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SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES: TITHING This morning, instead of roaming
around, I'm going to be up here behind the pulpit where it's safe, because
I'm going to talk about money. There are many ways to talk about giving
without just talking about money, and we do very well in those areas. We've
done pretty well with money. I've said before that I'm very grateful for the
way in which you've supported our budget this year. But I wanted to tell you
why I'm focusing on money by reading part of a report that comes from the New
Hampshire Charitable Foundation called "Charitable Giving and
Volunteering in
Several things: We're doing well in
a couple of areas. The fact that we give of our estates is wonderful, and
you'll be hearing more about that in coming months as we have a group now
that will be looking at that subject. I would suggest, though, that giving of
our estates should come as the culmination of a lifetime of giving, rather
than having our death become the beginning of our giving. Because we have
this disproportion in But I do want to lift up the thing about money. It's something I get a lot of questions about he word "tithing," the practice of giving 10% of their income to the church. Some questions are kind of how-to-do-it questions. "Is it a tithe of the net or the gross?" they ask me. "Is it just income or does it include assets? Do you tithe what people give you as gifts or scholarships?" Other questions are really ways of objecting to the whole concept. "Why is the church always fishing in my pocket? Why do we have to talk about money so much? Isn't it sometimes more important to give of our time and talent and other resources? And what are you doing with my money anyway?" The Bible has quite a bit to say
about money. The Bible has 500 verses on prayer, and less than 500 verses on
faith. There are more than 2,000 verses on money and possessions. One out of
every 10 verses in the Gospels deals directly with money, as do a full
one-sixth of Jesus' own words. Only the As I thought about the subject, and the various things that the Bible says about money and possessions, it all seemed to boil down to the same two types of issues that I get questions about: the technical how-to-do-it issues and the conceptual issues of why we do it at all and what the spirit is behind our giving. You might also frame the two issues this way. One, what is God specifically asking me to do with my money? And two, how does God want me to think about my money? What's the concept and how does it play out in real life? Look at the smaller picture first. What is this "tithe" thing, where does it come from, and why should I put up with anybody trying to convince me to do it? The tithe was established a little over 3,000 years ago in order to run the temple and its predecessor, the tabernacle. If you know the history of the Jews, you'll remember that they were founded by twelve tribes. These were sons of Jacob, who was the son of Isaac, who was the son of Abraham. When those twelve family clans came into the Promised Land somewhere between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the land was divided between those tribes. But one tribe did not get any land. The tribe of Levi was given the assignment of running the temple. There were certain cities set apart for them to live in, but they were not allowed to own any land or to do any work, which meant they had no way to live. They had no food, no way to provide for their families. God took care of that by telling the other eleven tribes that they needed to bring the first 10% of everything that they got (the tithe), which in those days was primarily things like livestock and grain, to the temple so that the Levites and their families could be provided for. The Levites, in turn, were to offer 10% of what they received back to God in a burnt offering so that the others wouldn't feel resentful and so that the Levites would keep from getting a big head and forgetting who was really in charge of the proceedings. The tithe was a very practical
arrangement to make sure that God's work could get done and to take care of
God's people who were doing that work. The tithe was not established to take
care of the needy. Those were offerings above and beyond the tithe. The tithe
was for the work of the temple, and for the Levites who had no other work. It
was sort of the dues of citizenship, the money that would provide the services
that were needed to keep the worship of God alive in the community. That kind
of giving is still needed. You don't get bills from the church. You don't pay
dues when you join. The work of God still needs support for basic operations,
and 10% is still the figure that would do it really well. In almost 4,000
years, the amount has never gone up. If every member of The tithe is just basic stuff. It's what it takes to run the place and to do the things that God is calling us to do together as a congregation. It's not the work of spiritual giants. It's a basic Christian discipline, just like prayer, Bible study, and gathering for worship. You should and must hold church leadership accountable for good stewardship of the funds that you give, just as we must hold the government accountable for the use of tax dollars. But it really shouldn't be a cause of offense that it's needed, or that we make that need known. Since we're in this lovely tax season, there is an added benefit to tithing that you don't get from taxes, in addition to getting to deduct it on Schedule A. When God is the one asking for funds, God is also the one that's providing them. My mother was in charge of stewardship and she used to arrange for people in our church to give tithing testimonies each month. And those people were not just getting up to explain a duty. They were people who were witnessing to God's faithfulness to them when they proved their faithfulness to God in the tithe. Our family had a tithing testimony of its own. By the time I was looking toward college, our family was pretty deeply dug into debt. Each month it seemed we were short by a little bit more. So my mother, who kept the checkbook, sat down with my dad, and they had a heart-to-heart. And my mother made a suggestion. "Dear," she said, "I think we could turn this around if we started tithing." Well, my father just kind of stared at her, thinking the brilliant woman he married had become a complete idiot. "No," he says, "we're short every month, remember? The answer is not giving away more. We need less going out, not more going out. It's very simple math." But my mother, like her daughter, is persistent, and somehow she convinced him to give it a try for one month. At the end of that month there was money left over. He went over the books once, twice, three times, and he really couldn't see where it came from, but he also couldn't find a mistake. He called a friend very early the next morning, got the guy out of bed, and said, "You've got something I haven't. Tell me about your relationship with Jesus Christ." And a new man was born in my father. It was the first, but not the last tithing testimony that my family would have. We could have filled the whole service today with stories like that, including my own. I may not always have had the niceties that I wanted, but as long as I've tithed, which I've done since that incident when I was a teenager, both in good times and in bad, I've always had a roof over my head even if it was someone else's roof, and food on my table even when it was food that was given to me out of charity. There were days when my income was absolutely zero, and I lived off the gifts of the people in my church. But there was always God's provision for me. And when people gave me gifts, 10% of it went to God's work. Now while I know there are some who can attest to government funds helping them in hard times, I could find as many or more to testify to just the opposite, that somehow they fell through the cracks of government systems, they were denied care after faithfully paying their taxes all of their lives. But I have yet to hear a single anti-tithing testimony. God also has a better record when we fail to make the tithe. God does not have the equivalent of collection agents and audits. Like when we fail in any other area of our lives, God does not zap us with lightning, but merely encourages us to do a bit better tomorrow. "Can't go from zero to 10%?" says God. "Ok, how about zero to 1%? or 2%? Got scared because bills were tight last month and you didn't give? Ok, so you missed out on seeing the miracle of what I would provide. But no hard feelings. Just try to trust me a little bit more the next time." We're serving a God of love and of grace. And 10%, by the way, is lower than any of the tax brackets. That's the basic answer to the detail, how-do-you-do-it question. What does God ask of us on a day-to-day basis? Ten percent for the work of the church. We're not sent to hell if we fail, or if we figure it wrong, or we're not guaranteed heaven if we comply with it. Our salvation is about the attitude of our hearts, not about legal details. But 10% is the standard that God sets for the use of our money. Just like love your neighbor is the standard that's set for our relationships. We might fall short. We probably do, again and again. But that doesn't mean that we should abandon the standard. For the answer to the second question, how should we look at our money, I think that's where the heart is, and the heart of Jesus' real teaching. I'd like us to look at the story of the widow in the temple. Here's Jesus, sitting in the temple by the court of the women, the part of the temple where there are thirteen trumpet-shaped containers set to contain offerings for various temple needs. These trumpet things were metal, and when the rich came in and deposited their tithe in metal coins, it made a racket. The more you gave the more racket it made. This would have been a perfect time for Jesus to praise the obedience of those who were tithing. There's no evidence that the people Jesus saw were giving less than the 10%, but he doesn't even suggest that those folks are faithful stewards. He doesn't stop any one of them to ask them to give a tithing testimony. Instead, he praises the woman who gave -- not a tithe -- but every last penny she had. Remember the great commandment, which appears in Mark in the same chapter, just a few verses before. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." All....all....all. And here, just a few sentences later, we see that that encompasses all your money too. If you find it offensive that God wants 10%, I've got bad news. God wants all of it. One hundred percent. When you start looking at scripture, you're grateful when somebody says they're just going to preach on tithing. How do we deal with this? Anne, I thought you just said that God only required 10%. Is scripture telling us that owning private property is wrong? Are we really supposed to give away every penny and rely on God to miraculously pay the light bill every month and drop peanut butter sandwiches from heaven? It seems from scripture that sometimes God does call people to that radical a witness. St. Anthony was one of those. Mother Theresa was another one, as well as all those members of religious orders who take vows of poverty and own nothing, or those in communities like the Shakers who give it all and own everything in common. But it doesn't seem to be the general rule for everybody. Jesus tells the rich young ruler to sell all he has and give to the poor. But when King Solomon in humility asked God for wisdom, God rewards him with unbounded material wealth as well as the wisdom that he sought. Remember, this is not the detail question. This is the attitude question, the concept question. The issue isn't really what you have or what you don't have, but your attitude toward what you have and what you don't have. The poor can be just as greedy as the rich, and the rich can be just as faithful as the poor. The issues that matter most are the issues of the heart. Let's go back for a minute to that disturbing little story about the rich young ruler. This man comes to see Jesus and asks how to get into God's kingdom. Jesus first gives him the technical, how-to-do-it answer -- "Well, duh, obey the commandments." This would have included things like don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal. But it also would have included the commandment to tithe. And the young ruler is faultless in this, in the details. "Been there, done that," he says. So now Jesus presses harder. The thing blocking this man's faith is not discipline, but atittude, and Jesus zeroes in on that. "Ok," says Jesus, "you've done well. Now go sell all you have, give your money to the poor, and then come and follow me." Ouch. The guy can't do it, and he turns and walks away sad. Jesus was right. The man's attitude needed help. He was too attached to his possessions. He wasn't willing to give all he had for the pearl of great price. We can miss the meaning of both the poor woman in the temple and the rich young ruler by thinking that Jesus is trying to answer a technical, how-to-do-it question, when he's really dealing with the bigger attitude-of-the-heart question. God is not in either one of these saying that the only way into heaven is for everybody to literally give away all that they have. That's not consistent with the way God acts in some other parts of scripture. These parables and stories are about the attitude of the heart which is, in the long run, the thing that will determine whether we can open our lives up to the saving power of God. The attitude that Jesus is getting to here is not that owning private property is wrong. It's that in a very real sense, owning private property is impossible. We fool ourselves when we think that we actually own anything. It all belongs to God. We've been given the use of it as stewards, but it's not ours. When we start thinking about the technical aspects of tithing, we start to think, "Ok, 10% is God's, and 90% is ours." And that's a huge attitude mistake, because 100% of it is God's. We don't own it. We've just been given it in trust to use, to invest, as in the parable of the talents, so that God's work might go on. God owns what we put in the offering plate, and God owns what's left in our pockets, and God cares about how we use that other 90%. It's not what we actually have in our possession that matters. What matters is that we realize, no matter how much we have in the bank or under our roofs, we own only as much as that widow in the temple -- absolutely nothing. All that stuff, every dime of our money, is owned by God and might be required of us at any time. "But I earned it!" you say. And how did we earn it? With the talents and abilities and brains and opportunities that have come to us as a gift from God. We wouldn't have the opportunity to earn it without God's gift. We wouldn't have the breath to remain alive on this earth unless God gave it to us, minute by minute, day by day. Think about the widow in the temple here. A widow in Jesus' day lost more than just a husband. She lost her only means of income. A widow in Jesus' day relied on charity, either from any remaining family she might have or from begging. This wasn't somebody on a fixed income who was collecting social security. This was somebody on no income whatsoever. Whatever she had was given to her. That's the recognition that God wants to dawn in our hearts. All we have is given to us too. None of it is truly ours. It's all, in one way or another, a gift from God, given to us to watch over and invest until such time as God has need of it. And I think that's why Jesus says in many different places that it's easier for the poor to get into the kingdom of God than the rich. It doesn't really have to do with how much money we've got. It's just that when you're rich it's easier to forget that you too live completely off of charity. The charity which in the Greek is karitas, the giving love of God. Karitas is the word for love in I Corinthians 13. And once we forget that God has supplied every last thing that we have, it's easy to slide into thinking that it's ours to do with as we please. The more we think of things as ours, the tighter our hands close around those things. And our hearts grow smaller and smaller, and our hands are never open to receive other gifts that God has for us. Look where that attitude has gotten in our world. We're destroying the earth that we think is ours. We're killing the bodies that we think are ours. We're hoarding the money that we think is ours, defending the rights that we think are ours, no matter who or what might be destroyed in the process. "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God," says Jesus. Do you see why? Do you see that all over our country people have their heavily laden camels with stuff sticking out the sides and across the top, trying to get them through the tiny little hole with all of their resources still intact? When Jesus was talking about camels and needles, all he meant was that it's human nature for us to want to have our cake and eat it too. He wasn't talking about legal details. He was talking attitude. The message of the widow in the temple is exactly the same as the message of Jesus on the cross. The only way into the kingdom of God is to let go. Jesus had to focus so much on money and possessions because that's the place where people have throughout history had the greatest trouble letting go. And that's why in churches, yes we encourage you to give of your time and your talents and your love, but as a rule we human beings tend to do better in that than we do in letting go of our money. So that's where we tend to focus. Because, like a doctor looking for the place where the illness is, that's where the illness tends to be in our country -- in letting go of our possessions. He's not saying it's wrong to have money. He's not saying that all of the poor are automatically righteous because they have nothing. He's saying that if there's anything in your life that you could not turn over to God -- if God in person is standing there asking you for it, as Jesus stood before the rich young ruler and said, "Go and sell all you have and come and follow me" -- if there's any possession, any money, any talent, any time, any human being up to and including yourself that you couldn't let go if God were to ask, you're blocking yourself from the fullness and the joy of God's kingdom. You're not going to hell because of it. You're just sitting in heaven and insisting on keeping your rags in a shack, when there are mansions and treasures all around that are free for the asking. Let it go. God may or may not ever ask you to give all of it up, or to give up more than you're comfortable with. God isn't trying to make us homeless. But if you want to know the fullness of God you've got to let it go in your heart -- all of it -- 100%. You may as well. The reality is, it isn't ours anyway. Amen. © 2000, Anne Robertson Return to AnneRobertson.com |