Mine!?

Mine!?

Mark 10:17-31

November 18, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

It starts early in our lives, and I don’t know that anyone is really aware of where it comes from. But since babies tend to imitate what they see, I’m guessing it’s picked up from parents. You picked it up from your parents, I picked it up from my parents, my children picked it up from Cathy. Okay, and me, too. It’s that word the seagulls repeat in Finding Nemo: “Mine! Mine! Mine!” Now, as parents, failing to recognize that our children have picked it up from us, do everything in our power to correct that behavior. We make our kids share their toys, their space, even their food. We encourage them to look out for the other person. We endlessly repeat the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (cf. Matthew 7:12). And yet, that attitude of “mine” remains rooted deep in us, way down in our personality. In fact, the Golden Rule often morphs, at least in our living, to the slightly-less-golden rule: “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

So let’s be honest and face the facts: we live in a selfish world. Ed Stetzer, professor at Wheaton College, talks about that in his latest book Christians in the Age of Outrage—and just as an aside, I think that’s a book we all ought to be reading these days. Stetzer points out how much of the outrage in our culture today is fueled by a sense of entitlement, of my preferences becoming paramount, over yours, over anyone’s. As a pastor for over thirty years, Stetzer says one of the things that concerns him so much today is how that “mine” attitude has crept into the church. Or maybe how it’s run into the church, since we seem to have opened the door and let it in. It shows up when we say things like, “This is my church, and therefore we should…” Or, maybe more to the point, when someone adopts this attitude: “Because I give money, service, loyalty or have a legacy here, you must do what I say.” Stetzer calls such an attitude “absurd and anti-gospel” because the church is not ours (Stetzer 99-100). It’s not mine, it’s not yours, it’s not ours. This church doesn’t even ultimately belong to the United Methodist Church. Jesus didn’t say, “On this rock I will build your church.” What he actually said is this: “On this rock I will build…my church” (Matthew 16:18).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about one of those elements that makes us selfish: money, and particularly we’ve focused on the power of money in our discipleship, in our ability to follow Jesus. We’ve seen how much power money actually has to influence and direct our lives. When you combine money and the church, big things happen. Sometimes those big things are good, and sometimes they are destructive. It all depends on what we believe about the church, whose we believe it is, and how we choose to integrate our financial life and our spiritual life. This morning, as we come to the end of this “God vs. Money” series, we’re going to look at a man who found that money was the biggest stumbling block in his life to following Jesus, because he believed that it was all “mine.”

Have you ever noticed that Jesus is very often on his way somewhere when someone or something interrupts him? It reminds me of my first senior pastor who told me, on one occasion when I was complaining that I kept getting interrupted and couldn’t get “anything” done, “Your ministry is in the interruptions.” He was right, for so many reasons, not the least of which is because that’s the way Jesus lived. So in the passage we read from Mark 10, Jesus once again encounters one of those “interruptions” that not only challenges a leader’s life but shakes his disciples to the core.

Mark says simply “a man” came up to Jesus and knelt down before him. This was, of course, when kneeling was understood to be a sign of respect. Matthew tells us he is “young” (Matthew 19:20) and Luke calls him a “ruler” (Luke 18:18), so we know he has achieved some sort of authority or power in the community early in his life. The Gospels aren’t clear exactly where Jesus is at this point; Luke locates him somewhere in Judea, which is the area around Jerusalem, so this could be a well-placed man in the limited Jewish government, and we assume he is Jewish because of his focus on the law (and the fact that he’s coming to a Jewish rabbi to ask advice). When he asks Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life (and that’s a very loaded question), Jesus at first tells him to follow the Jewish law. “You know the commandments,” he tells the man, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother’” (10:19). Hearing this, the ruler thinks he is on the right track; Jesus just confirmed it. “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he says (10:20). So he knows he has been and is doing the “right” thing, or at least he believes that. As Jesus has already pointed out, no one is good except God. No one is perfect. But to the best of his ability and according to his own self-reporting, he has done the best he can all of his life. He’s followed the law. He’s obeyed the rules. And yet there is something missing. If following the rules were enough, he wouldn’t be on his knees before Jesus, asking what else he needs to do. Deep in his heart and spirit, he knows something is not right, something about his spiritual practice is incomplete.

Jesus knows, because he knows all people (cf. John 2:25), that it’s not something that’s missing. It’s something he’s holding onto. It’s an obstacle, something that has ahold of this man’s heart and prevents him from having the peace that passes all understanding. That something is his wealth. To me, this is one of the saddest accounts in the Gospels. Jesus says to the man, “One thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (10:21). Now, that’s not the answer to the man’s question. It sounds like it is, but it isn’t. Jesus is actually testing this man, pushing on him to see what it is he really worships. Who or what is his god? And the man, Mark says, walks away sad “because he had great wealth” (10:22). Though he claims to have kept the commandments, he’s really broken the first one; he has made his money his god (cf. Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 129). Doesn’t your heart break just a little bit as you watch him walk away from Jesus? And yet, we see that happen over and over and over again in history and in our world. The more we have, the tighter it holds onto us. The more we have, the more deeply rooted it is in our hearts, the more it defines who we are. In our world today, the more we own, the more debt we have, and the more we need to keep ourselves in the way we have become accustomed. And the more we have, the more we want.

There is a key sentence in this passage that we often skip over or hurry past in order to see the man’s reaction. Before Jesus answers his question, Mark tells us, “Jesus looked at him and loved him” (10:21). The word Mark uses to describe Jesus’ reaction is agape, which you may know refers to a no-strings-attached, deep, overflowing kind of love. It’s the word that’s used to describe the kind of love God has for us. This is not a flippant, “I love ya, man!” In fact, the word for “looking" means to gaze, to have insight into, to see someone with more than your eyes (Card 128). Jesus does not sneer at him or question his claim of obedience to the law (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 396). Jesus loves this man to the depth of his being and he wants the very best for this man. That’s why he asks what he asks of him. He knows the hold that money has on this man, and he wants him free to experience and enjoy eternal life now. As I said last week, money is not evil. It’s the love of money that is the root of all evil. This man is not evil because he loves money; he’s misguided and burdened and missing out on the best Jesus has for him. Money is the obstacle that gets in the way of his embracing Jesus; in fact, we’re told he walks away from Jesus “sad.” He couldn’t give it up. He walked away from the love Jesus was offering because he loved his money more. And today, there are still millions of people, maybe some of us, who do the exact same thing. So as we watch this man walk away, we have to ask: where are we in this story?

A lot of us today end up in one of a couple of places. Some folks end up in the same camp as the rich young ruler; we hold tightly onto our money because in it we find our identity. It’s who we are. It’s what we’re known for. This mindset or action grows out of what we’ve been talking about the last couple of weeks, where money becomes the primary—maybe the only—thing we pursue in life. Sometimes it grows out of a fear of not having enough, or having to go without. In fact, as one author said, “Today, people would be more likely to ask Jesus how to get the highest return on their money rather than how they can serve God” (Garland 405). And that often starts very early in our world today. When we’re kids, we expect a certain standard of living. When we get out on our own, we expect to carry on that same standard of living, forgetting that it took our parents a long time and a lot of work to get to that point. It’s easy to end up in debt; all the commercials promise us we can have more if we just click on that link or send in that form or buy this product. Incredible debt is as much about hoarding as actual hoarding is. In both situations, we get to the place where money is the center of our world, just as it was for the rich young ruler. And when money is in that place in our lives, we can’t follow Jesus. He himself said it: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24).

The other place we sometimes end up is that we give some of what we have, but we give it with conditions. We give it in such a way that we can keep control over it. I sat in a meeting once where a debate was going on about how to proceed with a project, and the debate was fierce until one man spoke up and said, “I’ll pay for it if you do it my way.” The debate ended. It no longer mattered which way was the best; what mattered was whose money spoke loudest. I’ve also had friends—more than one—who give explicit directions to the church they were attending that their contributions were not to be used for the pastor’s salary because they were mad at the pastor for one reason or another. Now, let me tell you a secret: all the money given to the church goes into one bank account. There is not a separate account for paying this salary or that, and there’s no real way to guarantee that your exact dollar did or did not go to this particular person’s salary. Besides that, there are legal and ethical implications that mean the staff is going to get paid. But somehow it made these people feel better if they had some (illusory) measure of control over how their giving was spent.

Neither of those line up with the instruction Jesus gave to the rich young ruler, and do you know why? Because Jesus’ concern is the effect and the control money is already having on this young man. Jesus instructs the young man to implement the second strategy for winning the battle against money. Last week, we talked about the first strategy, gratitude. Gratitude changes our outlook because we begin to focus on what we already have, which changes our view on what’s most important in life. From gratitude, then, we begin to move into the second strategy, which is generosity. And while we’re talking specifically in this series about money, generosity is or should be a broader way of life focused on much more than just our finances. What we have, we give. We give to honor God. How does that happen? How does our giving honor God? Well, when we give of what we have for the sake of ministry in the world, we are saying with our lives and our actions that there is something more important to us than money, or whatever we have given. When we give, we’re demonstrating that our lives have been given over to a higher and better calling. Because the reality is that we need to give it more than God needs to receive it. We need to become people who give, who let go of the things that threaten to hold onto us. Generosity is the path to true spiritual freedom. Today we are far too addicted to ourselves and we rarely let God get a word in as to what is better and best for us (Christopher, God vs. Money, pg. 21). When we give of our money to a cause greater than our own comfort or our own kingdom, we’re demonstrating that our love for Christ outweighs our love for money, stuff and things. What is the greater cause you have given your life to? And does your wallet know about it?

We have been given much, and we are called to be stewards with what we have been given. A steward does not own what they have; a steward cares for what has been given to them but it really belongs to someone else. Biblical theology says that everything we have actually belongs to God, and that we are stewards of it all. That means God trusts us to use it for his purposes, and not primarily for our own. So generosity really accomplishes two purposes: we give so that money no longer has a control over us, and we give so that God’s purposes in the world can be accomplished. Can there be any greater cause than the kingdom of God? Now, that’s not to say there shouldn’t be accountability. In today’s world, we need to know if what we give is being spent in a way that is consistent with that greater cause, with the mission we believe in and support, in a way God is calling us to. So on this Generosity Sunday, I want to share with you this morning some of the ways God has called us to move forward here at Mount Pleasant with our mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

This past year, we have focused heavily on radical hospitality: welcoming better, helping people find a place in the congregation, and going above and beyond in what is expected. So we’ve made some changes—some popular and some unpopular, I realize—toward that end. Mike Pruitt is now our Director of Hospitality and he is just now beginning to take an even harder look at what we need to do to be the best at welcoming people. The truth is we don’t want to do anything that keeps people from finding Jesus. In other words, we don’t want to be the stumbling block that keeps people from becoming a disciple. Now, we do fairly well at that. About 25% of our guests became active participants in 2017, and while that may sound low, I can tell you it’s way above where most churches, large and small, are sitting. Still, we can always do better. We had a speaker from Chick-fil-a—because, seriously, does anyone do hospitality better than Chick-fil-a?—to help train our leaders, and we had a “secret worshipper” experience this past fall who gave us valuable feedback. In the midst of that focus, our staff and Leadership Council has also been visioning and dreaming about other aspects of the future. Our Grace Unlimited has had more participants than ever before, and they have begun learning valuable life skills—which in turn produced some yummy cupcakes and puff corn! We also began a GU Worship Service this year. Jess and her team have learned a lot, and though that continues to be small, there is plenty of room for growth in the future! Celebrate Recovery has seen an increased participation this year as people find hope and healing beyond addiction. You know, it’s hard to sum up a year in just a few sentences, but my point is this: we have done everything possible in many different ministries this year to remain faithful to the mission: to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

So that’s great for 2018, but I’m guessing the real question you have is where are we headed in 2019? After all, you know that this morning we’re going to ask you to make a generosity commitment for the coming year, and it’s only right for you to ask if there is a plan, a vision, an idea where we might be headed. The good news is: yes, there is! Once we have welcomed people, the next piece of our mission is to help them (all of us, really) become better and more deeply committed followers of Jesus. So our overarching focus in 2019 will be on intentional faith development, discipleship, growing deeper in our faith. One major change that will be coming at the first of the year is a change in our Sunday morning worship schedule which will allow us to offer two sets of discipleship classes each week. Now, the current Sunday School classes will not be going away, only the time will be changing, and I talked with each of the adult classes last week about that. We don’t want to take away what is working, but we do hope to add to that some content-driven solutions, some basic discipleship courses that can help us all grow in our faith. We want Sunday morning to become a one-stop-shop for worship and growth. You can come here on Sunday morning, take part in a class and worship and still beat the Presbyterians to the cafeteria! So beginning January 6, worship and classes will take place at 9:00 and at 10:30. I can’t wait to roll more of this out to you in the coming weeks; I think it’s going to be extremely helpful in our doing better at accomplishing our mission.

We’re also moving ahead on our Steps to the Future campaign. Last Sunday, our chairperson, Bryan Jackson, shared that we have done all right this year, but we have had to put some of the goals for that campaign off to the side as giving has not been where we need it to be. Just to remind you, the Steps to the Future campaign has two primary goals. It’s about paying down our mortgage debt on this building as well as taking care of some of the upgrade and maintenance needs on the rest of the current campus. The whole point of this three-year campaign is to position us so that we can indeed finish the goal that was put in place when we did the ReBuild campaign on this worship space. We want to, and really need to, add space on to the east for gathering space as well as more rooms for some of our specialized ministries. We need to get the nursery closer to our worship space. We need to have some specialized space for Grace Unlimited. That and other goals are all part of the Steps to the Future campaign, and I know it’s not exciting to give to maintenance needs, but if we really are stewards, it is irresponsible of us to allow the space and the campus God has given us to fall in, to not be taken care of in any way. I also understand that there may be some fatigue with the effort it took to do the ReBuild on this space, but here’s the reality: there is no end to being a good steward. If the mission is worth giving ourselves to, there isn’t a place where we ever say, “Well, we’ve arrived and can rest a while.” Jesus calls us constantly forward, into the future.

Then, the third area I want to highlight is our Missions Team. Many of you may not realize that there is no budget line item for our Missions Team. Yet, every year, we, through them, help support a number of missionaries and ministries. The work of Mount Pleasant Church literally goes around the world, and that’s something to be proud of and excited about. Currently, the missionaries we support include Dan Miller in the Middle East, Jessie Oliver with Young Life in Costa Rica, Andrew and Kelly Wheaton doing Bible translation in Chile, McKenzie Barber reaching college students with InterVarsity at Indiana State, Jeff Horstman establishing a prayer ministry in Lafayette and Deb Williams who lives here but helps coordinate work teams with Mountaintop Ministries in Haiti. So they do a lot of fundraisers and those are a lot of fun—you could call them “fun-raisers”—but they also depend on many of you who donate above and beyond your normal giving toward missions. The work they do, most of it behind the scenes, is one more way we are involved in making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation…of the world.

I often get asked, “How much should I give?” Jesus asked the rich young ruler to sell everything and give it away, but I don’t believe and I don’t understand the text to be saying that’s a standard for all people everywhere for all time. Jesus is, as we’ve said, looking into his heart and trying to help this particular man get beyond the obstacle that is in his way. The Old Testament sets a standard of a tithe—giving 10% of what we earn back to God as a sacrifice. Then we start debating: well, is that 10% of net or 10% of gross? But by the time we get to that kind of discussion, we’re missing the point. The New Testament gives us a better perspective. Rather than legalistic giving, what God wants is someone who gives joyfully. He wants us to give gladly. Paul puts it this way: “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work” (2 Corinthians 9:6-8). Three quick things jump out at me from those verses. First, if we are stingy in our giving, God will be stingy in his giving to us. The way we are willing to give is the way God will give back to us. There’s a connection there that Jesus hinted at when he said, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48). The second thing I notice is that God allows us to decide what we should give. In the New Testament, while a tithe is assumed, that’s only the starting point. For some of us, it may be a goal. For others, it’s the ground floor. But whatever we decide to give, God calls us to give it joyfully, and that’s the third thing. If we’re giving it grudgingly, or only because “we have to,” or to pay our “dues” in the church, then we might as well keep it. God loves a cheerful giver. God loves one who smiles as he or she gives. The literal translation is, “God loves a hilarious giver.” How much should we give? That’s between you and God, but it’s been my experience he will always call you to give more than you think you can because generosity helps us win the battle with money.

It’s also been my experience that God provides. When we are faithful to give, God provides what we need. We may not always have everything we want, but we have what we need. It’s not mine anyway. Let me sum up these last three weeks this way: money is a discipleship issue. We’re constantly in a battle as to where we give our allegiance: God or money. But Jesus knew we would face that struggle and he provides two strategies for winning the battle: gratitude and generosity. Gratitude helps us focus on and be grateful for all we have, and generosity helps us give our lives and our resources for the sake of something bigger than ourselves. It breaks our natural tendency toward selfishness. That’s the call of Jesus. That’s the call to deeper financial discipleship. And you have a chance to exercise that discipleship this morning as we make promises, commitments, to the future of our church and, more importantly, to God’s kingdom.