The Mission of the Church: Material Formation

Luke 16:1-13
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
(4th in a series of 5)

This morning’s sermon is the fourth in a series of five sermons on the mission of church based on the gospel passages in the Revised Common Lectionary. As I said at the beginning of the series, these passages aren’t your typical “mission-of-the-church” texts. But because they come from a section of the gospel of Luke that portrays Jesus as preparing his followers to carry on his mission of preaching and teaching and healing and ministering after his earthly ministry is over, there is a lot we can learn about the mission of the church by listening in on the conversations, the instructions, and the parables of Jesus in these passages.

Now, before you become uncomfortable with this morning’s sermon without knowing quite why, let me go ahead and make it clear what the problem is so that you know up front why you are uncomfortable. The problem is that Jesus is talking about money. And if there is one thing that people in church don’t like to hear talked about, it’s money.

Over the decades of my experience in the church both in the pew and in the pulpit, a frequent refrain that I have heard one person or another sing goes something like, “Money, money, money. That’s all the preacher talks about down there.” Some people in church sing “In the Garden”; some sing “Amazing Grace”; and some sing, “Money, money, money. That’s all the preacher talks about down there.”

I don’t know a preacher who likes to talk about money. But one of the perennial problems that preachers face is that Jesus talks about money a lot—or at least about attitudes and allocations of material resources of one sort or another. It’s a good thing that people who don’t like to hear talk about money in church don’t read the Bible, because they really wouldn’t like the Bible. Think about the three passages we’ve seen so far in this series of sermons.

In Luke 14:7-14, we read that Jesus attended a dinner at the home of a leader of the Pharisees where Jesus “said to the one who had invited him, ‘When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

I preached that morning about the open table and the open church, open to persons who are usually excluded or ignored or abandoned by good religious people like the Pharisees and like us. But did you notice that Jesus was not just talking about the dinner host’s attitude toward persons? Jesus was talking also about the host’s allocation of material resources, about how the host spent money. Don’t just spend money on people who can pay you back, Jesus said. Spend your money to feed and support people from whom you will never see anything in return. “Money, money, money. That’s all the preacher talks about down there.”

Then there was Luke 14:25-33. Back out on the road from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus talked about a man who intended to build a tower but failed to sit down first and “estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it. . . . when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’” I chose to talk about the difference between the crowds who were merely “traveling with Jesus” and the disciples who were genuinely “following Jesus,” but Jesus was talking about money. And at the end of that passage Jesus delivered the least preached and most seldom lived-by line in the entire gospel tradition: “So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” “Money, money, money. That’s all the preacher talks about down there.”

And then last Sunday, I chose to talk about “spiritual escapism” and “spiritual domination” and the creation of a community with the spiritual fortitude to see God’s redemptive mission in the world through to the bitter end when the last one comes in. But did you notice that Jesus just had to use an illustration with money in it: a woman had ten coins, and when she discovered that one was missing, she turned the house upside down until she had found it. “Money, money, money. That’s all that preacher talks about down there.”

The truth is, Jesus talks about money—and the allocation of material resources more broadly—a whole lot more than this preacher does. (I say that as a confession of sin and an acknowledgement of a shortcoming in my proclamation of the gospel.) I talk a lot about “spiritual formation.” But it Jesus talks a whole about “material formation.” “Material formation.” Jesus points to the fact that the material shape of our lives provides the clearest indication of our spiritual condition. Four chapters ago in Luke’s gospel, Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Luke 12:34). Jesus says that your spiritual condition follows the material shape of your life, not the other way around.

What Jesus understands about human nature is that we believe in what we live more than we live what we say we believe. Do you hear that? You believe in what you live more than you live what you say you believe. Your spiritual condition follows the material shape of your life, not the other way around. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

That’s why Jesus tells one of his least-liked parables in this morning’s gospel lesson. The story goes like this. A manager is about to be fired from his job handling the business affairs of a wealthy man. When the manager hears that he is being let go, he decides that the best thing he can do is to ingratiate himself with his boss’s debtors in the hope that one of them will take him in when his boss has thrown him out. He goes to the oil man and discounts his debt 50%. “You owe a hundred?” he says. “Sign for 50.” Then he goes to the wheat man and discounts his debt 20%. “You owe a hundred?” he says. “Sign for 80.” He’s obviously making friends for the future, isn’t he?

What isn’t so obvious—what you and I couldn’t possibly see coming—is that Jesus turns this story about an unscrupulous manager into a lesson about eternal life. Speaking in the story as the manager’s boss, Jesus says, look how savvy this guy is, “a child of this age” he calls him, in preparing for the future by the way he handles “dishonest wealth.” “The children of light,” Jesus says, should be as shrewd as this guy. Here’s the punch line: “If you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches”? There it is again: your spiritual condition—“the true riches”—follows the material shape of your life, not the other way around. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Let’s think about this idea of the manager’s discount in relation to “true riches.” 50% discount? 20% discount? What about a 90% discount? Let’s talk about cars. I’m not going to advertize any particular make or model; but that BMW 6-series convertible coup looks like one sweet driving machine. Imagine, let’s say, that you’re at a new-car dealership, and the salesman tells you that you can have the car of your dreams for ten percent of the sticker price. Would you take it for that? You’d probably pay cash on the spot and drive it away in the hope that the sales manager didn’t find out about the deal before you were way down the road. A 90% discount! Who wouldn’t take it? You bet you would.

Let’s talk clothing. Women’s clothing. You walk into Talbot’s, or your favorite women’s clothier, and the saleswoman walks up to you and says, “You can have anything in the store you want for 10% of the price on the tag. Not 20% off. Not 40% off. Not 60% off. 90% off. Would you take it? You bet you would. I’d buy as much as I could carry out of the store. I wouldn’t wear it, mind you, but I’d buy it. (I’m not man enough to cross dress.)

Remember what Jesus said back in Luke 14:33? “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” That’s 100%, folks.

I grew up in the church. I’ve been in church all my life. And all my life I’ve heard people groan and grumble whenever a preacher talks about tithing. Tithing is the biblical standard of giving ten percent of one’s income to God through the church. All my life, I’ve heard the groans and the grumbles. I’ve even groaned and grumbled myself sometimes. But here’s what this morning’s gospel lesson suggests to me about tithing.

The preacher who talks about tithing is offering you a 90% discount! Now, that's good news! That's GREAT news! For 10% of the price on the tag, for one tenth of the sticker price, which Jesus says is “all your possessions,” you can have “the true riches.” But instead of taking that deal on the spot, as we would for cars or clothes or houses or furniture or jewelry, you and I groan and grumble whenever the preacher talks about a tithe.

That’s why Jesus shakes his head and says in this morning’s gospel lesson, “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” The children of light don’t seem to have a clue what a bargain they are getting, what an opportunity they have to prepare for the future at a 90% discount.

You see, in the teachings of Jesus, there is no “double standard.” Jesus does not teach us to look at the life of faith as though it were some sort of mere “spiritualism” while the rest of our life is about stuff, “materialism,” apart from the Spirit. For those of you who are church history buffs, that was the root of the problem with the Docetic heresy of the early centuries of the Christian faith, that said Jesus only appeared to be human; he was really God but not really human, because God would and could not deign to live in the material stuff of this world. The Gnostics put it this way: the stuff of this world is essentially evil, and only when the inner spark of our divine nature is set free from our material selves can we truly be with God and God with us. That double standard—thinking of the material world one way while thinking of the spiritual world another way—is a heresy. And it’s a heresy you and I live every day, because we believe in what we live more than we live by what we say we believe.

The coming of God in Jesus Christ, truly God and truly human, the Word made flesh, Emmanuel, “God with us,” shows that there is no double standard: the material world and the spiritual world are one world in which your spiritual condition follows the material shape of your life, Jesus says. Like it or not, the mission of the church is every bit as much about the material formation of “a community of believers, each member a minister,” as it is about the spiritual formation of that community and its members.

Now, you might think, “The preacher’s just trying to raise the budget this morning,” but I’m not. I’m trying to form a community consistent with the teaching and preaching and healing and ministering of Jesus Christ. If we can do that, the budget will take care of itself. The material formation of a community is why we say in our Church Covenant, “I will give systematically a sacrificial percentage of my income and possessions to support financially our church’s ministries in gratitude for the grace of God and the ministry of this fellowship.” Because we understand the wisdom of what Jesus says: that our material formation determines our spiritual formation, not the other way around. The way we live in relation to the things of this world lays bare our relationship to eternal things. There is no double standard. If you were offered a 90% discount on “the true riches,” would you take it?

The photo of money is by Tracy Olson and is used here under Creative Common licensing.
The discount icon is from DryIcons.

This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.