Craig
Anderson
Brookside Community Church
II Corinthians (II Atlanta) 9 October
14, 2001
There is no need for me to write further about the aid fund for the
church members. I am quite aware of
your willingness. In fact, I’ve been
bragging on you to the Mississippi Christians, saying, “Those Georgia folks
were all ready a year ago.” Your getting
on with this surely did get a lot of them cranked up! ...But remember this: “A
stingy sower gathers a stingy harvest and a generous sower gathers a generous
harvest.” Let each person follow the
dictates of his conscience, giving neither with complaint nor under compulsion,
for God likes to see a man smile when he gives.
Clarence Jordan
The Cotton Patch Version of Paul’s Epistles
The mega-church movement, churches with 5, 10 and 20,000 members owes
much of its momentum to Bill Hybels, founding pastor of the Willowcreek
Community church where on a typical week-end in suburban Chicago 15,000 people
worship. Doing market research with the
unchurched living in the vicinity of Willowcreek 20 years ago, Hybels was told
repeatedly that what turned people off are sermons which tell people to change
their lives, but never how to do it.
It’s like someone said at a coffee hour once: “the preacher wanted awful
bad for us to do something, but he never said what!” Taking note of such feedback,
Hybels’ sermons ever since have included specific action
recommendations. We certainly don’t
have room for 20,000 and would surely need a shoe-horn for 5, but I’m going to
borrow a page from Hybels game plan this morning and be specific.
My action recommendation today is for you to change your life by giving
away more of what you have. OK? Got it?
Is this enough? I don’t have
Hybels’ whole game plan, just this one page.
Shall we proceed to the offering, or do I need to make a case for this
recommen-dation?
Well, there’s time left, maybe I should fill in the blanks and check
with Bill tomorrow!
My recommendation comes to you this morning from Clarence Jordan, whose
Cotton Patch translation we’ve just read. Jordan not only founded Koinonia Farms in Georgia, but he was
also the visionary who laid the foundations for what has become Habitat for
Humanity. Recognizing the need for
affordable housing in rural Georgia, Jordan conceived of the notion of offering
interest free loans to poor families to build homes:
“We will put up houses to
be sold to families over a twenty year period with no interest,” he wrote,
“thus the cost will be about half the usual financing, and for a poor person
this can be the difference between owning a house and not owning one. The interest forces them to pay for two
houses, but they get only one.
The partner family will
gradually free the initial capital to build houses for others, and be
encouraged to share at least a part of their savings with the fund. Even as all are benefitted, so should all
share. If, as Jesus says, ‘it is more
blessed to give than to get,’ then even the poorest should not be denied the
extra blessedness of giving.
The money for this program
will be raised through the inauguration of a Fund for Humanity. What the poor need is not charity but
capital, not caseworkers but co-workers.
And what the rich need is a wise, honorable, and just way of divesting
themselves of their overabundance. The
Fund for Humanity will meet both of these needs.
Clarence Jordan’s congregation in Americus Georgia during the 40's and
50's was rural, poor. His concern was
for what poor people need. My concern
for this congregation in Morris County, NJ is... well, you can see where I’m
headed.
The feedback Bill Hybels got about sermons is that people want specific
action recommendations. So I’ve made
one. With Clarence Jordan I am
venturing that what we rich folk need are wise, honorable, and just ways of
divesting ourselves of our overabundance!
A challenging recommendation on a beautiful morning, but somebody has to
make it! Indeed what many of you have
told me repeatedly is that in fact you do want to be challenged in the
sermon: challenged to think, challenged
to rethink, challenged to act and to change your ways of living. So again, here it is: let’s divest ourselves
of our overabundance!
In a month when 850 million dollars have been contributed to victims of
terror at the World Trade Center, it would seem that a compelling case is
already being made. Clarence Jordan
would certainly agree that we are all cranked up. No messing around here! What an amazing outpouring! How incredibly generous we are when the
story is compelling and the need is clear: not only on the macro level as a
nation, but on a micro-level as a local church as well.
But 850 million isn’t enough.
Maybe you also heard the story this week about the dire poverty in
Afghanistan, where a drought is adding to the miseries of a totalitarian
regime, and 20 years of fighting: the
story of a man, who this week sold the roof from his house in order to feed his
family.
Let’s make no mistake, as much as we try to wiggle out of the
designation, compared to that man and his family, we are the rich. When compared to our neighbors whose
families are missing bread-winners and
mourning the loss of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, we are the
rich. When compared to most of the rest
of the world we are the rich.
Living in Morris County we lose sight of this reality. We tend to forget and take what we see
everyday as the norm. But then we go on
vacation in upstate New York and see very different standards of living. Or more dramatically we venture away from
the beach in the Caribbean onto the back roads and see the shanties people live
in. Worse, some of us travel to India,
or Egypt or Africa, and encounter children with vacant stares and bloated
bellies, and are reminded: we are the rich.
Part of our motivation for encouraging ministries to community at the
Soup Kitchen or the County Jail, Juvenile Detention Center, the Eric Johnson
House, or Mrs. Wilson’s House, is that at those places our eyes are opened and
we see how privileged we are, how fortunate, how great our overabundance. Our everyday lives are not the norm.
But like Paul addressing the church in Atlanta, I want the giving from
your over-abundance to be a cheerful contribution on your part, not an
extortion on mine! God likes to see us
smile when we give! But it’s pretty
hard to smile if we are calculating what our gifts are costing us, or how to
accrue the greatest tax advantage and the least sacrifice in giving them. One of my boys and I visited at my parents’
church earlier this year, and at the offering I slipped him a couple of bucks
to put in the offering plate. He looked
at the money. He looked at me. And then he leaned over to whisper, “Is this
coming out of my allowance?!” God likes
to see us smile when we give, and as I put my offering in the plate that
morning I was wearing a big one.
Give of your overabundance, that’s my main point today, but as Clarence
Jordan so aptly puts it, “follow the dictates of your conscience” as you do,
“giving with neither complaint, nor under compulsion.”
I’ve seen two terrific pieces on charitable giving in alumni magazines
this year. One was from a sophomore,
who, we can be reasonably certain, didn’t have much money, and the other from a
95 year old multi-millionaire in Iowa who was Warren Buffet’s mentor. If you doubt you are rich. Fine.
The college sophomore says, “don’t wait until you’re rich to contribute
to causes that matter to you, that day might never come. Do what you can now.” That is, don’t miss a chance to smile. The millionaire who gave his fortune to his
alma mater, said simply, “I just wanted to do some good with the money.”
Isn’t that what we’d like to accomplish: to do some good with our
money? And yet we are often reluctant
to give, because not every charitable organization, including this local church
spends every dollar wisely. Truth to
tell we goofed on a copy machine and are paying the piper! That particular mistake won’t happen
again! But that mistake is not representative
because our trustees and program people continually scrutinize our
expenditures, striving to be good stewards of your gifts.
As Jordan says, we need wise, honorable and just ways to give. We rightfully want our gifts to be
well-spent. We don’t want them to be
gobbled up in administrative costs or mailing fees. We want them to get to the point of need and for duplication to
be avoided. These are all reasonable
expectations, and some organizations will do better than others. Be prudent.
But don’t be stingy. There are
charities worth giving to. Exercise due
diligence, and then write some checks, and experience the joy of knowing you’ve
done something good with your money.
A major donor once said to a
seminary president, “Remember, when you ask for money you are offering donors a
privilege. You are offering them a
chance to become part of something bigger than themselves, something more than
their money can buy.” You need to say
to people: “Your money will be useful
to us, but by giving you will be buying something that is priceless.”
You are being offered such an opportunity in this season of stewardship
at Brookside Church. We are not the
only ones doing good works. So is your
college, opening new worlds to young people.
So is the Visiting Nurses Association, as they minister to the needs of
the frail and elderly in our communities.
So are the scouts. And the folks
at the library. And the hospital. And
the Food Pantry. There are many ways
for us to become part of something bigger than ourselves. I won’t extort you, but I will encourage you
to see our church as one of the worthy outlets for your wealth.
Aren’t you proud to be part of a community of faith which has begun to
welcome our gay and lesbian neighbors who aren’t always assured of a welcome in
other places? Isn’t it wonderful to
know that an eleven year old with Downs Syndrome has begun to participate in
our youth club? How good it is to
gather with faithful women who have been visiting in the county jail every week
for eight years! Isn’t it priceless to
know that one of our teenagers told a reporter
he was glad to go on the mission trip, because “It kind of put things in
perspective for me because you realize how much you have.” Aren’t we part of something bigger than
ourselves when one of our 10 year olds observes, “I think community service is
really great because they don’t have the stuff that you have and you feel bad
for them...” (Maybe like that family
without a roof.) If our church
accomplished only one of these things, wouldn’t our existence be
justified? Wouldn’t our cause be
honorable and worthy of our support?
So what’s the preacher’s action recommendation for the rich this
week? Buy something priceless -
something bigger than yourself. Divest
yourself of your overabundance, with a smile...
This morning’s
lesson is from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. I’m going to read it from a translation done
by Clarence Jordan, whose Cotton Patch Versions of hte New Testament, have brought
smiles and winces for 40 years now.
Jordan was a biblical scholar with a Ph.D. in Greek, who founded an
inter-racial utopian community in Americus Georgia in the early 1940's. Some of you have probably eaten pecans from
Koinonia Farms, one of the financial ventures they’ve used to support themselves through the years, especially htose
years, when inter-racial anything was frowned upon in our country.
Jordan’s
translations are earthy and rich, full of humor and insight, and they are
wonderfully adept at bringing the gospel forward to our day. You’ll notice that Corinth becomes Atlanta,
and the church in Achia becomes the Christians in Mississippi. A reading from 2nd Corinthians,
that is, from 2nd Atlanta, chapter 9: