Will you pray
with me? Lord, may the
words of our lips and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable
in your eyes, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
A colleague of mine tells a story
from
the early days of his ministry. One day, a parishioner came to his
office and asked to talk. The woman was obviously in deep distress,
and as she began to tell her story, the tears that had been
threatening when she entered began to flow hard and fast, punctuating
her story with sobs.
The substance of the story was this:
her family finances had for some years been in a slow but steady
decline. Misfortune after misfortune piled themselves upon one
another, and then the decline had sped up in recent months until she
had her husband had, she said, lost everything. Their finances were
utterly and completely shipwrecked, they were destitute, and she had
no idea what they and the children were going to do. She had come to
ask for help.
Now, my colleague had grown up in a
tightly-knit rural church and had seen his share of families in
distress being taken care of by their Christian sisters and brothers.
He knew what to do. He began describing to the woman how he would
organize church members to provide food for the family each day, how
they would gather donations of back-to-school clothing for the kids,
and how the money in the church’s benevolence account would pay to
keep the heat and water turned on. He assured her their needs would
be met.
But this news did not seem to
relieve
the woman at all. In fact, as he was speaking she had entered that
calm and thoughtful place that tends to be the result of a good cry,
and she had been staring thoughtfully at the wall over my colleague’s
head while he talked. After he had finished outlining the plan, the
woman, eyes still on the wall and clearly not having heard a word
he’d said, sighed and said resignedly, “You know, I think—I
think—we’ll be able to keep the lake house if we just sell
one of the paintings instead.”
My colleague learned that day that
perceptions of poverty, or of financial instability, do not
necessarily have anything to do with fiscal reality. A recent New
York Times article
examining the lives of several millionaires living in Silicon Valley
ini California came up with a similar truth. The people interviewed
for the article—people with 3, 5, 10 million dollars in
assets--were, almost without exception, anxious, sometimes fearful,
and unhappy. They were miserable, they all worked between 60 and 80
hours a week and they all felt that they had nowhere near enough
money to be getting on with. They were this way not because their
money was invested in shady deals or there were signs their jobs
might fall through; these were all people with stable futures, who
liked their jobs and who were likely to continue earning at the same
rate they’d been. In every case, they were anxious simply because
they simply didn’t believe they yet had enough.
These millionaires’ experience is
nothing new, of course. An interviewer once asked John D.
Rockefeller, the richest man the world has ever seen, how much money
was enough. His smiling reply? “Just a little bit more.”
Now, my guess is that many of us
have
very little sympathy for the feelings of millionaires who feel
poor—and that’s good. But there is a truth in Rockefeller’s
words, and the Silicon Valley millionaires’ experience and it is
this: most of us are absolutely convinced that our lives would be
better, perhaps fixed altogether, if we had just a little bit more
money.
Now, hear me say that I’m not
talking
the truly poor among us—those who are poor in an absolute sense,
who lack the money to feed or house or clothe themselves. What I’m
talking about is the vast majority of us here in the United States
who are not very very poor or very very rich, we who do OK, who can
pay most if not all of our bills most if not all of the time and even
have some left over. I believe that most of us spend a fair amount
of time wishing for Rockefeller’s just a little bit more. And I
believe that no matter how much more we got, we, like Rockefeller,
would always be tempted to wish for more. I believe the Silicon
Valley millionaires’ experience is simply our own experience taken
to absurd lengths. It seems to be just who we are, something in our
American, or maybe our human, DNA, that anxious niggle, that annoying
and dangerous whisper from our worse selves, saying, “There is not
enough, there is not enough, there is not enough.”
The problem as I see it is not with
wanting money, which is after all necessary in our world. The
problem comes when the desire for money outstrips the need, when the
niggle we all feel, and the whisper even the best of us hear,
overpower our ability to perceive reality. The problem comes when
the desire for money and the things it obtains, fed and fed and fed
by advertisers and by unflattering comparisons with the neighbors and
by our own unchecked insecurities, becomes a species of dipsomania in
which too much is never enough.
The writer of First Timothy
understood
something about this. “The love of money is a root of all kinds of
evil,” he said, “and in their eagerness to be rich some have
wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.”
It is tempting to think that the sorts of evil that that line refers
to are the really bad sorts, like stealing and killing and warring,
and we would be justified in thinking that. God knows that people
have lied, and cheated, and stolen, and killed, and gone to war for
the love of money. But I suspect that what the author is really
talking about here are evils of a different, more domesticated sort.
Evils that are much more common and much less sexy than those really
bad ones, and all the more invidious and painful for it. Evils like
never ending anxiety that prevents us from enjoying the good world,
and evils like compulsive work that keeps us from family and God and
the things we love most, and evils like emotional insecurity, and
ongoing comparison with everybody around us, and the fear, the fear,
the piercing fear there isn’t and never will be enough.
It’s these kinds of commonplace
evils
that can blind one, to send one, as the author says, wandering away
from the faith. And the faith from which we wander? The faith from
which we wander is this: that the world and all that is in it belongs
to God, its Creator. The faith that the goodness with which God
imbued the Creation is meant for all the Created ones to partake of,
to dip into, to revel in. The faith that there is enough, there is
enough, there can be enough, and that God is with us.
At the beginning of this letter,
before
what we read today, the author makes clear his purpose in writing: to
instruct Timothy and the leaders of his community in God’s plan for
the Creation and for the church. The Greek word that is rendered
“plan” in those early verses of the book is “oikonomia”, from
“oikos”, or home, and “nomia”, for manager, or steward. Elsewhere in
the Bible, “oikonomia”, rather than being rendered
“plan”, is simply transliterated, and becomes the word…economy. So do
you get it? The writer is seeking to instruct the church
about God’s plan for the stewardship of our homes, God’s Home Ec.
In the passage we read today, we
learn
that God’s oikonomia, God’s plan, God’s economy, is one of
extravagance, in which there is plenty of the good Creation for all. In
God’s oikonomia, there are food and clothing, with which the
author reminds us we should be content, but the plan goes beyond
that, too: there is also everything for our enjoyment. Not just our
need, but our enjoyment, too, and it is provided richly.
But for God’s economy only works,
the
author says, when we must remember that we brought nothing into this
world and can take nothing out of it. For God’s economy to work,
the author says, we must not set our hopes on the uncertainty of
riches, but rather on God, who provides extravagantly. For God’s
economy to work, we must trust in the God who provides for the world
richly, and provide richly for the world in our turn, and so take
hold of the life that God has planned for us: a life of lavish,
extravagant trust and freedom from anxiety. In God’s economy, the
author writes to the leaders of the church, if we share what we
have, there is enough, there is enough, there can be enough for
everyone to have such life and for all to delight in the world God
has provided.
It was good advice for the leaders
of
Timothy’s church, and it is good advice for the leaders of ours. And
after worship today, we will try to take it. Old South’s
leaders will gather to remind ourselves of God’s oikonomia, God’s
home ec. for the church. We will remind ourselves of God’s great
blessings, we will seek to quiet the dipsomaniacal voices that
whisper and niggle, and we will challenge ourselves to listen instead
for God’s whisper, calling us to extravagance, and mercy, and
contentment.
In this way, we will seek to live
with
integrity and faithfulness into God’s realm in the here and how,
the realm where there is enough. In this way, we will seek to make
ourselves stewards instead of owners and amassers. In this way, we
will seek to make our fortunes, our lives, and our economies what God
would have them be. In this way, we will begin to do the work of
challenging each of you to do the same.
Make no mistake; this will take some
doing. It is no easy task to break free from the niggle and the
whisper, so deeply embedded in our psyches. It will wake work and it
will take the grace of God.. And even with the grace of God, it will
still take us reminding one another again and again of God’s love,
and God’s Providence, and God’s call to respond to her
extravagance with trust, and with extravagance of our own. And when
we do it, even when we sort of do it, the blessings and the
extravagance will, God promises, overflow from our lives to the lives
of all around us, in this good church, in those good streets, in all
the good world. And when that happens, our lives, our economies, and
we, will be truly holy, blessed and consecrated by the God in whom
there is always enough. So may it be. Amen.
