From Idolatry to Generosity
This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, February 16, 2025.
Transcript
Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
I don't know about you, but if I had to make a decision and choose personally between the two versions of the Sermon on the Mount that we have, I'd much prefer the one out of Matthew's Gospel. The Beatitudes, Matthew 5, starting at verse 1, blessed are the poor in spirit and blessed are the pure in heart. Where you may be down, but God will lift you up. You might be low, but God will exalt you. And these are good. It makes you feel good. And there's a reason why that's such an important part of Matthew's Gospel. We call those the Beatitudes because they are, that's another way of saying blessings. Blessed are you, blessed are you. And that's the blessings in Matthew 5. And the Sermon on the Mount runs from Matthew 5 to Matthew 7. Three chapters, one big sermon. That sermon there is at the core of the Gospel. It's at the core of the teaching of Jesus. And so it's a really important part of a really important part of the Gospels. So I really like it. I like the Beatitudes.
The Woes in Luke's Gospel
And then St. Luke has to go and ruin it all because here in Luke chapter 6, he gives his own version of the story and he throws in a couple of details that we don't see in Matthew. Not just Beatitudes, not just blessings, but woes. And not like, "whoa." Like, "woe is me," like we were talking about last week.
And those woes make me uncomfortable. Maybe they made you uncomfortable today. So that's probably the reason why we need to go into that. Instead of taking the things in Scripture that we don't like or that are challenging for us or that make us uncomfortable and saying, "Okay, Jesus, I understood you said something about that, but I'm going to try not to look at that as much as I possibly can." We'll just skip over that passage and go on to the stuff that makes me feel good. Instead today, let's charge into them and learn what Jesus has for us when he talks about his woes.
He says, "Woe to the rich." Now, that doesn't sound like something that I need to worry about right away. But the challenge is that the question really is, what is rich? And by American society standards, I'm neither rich nor poor. I'm kind of right there in the middle like a lot of you are. And that's great. That's good. But I don't think of myself as rich. I don't think of myself as wealthy. But by the standard of our ancestors, even in this country, I'm enormously wealthy. And by the standard of human beings across time and space, I'm one of the most wealthy individuals who has ever walked the face of the planet Earth. How wealthy we really are.
He also says, "Woe to the full." And that's challenging to me too, because he's saying you will eventually be hungry. And that "woe to the full," I think in my life that there have been practically no times where I have really, truly lacked for anything I actually needed. And so it's really difficult for me to put myself in the position of somebody saying that this is good. It feels like really bad news. "Woe to the full." He might be talking about me.
And then he says, "Woe to those who are laughing, for you will soon mourn and weep." And I think, I've had some hardship in my life, but I've had more good than bad in this life. And so I worry that he might be speaking about me.
And then the last of the four woes he gives us, he says, "Woe when all speak well of you." And he goes a little further there. He says, "Woe when all speak well of you, for that is what they did to the false prophets."
Let me give you a little inside baseball. When you all come through and shake my hand afterward, a lot of you are very kind and sweet, and you'll say something really nice, like, "Good sermon, pastor." And part of me wants to say, "Thank you. You're very perceptive." But realistically, most pastors, myself included, and we were taught this a lot, in seminary we're taught this, always take that not just with a pinch of salt, but with a whole heaping spoonful. Because you don't know whether they think it's a good sermon because it actually challenged them to live as Jesus Christ did, or if they just felt good about not having to change a thing. So don't give up on encouraging me. I thrive on encouragement. Don't leave the church scowling with your arms crossed. I mean, I hope not. But sometimes I do wonder, did you hear some of the things I said to you? If I were you, I might have been offended. But I'm not saying them out of my opinions. I'm trying to speak only out of God's word.
So we're focusing on the harder stuff today. We're focusing on some difficult things of Jesus that are nevertheless, we confess as Christians, these are true things that we need to wrestle with. Jesus is telling us truth about the world, and we may not like it, and our lives may not perfectly reflect it, but we still need to wrestle with it.
The Challenge of Generosity
How do you get rich? Well, I mean, some people, they're given their wealth, but actually, at least in this country, the majority of people who reach the point of being called a millionaire did not start off at the beginning of their lives as a millionaire and did not inherit a vast sum of money. The statistics show that like 80% of millionaires are self-made millionaires in this country. How do you get rich? In this country, the answer is, by and large, work hard. How do you stay rich, though? Save your money. That's right. Don't spend too much. Our government could use a lesson in that. It's difficult for us, though, to turn loose of our money. We know that the way that you get to the point where you are staying wealthy is you're careful about your spending. It's difficult for us to turn loose of our money and give it to somebody else.
I'm reminded of a story, and I'll be totally honest, I don't believe that this story is true. It's been proclaimed from pulpits for at least 100, 150 years, as far as I can tell, and as far as I can tell, there's no historical mandate for it, but it's such a good illustration, I'm not going to let facts get in the way of a good story. It's a story of, and it's told in a couple different ways. I like the version of it where there are priests going out as missionaries to evangelize Germanic tribes. There's also the story sometimes told about Charlemagne, too. And the tribe is being baptized, and as they go into the water to receive holy baptism, to become Christians, they all go into the water, and then as they go underneath the water in the stream there, we're all being baptized by immersion. They're keeping one hand up out of the water, and they go down up to their wrist, and then they come back out, and the priest notices they keep doing this, and he finally asks, "Why are they doing that that way?" And the answer he gets is this, "Well, he knows that these men know that they're being baptized, they're becoming Christians, but they still are keeping their sword hands out of the water because they may still need them to commit violence." I don't know if it's true, probably it isn't. It's a good story, though. Only today, I'm guessing most of you aren't worried about your sword hand, raise it high and keep it out of the waters. "God, you can have all of me, but not my priorities with money."
People of God, how difficult it is for us to be generous. It's difficult for me, and I know it's difficult for you. And it's difficult, I think, for two big reasons. There's lots of little reasons, but there's two big reasons that generosity is difficult for us.
Personal Judgment: First of all, it's because we want to commit a personal judgment of the people around us. We look at people who are after our generosity, who need what we have, and we form an opinion. We say, "I know your circumstances well enough that I have an opinion on whether you truly deserve what you're asking." And it's really not the right attitude. For a Christian, it's exactly the wrong attitude, because if you have been forgiven a great debt, Jesus teaches that with multiple parables, that if you have been forgiven something great, then turning and being forgiving to others and generous towards others is necessary. But I struggle with this, and I bet you do too, struggle with being in a position of judgment by looking at the lives of the people who seemingly need my generosity and say, "Well, you know, you could actually do a little bit more for yourself." And it bugs me.
Trust in God's Provision: But you know what's even deeper than that? The second big reason I think it is difficult for us to be generous, we have to be willing to give from our abundance, which means that we have to trust that when we have less, that God will provide for us more. And that's really difficult, especially if you are on a fixed income, or if you are on assistance, or if you're living paycheck to paycheck. I get that. And I'm not just talking about giving to the church. I'm talking about generosity in all aspects of our lives. But the question that people ask, you know, "Can you actually live on less than what you make?" That's not just a way to build wealth and preserve yourself against the vicissitudes of life, but also it's a way that we have to approach the question of generosity. Can you live on less than 100% of what you have? And most of us can. But it's hard. It's hard for us, sometimes for our budget, but it's always hard for our hearts. And the thing that's at the issue of that is not the dollars and the cents, but it's the issue of trust.
Trusting in the Resurrection
The issue is this: Do we trust that Christ has really raised from the dead? Has he really risen? Or is our faith in something else? Because God never gives us a command that he doesn't also give us the means to live. He never tells us to do something which is impossible for us.
Do we fear, love, and trust God above all things? (Confirmation students should go, "ding, ding, ding," because we literally talked about this Wednesday.)
Martin Luther puts it this way. He defines God. And the definition of God is: that in which you put your ultimate trust in is, properly speaking, your God. And so we don't worship idols of wood and stone. I mean, practically nobody around here does that. There are actually a couple people around here who do, but most people are not idolaters in the conventional sense. They're not worshiping idols of wood and stone like that. But what they do, what I do, what you do, is we worship wealth and security and politics and popularity and things like that, substituting created things in this world to put our ultimate trust in instead of their creator, trusting something other than God. It's all over the Bible, too. The word for that is idolatry.
St. Paul is writing about this idolatry of the heart when he's talking about the resurrection of Christ today. He says, "If Christ has not been raised, then our faith is in vain." If we trust in the resurrection to eternal life, if we trust that Christ died on the cross, really, truly dead, was buried in the ground, really, truly buried, rose from the grave, and that he was really, truly alive and is still alive today, that will change the way that we live now. If we believe that Christ is the first fruits of those who have died, not the only one who will rise from the dead, but the first of those who rise from the dead, that'll change the way we live now because it gives us a different way of looking at the world. We get to give ourselves away for the sake of other people. Because anything that happens to us, no matter what the worldly consequences of that decision to be generous, to be forgiving, to put ourselves at risk for the sake of somebody else, no matter what we do in the name of Christ, God will use that and will bless that. And anything that happens to us, up to and including losing our lives, will be okay. Because even if we die, Christ is risen. And if Christ is risen, we will rise too. And so even death is a defeated enemy.
Our scarcity mindset puts us in the mode of thinking that I don't believe that God has power in my life. And ultimately, what it comes down to is idolatry, trusting that I just need to take care of myself and everything's going to be okay. But trusting God says, Christ has provided for me abundantly in his cross and resurrection, that no matter what I face in life, if I do it with generosity, Christ will be with me. And no matter what happens at the end of it, I will be saved. It's actually real. And we can actually trust it. If we believe in the resurrection to eternal life, then we can act like it's really true because it is. And then that helps us because we aren't just going to be generous, but we can be abundantly generous. We can be exceedingly generous. We can look at the people around us. And we can say, "You know what? I have something and you don't. I'm there for you." We can live like the early church did, giving for one another and regarding everybody as brothers and sisters. Not just as words that we use in a traditional church, but as actual members of God's family. And we can let go of the things that we cling to in vain for our peace and our security. Because ultimately, God is our peace. And God is our security. And we can forgive others. And we can do that, not because it's easy, but because Christ has already forgiven us.
No, God doesn't give you a command without giving you the ability to fulfill it. But he gives you exactly what it is that you need in this moment. Gives you your true identity in holy baptism. He's gathered you here today to be reminded that you are baptized into Christ. You belong to him. You are his child. And if you are baptized into Christ, if you are a child of God, will our loving Heavenly Father not provide for you? Or would he not take care of you? And you've been brought here so that you can be fed with the body and blood of Jesus himself, who gives himself for you so that you can receive his life within you. And your faith would be strong. And then after that, he sends you out into the world. For the sake, not just of yourself, but of the people around you. Not just those closest to you, but those who are at a distance. And you are given the ability to be generous like that. And carry that cross. And follow Christ in that way. Because when we live in that way, that gives us the truest meaning of what it is to be human. Giving ourselves for the sake of others is the highest form of being a human being.
And when you do that, when you trust and follow the cross of Christ, the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds strong in Christ Jesus our Lord to life everlasting. Amen.
