Sermon 2019.04.07
Extravagant Generosity
(1 Timothy 6:17-19; sermon 6 of 6 in Lenten series “Bearing Fruit”)

1. Bearing fruit.  During Lent, we’ve been considering John the Baptist’s appeal to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8). To help us be more fruitful, both individually and as a church, we’ve been reading Bishop Schnase’s book, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations: Revised and Updated. Schnase’s comprehensive update of his book focuses us not just on a “come and see” approach to church, but also an active “go and do” approach to reach new people. You can get a copy of the book in the church office for $15, and it is well worth a read.

Week one we talked about radical hospitality – We love unconditionally. We welcome all who come to church looking for an experience of God’s love, and we take our welcoming attitude out into the world in ways that invite people to know us and know God better. 

Week two focused on passionate worship – We celebrate God in all we do. We give God the best praise we can each week at church, and we go out to the world praising God in daily life. 

Week three we talked intentional faith development – We prepare our hearts, minds, and hands. How is it with your soul? We grow in our faith and knowledge of God through small groups and study, and we carry that attitude of learning into the classroom of the world. 

Last week we encouraged risk-taking mission and service – We serve in all the ways we can. This means going outside our comfort zones. Sometimes we have to put ourselves “out there” to make a difference “in here,” in our hearts. We serve Jesus when we serve others.

We conclude our series today with extravagant generosity – We earn and save all we can so that we can give all we can. We give generously to support the ministry and work of God in the church, and we live generously in the world to win friends for Christ.

2. Rich!  So, I’m going to begin today with some classic good new / bad news. Do you want the good news first, or the bad news? …    [congregation responses]

Sounds like the good news folks have it. So here’s the good news, folks: you’re rich! Every single one of you! The median household income worldwide is roughly $10,000, so if you make that or more per year, you’re rich. 

Want to be one of the super-rich one-percenters? Let’s go to the website GlobalRichList.com and see what it takes. Can we load that in a web browser? …  [load http://globalrichlist.com]

Let’s compare based on INCOME, and for our location choose USA (Dollar). For our annual net income let’s enter 32,400 and see where we rank… [website results = top 1%]

Look at that! If your household income is more than $32,400 you are in the richest 1% of people around the world. So, good news: everyone here is rich, and many of us are one-percenters! I’ll let you savor your newfound wealth and privilege for a moment … 
[back to Powerpoint]

3. Bad news.  Now the bad news… Jesus warned us that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). If we’re all rich – and we’ve just established that – then we’re all in trouble!

In our scripture reading this morning, Paul helps us to glimpse why riches can be a danger. “As for those who are rich in the present age, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches” (1 Timothy 6:17a). 

For humans, it’s always easier to trust the stuff we have and the wealth we can count, than it is for us to count on God. The more stuff, the more wealth, we have, the more we tend to obsess and worry about it instead of worshipping and trusting God.

We can easily be like the rich fool in from Luke 12:18-21 who said to himself, “I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” Jesus says, “‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

4. Wesley’s rules.  John Wesley was concerned that the people called Methodist would fall into this trap of trusting money instead of trusting God. He preached a sermon called “The Use of Money” in which he laid out three points: earn all you can, save all you can, and give all you can. But Wesley gave nuance to those points that we often forget today, nuance which gets back to our point of how we live in the world as well as in the church. 

Earn all you can – this seems obvious. Why wouldn’t we want to make as much money as possible? Yet Wesley strongly warned about the dangers of pursuing wealth for the sake of wealth. Christians need to be ethical in our earning, such that we don’t take advantage of others, damage creation, or harm ourselves through overwork. We should be constructive, not destructive or greedy.

Save all you can – Wesley challenges the idea of hoarding wealth or counting on investments in stocks or property. His call is to live a simpler life, less extravagant life. My seminary professor, Bishop Carder, interpreted this: “Wesley considered anything we have that is unnecessary as having been extracted from the blood of the poor. ... Are we willing to simplify our living so that others may simply live? Stewardship has to do with what we are willing to do without as surely as it has to do with what we are willing to acquire.” 

Give all you can – Wesley’s first two points, earn all you can and save all you can, are meant to enable his third point, give all you can. Life, for John Wesley, is all about giving. Giving is how we reflect God’s nature, which is love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him … may have eternal life” (John 3:16).

For Wesley, and for us, it isn’t just a matter of earning, saving, and giving all we can. It is how we go about earning, and saving, and giving, that reflect Christ for the world around us.

5. Generosity IS discipleship.  It is not a stretch to say that generosity IS the embodiment discipleship. How we share and give is an important measure of our faith and discipleship. Disciples follow Jesus. Jesus spent his time with the poor, feeding them and healing them. Therefore, we need to use our time and gifts in serving the poor as well, instead of using our wealth to insulate and separate ourselves from those in need.

Generosity is also an important act of faith. Giving more than we are comfortable giving helps us to trust God. Every time we pray the Lord’s prayer, we ask: “Give us today our daily bread.” Do we really trust God to provide the basic needs of life? Or are we keeping $10 in our pocket for a hamburger? Generosity sets us free from the tyranny of stuff so that we can trust and worship God. When we open our hands to release our stuff, God can fill our open hands and hearts with blessings.

Ultimately, Jesus loved us so much he was willing to die for us, to give his life so that we might have eternal life. Everything we have, and especially our hope of eternal treasure, of life in heaven, is a gift from God. As disciples, as followers of Jesus Christ, we live out our love of God and love of neighbor by living generously. Generosity is discipleship.

6. Extravagant generosity.  In the book Five Practices, Schnase says faithful Christians “have discovered a truth as sure as gravity, that generosity enlarges the soul, realigns priorities, connects people to the body of Christ, and strengthens congregations to fulfill Christ’s ministries. Giving reflects the nature of God. Growing in the grace of giving is part of the Christian journey of faith, a response Christian disciples offer to God’s call to make a difference in the world.” 

We live out our generosity in the context of the church, where we are invited to give to support God’s ministries of radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, and risk-taking mission. We can’t be radical, passionate, intentional, or risk-taking unless we are willing to be extravagant!

And we live out our generosity in the context of the world, where people see Christ in us through our honest, hard, ethical work earning; our modest, environmentally- and socially-conscious lifestyle of saving; and our extravagant giving all we can.

Hear Paul’s advice again: “Do good, be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, [and] thus store up the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that you may take hold of the life that really is life!” (1 Timothy 6:18-19).						- Amen.