will serve. It’s not that God doesn’t know what choice we’ll make—but we need to know, and we need to make that choice.

And the only way to make that choice is to come to it, to come to the point where God calls us to do something that doesn’t make good financial sense, and to love him and trust him enough to let go of the money and do it. That’s not an easy test, but Jesus doesn’t just give us the easy ones. He doesn’t say, “The good news of the kingdom of God is preached, and everyone is allowed to make up their own minds about it”—no, he says, “everyone is forcefully urged into it.” (I know the NIV reads “everyone is forcing his way in,” but I think that’s wrong.) There’s an urgency to God’s appeal here, because there’s only so much time left, and we don’t know how much; and so he gives us the hard challenges on the big issues. He doesn’t call us to live by just a little faith—he calls us to put everything in his hands, to go out on the tightrope, where either we let go of our idols, or we fall. He calls us to live by a simple commitment—“Heaven or Bust”—and to use our money accordingly.

(1 Kings 3:5-14; Luke 12:22-34)

If you were here for the first two weeks of this series, as we were looking at what Jesus had to say about money in the Sermon on the Mount, you probably recognize that this is mostly the same material. It’s arranged a little differently and worded a little differently, but most of it is essentially the same. Some scholars like to take that and argue about what is “original,” assuming that Matthew and Luke changed stuff to suit them; which is kind of stupid, because it assumes that Jesus only talked about all of this once. In an age before newspapers and magazines, to say nothing of videocameras, TV and the Internet, I’m sure Jesus gave his sermons many times apiece; indeed, even today, people on the speaker’s circuit do that all the time. How many times did the President use his Slurpee line last year? As such, contrary to some of my academic brethren, I figure what we have here in Luke is a different version of the same message, which makes it worth our time to take both the similarities and the differences seriously.

First, we see again the emphasis on not being anxious, on trading in worry about what we have and don’t have for trust that God will provide for us, as he does for the birds and the flowers; given that he’s the one who gave us life, and he’s the one who created out bodies, it’s absurd to think that he can’t provide all the lesser things we need as well. More, given his wisdom and goodness, it’s equally absurd to think he doesn’t know what we need, or that he won’t provide for us if we depend on him. Jesus here is giving us essentially the same challenge God gave his people through the prophet Malachi, in a passage we’ll be reading in a few weeks: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse . . . and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.” Just trust me, he’s saying; you’ll have everything you need, but without the worry.

Of course, if we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of our worry isn’t really about having what we need, is it? Most of us could do with less than what we have; it’s about what we want, the way we want to live our lives, what we’re not willing to do without. Most of us could live more simply than we do, and I certainly don’t exempt myself from that; and I’m sure we can all think of people we know who got themselves into financial trouble because they spent way more than they could afford on houses and cars and other things that were far more expensive than they needed, just because they wanted them. I’ve been thinking lately about the sister of one of my secretaries back in Colorado, who was overextended and in deep financial trouble even before the housing market started to crash; I wonder whatever happened to her and her husband and their two kids.

The truth of it is, as we talked about two weeks ago and see again here, the core issue in all this is idolatry: where is your heart? Who or what is really your first love? What are the priorities that determine everything else in your life? It’s not bad to have more than we need, but if love of money—or fear of not having enough—is calling the shots in our lives, then that’s our idol, that’s our treasure, and we need to cut it down. “Sell your possessions and give to the needy,” Jesus says, and immediately we start asking, “Sell how much? What do I get to keep?” We start defining the limits and trying to figure out what’s the least we can do to be good enough—it’s law-based thinking, and I caught myself doing it as I was writing this sermon; and it’s completely wrong way round. The real question is this: if we cared more about storing up treasure in heaven than in accumulating treasure on earth, if our hearts were really set on Jesus and he were truly our first love and our first priority, then how much would we want to keep, and how much would we gladly give away?

This has been a hard one for me in the last few years, because I never thought of myself as materialistic; indeed, I would have strongly resented the suggestion that I was. I could rationalize all the stuff I have—and pastors can be great rationalizers, as this cartoon shows; and it’s not like we’re particularly extravagant or buy things for which we have no real meaningful use. But as I was coming to realize the degree to which my life has been driven by fear and anxiety, I began to see that I did have a fear issue when it came, not to money, but to material things: fear that I would need something and not have it, and that if I didn’t have this particular thing, at some future point I would be inadequate, because I wouldn’t have the whatever-it-was that I needed. Trying to prepare for contingencies, to get a leg up on the future, by piling up stuff, rather than trusting God to take care of it—that, I think, is my main issue here. It’s stupid, and it’s twisted, and it’s not at all what Jesus wants from me; but it is, I think, all too sadly human.

And it all really flows, in the end, from us wanting what we want, rather than letting God teach us to want what he wants. We look for security in earthly things, even as untrustworthy as they are, because our hearts are set on an earthly security with earthly rewards. Why else would we use the word “securities” to mean stocks, bonds, and other investments? They’re not secure at all—just look at the New York Mets, who bought “securities” from Bernie Madoff; now they’ve been hit with a $1 billion IOU. Stocks, bonds, they go up, they go down—on the whole, they may do well by you, but you can never be sure about tomorrow. It’s all in God’s hands, none of our own. But we call them “securities” anyway because we want to believe that they can give us the security we want: enough money and things to kick back and live the good life, however we define that, without having to work any harder than we want to.

It’s a pleasant vision, but even if we get there, it could still all go splat at any time—financial crisis, medical crisis, family crisis, you can think of all the ways; and even if it doesn’t, is that really enough for us? In the end, human experience seems pretty clear: no, it isn’t. That desire for more, that we can be so prone to try to fill with ever more material things, is the surest sign that material things will never be enough. To find what we really need, we must look beyond the kingdoms of this world; and so we have this little verse, unique to Luke, that ties this whole passage together, verse 32: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”

Note that. He doesn’t say, “It is your Father’s good pleasure to make you rich”; those sorts of financial blessings may come, or they may not. Instead, he tells us two things. One, if we seek his kingdom, we will receive it. There’s certainty there. If we seek for material wealth, we may find it or we may not—there are many who have gone broke trying to get rich—but if we seek the kingdom of God, we will get what we seek. And two, what we will get will be better than anything else we could ever find.

No, we may not have all the things we want—we probably won’t—but while God may not give us anything more than we need, he won’t give us anything less, either; and more than material things, he’ll give us his love, his peace, his joy, his hope, his power, his strength, and most of all, his life, and those will do more to bless us through the difficult times in this world than all the wealth of the Americas. And that’s just in this world, which will end, and maybe all too soon for some of us; when this world dies and is raised to new life as its maker died and was raised to new life, and all those things that were merely temporary markers of position have passed away, when all that remains is the kingdom of God—then that kingdom will be ours. Totally, without exception. Forever.