Lent 4, Yr. C, 3/14/10
HIOG #4
We are kicking off week
number 4 in our Hole in Our Gospel
parish wide study.
The first being God’s grace.
That God first loved us and
that we live our lives fueled by our gratitude for that grace and love and
mercy.
No, we can’t earn God’s
favor.
We can’t earn our salvation.
We care about loving our
neighbor because we are grateful for God’s grace and love and mercy.
The second foundation of our
study is the idea of suspending judgment.
That by judging the actions,
choices, motives of those in need we effectively distance ourselves.
We distance ourselves from
the human suffering, from compassion.
And we distance ourselves
from having responsibility for those in need.
When I first read the book
last fall I was so not happy with myself.
I remember turning the last
page and thinking:
I have made so many idols of
comfort and safety and convenience in my life.
I’m reading it for the second
time and I still think that about myself.
It is anxiety producing to
even imagine life without health insurance or money in the bank or a cell phone
or a car.
In fact I can hardly imagine
it at all.
This is the big question that
I’m hearing in one form or another from people reading the book:
What can I do?
We’re not all going to get to
the end of Lent and then hear a multi-level marketing pitch about how to be a
“real” Christian.
There isn’t one thing that
we’re trying to get you all to do…one way for us all to think as Christians.
If in the end we all find
ourselves with our hearts broken… then this study is doing what we hoped for.
Some of the stories in the
book are brutal.
But the videos…seeing the
faces of people just trying to stay alive.
It’s heartbreaking.
The title of this week’s
small group session is Uncovering the
Hole in the Church.
The chapters you’ll be
reading this next week are full of exhortations about tithing money to the
church.
Which Stearns clearly defines
as 10% of the household’s gross income.
Off the top. Not the
leftovers.
Nobody wants to hear that.
Tithing talk is just
guaranteed to get people riled up.
You get the OT versus NT
ideas of giving arguments going.
How it’s not about giving a
certain percentage for NT people.
The arguments about giving of
our time and talents as part of our tithe.
Talking about money and
giving is more off putting than just about anything you might bring up in
polite, Christian company.
Richard Stearns throws some
scary numbers at us in these chapters.
If your household has an
income above $25K you are in the top 10% of the 6.7 billion people on earth.
If your household income is
$50K or above you are in the top 1% of those 6.7 billion people in the whole
world.
93% of the people on this
earth do not own a car.
Churchgoers in the
Of those who give to churches
the average is about 2.58% of the household income.
If American churchgoers actually
did give 10% of their household incomes there would be about $168 billion more
dollars available for churches to help others.
As an example:
The cost of bringing clean
water, adequate nutrition and basic healthcare to most of those who live in
extreme poverty in the world would be about $22 billion dollars.
That would be for billions of
people.
In the
I did my part.
It’s heartbreaking.
So what are our reasons, our
excuses for limiting what we give to the church and to charities that help
others?
Our Gospel story this week is
about the unnamed Rich Man and the poor man Lazarus who lived just outside the
rich man’s gated community.
Like
The sin was that he ignored
the poor man laying outside his gate.
Bible commentaries tell us
this.
That these men lived in a
time when mainstream religious belief was that richness was evidence of God’s
favor.
And poverty was evidence of
God’s punishment.
A rich person wouldn’t reach
out to a poor person because that would be interfering with God’s action in the
world.
Does that sound at all like
something we might hear today?
The God part might be taken
away, but it sounds pretty much the same.
Richness is a sign of hard
work and poorness is a sign of laziness.
That thinking creeps in on
us.
And then along comes Jesus to
rock the Pharisee’s boat, to rock our boat.
He tells this story to remind
us all that God’s loving favor is for the poor and the needy.
To tell us that we have no
excuse for ignoring those in need when we have enough.
Did you notice in the video
clip of the little girl in the yellow dress making her bed on the city street
in
The whole time she is
carefully spreading the blanket out and making her little backpack into a
pillow, people are walking by her on the street.
She lays down on her side to
sleep on the sidewalk for the night and no one even looks her way.
That video clip was life
changing for me when I saw it a couple of years ago.
My heart broke to think about
a little girl like my granddaughters being alone.
What kind of world do we live
in where children are ignored when their poverty and their need is so great?
Why are we dragging you
through all this heartbreaking stuff?
Because all of us here…we are
the church.
And we have a God given
responsibility to help the poor, the hungry, the homeless, orphans, widows.
We are the church, not
someone else.
When our hearts are broken,
that is when God’s love can truly come into us…
And begin to change the way
that we see the world around us.
When our hearts are broken
open, that is when we find ourselves driven to our knees asking God what we can
do for our neighbor.
We tend to be long on
reasons, excuses, why we can’t do more or give more money.
When our hearts are truly
broken we find ourselves willing to be willing to let go of our excuses.
Willing to ask God each
day…what do you expect of me?
We’re so busy with work, kids’ activities,
school stuff, skiing, laundry, yard work, taking care of aging
parents…whatever.
Money is so tight…we have
bills, and mortgages, and credit cards, and kids’ sports fees and lessons and
clothes and cell phones and medical bills.
The problems over there are
too complicated, my money will get sucked up by corrupt governments.
Or why send my money overseas
when we have so many problems right here?
There’s a Catch 22 for you.
We say we won’t send money
overseas because we have so many needs right here in the
But how many of us tell
ourselves that people here in the
If judging others creates a
distance that helps us not feel responsible for those in need…
Then being too busy, too
materially comfortable, too overwhelmed, too reluctant…
All those excuses become ways
to create a distance to let us off the hook, too.
I want all of us in this
church to do two things in the next week.
I want us to actually
calculate what percentage of our household income is given to the church and to
charities helping those in need.
I think each of us should look at the numbers
on paper.
While we’re doing that we might
calculate what percentage we spend on whatever our weakness is…eating out,
books, clothes, DVDs, gadgets.
Second, I want each of us to
think about the reasons we use for not doing more to help those who have such
great need.
Be honest.
The goal here is not simply
to end up feeling guiltier than you may already feel.
The goal, the hope, is that
as our hearts are breaking we will keep opening ourselves up to God’s grace.
We will become more and more
willing to be willing to listen for God’s leading in reaching out to our
neighbor.
As the church in the world,
as one part of the Body of Christ in the world…
I want our hearts to break
open so that we can be used by God to help others.
To be a Christian, to be the
church, doesn’t mean much if it’s just a “God loves me and I feel good about
it” thing.
My prayer is that as we
continue on with our study that our hearts will be broken…
That we will keep falling on
our knees…
That we will keep trying to
hear God’s leading in all of the ways that we can love our neighbor.
And there are so many
ways…big and small.
Richard Stearns quotes Bill Pierce, the
founder of World Vision several times in the book saying this:
Don’t fail to do something just because you can’t do
everything.
Are we willing to ask this
question each and every day:
What do you expect of me, Lord?
Because as the church, doing
nothing is not an option.