Generosity and Earthly Treasures -- FPC sermon excerpt

Through my 25 years of ministry, I have done hundreds of sessions of premarital counseling. Brides and grooms talk with me about their relationships, their expectations for marriage, and the division of various household responsibilities.

Where we usually bog down is in the topic of money.

Our conversation is light and full of humor when the focus is household repair and maintenance. They’ll say things like, “We both know how to call repairmen!” But when we hit finances, the conversation becomes deadly serious.

Sharing a bed is no problem for most couples, but sharing a checkbook raises issues of control, independence, trust and priorities. It reveals, more than anything else, just how much individuals are willing to invest themselves in a marriage.

The most difficult set of premarital sessions I ever led were in my first church in Connecticut, involving a young woman who had a very clear idea about her relationship with her money. She and her fiancé appeared at first to get along well, and most of their responses to my questions were normal — at least for a strong‑willed wife and rather mild‑mannered husband.

But when we reached finances, she revealed that she would not give him access to her assets. She would contribute her fair share, of course, but she wanted complete control over her cash. The groom did not seem happy about this, so we spent an additional session talking about finances. In the end, I told them that I could not perform their wedding unless they were able to resolve this issue. They left and never returned.

I believe that shared finances are central to a strong relationship. People in our society invest in what is important to them, and joint bank accounts are one way individuals put stock in a marriage. Such accounts force people to move from independence to dependence on one another; they require couples to talk, dream and work together toward common goals.

I tell brides and grooms that shared assets are a tangible sign of commitment, and to illustrate this I often find myself quoting the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (6:21).

Most couples don’t understand this verse, and get it exactly backwards. They are ready to invest their hearts, but not their treasures. The truth of this passage is that the commitment of treasure helps to strengthen the commitment of the heart. When you put money behind your words, you are showing — not just saying — that you have faith in one another. When your treasure is invested fully in the marriage, your heart will be invested fully as well.

The very same is true in your relationship with Christ and the church. Giving money raises issues of control, trust, and priorities. Many people are happy to invest their hearts, but not their earthly treasures. But Jesus tells us, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Your commitment of earthly treasure helps to strengthen the commitment of your heart.

Why Generosity? -- FPC sermon excerpt

In a sermon last fall, I told the story of the writer Stephen King being hit by a minivan while walking along a country road. He could have been killed by that accident, as it left him covered with mud and blood by the side of the road, with a badly broken leg.

Now King, as most of you know, is the popular and successful author of a string of horror novels. What is less well known is that many of King’s books contain Christian themes. He used his near-fatal accident as an opportunity to reflect on how fleeting life is, and how important it is to be generous along the way.

After that sermon, a visitor to FPC said to me, “I have never heard a preacher use Stephen King in a sermon before.”

And I thought, “Hey, we’re an uncommon Christian community.”

Lying in that ditch by the road, Stephen King realized that the greatest power we have is the ability to give. Nothing else we do will have a more positive impact on the world around us … or on ourselves. “Giving isn’t about the receiver or the gift, but the giver,” said King. “It’s for the giver. One doesn’t open one’s wallet to improve the world, although it’s nice when that happens; one does it to improve one’s self. ... Giving is a way of taking the focus off the money we make and putting it back where it belongs — on the lives we lead, the families we raise, the communities which nurture us.”

King is right: Giving is for the giver. Giving is a form of self-improvement. It takes our focus off of money and puts it back where it belongs — on improving quality of life for ourselves and others.

This message is the second in a series on Extravagant Generosity, and our topic today is the question, “Why Generosity?” If Stephen King were asked the question, he would probably answer, “Because it makes us better people, by shifting our focus from money to the things that really matter.”

That is a good start, but we need to go deeper. Yes, it is true that we want to be better people, but in particular we want to be better Christians. And we do want to shift our focus, but for us that means giving more attention to God, to the church, and to our neighbors. The apostle Paul includes all of these focal points in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, when he reflects on the importance of generosity.

When the Bible becomes a weapon -- USA TODAY, February 28, 2011

The Bible is too often invoked in today's political battles, just as it was employed during the Civil War, which erupted 150 years ago.

While previous anniversaries of this conflict rekindled old Yankee-Rebel debates about who had better soldiers and greater generals, times have changed and this anniversary is likely to be different. It offers a chance to re-examine crucial events and beliefs from new angles. As a minister, I am fascinated to reflect on how the Bible was used — and misused — to fuel the Civil War.

It makes me wonder whether we are making many of the same mistakes today, with issues such as gay marriage, the environmental movement or even the death penalty. Are we allowing a literal reading of the Bible — which understands homosexual activity to be an abomination, encourages humans to subdue the earth and says man should not kill — to push religious discussions in one's favored direction?

In January, megachurch pastor Joel Osteen told CNN's Piers Morgan that homosexuality is wrong because "the Scripture shows that it's a sin." Osteen isn't the first, nor will he be the last, to make this observation, of course.

And then there's our tutelage of God's earth. Conservative Christians have long interpreted Genesis 1 as divine permission to use nature — not necessarily protect it — and evangelical radio minister John MacArthur has written that the environmental movement is wrong to try to preserve the planet forever because "the Lord is going to destroy it."

God said so

In the 1860s, Southern preachers defending slavery also took the Bible literally. They asked who could question the Word of God when it said, "slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling" (Ephesians 6:5), or "tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect" (Titus 2:9). Christians who wanted to preserve slavery had the words of the Bible to back them up.

The preachers of the North had to be more creative, but they, too, argued God was on their side. Some emphasized that the Union had to be preserved so that the advance of liberty around the world would not be slowed or even stopped. One Boston preacher, Gilbert Haven, sermonized, "If America is lost, the world is lost."

Historian James Howell Moorhead of Princeton Theological Seminary points out that other ministers drew on the Book of Revelation and suggested that a Northern victory might prepare the way for the Kingdom of God on earth. Still others preached that God would not allow the North to win until it ended slavery. The Battle Hymn of the Republic poetically summed up such Union beliefs:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, While God is marching on.

Theological shots were being fired, from both the South and the North.

They were bringing the words of George Washington to life, a warning written 70 years earlier, "Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause." But then another president, Abraham Lincoln, offered the most constructive perspective on religious warfare. "My concern is not whether God is on our side," he said. "My greatest concern is to be on God's side."

That's the question that we are left with today, in the middle of our contemporary civil wars: Are we on God's side? We will not be able to answer this question by assuming that the Bible is going to give us clear guidance on every moral and political issue. The Civil War shows us that the words of the Bible have been used to defend what history later determined was indefensible.

Peter Wood, emeritus professor of American history at Duke University, suggests that in revisiting the Civil War, we need to remember not only the preaching of white ministers from the North and the South, but also the perspective of African Americans, so absent during the Centennial. "In Frederick Douglass' world," says Wood, "devout black believers — and numerous white abolitionist allies, violent and non-violent — were quick to see slavery as a sin and a defilement of New Testament values that had to be rooted out."

New biblical perspectives are needed today, including those of gays and greens, as we discuss contentious issues. Yes, it is true that the Old Testament says, "You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination" (Leviticus 18:22), just as it says that God killed Onan because he "spilled his semen on the ground" (Genesis 38:9). In both these cases, relationships that did not produce children were condemned, because the Israelites were under orders to "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28).

But perhaps reproduction is no longer the goal of every person and every marriage. Many couples choose not to have children, or marry late in life when they are unable to produce children. The New Testament values of faithfulness, love, sacrifice and promise-based commitment can be practiced by heterosexual couples without children — and by same-sex couples as well. Discussions of gay marriage can focus as much on scriptural equality as on the ability to reproduce.

How we treat the earth

With regard to the environment, we no longer live in a biblical world in which humans needed to subdue the earth in order to survive in it. Instead, we threaten the health of our planet with our destructive patterns of consumption, so the time has come to reclaim the biblical value of stewardship — being good caretakers of the earth, as Adam was instructed to be when God put him in the garden of Eden "to till it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15). We have mastered the technology of tilling the earth — the challenge of the future will be to keep it.

Liberals also use Scripture for their purposes, citing commandments such as "thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13) whenever a war breaks out or the death penalty is being debated. But the commandment is actually a prohibition against murder, arising out of blood feuds and vengeance killings between ancient clans and families. A literal reading of this verse does not give us the moral and political guidance we need today.

So the question of Lincoln remains, "Are we on God's side?" An answer based only on biblical quotations may put us on the side of Southern theologians who supported slavery and lost their way. But creative theological conversation, grounded in scriptural values such as equality and stewardship of the earth, can put us on the right side of both history and religious faith.

Henry G. Brinton, pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia, is author of Balancing Acts: Obligation, Liberation, and Contemporary Christian Conflicts, and a contributor to the preaching journal Homiletics, where some of this historical material first appeared.

The Power of Sonlight -- FPC sermon excerpt

The Sun is the center of our solar system, and the source of the power that gives us life. But for most of human history, we haven’t understood it.

Until fairly recently, we appreciated the light of the Sun, but didn’t think of it as an energy source. Now, solar panels are popping up around the world, and scientists are getting ready to launch a satellite called LightSail-1, a spacecraft that will be powered by sunlight propulsion.

LightSail-1 is basically a giant Mylar kite, one that will be pushed along by light photons from the Sun. The beauty of photon power is that it lasts forever, unlike the rocket fuel on traditional satellites. A spacecraft pushed by the Sun will keep going, gradually moving faster and faster, until it reaches speeds of one-tenth the speed of light.

That’s fast: About 108 billion miles per hour.

For thousands of years, we underestimated the size of the Sun, thinking that it was smaller than the Earth. Even the ancient Greeks — described in mental_floss magazine (September-October 2010) as “the classic nerds of the Old World” — had trouble figuring out which one was bigger.

One philosopher thought that the Sun was just a few times bigger than his country Greece. Another mathematician and astronomer calculated that it was bigger than Earth, but just 150 times larger.

It wasn’t until the year 1672 that two astronomers calculated the true size of the solar system. Today, we know that the Sun is 1.3 million times bigger than Earth.

Picture a baseball, approximately three inches in diameter. If the Earth is the size of a baseball, the Sun would be a ball with a diameter of 25 feet.

That’s big!

We also fail to grasp the effect of the Sun on our day-to-day lives. Flare-ups on the Sun can have an effect on the Earth’s magnetic field, and can mess with powerline currents and oil pipelines. You can now get an iPhone app called 3D-Sun, giving you all the info you need on sunspots and solar flare-ups.

The bottom line is that the Sun is powerful, big, and able to affect our day-to-day lives.

Just like Jesus.

The Gospel of Matthew tells us that Jesus gathers three of his disciples — Peter, James, and his brother John — and leads them up a high mountain, by themselves. While they are there, Jesus is transfigured before them, his face shines like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white (17:1-2).

They see the power of Sonlight — the light of the Son of God.

Now “transfigured” is not a word we stumble across every day, probably because surprising changes in appearance don’t happen often. To be transfigured is to be transformed, to undergo a metamorphosis — a change in appearance, condition, or form.

Jesus goes from being an ordinary Galilean peasant to an extraordinary figure with a face that shines “like the sun,” with clothes that are “dazzling white.”

The disciples look at him and think, “This is powerful.”

But before they can get a handle on this energy flowing out of Jesus, two men appear to them — Moses and Elijah (v. 3). These are the heavy-hitters of the Old Testament, men who represent God’s law and God’s prophecies. Both worked miracles, and were believed by some to skip death and go directly to heaven. Because Jesus is talking with them, he is on their level; his ministry is fulfilling what God had been doing through the people of Israel.

The disciples think, “This is big.”

Realizing the significance of the moment, Peter says to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” (v. 4). I give Peter credit — this is a thoughtful and hospitable impulse, but of course it is a ridiculous offer. Is there any way that something shining with the brightness of the Sun could be contained within a dwelling? It’s just too powerful. Too big.

Before Jesus can answer, a bright cloud overshadows them, and from the cloud a voice says, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” When the disciples hear this, they fall down, overcome with fear. But Jesus touches them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.” And when they look up, they see no one except Jesus himself, alone (vv. 5-8).

As the disciples arise, they think to themselves, “This Jesus is the Son — the Son of God. He’s powerful, he’s big, and God wants us to listen to him. And what an effect he has, knocking us down and picking us up!”

On the day of the Transfiguration, the disciples begin to grasp the power of Sonlight.