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Exodus 16: 9 – 16 and 2Corinthians 9:7-15
Preached by Rev. Susan J. Murtha
November 11, 2007
When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground.
When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, ‘What is it?’
Moses said to them, ‘It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.’
- exodus 16:14-15
Church economics are quite unlike any other economic system. I draw a simple illustration of these unique economics from my former church, but it’s one you will recognize because it happens in every church and you have seen it many times and in many forms. It goes like this: we are having a bake sale to raise money for our youth group retreat and so I make an announcement asking people to bake. The following weekend, a church member named Karen who is known as a wonderful baker goes shopping for ingredients, makes cookies, puts them on plates of one dozen each and brings them to church on Sunday for the sale. At the same time, we’re having a car wash and I’m overseeing that, but at some point I go over and check in at the bake sale table and Karen is there. She surveys the goods, picks up a plate of the cookies she made, hands me $5 for the $3 item and tells me to keep the change. “Aren’t those the cookies that you made?” “Yes,” she says. “Trevor’s home for the weekend and they’re his favorites. He wanted to eat them last night but I told him they were for the bake sale. He’ll be thrilled.” And off she goes happy as a lark.
So, she buys the ingredients, she labors to prepare the cookies, she donates them to the bake sale, she purchases them for her son and somewhere in the process, the youth group goes on its retreat. And everyone in the church thinks this is perfectly normal! It’s crazy!! You can go to college for years to become an economist and never learn a thing about this. You can even lead a nonprofit charity and never understand this because when we give to a charity we’re giving to a cause, a program, and that’s wonderful, but is that an adequate explanation of what Karen has done? No; at least I don’t think so. What is going on with church economics – with those who give three times to one request: first with materials, second with labor and third with their money?
Well, you probably think that someone who spends a lot of time at church would get an insight into the answer during some of the long-spent hours at church. But in truth, it was a weekend I was away that was particularly helpful. Early last January I was in Vermont with my family for our annual weekend ski trip. Do you remember that weekend last January when it was 70 degrees? That was our ski weekend. Some of the hard-core in our group thought it was great fun to ski in puddles, but most of us, most of the time, resorted to other entertainment. And that was easy to come by: my then 2-year old nephew had learned to talk. And he got a lot of practice with all the names of his aunts, uncles and cousins and our insatiable desire to hear our names uttered, grinning until our faces hurt. You hold him in your arms, point and say, “Who’s that?” He pauses, retrieves the name and utters it with a preciousness that could heal the world. Well, on Sunday morning I took that luscious pile of little boy-ness outside to this Vermont village and I pointed across the road and asked the kind of question we’d been asking him the whole warm weekend. I pointed across the road and asked, “What’s that?” He paused as his eyes locked onto the image and then his eyes moved up and then up and up and then he said, “Curch.”
Having studied a bit of theology I can tell you that many brilliant minds have endeavored to name what it is that makes a church a church – what are the true marks of the true church? In seminary, we have whole courses in this with multi-syllabic names. But at two years old a child perceives clearly that the way you know it’s a church, and not any other possible thing, is that it points high; it looks up and up and up. In his lifetime he will learn just how high a church looks – all the way to God – and just how far it aims; there is nothing that it will not dare to imagine as possible and ask of the people who come through its doors. Certainly he’ll have a lot of questions along the way – about God and about the church. In his childhood, he’ll ask questions like, “If God made me, who made God?” and my sister will say, “Why don’t we call Aunt Susan and ask her?” And when he’s older, he’ll wonder about the church. He’ll probably say, “The church has hypocrites.” And I’ll say, “Yeah that’s us; in the church, we’ll take anybody.” But throughout his life, with his questions answered and his questions unanswerable, he will always know what he knows now: a church points to something beyond itself; it looks all the way to God. It makes mistakes, it can run amuck, it gets bogged down, but the church can never get entirely lost because its compass is not an immediate one, not a temporal one, but an eternal one. And we build it right into the architecture as a witness to the God we serve and the business we’re in, a pointer to our beginning and our ending and to the Way we seek to live in between.
You will never understand the economics of church giving, until and unless you understand that when human beings look all the way to God, when God’s story begins to unfold – a story so different from the world’s story – then their lives are recast and their landscape is reordered and therefore their economics are less and less about worldly transactions and more and more expressions of grace. God’s story is a different one than the world’s. Every day the world says you are born and defined by your genetic code; these are your beginnings. And then it says but don’t let that stop you; push hard; achieve and get everything you can. You must do this because there are no gifts; and there are no gifts because there is no giver. You reap what you sow. Put yourself first and all along the way, be careful of strangers. The world says eat, drink and be merry and in the end the one with the most something wins. However compelling, the world’s story is a death-tale that ends in despair and brutality. And then in the midst of the world, the church says we are originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of God who loved the world into being and each human life is a reflection, an image of that divine love. Therefore welcome the stranger, as an irreplaceable life. It says there is a Giver
whose bread comes down in your barren wilderness as manna,
that this bread is multiplied in the midst of hungry thousands,
and that breaking it is the way we share it and become one.
It says that our lives will end in God and that this well-being cannot be taken from us – not by death, nor powers, nor principalities, nor things.
Those who give not once or twice or even just three times, those whose economics make no sense to the world – well, the best the world can make of it is that it’s a donation to a bake sale or it’s a pledge card to a cause. But that is because it doesn’t know we don’t believe the world’s story even if we have to live in it, that we believe a different story about our beginnings and our endings and that creates a very different kind of present tense for us. We are free to live according to an ethic whereby we are not driven, controlled, anxious, frantic or greedy, precisely because we are sufficiently at home and fed and at peace to care about others as we have been cared for. It’s a different story.
I once received a note from a woman who was not a member of the church but encountered its economics when she found herself in the midst of the church at the time of her husband’s death. Afterwards, she wrote and said this: ‘I still can’t believe the outpouring of affection and support that surrounded me when my husband died. I feel like I’ve inherited a whole circle of friends but in people that had been strangers before. I’m still overwhelmed. And if it’s suppose to be true that you only reap what you sow in this life, I can only tell you I never planted the seeds of this incredible abundance. But someone or something must have.’ She had encountered church economics – an abundant bread in her wilderness, a people so free to give that they would be embarrassed if you told them they did something extraordinary; they gave only what they had received – an abundance they did not plant. The economics of church giving make no sense unless and until you understand the whole story is rooted in God, in whom we have found the Giver, the Planter, the Sower of grace upon grace.
I admit it freely that I am completely biased in saying this but I can’t for the life of me understand how people live without a “curch” (read church). I don’t know how they live without that compass that keeps pointing them God-ward. I don’t know how they bear to live believing the summation of their life is their genetics and accomplishments. I don’t know how they live without the church’s bread in their wilderness. I don’t know how they can keep up with all that measuring and dividing, rather than human sharing and divine multiplication.
I suppose there must be some truth to the world’s story. But the only thing I know for sure is that whichever story you choose to believe, and you do have a choice on that, it is the one you will live and in living it, it will prove to be more and more true.
In this week ahead and this year ahead, may we prove to be a church of this abundant bread and magnificent grace.
Peace and grace. Amen.
Sources available upon request
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