The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 23 B
Biblical literalists sure ignore this passage of Jesus. “Go, sell what you have, give it to the poor, then you’ll have treasure in heaven! Then follow me.” Somehow it gets twisted around to say something other than what it says right at face value because the impulse is to downplay the radical poverty that Jesus proclaims here. There are even stories of “Oh, well, there must have been a gate called ‘Eye of the Needle’ where you’d have to basically unload your camel and practically crawl through, so that is what Jesus was referring to.’” We don’t have any evidence of that at all, and what makes more sense: Jesus saying it’s just difficult, or saying it’s impossible? Jesus has often used hyperbole in his preaching, and his disciples even tell him he’s asking the impossible in this passage.
Money is a hard subject to deal with. Christianity has not been great at talking about money. It’s a messy, murky history. We have the story in Acts of a man trying to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit, and he is roundly chastised. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and throughout Christian history, then the Church depended upon the government (and the very rich) to provide for its needs.
A rich family might provide a gift to a parish or a monastic community, for example, in exchange for special masses to be said annually to help get some years off purgatory. Or perhaps they’d donate a sum of money to take a troublesome family member off their hands, or just to look good when they got caught doing something wrong. Governments, princes, and kings would donate and establish religious foundations to help cement a spiritual legacy when, perhaps, their hands were covered in blood from war, greed, and hunger for power. And unfortunately, many bishops were happy to go along with it, since the miter sure felt enough like a crown.
Even the monastic communities were not immune. St Francis was a big fan of poverty, but each iteration of the Franciscan rule during his lifetime and after his death slowly relaxed the vow of poverty. Shortly after his death, the order split – one side wanted to dispense with the vow of poverty and hold onto resources, and the other wanted to retain the vow of poverty. Then, later on, the side that wanted to retain that vow of poverty wanted to relax it, and a group split off from them who wanted to return to the radical vow of poverty of St Francis.
Benedictines went through their own rifts around poverty. The original Benedictines held everything in common, but over time communities ended up wealthy landowners themselves. Over time, practices became lax. The Cistercians broke off from them to preserve the original spirit of simple poverty. Then eventually the Cistercians had their own split – the Trappists wanted to be very strict about the rule. It’s a perennial cycle.
At the time of the Protestant Reformation in England, so many of the monasteries were incredibly lax and over-resourced. They had lands, they had money, and they had lost the spirit of what they were doing. It was a comfortable lifestyle! So not much of a surprise that Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and at the end of the process, departing monks and nuns got a stipend for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t for 300 years that our tradition regained the witness of monasticism.
If the monks and nuns throughout Christian history couldn’t get poverty right in trying to follow Jesus more literally, what hope is there for us to handle our money any better?
Money is useful – it can do many things. It pays for the lights, the electricity, the AC and heating, the phone, the computer software, the printing, weeding and tree trimming and lawn mowing, and salaries of professionals to handle certain tasks for the good of the community. Money helps us to fulfill our mission in the world. Money helps pay for the community meal, money supports the discretionary fund to help those in need, money is going to be important for rebuilding so many communities torn apart by hurricanes, as well as taking care of needs here in Boise. Money is so incredibly useful.
But, so often, money can become an end to itself. Some money is never enough – look at the folks who have hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth and who think they need even more! If you had 10 billion dollars, you could spend 1.4 million dollars a day for twenty years before you went through it all! It’s unfathomable!
And so we at All Saints have tried to keep the main thing the main thing. When we got a generous gift over forty years ago, we set up a mission endowment to help keep the money moving toward priorities at home and abroad. We know money is useful. This money would give toward needs in far off places, it would give locally, it would help people learn, and a part of it would help with taking care of our home, this building. We could have just kept the money for ourselves to spend frivolously and lose sight of our calling, but we tried our best to keep the main thing the main thing.
And so when we got another very generous gift a few years ago, we wanted to keep the main thing the main thing. We set aside endowment money for spiritual formation and set aside endowment money for big building needs. We boosted the mission endowment, and we set aside money to start building up a new endowment, the All Saints Legacy Endowment, to help provide for the overall needs for the parish, the less sparkly, exciting stuff.
We could have just gone hog-wild and spent this big bequest. We could have just shoved it into savings and eaten it away, but we didn’t. We set ourselves free from debt, finished the roof and gutters, and set it aside to add to, not replace, our giving.
Because our pledge campaign is how we fund the day-to-day mission of the church. Because the labor of our hands is how we make ministry happen. Because our time spent in ministry, mission, and fellowship is how we build up the kingdom of God in our midst. What we do, what we give is what makes it ministry, it’s what teaches us how to be followers of Jesus.
When we get our disbursement from the Mission Endowment, it’ll be wonderful knowing that a portion of it will be going to Episcopal Relief and Development to help those affected by disasters. A portion of it will go to our discretionary fund to help miscellaneous needs in our community. A portion of it will go to help refugees and more. We know those needs are there.
But the pledge campaign, your everyday gifts of time, talent, and treasure, your donations of wisdom, wealth, and work – that’s where our common mission happens. Because we each give, we put energy into the community. We put our hands and hearts into the work of the community.
If the church had a huge endowment so no one had to give anything to keep the lights on or pay for a gardener to take care the endless weeds or to pay for the work of awesome people like Nicole in the office and Shauna with music or, you know, me – then the church would just be a club that you’d attend. It wouldn’t be a church community at all! There wouldn’t be common ministry and mission. It would be simply attend a club meeting, get the sacrament, and leave.
In a powerful sense, we’ve learned from our forebears – we must always be discerning and wise and prayerful with what we’re given. And we must always be giving of ourselves, too – it is our mission together, not the work of an institution. It is our ministry together, not the administration of an institution. Our pledge is our work together. Our pledge of wealth, wisdom, and work, our gift of time, talent, and treasure is one way we walk together in love – and work together in mission and ministry for the Kingdom of God. Amen.