PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Matthew 6:19-24                                                                    Neither Steal Nor Covet
Sermon March 14, 2010:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            There was a time, not too many decades ago, when “You shall not steal” mostly meant cattle-rustling and moving the boundary marker between farms.  There was a time in your own life when “You shall not covet” meant that your parents gave to you what you needed, and gave to your sister what she needed; and “just stop being jealous—everybody is okay.”  But both our culture and we ourselves grew up and got sophisticated, and now two of the Ten Commandments talk to us about money.  Well, Jesus talked about money in the Sermon on the Mount.  What is the relationship between the spiritual life and money?  What does money have to do with morals?  “You shall not steal.”  “You shall not covet”—that is, you shall not live out your greed. 

            My father used to tell about a preacher in Kentucky whose sermons were marvelous.  Everybody in the church liked his preaching.  And then one day he preached against smoking—in Kentucky, and one farmer was heard to mutter on the way out the door, “Now he’s stopped preaching and gone to meddling.”  If we’re going to take the Ten Commandments seriously, we have to talk about money. 

            But talking about money in church breaks some unspoken rules.[1]  I’m okay talking about the present recession.  We can even make announcements about the church’s budget needs and ask you to give a bit extra until we make up the deficit.  But it isn’t polite to talk about money—I mean really talk about your money:  that’s your private business.  Following this rule over the decades, the church’s theology of money has become a thin message, an anorexic whisper as if “we don’t talk about that in nice company.”  There’s a problem with this reticence:  money, your money, my money, is a spiritual issue and a moral concern; and if we don’t address it in church, it just won’t get attended to.  What would you think about a church that never taught its members what Jesus taught about human sexuality?  How could you say your church was being faithful to Jesus Christ if we didn’t talk about the spiritual meaning of the work you do for a living—your “vocation,” which means your “calling from God”?  Is money more private than sex and vocation? 

            So what is it about money that we need to consider?  This is my point today:  The Christian management of your resources is perhaps the most important spiritual thing you do. 

            The Eighth Commandment says, “You shall not steal,” and the Tenth Commandment says, “You shall not covet”—that’s greed.  Jesus said, “You can’t serve both God and Mammon.”  “Mammon was the Syrian god of wealth, like the Greek god Pluto.[2]  Money really is deified—“the almighty Dollar.”  If you serve Mammon, you lose your life.  If you serve God, we have this doctrine called “the doctrine of Creation,” that says God placed us here in the midst of all this bountiful wealth “to work it and to keep it,”[3] that is, to “manage” what belongs to the Owner.  And there’s a church word for our job of managing the world:  “stewardship.”

            “Stewardship” has become a code-word for the budget campaign.  That’s only a small part of our management responsibility:  Christian “stewardship” is really about everything God has placed into our hands—our property, our income, our family, our work, our environment, even the polar ice caps and the rivers and bays.  This is also why we receive the One Great Hour of Sharing offering each year:  to steward some of our resources to save the lives of others.  The question that we must answer about all these is, are we managing them for God or for Mammon? 

            You who grew up during the Depression:  how did your parents feed you?  Did they steal?  Did they engage in dishonest business practices?  Did they break the law in order to enrich your table?  Or did they trust God and go to work?  And when orphans and hobos came around, what did your parents do?  They helped them.  That’s “stewardship”—management. 

            Now we live in an affluent society.  Yes, the economy has taken a beating, and we’re still not out of the woods; but compared with all the people in the world who go to bed hungry, we’re making it okay.  And yet people we know don’t flinch about stealing programs off cable television, stealing time on the internet, stealing money with shoddy products, stealing other people’s children’s education with poor teacher skills.  Theft has become America’s blight.  So now, when you go for a job interview, after you fill out the application form, you take an employee test to see how honest you are; and the test is scientifically organized so you end up telling on yourself if there’s anything to tell.  All because America has forgotten that money is a spiritual issue.  The Christian management of your resources is perhaps the most important spiritual thing you do.

            In the Gospel Lesson today Jesus speaks about the spiritual meaning of our resources:

In these words Jesus is not condemning Social Security or your retirement savings.  People in the first century provided for old age differently than we do; in our culture you have to save.  But what Jesus is getting at is what we call today “conspicuous consumption.”  We live in a time and place where people want to spend everything on themselves.  The richest man in America—you know, the guy with the bad hair—has been criticized for decades because he gave nothing away:  he kept it all.  So about ten years ago he set up a small foundation to give away some of the money and stop the criticism.  But you don’t have to have bad blond hair to think covetously.

            Commercials!  None of us in immune.  They create an atmosphere that says, “You’re nobody if you don’t buy this.”  Now a Christian can have “this”—a flat-screen TV across one wall, an SUV, a cruise, an in-home WiFi; but the Christian doctrine of Creation reminds us that none of this stuff is mine:  there is another Owner to whom I am responsible.  And how am I managing God’s world of things?  The Christian management of your resources is perhaps the most important spiritual thing you do. 

            And how well are you managing your resources for the sustaining of a house for God?  This is that narrow definition of the word “stewardship” as a church word.  As our society becomes more secular, the support of people who really do believe in God is becoming critical for the church’s life and mission.  It is a valid and necessary part of a Christian’s practical management of the bounty we have received from God, to provide a house for the Owner.  And this year, our attention to this is especially important.

            “You shall not steal.”  “You shall not covet.”  “You can not serve both God and Mammon.”  There’s an old saying:  “You can’t take it with you.”  But I like the second old saying, too:  “You can send it on ahead.”  Christian, be God’s manager.  The Christian management of your resources is perhaps the most important spiritual thing you do.

AMEN