11/12/61

Scripture: Mark 10: 23-24

Text: Luke 6: 24: “Woe to you that are rich.”

Last week, I reminded you of a sentence in the Statement of Faith adopted by the 1959 meeting of the General Synod of the United Church of Christ. God “calls us into His Church to accept the cost and the joy of discipleship.”

The cost is a great deal more than the amount of money that we pledge and pay to our church. It is more than the time that we give to and through the church. It is more than the talents that we spend through the church. I trust you will understand, before this hour is over, why I say that the cost is much more than these.

The joy of discipleship is something which I hope we can understand better. For, despite the misunderstanding of a lot of folk who think that there is something dull and somber about being a Christian, the truth is that discipleship is a truly joyful matter. Perhaps the joy becomes more apparent when we understand better what it costs.

Part of what I wish to say this morning is central about the saying of Jesus (in the book of Mark) that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the needle’s eye. Part of it is central around a text from Luke, in the 6th chapter at the 24th verse: “Woe to you that are rich.” And most of what I want to say in the next few minutes has already been more ably said by Dr. Frank Scribner who was at one time minister of our Congregational Church at Janesville and then was for many years, until his retirement, secretary of the denomination’s Annuity Fund for Ministers.

“Woe to you that are rich.” Possibly every person in this room may silently say to himself, or herself, “Yes, that’s right. Jesus said it and it must be so. He certainly gave it to the rich in stiff doses.” Maybe that is why the text doesn’t frighten us. It never occurs to anyone of us that that means us! You; and you, and me!

Probably you have known a good many people who think of themselves as poor. I have. But do you recall ever having met one who would admit that he was rich? How much income does it take to place a person in the classification that can be called “rich”? Whatever the amount, I venture to say that every person in this room is pretty sure that it takes more than he or she has! Rich people are almost always somebody else, in our thinking. What do you suppose the word “rich” meant to Jesus?

A number of incidents in the gospel throw light on the basic scale of living against which Jesus measured wealth or poverty. He was talking to people among whom a denarius (19 or 20 cents) was an accepted wage for a 12-hour day of work. He was talking to families for whom the loss or mislaying of a drachma (of about the same value) was the occasion for a general house cleaning in order to find it again. His hearers were familiar with the price of sparrow meat in the market -- five sparrows for a cent. When he called attention to the widow who dropped all she had into the offering chest at the temple, that “mite,” that “all,” was equivalent to a quarter of a cent. When the good Samaritan took the injured traveler to the inn, a deposit of 40 cents was a satisfactory advance payment to assure shelter, food and care.

We can make all the allowance we will for the greater purchasing power of money in those days, and still we are considering a very modest scale of living. And it was not so very different from the scale of living for a majority of the people, the world over, today!

When I go to bed at night with a satisfied stomach, I’m rich from the point of view of more than half of the world’s people today! If you have a home - house, apartment, trailer home, or even just a share in a room where you can find shelter, rest, some privacy; and it you can turn on a faucet and get water (not hot or cold running water, but just water); and if you can get light by turning a switch or pressing a button --- you are rich. When we are sick, and we consult a doctor as a matter of course; or when we can take a toothache to a dentist for relief -- we are very rich.

And when you consider our developed comforts and conveniences -- radio and television, bath tubs, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, automobiles (owned or hired), the telephone -- the contrast between our way of living and that of by far the greater part of the world is simply astounding. We are citizens of the nation that is accounted the wealthiest in the world -- now or at any time in history. And most of us in this room are not in the lower brackets of privilege in this nation! The whole world looks upon us with incredulous envy. “Woe to you who are rich” means us!

And that woe is real and it is present. This is not a warning of something that may happen; it is a somber statement of what is happening right at this moment. Our wealth costs us heavily. We are so accustomed to paying the price that we do not realize it.

Our wealth is costing us friends. Most obviously, it costs us friends on a national basis. Why didn’t the people of Cuba welcome our bungling attempt to interfere on their behalf? We are naive if we do not see the reason for the resentment of all those who stay loyal to the present revolutionary regime. We sponsored a revolt of conservatives against a regime that at least pays attention to the poorest peasant on the island. That regime is intolerably despotic. But, as Rheinhold Niebuhr has remarked: “It requires time for poor people to realize, when they need bread more obviously than liberty, that they need both bread and liberty.”

Wealth costs us friends on a personal basis, too. There is a great gulf between us and those in real want. We do not understand them; they do not like us. And that may be true most of all when they come to us for help. Robert Louis Stevenson commented, with great discernment, “Gratitude, otherwise than as an element in a friendship, is a thing so near to hatred that I do not care to split the difference. Help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued. It is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.”

I will remember the hard luck story of an old man in Hawaii who frankly admitted to me that he drank too heavily; but just then he wanted me to give him enough for the price of a meal, or enough for fare to get to a nearby village where he could get a meal. I gave him a coin. I shall not forget the jeering light in his eye as he laughed at me before starting off down the street (I doubt not) for the nearest tavern. That part of the price of wealth we pay because we have to. But there are other prices that we pay that are heavier. Wealth costs us our sense of values; our clearness of eye to see what matters most.

Tolstoy, in “War and Peace,” tells the experience of his hero who was supposed to be the richest man in Russia -- able, thoughtful, robust in health, triumphant in most undertakings. He was taken prisoner by Napoleon’s army and was carried off in the terrible retreat from Moscow. Now he experienced the limits of privation that a man can endure. And he learned what simple things satisfy man’s needs -- good food, cleanliness, freedom; the possibility of having an occupation.

A man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things he possesses. The danger in our possessing is when we do not find happiness in our possessions (and we don’t) we think that we will find happiness if we can just achieve a greater abundance.

Another of the costs of wealth is that it costs us our sense of dependence on God. Money will buy so many things that it is easy to forget that there are some things that money won’t buy; can’t buy! Remember the words of Agur in the 30th chapter of the book of Proverbs: he prayed that he should not be given riches, “lest I be full and deny thee, and say ‘Who is the Lord?’” [Proverbs 30: 8,9].

A comfortable bank balance gives such marvelous security that it is easy to feel that we need no other. Remember the church at Laodicea: “You say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,’ not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.” [Revelation 3: 17].

I wonder what it would be like to pray the Lord’s Prayer on a morning when I got up from bed knowing that cupboard, and purse and bank account were all empty. “Give us this day our daily bread.” We say, “Of course, He gives it to us ultimately.” But I suspect that there would be a different feeling of the immediacy of my dependence upon Him, if I did not have the money at hand to exchange for a loaf at the nearest grocery store. Woe to you that are rich. You and I are reminded so much less often that we need God.

Well, here ends the first part of this sermon. Dr. Scribner says that all of this thought can be compressed into the words, “We are camels.” And so here begins the second part of the sermon. What are we going to do about that gate, no wider than a needle’s eye that lies between us and the rightness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit which is the kingdom of God?

Well, one thing we are probably not going to do. We are not going to pick up the option that the rich young man in the gospel account declined. “Sell what thou hast and give to the poor.” [Matthew 19: 20,21]. We are not even going to seriously consider that.

Probably we ought not to. We would hardly have the right to, even had we the courage -- which obviously we haven’t. Probably Jesus did not intend that everyone take that counsel as a rule of life. If everyone tried to give away to everyone else all that he had, there would soon be nothing left to sell or give. But we need hardly lose any sleep over it. There is little danger that that will happen on any voluntary basis.

But if Jesus did give a special charge to one individual young man to “sell and give,” he uttered another saying which he made universal. “Whosoever does not renounce all that he had cannot be my disciple.” That is an infinitely more complex task.

To renounce, and then to retain the thing renounced; to renounce and then administer the thing renounced; is a difficult, a dangerous, a delicate undertaking. It is surrounded by the most subtle of temptations.

Some years ago I heard a talk by a man who was then head of the Pullman porter’s union. As he talked about the tips that a porter receives, and laughed over what an excellent tipper the Prince of Wales proved to be, I realized that what one thinks about tipping depends on who is doing the talking about it -- the porter or the tipper.

A man I know talked with the pastor of a Negro church in the east about this. Knowing that this pastor had several Pullman porters in his congregation, he asked him what he thought was a reasonable tip to give to the Pullman porter after a trip from Chicago to New York. The Negro pastor laughed and said, “Reasonable from whose point of view?” And the inquirer replied, “Reasonable from the point of view of a man who does not want to be small, but has to remember that he is tipping from an expense account, with other people’s money.”

He answered “off the top of his head,” and the answer served the moment. But it set him to thinking about some things more fundamental than the proper size of a tip. When he was traveling on his employer’s business, he was spending other people’s money, and he expected to give account of it. What about the trips that you and I take at our own expense? Whose money are we spending then? If I have renounced, it is God’s money. If I am spending His money, doesn’t He expect an expense accounting?

Did you know of the man whose career was literally ruined by the fact that he was placed in a position where he had authority to approve his own expense accounts? He abused the authority and the abuse caught up with him. Isn’t the Christian who has renounced all that he has in exactly the same position, and subject to precisely the same temptation?

If I have renounced (and remember, if I haven’t, Jesus says that I can not be his disciple), then every dollar that I spend, or save, or invest, or give away, belongs to God. I have complete discretion as to how much, and for what things, I spend or save or invest or give away. But my accounting must one day be rendered to God and be reviewed by Him. I have complete discretion, and complete accountability.

1) This is not the same thing as a vow of poverty. The taker of such a decision has made his choice once for all. But the disciple who has renounced makes his decision many times a day.

2) It is not the same thing as a formula: (x percent for God and 100 minus x percent at my disposal.) For it all belongs to God, and it is all at my disposal. It think that the formula may be useful as an administrative device some of the time. But it is not pure stewardship.

3) It is not asceticism. For does not God, whose money I am managing, want me to enjoy the life He has given me and world into which He has put me? The money that I spend upon myself is as legitimately used for Him as if it were contributed to college or church or hospital or United Fund. Ah, but what is a reasonable amount? God leaves that decision to me. But He gets the report! Surely God want you to feed your soul on re-creative pleasure; travel and books and concerts and plays and ball games. Certainly He does not want you, nor me, to overdo such things. But where does the point of overdoing begin? God puts it up to you, and to me.

4) It is not relinquishing forethought and care for the future. God wants me to take thought for tomorrow. Those words, quoted from the King James version of the Bible, are a mistranslation. Translators say that the Revised Standard version of the Bible gives a better sense of the Greek: “Do not be anxious about tomorrow.” God does not want me to worry myself into inefficiency. And a wise “taking thought” for the morrow is one of the best protections against anxiety. But God does not want me to get on the treadmill of going on to pile up a larger and larger estate. How much protection against the future is enough? I have to say.

5) Surely God wants me to remember my responsibility for my own family. It seems obvious to me that their welfare is an obligation which takes a high priority over the welfare of other children of God. I am the so-called bread-winner and provider for the family that He has given me. But certainly God does not want me to handicap the members of my family by turning over too much for them at the expense of his other children. How much is “too much?” I have to decide.

6). I believe that God wants me to give, thoughtfully, cheerfully, generously. He leaves the recipient, and the amount to me, as in all the other cases we have been considering. The transmission of God’s money to church or school or hospital or United Fund board is an act of devotion to Him. But it is not necessarily an act of greater devotion than is the transmission of God’s money to the grocer, or the landlord, or the clothing store. I have accomplished renunciation only when I am able to see every expenditure of God’s money as a religious act, performed as a responsible steward, for Him.

And that, my fellow camels, is the needle’s eye through which we must pass if we are to enter into the kingdom of rightness and peace and joy. If it sounds too difficult, or not possible, remember that with God all things are possible!

Now today we need to make one of those stewardship decisions. For, on this Stewardship Sunday, we indicate on a pledge card what we intend to do with God’s money by way of support for the program of this church in 1962.

Last Sunday, we considered some of the work that can be accomplished under the budget that has been proposed, and which was mailed to our homes this past week. The budget includes those items which we can call “home expenses” for the operation of our own local church program, and also the items of aid for causes other than our own local concern. It has been a thrill to see that one of the many fruits of our foreign mission gifts is the winning of the 1960 Nobel Peace Prize by Zulu Chief Albert John Lutholi. There is more information about him posted on the literature racks this morning, if you care to see it.

Our denomination-wide goal for apportionment benevolence is 11 and one-half million dollars, a sharp and very urgently necessary increase if we are to measure up, in any suitable way, to the opportunities of these times. A poster designed for use in the Colorado Conference, and which you may see displayed on the back walls of the sanctuary, pictures individuals and churches like us holding up the whole world in our arms for a year. If we fully subscribe our benevolence goal this church can “hold it up” for something like 6 hours of the year! A few, alone, could not do it. But all of us together can!

Our budget for local expenses and for benevolence can be fully subscribed if we meet a goal in pledges of approximately the same figure as last year. I’m satisfied in my own mind that many of us ought to increase our pledges and really oversubscribe this budget, for the glory of God and for our own satisfaction.

“God loves a hilarious giver.” Let us give with that thoughtful, but joyous abandon that characterizes a Christian disciple!

Some of us have brought pledge cards already, filled out, to the service today. Others will want to receive a card from the ushers now, to be filled out before we place our cards in the offering plates to be dedicated. Some of us may wish to revise our pledge upward. Those of us who turn in a card today will make the work of the canvassing team just that much lighter. God bless us, every one!

--------------------------

Dates and places delivered:

Wisconsin Rapids, November 12, 1961.

Imiola Church, November 9, 1969. (first page only)