Sermons

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Don't Be Careful
Stewardship Sunday
November 19, 2000
Pastor Dan Baumgartner     
Mark 12:28-34 

I bring you greetings this morning from Camp Casey on Whidbey Island, where 70 Bethany men are gathered this weekend. All was well when I left last night…though there was a problem yesterday. People were unexplainably missing about the time of the Cougar-Husky game!

What would you expect from a sermon on Stewardship Sunday? If you’re like most people, you’d expect to hear a talk about money or budgets. I actually tried pretty hard to prepare sort of a traditional stewardship sermon. I thought of some clever ways to weave finances in, to talk about tithing…but God would have none of it. Every time I thought about “giving,” it seemed like God had this for us: “Give me your heart…give me your whole heart.” And so this morning, I guess we’ll talk a little bit about stewardship…and later we’ll take an offering to receive our pledge cards…but mostly I want to talk about a stewardship of the heart.

Okay, you go to a restaurant, and your bill for breakfast is $14. Now…how much are you going to tip? It’s actually a very complicated process. You have to consider, of course, that your waiter makes most of his money off of tips. So you want to be generous. Yet, some of you will think, I only want to reward for good service. Now, maybe you went into the restaurant thinking that 10% was a normal tip. No, you are living in the dark ages. Fifteen percent would be normal, at least. Then you have to evaluate the waiter. Was he good? Did he pay attention to you? Did he pester you too much? Did he bring the right food? Keep the coffee cup filled? Well he was pretty good. Maybe he deserves 18%. 

Oh, but that’s so hard to figure out. But luckily…luckily, you can buy these little cards that have a tipping schedule, and you just look it up. Then again, maybe he was really, really good. Now what do you do? Tip 20%? Or, gasp, 25%? It all gets so confusing, doesn’t it? In fact, it can get so confusing, and so big that you forget exactly what it was you were thinking about when you started the whole process. You have to narrow it back down to something simple.

I wonder if that was a little bit of what Jesus was facing as he was surrounded by a whole bunch of religious leaders, scribes and Pharisees and Saducees…..or, as Dale Bruner always says, a bunch of senior pastors and associate pastors! This group was debating various points of the law from the Old Testament. Now the Old Testament is filled with laws…a lot of laws -- 613 laws, to be exact, according to the rabbis, 248 positive ones, 365 negative ones. How is someone able to grasp that many different commandments? You’ve got to narrow it back down to something simple. And so they tested Jesus by asking him to do this: “Which commandment is the most important?” No small task, I’d say. 613, take it down to one.

Jesus goes immediately to the book of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 6:4. Something that every Jewish person would have been intimately familiar with, something which in fact has been recited every morning and every evening by people of the Jewish faith since the second century BC…and it still is done today: It’s called The Shema. It’s called that because shema is Hebrew for the first word of this verse, meaning “hear.”

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” Imagine saying that every day, twice a day for your entire life. It would sink deep inside you, wouldn’t it? There’s something about that repetition of something sacred…it affects you. 

In a little while, we’ll take communion. And those people that serve communion will say 200-300 times, “The body of Christ was broken for you,” or “The blood of Christ was shed for you.” You don’t give that assurance that many times without being changed by it.

Jesus says that the most important thing of all is “to love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind and with all of your strength.” Now, we could spend a long time just dissecting those words. 

• The heart, the will, the personal center of a person. 
• The soul, the psyche, our psychological yearnings and instinctive reactions. 
• The mind, the intellect, the thought processes, our learning.
• Our strength, our physical, bodily strength, endurance, material being. 

And each one of those words can be looked at individually, and dissected and compared. But that’s not what Jesus is doing. He’s not giving us specifics, he’s identifying our reason for living. He’s not giving a “how-to” lesson on loving God. He’s giving us a direction to face. In God’s direction. And not just towards some god, not just some spiritual feeling, not just some sense of divinity hidden inside us, that is not the Biblical God. 

No, “Hear O Israel,” “Hear O Part of the Church That Meets at Bethany,” the Lord…YHWH, YHWH the God who has picked you out, the God who has chosen you, the God who has saved you from Egypt and from slavery and from death itself, this God, this ONE God, revealed in Christ, full of grace, that God has chosen to love YOU, to forgive YOU, to covenant with YOU, to stay with YOU even when it makes no sense at all…that’s the God we are to love…the God who loved us first. 
 
I talked this week with someone who has an addiction problem, and probably has had for over 20 years. Lives on the streets, probably has for over 20 years. He was talking about wanting to go into treatment, talking about how his family is embarrassed of him, how he wishes things were different. How he believed in God, and that God wanted other things for him. And I said, “George, I think God probably does want for your life to not be such a struggle, wants better for you. But whether you make it into treatment or not, you have to understand something: Jesus loves you, George. Jesus loves you so much. Jesus loves you every bit as much as he loves anybody else in this room, or me. Jesus loves you so much.” I’ve never been more convinced of that than I am right now. 

There’s a story that Brennan Manning tells…it’s one of my favorites.  Maybe I’ve told it to you before: It’s about a professor who was one of 13 children. One day when he was a young boy in Holland, he says,

 I was playing in the street when I got thirsty and came into the pantry of our house for a glass of water. It was around noon and my father had just come home from work to have lunch.  He was sitting at the kitchen table, having a glass of beer with a neighbor. A door separated the kitchen from the pantry and my father didn’t know I was there. The neighbor said to my father, “Joe, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for a long time, but if it’s too personal, just forget I ever asked.”

“What is your question?” 

“Well, you have 13 children. Out of all of them, is there ONE that is your favorite, one you love more than all the others?"

I had my ear pressed against the door hoping against hope it would be me. “That’s easy,” my father said. “Sure there’s one I love more than all the others. That’s Mary, the twelve year old. She just got braces on her teeth and feels so awkward and embarrassed that she won’t go out of the house anymore. Oh, but you asked about my favorite. That’s my 23-year-old Peter. His fiancee just broke their engagement, and he is desolate. But the one I really love the most is little Michael. He’s totally uncoordinated and terrible in any sport he tries to play. The other kids on the street make fun of him. But, of course, the apple of my eye is Susan. Only 24, living in her own apartment, and developing a drinking problem. I cry for Susan. But I guess of all the kids…” and my father went on mentioning each of his 13 children by name.

That’s a great picture of how great God’s love is for us. But I always want it to go one step further. What would this boy have done, as he stood there in the pantry, hoping to hear his name? What would he have done when he heard his father describe how much he loved him? I think he might have bolted out into the kitchen, wrapped his arms around his dad, and told him he loved him.

And so we love God in response. And what Jesus is saying is: Love God with absolutely everything that you have. Leave nothing out. Love with your whole person. Love with abandon. Love recklessly. Love God. Love without limits. It’s the most important thing. There is nothing more important. Love God with your strengths, love God in your weaknesses. Love God with all your energy. 

I was reading last week the story of Eric Lidell, the great Scottish runner. Remember Chariots of Fire? Remember the race where Lidell gets knocked down early in the race, and falls to the ground and is left behind…and how the movie shows him in slow motion, getting up and starting to run again, running and straining and you know his lungs are bursting and his legs are burning and his jaw is set and he runs and pushes and pushes and runs to get back in the race, giving it everything he had? 

Love God like that, Jesus says. Love with abandon. Love recklessly. That’s how God loves you. Paul says God is “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all…” God gives us everything. There is nothing careful or cautious about God’s love. And He says “love me back with everything you have.” 

Loving God is our main responsibility in life. Loving God with everything we have teaches us to love those around us with grace as well. Loving God allows us to love our kids, friends, wives, husbands, neighbors, enemies. It will spill over, spontaneously, like water surging over a dam that just couldn’t possibly stop the kind of love and care you have for people. Loving God is the most important thing we can do…that’s what Jesus says.

So what’s that have to do with stewardship Sunday? Everything. God wants you. Wants all of you. Wants you to love Him with every single thing you have. Not with one compartment of your life, but everything. Stewardship is not just financial. It’s a matter of the heart. 

So how do you figure out how much to give to church? If you don’t watch out, you’ll be spending a lot of time calculating your contribution. You’ll forget that you are a whole person, that your life is not chopped up into little segments, and that your main job is not figuring out what the minimum amount of money you can give back to God is, and then spending the rest of it. Everything we have is from God, we’re just using a part of it. I don’t think the Lord wants us to be careful stewards. I think he wants us to give with abandon in every way… our time, our money, investing in people, opening up our homes. I think he wants us to give gratefully out of hearts that are overwhelmed by how much he loves us. That’s a very different thing than looking up on the chart for what size of tip is appropriate.

I have to share something with you. I took a few vacation days last week, and had a great time getting extra time with Anne and the kids. When I came back in the office on Tuesday…I had a terrible day. A really terrible day. It seemed like I had so many things stacked on my desk, and phone calls and emails and deadlines, and worship services coming up and people that had to talk to me and bulletins to proofread and scheduling to do, and meetings to get ready for…that by 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, I was wishing I hadn’t gone on vacation at all. It wasn’t worth it. I was frustrated and irritable, and I have to confess to you that I felt overwhelmed by mostly things I didn’t care about doing, and wondered what it all had to do with ministry, and where on earth some sense of God was in that hectic mess of paperwork.

Then came Wednesday. On Wednesday morning, I met a friend for breakfast. And the most amazing thing happened. . After a few minutes, I had tears rolling down my cheeks. 

This friend reminded me of who God was. Reminded me of how God had very specifically called me into ministry. Reminded me of years back when I discovered that my passion for life was in seeing God’s hand active in people’s lives. By now I was crying like a little baby. He reminded me of what a miraculous thing it was that I had ended up at Bethany. He talked about what he saw God doing in my life. And it was like God just pierced through all of the layers of things that weren’t important, and went right to my heart. It was like I saw more clearly than in some time exactly why I was in ministry, and how much I loved it. 

We talked overtime, until we were both late for meetings. And it was my turn to pay the check. It was $14. I paid at the register, and went back to leave the tip on the table. My eyes were still full of tears, and my heart was even fuller. I was kind of floating, soaring, feeling very close to God. I started to think about how much to leave for a tip, and it seemed ludicrous to be multiplying out a little percentage. I was so filled up, so grateful to have been reminded that God was with me that I threw a bill down on the table that was ridiculously high for a tip, it was practically paying the bill again, and it just didn’t matter. It was God’s money anyway. And right at that moment, I probably would have handed over my car keys if someone asked, or taken off my watch to give someone. My heart was calling me to love…not carefully, but recklessly, without limits. In a different place, Brennan Manning writes this:

“The Jesus of my journey will never say to me, 'Brennan, you were too reckless, you confided in me too much, you trusted beyond reasonable limits, you hoped in me too much.' No, the Christ of my life would never say that.”

Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your mind and with all of your strength.” As God grabs ahold of our hearts, we are changed people. And that kind of extravagant love spills over…in our giving, in our relationships, and in every other way. Don’t be careful.