Money and Soul

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists

April 5, 2014.

OT: 1 Kings 5:1-6, 10, 11.

NT: Luke 21:1-4.

Money is a powerful tool for turning our dreams into reality, for turning our values into life. The way we manage our money always expresses our fundamental values. A discerning observer could read our soul in our bank statement.

A note before I begin: Preaching tends to be a one way street: I talk and you listen. I like it when people talk back. Please feel welcome to comment or ask a question. If you have my phone number, feel free to text me. I value your input.

Imagine a warm spring day. Around us are the massive stone walls of the temple courtyard in ancient Jerusalem. Overhead, puffy white clouds float in a blue sky. The temple is throbbing with people, so many you can scarcely see the foot-worn stone pavement. Bustle and commotion. A hundred languages or more floating in the air. Turbans and robes and foot-ware reflect a hundred different cultures across North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle East. Jesus is sitting here in the courtyard, watching. His disciples follow his eyes. They are learning to see what he sees, learning to see how he sees.

Right now, he is watching the offering box. People pour bags of coins into the slot. Little streams of gold and silver.

Contributing to the temple was both a civic and a religious responsibility. It was a marker of social status. And appropriately so. The temple was the preeminent expression of Jewish national and religious identity. Maintaining the buildings and the services of the temple took huge financial resources. It could not function apart from the patronage of the wealthy. Their gifts were appreciated. The very bench where Jesus sat watching was paid for by gold coins given by a wealthy Jewish donor.

The eyes of Jesus catch a furtive movement off to the right. He turns his head, and his disciples follow with their own eyes. They see a skeletally-thin woman with a couple of skinny kids in tow threading through the crowd. She must be a widow. No self-respecting husband would let his wife loose in this crowd. She's moving toward the offering box. Jesus and the 24 eyes of his disciples follow her progress.

Then she's there. She quickly lifts her hand and drops a coin in the box. It makes a different sound. It's not gold or silver. It's copper. A penny. She drops another, then lifts her eyes to heaven in a silent instant of prayer, then she's gone.

I don't want the story to end here. I imagine Jesus sending a couple of disciples after her to learn her story and offer financial assistance from the money bag we know they kept for just such purposes. It's easy to imagine this part of the story. It would fit with the rest that we know about Jesus. But we have to create this part of the story purely from our imaginations. The actual account in the gospel ends with her release of the coins and their clink in the offering box.

Except for this.

3 "I tell you the truth," Jesus said, "this poor widow has given more than all the rest of them. 4 For they have given a tiny part of their surplus, but she, poor as she is, has given everything she has." [Luke 21:3-6, New Living Translation, accessed through BlueLetterBible.org.]

It's a delicious story. One that deserves its own movie. It's another example of Jesus undermining the traditional identification of actual value with social status.

Women were third class citizens in that society. Widows were several steps further down the yardstick of social value. Add poverty to the mix and this woman with her pennies is genuinely a nobody, a no account.

Jesus contrasts her with the rich, publicly-devout men who were depositing loads of gold in the offering box and Jesus says, “She gave more.” “She out did them.” It was an outrageous statement then. It's still an outrageous statement. It raises profound questions.

Imagine sitting there with Jesus if you were on the Temple Finance Committee. The reason you are on the committee is your long history of generosity toward the temple. You would have to be a man, of course, in that culture. You would have been a good man, a devout man, a kindly man.

When you saw the widow drop her two pennies into the box, you would have smiled. You would have agreed it was touching, sweet. But when you saw the owner of a fleet of cargo ships based in Alexandria pour a couple of large bags of gold coins into the box, you would have immediately started dreaming. That would cover the cost of new robes for the high priest or a new drain in the sheep washing area.

Two copper pennies would be cute. Yes, for sure. But two bags of gold could do real work.

That's one view of money. It is realistic. It's concrete. It's unarguable. More money, more work. More money, more impact. It's the way the world works.

Then you hear Jesus say the widow gave more and you start thinking. How can that be?

It doesn't take you long. You realize Jesus is talking about the soul of the giver rather than the dollars that were given.

In the temple budget, the widows pennies were vanishingly trivial. In the widow's life, those pennies were as large as the world because she used them to give her entire life to God.

If you looked at the woman and her gift only through the lens of your role as a member of the Temple Finance Committee, the woman's gift, and perhaps the woman herself, would appear utterly insignificant.

Jesus was looking at the woman's money from the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Instead of measuring the woman's gift by the amount of work it could accomplish, he measured it by the purity of the spring from which it came and the richness of soul it carried.

By these measures, this widow's pennies dwarfed the bags of gold brought by ship captains, merchants, and nobility. Her offering was full of soul. She packed her entire life into those two pennies and gave them to God. And walked away light as a feather. She might be a widow. She was desperately poor. Society scorned her. But when she dropped those pennies into the box, she declared her independence from the judgment of society, even from the obvious circumstances of her life. She acted the way rich people do. She did what she wanted with her money. And what she wanted to do was to participate in the mission of God.

She bought into the kingdom of God with her whole being. Her gift became an essential, eternal element of the work of God. She could tell herself that God himself depended on her to do his work. And she was happy.

Have you ever given all of yourself to something? It is usually the sweetest moment in life. In good marriages, the man and woman find their supreme happiness in leaping into pledge of their livevs to one another. Sometimes when I'm standing here on this platform with a couple during a wedding, their ecstasy is palpable. As they say their vows—I am yours. I will be yours. I give you my best, I give you myself.--as they say these words to one another, I feel their ineffable joy.

Runners who throw themselves into intense training for a marathon find a rare euphoria. The discipline takes over their lives. And in surrendering to that discipline they find a pleasure unavailable to them another way.

It's the same with our money management. When we make giving money away central in our management of our money, money becomes a rare source of pleasure.

Our money inescapably is intertwined with our souls—with our values, our sense of place in the world, our sense of God.

Obviously, there are a lot of ordinary, mundane things we must take care of. Housing and groceries. Clothes and transportation. Tuition and books. Phone and internet service. Vacation and dates. Retirement. Taking care of these responsibilities and needs is obviously important. They are a good use of our money.

And we are tempted to think, if I just had a little more, then I wouldn't need to worry, wouldn't need to fret. But if you ever do get that little bit more, you will discover that you still need a little bit more. No matter how much you get, you always need a little bit more. That's when we need to learn from this widow woman and her pennies.

The most direct path to being pleasurably wealthy is to give. When you reach the point in your life when you can boldly give money away, that's when you will know you are rich. That's when you will enjoy being rich. And if you are so secure that you can give away all of your pennies, you will have entered the blissful paradise of the half percent (that's an even more elite group than the One Percent!)

Generosity is the most reliable entrance to joy. This is true for individuals. It is also true for communities.

At the very core of our identity as a Christian community is our commitment to make freely available to others the riches of church. Our beautiful building, our rich worship in music, Bible reading and preaching, the opportunity for social connection—we make all this freely available. Most people who enjoy church take it for granted. They make use of it and pass on.

But a few experience the deep satisfaction of sustaining this work of God. This building, the life of this community, is an expression of the soul of their money.

How is it with you and your money? I know for some of us money is very tight. Others of us have a surplus. But for all of us, money is connected with the core of our being. It carries our lives.

And to all of us comes the invitation to participate in the mission of God. Here at Green Lake Church and elsewhere in the world. We may have tens of thousands of dollars at our disposal or only pennies. Whatever the amount, know this: your giving is honored by God as true partnership. Your generosity is noted and celebrated in the kingdom of heaven.