Whose Are You?

Luke 12:16-21

November 13, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

So we are back where we started four weeks ago. At least I hope this parable sounds familiar to you! We looked at this when we began this series called “If Money Talked,” and as we wrap things up this morning, I want to remind you of what money has said to us thus far. First of all, we heard that money can add meaning to our lives, but it is not the meaning of life. Then we considered that the moment we think we own money, it actually owns us. And last week we talked about priorities, how money’s direction reveals our ultimate affection. So over the last week, I asked you to think about and pray about your priorities. What is most important to you in life? And is my spending in line with my priorities? It is amazing how often I’ve found in my life that those two things don’t match. What about you? Because if money talked, it would tell us, “What you choose to do with me speaks volumes about who and whose you are” (Stanley, If Money Talked, pg. 64).

So four weeks ago we talked about the context for this parable, how Jesus was being asked to intervene in a dispute between family members over an inheritance, and how Jesus refused. Instead, he told this story, which in my Bible has the heading, “The Parable of the Rich Fool.” Now, your title may be the same or different; remember that the titles are not in the original text. Those are inserted by translators to help us get the point. In the story, God himself calls the rich man a fool, so it’s appropriate, and foolishness, in the Scriptures, means you have turned your back on God. The psalmist says, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good” (Psalm 14:1), and the word translated “fool” refers to someone who lacks any morals. A fool is a person who lives for himself or herself, not for anyone else and definitely not for God. That’s the same way the word is used in Jesus’ parable. By calling the man a “fool,” God is basically saying, “You have no moral compass. You don’t think of anyone beyond yourself. And because of that, you will have no legacy.” The rich man thought it was all for him. He had no desire to share or to try to make the world a better place with what he had. He grabbed onto his money and he kept it—or tried to. He was a fool.

I don’t know about you, but I want my life to make a difference, and one tool I have to accomplish that is money. The Bible is pretty clear that that’s all money is—it’s a tool that can be used for good and in other ways as well. The choice is up to us, and the choice we make reveals a lot about who we belong to, about whose we are. Let me get at this another way by asking a couple of questions. What do you want people to celebrate about you when you’re gone? What do you want people to line up and thank you for in the end (cf. Stanley 65)? The rich man in Jesus’ parable was not asking or even thinking about those questions All he could think about was his own comfort. All he wanted was to be able to “take life easy; [to] eat, drink and be merry” (12:19). Is that really what life is all about?

What might God have said to the man in the parable if, rather than hoarding what he had, he had given at least some of what he had away? That’s the lesson Jesus wants his disciples to take away from this parable. He wants them to grasp the truth of what he said in the sermon on the mount: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21). To have that kind of an attitude will require the rich man (and probably each one of us) to have a change of heart. Sometimes a heart change is what literally saves your life.

This fall, a month ago yesterday actually, I celebrated five years since my second heart valve replacement surgery, a surgery that literally changed my life. In fact, we only learned after the fact that my life was in a lot more danger than we knew due to an aneurism that had formed around the valve. When I came out of that surgery, I not only had a fixed heart but a changed heart. Now, due to the mechanical valve that keeps me going, I hear a ticking sound all the time. My heart is different since I allowed the surgeons to work on it, and while it’s not a perfect analogy, that’s what we want to have happen to each of us spiritually. We need heart surgery, we need a heart change, from someone who would rather build new barns to keep all our stuff to people who give. What kind of spiritual surgery will it take for us to become the sort of people Jesus was longing to see in this parable?

First, we need a grateful heart. If there is anything social media and our 24-hour news cycle has taken from us (and I believe there are many things), a sense of gratitude is one of the most prominent. Certain social media sites are an endless stream of complaints. The other day, Cathy was reading reviews for some product on some site (I don’t even remember what), and we talked about how the only people who write reviews seem to be those who want to complain. And I’m as guilty of that as the next person. A while back, I wrote a negative review on a restaurant site and someone I didn’t even know commented, “Do you also write reviews when things go well?” I had to answer, “No, I don’t,” because the default position today is to complain. Today, if this rich man had an abundance of crops, he would probably go on Twitter and say something like, “Great, now I have to build new barns because my harvest was so large. So much work! #ugh!”

What if we flipped this script as well? What if we chose to be grateful more than just one day a year? I had a friend who, several years ago, was struggling with this and decided that every day of the year she would post something online she was grateful for. 365 days of gratitude. She told me it wasn’t easy to come up with that many things. It’s not that there aren’t that many things to be grateful for; we just struggle to see them. I kept telling her she could post that she was grateful for such a great friend as me, but I don’t think I ever made the list. Anyway, what and who are you grateful for? Some people I’ve heard of take a moment before going to bed each day and write about the things from the day they are grateful for. And not just things that happen to you. Who has made a difference in your life? Do they know it? Who walked with you when your family was going through a crisis? What are the organizations you’re a part of that you’re proud to be a part of? Are you grateful for this church? How do you show that (cf. Stanley 66)? We’ll come back to that in a few moments. We need a grateful heart.

We also need a broken heart. The founder of World Vision, Bob Pierce, once visited suffering children on an island in Korea, and after that visit, he wrote in his Bible what became a famous prayer and the guiding principle of his life: “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” That’s a good prayer for all of us. For Dwight L. Moody, it was a fire that broke him. On October 8, 1871, Moody was finishing his Sunday evening sermon when the city fire bell began to ring. Chicago was on fire, and so Moody ended his sermon and encouraged the people to return the next week. Unfortunately, due to the fire, many of them would never return; they died in the worst fire in Chicago’s history. The realization that he had let them leave without inviting them to trust in Jesus broke Moody. After the fire, he vowed he would never hold back again and in fact, he spent the rest of his life inviting anyone he encountered to follow Jesus. Moody was broken in a good way and he gave everything he had because of it (Groeschel, Lead Like It Matters, pgs. 233-234).

What breaks your heart? I have a very clear memory of being in our family room. I was pretty young, and I don’t think I was even praying, but in a moment, and only for a moment, God gave me a vision of a person I knew well who wasn’t following Jesus. And I can’t say there were really images or even anything like that, just a sense in my spirit of what it was like to be without any relationship to God. In that moment, God not only broke my heart for that person, but he began to break my heart for anyone who was trying to do life without Jesus. Now, I didn’t have a real call to ministry until much later, but I still go back to that moment as the moment when God broke my heart for the world. I have not gotten it perfect, not by any stretch, but a broken heart is what changed the way I give of my life and my resources. I’ve said a lot, especially in the last few years, is all I really want to do is just help people know Jesus better. That’s my calling. What breaks your heart?

A grateful heart plus a broken heart leads to a new way of using what we have for the sake of the world. Here at Mount Pleasant, we long to leave a legacy of Jesus followers in every generation. That focuses everything we do. One of the good things—in fact, maybe the only good thing—that came out of the COVID pandemic was a refocusing on why we do what we do. As we began to come out of lockdowns, we were very intentional with what we invested energy in, and what we invested finances in as well. We have made some choices that, while maybe not always popular, align us better with our mission statement, to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. That’s our calling. That’s why we exist. And out of a grateful heart and a broken heart, we seek to channel everything toward that purpose.

So, this morning we’re asking you to consider whose you are and who your heart belongs to. The rich man’s ungrateful and unbroken heart belonged only to himself. We, by contrast, are called to belong to Jesus who calls us beyond ourselves into a greater mission and to take part in that mission with everything we are, including our finances. Because, if money talked, it would tell us, “What you choose to do with me speaks volumes about who and whose you are.” This morning, in just a few moments, you will have a chance to fill out a pledge card, to make a promise, that will say something to God about who and whose you are. But before we do that, I want to be share a little about this church and where we believe God is calling us.

First of all, I am proud to be part of Mount Pleasant Church. There is literally no where else I would rather be. This is a place whose heart is grateful and broken in all the right ways. We don’t always get it right, and we get frustrated with each other over things large and small, but I am still proud to be a part of this church. I’m proud to be part of a church that welcomes everyone, especially the ones the world considers the least, the last and the lost. I’m proud to be part of a church that is helping people get on the road to recovery, a place that provides space every single week to help people get past their hurts, habits, and hang-ups. I’m proud to be part of a church that invests to heavily in children’s ministry, from the preschool to the kids choir to youth mission trips. We have a single curriculum that is designed to help our youngest participants learn about Jesus in a wholistic way from the nursery to the time they graduate. We invest heavily in those ministries because without the young, the church literally has no future. Just this past June at Annual Conference, 22 churches were closed because they could see no future for their ministry, and some of those were from our District. So I am proud of our children and youth and get excited when there is that kind of messy energy in the building. During the week, I love hearing the sounds of the preschool kids coming from downstairs. I am also proud of the way this church reaches out into the community to care for everyone. Our Grace Unlimited ministry reaches special needs folks all over this community and beyond, and this afternoon, we are taking a group of special needs folks on a mission trip to Mayfield, Kentucky. We’re going to be working with Samaritan’s Purse in tornado recovery, and they tell us this is the first time a church has ever embarked on a special needs mission trip. That’s exciting! And I’m proud of our partnership with 14th & Chestnut as we provide what they ask for every month. We’ve branched out into the community with the Friendship House, and we’ve reached around the world as we partner with Jessie Oliver, Andrew & Kelly Wheaton, Jeff Horstman and Deb Williams. I could go on and on, but I don’t have time. Suffice it to say: I am proud to be a part of Mount Pleasant Church.

I hope you are, too. I hope you are grateful for all that God is doing in and through this church, and I hope your hearts are broken by the state of the world. And I hope you are proud of the ways this church in particular is seeking to bring Jesus to our broken world. I kind of think you are, at least on some level, or you wouldn’t be here. But here’s the deal: the staff and the Leadership Council can’t do it on our own. It takes all of us, giving of ourselves and our resources, to transform the world for Jesus. Here’s the honest part: the last couple of months have been challenging financially as giving has been lower than usual and lower than expected. We did really well through the pandemic, and I know the economy has taken a hard turn over the last few months, but those bills that you and I have to pay, the church has to pay as well. So we’ve tried to take that all into consideration as we put together the 2023 budget, and if you’re a numbers person, we have copies of that budget in the lobby you are welcome to pick up. It’s all aspirational, of course, at this point, as we need each and every one of us to participate to make the hopes and dreams represented in that budget a reality.

So you have a pledge card in front of you this morning. I’m going to walk through it, then invite you to fill it out and bring it forward this morning. The whole name, address, phone, and such area I’m fairly certain you can figure out yourself. But please don’t assume we have it correct in our database, so if you will in fact fill that out for us, I would greatly appreciate it. What we’re asking in the choices above that area is this: are you “in” on the mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world? Out of a grateful and broken heart, what do you want your money to say about who and whose you are? The first line simply asks what your commitment will be for the coming year. And every year, I get people who ask why we want to know. Why can’t this just be between “God and me”? It is very important that you talk to God about it, because this is a promise you’re making to him before you make it to the church. But from a practical standpoint, I fill this out every year because I want my church to know they can count on me. Simply put, it relieves some of the stress of your Leadership Council when they know they can count on you to support the ministry taking place here. So you fill out a weekly or a monthly or annual number there. Then, if this is your first time to make a commitment like this to Mount Pleasant, we want to celebrate that. Check the “first-time pledge” line. And if you’re moving toward tithing or continuing to tithe, we want to know that, too. Then there are two other “above your general giving” opportunities listed below that. The first is for our mortgage reduction. We have a mortgage on this building from the rebuild of eight years ago and we’d like to be responsible and pay that off as soon as possible. (And if you’re unfamiliar with the rebuild story, ask me about it.) Since the initial campaign, support for that fund has dwindled. If you feel called to help with that, you can fill that out. And the other opportunity is our Missions Fund. The Missions Team does fundraisers all year long, but they are also supported by some of you who give regularly which in turn supports our missionaries. So whatever you give in that area above and beyond goes for direct support to those serving from this church around the world.

Again, let me say: I know these days are a challenge. It’s tough for everyone these days. But the need for the good news of Jesus is as real as ever before. And so, for our house, we continue to choose to give to God first; these are actually the first checks I write every month. We adjust in other areas so that we can be in on the mission, so that who and whose we are speaks louder than the voice of the world. So, whose are you? I’m going to pray and then you’re invited to fill out your generosity card and bring it forward this morning. Let’s pray.