The Reverend John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
September 23. 2007 Pentecost
17
The sermon today is taken
from Luke, chapter 16, verses 1-13.
Some of you may have read a
remarkable short story sometime during your school years by D. H. Lawrence
titled The Rocking Horse Winner.
I wonder if you remember how the story begins. It is a haunting tale about a family living
above its means. The mother is
considered by friends and neighbors to be the perfect mother in spite of the
fact that deep down she knows she has difficulty loving her three
children. It is important to the husband
to keep up the pretense of success: the
large house staffed with servants. But
they are living on the edge just like many families today.
Now listen as D. H. Lawrence
describes this family’s life situation:
“And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase, ‘there must
be money, there must be money.’ The
children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas when the expensive
and splendid toys filled the nursery.
Behind the shining modern rocking horse, and behind the smart doll’s
house a voice would start whispering, ‘there must be money, there must be
money.’ The children would stop playing
to listen for a moment, and they would look into each other’s eyes to see if
they had all heard. Each one saw in the
eyes of the other two that they too had heard.
‘There must be more money, there must be more money.’ It came whispering from the springs of the
still-swaying rocking horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden head, heard
it. The big doll, sitting so pink and
smirking in her new pram, could also hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be
smirking all the more self-consciously because of it. And the foolish puppy too. That took the place of the teddy bear, and he
was looking so extraordinarily foolish for no other reason but that he heard the
secret whisper all over the house:
‘There must be money.’”
That’s the family backdrop to
the story of The Rocking Horse
Winner. Quite an extraordinary
picture: there must be money, there must
be money.
I wonder if there are any
homes in our community today that are haunted in the same way: there must be money.
This morning I want to talk
about financial freedom. Jesus said on
one occasion, “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the
other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and wealth.”
This morning I am going to
substitute the word money for wealth, because I think that’s what we think
about when he hear the word wealth.
Here, I think, is the challenge for this morning. We want to break the grip that money has on
our lives. We want to affirm that
Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is the our God and our only
God. We want to affirm that the God who
manifested himself in Jesus of Nazareth is our God. This is who we are. That is why we are here in this church at
this time. “Thou shalt have no other
gods before me.” We want God to be our
God, not material possessions. Still,
let’s be honest. We live in a materialistic
society. Fairly or unfairly, people
judge us by our possessions, and it costs so much to live nowadays. But we know we don’t need everything we have,
much less, everything that we want. It
troubles us. Like the rich man God
called a fool, we keep needing bigger and bigger garages to hold all of our
stuff. And how do we extricate ourselves
from this vicious cycle?
I want to begin by noting
that Jesus (at least I don’t read it anywhere) was anti money. He understood the place of money in our
lives. Jesus told a strange little
parable about a manager who is accused by his boss of wasting the boss’s possessions. “And what is this I hear about you,” asked
his boss, “give an account of your management because you cannot be manager any longer.” So there this manager was, given his notice,
and what in the world was this poor man going to do? If any of you find yourselves in this
situation, I hope you do not do what he did.
The manager said to himself, “What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I am not strong enough to dig, and I am
ashamed to beg, and I know what I’ll do so that when I lose my job here, people
will welcome me into their houses. So he
called each one of his master’s debtors.
He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ ‘One hundred
gallons of olive oil,’ the first debtor replied. And the manager told him, ‘take your bill,
sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’
Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe? He replied, ‘A hundred bushels of wheat.’ He
said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’” And he spent the last few days of his
employment defrauding his employer of thousands of dollars. How do you imagine his employer
responded? And here is the shocking
conclusion to Jesus’ parable this morning:
His employer commended the dishonest manager because he had acted
shrewdly.
I have to wonder if some of
these debtors were not deadbeats, and maybe they were usually very slow paying
their bills, if they paid them at all.
And maybe what the business owner was praising was his manager being
able to collect as much as he did before he left.
Jesus doesn’t explain, and
really he doesn’t need to. A parable
only has one point, and he explains the point like this: “I tell you,” said Jesus, “use worldly wealth
to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed
into eternal dwellings. Use worldly
wealth to gain friends for yourselves.”
Jesus seems to be saying that there is a place for money in our
lives. It would be foolish to imagine
that we could get by without money in a society like ours.
As we have noted before,
there are some things only money can do.
Pay for healthcare, for example.
Many people in our society are facing crises because they either can’t
get or can’t afford decent health insurance.
Fifty years old, diabetic, laid off from your job. Just try to find a health insurer who will
cover you at any price. I guarantee you
that even if you can find it, you can’t afford it. There are some things only money can do: put a roof over our heads, put food in our
stomachs, fill up our car with gasoline.
Try to do it without money. It is
impossible. There is a place for money
in our lives and Jesus knew that. He was
a practical man, he knew that there are some things that only money can
do. But I think Jesus is saying here
that we are in deep trouble if money has first place in our lives. Money is a nice servant, but a terrible
master.
It is easy to see the worship
of money in misers. An elderly couple
dies of malnutrition and authorities investigating the deaths discover
forty-thousand dollars in cash tucked away in a closet. Somehow, their sense of values had got turned
around, and at this stage the need for money is a sickness. And we can see it in misers. Their values are terribly skewed.
And, you know, we can see it
in thieves. Whether we’re talking about
what happened with Enron and all the people who lost their retirements, or
we’re talking about financial planner who is trying to help people in one
sense, but taking their money in another.
We also can talk about income tax.
Well, you know, if I just cheat a little bit, it will save me some money
and no one will find out.
Last night it was revealed in
the news that there was a man who was posing as a veteran of the war in Iraq
and going into Pufferbellies in Hyannis ordering all kinds of drinks for himself
and for others, and meals and paying by check.
He was telling everyone that he was a war hero and that they should
honor his check because he had served his country in Iraq. The reality was that the checks were no
good. They bounced, and he never did
serve in Iraq. And, you know, that’s the
value system of a person who values, who worships money. It’s easy to spot in misers and thieves, but
what about us? Could we be worshiping
this God as well?
A church member came to his
rector’s study one day, and the rector could see that the man looked deeply
troubled. The man said, “Father, I need
to talk, I feel so empty, so dried up inside.
I’m scared.” And his voice began
to quiver just a bit. And he said,
“Father, I have just come from the doctor’s
office and he told me that I have only six months at best to live. And after I left the office, I realized that
I have no spiritual resources, no inner strength to cope with this horrible
diagnosis. There is nothing to fall back
on, to lean against. And many people
would be surprised to hear me say that, for I have made lots of money and
people think I am a success not only at making money, but at being a strong and
powerful person.” He then fell quiet and
the rector waited in silence for him to go on.
And finally the man said,
“You know, I am poor in the things that count the most. I see it now.
I put my faith in the wrong things; and the truth is, I am destitute,
spiritually destitute. I could pick up
the phone and call any bank and borrow any amount of money to do whatever I
wanted to - just on my name, Reverend, just on my name. Do you understand? I could borrow it on my name only.” The man then leaned forward and put his head
in his hands and said softly through tears, “I guess there are some things you
can’t buy or borrow.”
This man’s material bank was
full to overflowing, but his spiritual bank was empty. Is that your situation? Then you are serving mammon and not God. The dishonest steward at least understood
that money is a means, not an end. He didn’t take his boss’s money for himself,
he didn’t hoard it up. He used it to buy
favor with his friends. He didn’t want
to be all alone and unemployed in that harsh world when people were fortunate
if they could eek out even a subsistence living.
The really big question that
the Gospel reading for today raises is:
do you own your money, or does it own you?
The great Evangelist of the
eighteenth century, John Wesley, understood the spiritual struggle that many
people have with the place of money in their lives. And here was the irony of John Wesley’s
ministry: The Wesleyan revivals were
turning people, many of whom had serious drinking problems, into sober-minded,
hard-working and responsible individuals.
In fact, some of Wesley’s converts became so successful that they began
letting their commitment to Jesus slide.
They had allowed their success, their affluence, to become their God,
and in reality they were as lost as they were when Jesus first touched their
lives.
Now what was John Wesley’s
solution? He saw only one. That they should earn all that they could,
save all that they could, and then give all that they could. Let me put his formula into the present
tense, for I think it is a good one.
Earn all you can, save all you can, and give all you can. Many people today can do the first two, but
they have an awful lot of difficulty with the third. Why?
Because money has taken over first place in their lives.
Someone else is giving us
another formula; one that has blessed millions of people through the
centuries. If you want true financial
freedom, learn to live on eighty percent of your present income. Take ten percent of your income and invest it,
and take the other ten percent and give it to God. Eighty, ten, ten. Present needs, investment for the future, and
being rich toward God. This formula, I
think, ensures that money has its proper place in our lives. Follow it, and you will have enough to live
on, you will look forward to a secure retirement, and you will signal that God
is in control in your life. And no more
will you hear the chant in your house:
there must be more money, there must be more money. You will own your money, but your money won’t
own you. Even more important, you will
have treasure laid up in heaven.
Amen