This week I was trawling the internet for some a sermon opener for the annual stewardship sermon (for it is that day once again), and came across this on an Australian website.

The population of this country is 18 million.
      8 million are retired.
      That leaves 10 million to do the work.
      There are 6 million in school, which leaves 4 million to do the work.
      Of this there are 1.5 million unemployed, leaving 2.5 million to do the work.
      Take from that 1,180,000 people who work for government departments and that leaves 1,320,000 people to do the work.
      480,000 are in the armed forces, which leaves 840,000 to do the work.
      At any time, there are 179,000 people in hospital, leaving 661,000 people to do the work.
      At the moment, there are 660,998 people in prison.
      That leaves just two people to do the work.
      You and me.
      And you're sitting at your computer reading jokes!

Well Jesus was sitting in the Temple in today’s Gospel reading, opposite the place where people made their offerings of money.  Now as it happens Jesus was teaching his disciples about pride and humility.  And these people making their offerings were the preacher’s absolute dream because they illustrated perfectly the point he was trying to make.  His sermon was being played out right in front of him. There was a comfortable type of giver and there was a widow.  And if you were a widow then you were poor - no govt welfare, no insurance, no pension. She had little or no regular income.

Now you’d expect all these people dropping their offerings in the box to give different amounts.  And you’d be right to expect that.  Some have their money pouches and they take out some nice new 24-carat gold coins, rub them fondly and drop them into the offering with a satisfying clunk. And they possibly feel pleased with themselves, they’ve done their duty before God. And it’s likely that many of those givers that day did so with good motives.  Many no doubt wanted to do right by God and the poor.  But then it’s someone else’s turn to make her offering.  And so this widow shuffles up rather sheepishly and self-consciously, takes out 2 small copper coins worth one penny and drops them into the bowl.  No clunk this time, but a pathetic tinny sound. 

And then Jesus, having watched all this, utters this stunning statement. “This poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”  Now the reaction of the disciples to this teaching is not recorded, but I can imagine them glancing nervously at each other and moving their weight from one foot to the other and wondering which of them was going to challenge Jesus’ math.  Which one was going to say, “Er, actually Jesus, that ‘she gave more than everyone else’ part?  Well, that isn’t strictly true.  She gave a penny, the others gave much more.”  And even we can write this off as a bit of an exaggeration by Jesus.  Sure, proportionately, she gave more than the rest but actually she gave much less.   If I were Jesus I’d have said, ‘well, the wealthy people have clearly given more just look, but the widow has given a greater proportion of her money.’  But Jesus doesn’t say that; he says she has ACTUALLY given more. To Jesus 1 penny is more than hundreds of dollars.  Not proportionately more, but just MORE; period. Jesus would not have got on well if he had applied to Harvard Business School. 

And the point is that Jesus does not notice dollar signs, he notices percentages.  He doesn’t look at what a person gives; he looks at what they have left.  Someone may have given away a million dollars to good causes, but if they are still left with many more millions then they’ve given very little, in the eyes of Jesus.  We might be impressed with the dollar amount but God is not.

According to Christ if our giving is painless, then we’ve not really begun to give. If we are giving an amount that we can easily afford out of our plenty then we are giving less than a person who gives fewer dollars but whose resources are meagre. This is such a radical truth and one that could turn our culture upside down if we understood it. In the West we honour philanthropists. We name theatres and hospitals and zoos and parks after wealthy people who have given large sums of money. We print the names of benefactors on the walls, and put photos of big donors in pamphlets.  A couple of weeks ago I visited Western Michigan University campus and every building had someone’s name on it.  If you think about many of the public buildings and leisure venues in our community - especially in Grand Rapids, so many are named after benefactors.  And I wondered how these places would be named if we ran our society on the principles of Jesus.  Maybe the theatres, hospitals, the visitor attractions would be named something like the ‘Mrs Schmidt’ hospital after she gave $20 she couldn’t afford to the children’s ward.

If we take Jesus’ words here seriously then the dollar amount a person gives is irrelevant. And if the difference between a person’s wealth before and after the gift is insignificant then God just doesn’t recognise that gift. Bill Gates was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2005. He received this accolade for his philanthropic work in the developing world. Gates started his Foundation in 2000 with a gift of $106 million. A staggering amount of money. Just think - starting your own charitable foundation and putting $106 million into it. However, when you consider that his wealth at that time was $53 billion and he was getting $32 richer with every beat of his heart, then according to Jesus’ criterion Bill Gates actually gave very little. The true heroes of giving are those who give high percentages of their income, regardless of the number of dollars.  (By the way, I do have a great deal of respect for Bill Gates. He does appear to be a genuinely compassionate and good man. My criticism is not of him, but of the values of our society that measure a person’s worth by dollar signs.)  

I found some fascinating statistics last week that seem to suggest that the wealthier a person becomes the less they give to charity, as a proportion of their income.  A group called the ‘INDEPENDENT SECTOR’ which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan coalition of more than 10,000 charities found that households earning under $25,000 give 4.2% of it to charity, and that percentage falls as the income rises.  So that households earning over $75,000 a year give just 2.7% to charity.  Which means that, according to Jesus’ way of looking at things, the poor in the US give more than the wealthy.

Now today is stewardship Sunday, like you hadn’t guessed, but I’m kind of uncomfortable with the message I’ve preached so far.  Because if you take the sermon up till now you could be forgiven for thinking that stewardship is about having a collection for God, as if he were a charity who needs our money to keep operating.  And nothing could be further from the truth.  No, the meaning of stewardship in scripture is that we cannot give to God.  People can only give what belongs to them.  Stewardship means managing someone else’s belongings.  And that’s the message that is so hard, and yet is so liberating.  Yes, liberating.  Because if we truly believe that everything is God’s then it frees us from some things that just make life miserable.  If we truly believe that everything on earth belongs to God then we will be free from worry.  Why worry about having things stolen, or lost in a fire, or getting broken, when it’s all God’s?  Why worry about money when God owns it all?  If he chooses to pass some of it on to you to look after and use wisely then that’s his business.  If he does not, then again, that’s his business.  If we can somehow allow this most radical teaching to touch our hearts and change our attitudes then we will probably sleep better at night.  We won’t be so anxious about the vagaries of the stock market.  We won’t lose our peace over what will happen to me if …

So understanding that everything is God’s helps us not to worry.  It also helps us not to get angry.  Now anger is a normal healthy response to things like fear and loss and injustice.  In that sense anger is neither good nor bad, it’s just an emotion that is common to every person, including Jesus.  Yet I think we live in a very angry society.  I think it’s fuelled by the media, especially 24-hour news channels which can only survive by creating conflict.  They thrive on people getting mad at each other.  And if the viewers get emotional then they’ll keep watching and the news channel has succeeded.  24-hour news channels can find a civil war in an empty room.  And there’s nothing quite like the subject of taxes to raise people’s hackles.  The common phrase is ‘tax-payer dollars’, and another is ‘your hard-earned money’.  But the people who use those phrases have not begun to grasp the Christian truth that the tax-payer does not own those dollars – God does.  And the hard-working employee does not own her paycheck- God does.  That’s not to say that she didn’t work hard.  She probably busted a gut all week.  The point is that she doesn’t own anything.  It’s all God’s.  So, why get bent out of shape by taxes?  If it’s not our money then why should we get angry if God decides to take it away from us?  (I’m embarrassed saying all this because I open myself to the charge of hypocrisy.  So if you’re thinking ‘hypocrite’ then I regret to confess that you’re correct!)

Do you see what I’m saying?  This is so hard I can’t tell you.  I don’t need to tell you.  We all experience this message of biblical stewardship with alarm, and possibly with the kind of anger that I’ve just been talking about.  I experience it too because we have all been indoctrinated since we were this big with the lie that human beings own things, and that we need to acquire those things, and if we work hard then we will not only possess those things but will deserve to possess them and no one has any right to take them away from us.  But this hardest of all messages can also be one of the most liberating.

Someone wrote this, “Truly living the Christian life is like launching a ship. We begin in a sort of shipyard, supported by all the materialistic props society has to offer. It takes courage to forgo the only security we have ever known, to begin the short, stomach-churning slide into the black water. It's risky. It's frightening. Yet if we do not undergo that journey, we will never discover the purpose for which God has made us. We will trade the hazards of the open sea for the slow death of dry-rot in the shipyard.”

We can feel the freedom that comes from believing that God owns it all.  He asks us, in his wisdom, to mange it for him.  That’s a great responsibility.  But where he calls he also equips.  So let us step out in faith and manage God’s resources for the good of his kingdom.