It has been said that United Methodist pastors were once moved every 2 years because they only had 104 sermons. I think I have surpassed that number already and plan to add to it, but I am finding that whenever it comes time to preach about generosity I have one message I want to say again and again.
We start preaching about generosity this week. I found a new thing to say.
But before the new thing here is the old. Whenever I talk about money, I always will have this to say:
“a perspective grounded in scarcity will rob you of joy
a perspective grounded in abundance will deliver hope”
And that really is the truth. But some of the people who worship with me have heard me preach nearly every Sunday for over five years… I can’t just reheat what I have already served.
On Mondays, I read as much as I can from different sources in an attempt to find as many new perspecitves and lessons worth sharing. I read a story from Kate Armas that I had heard before but she delivered it best. I read commentaries from the passage I will preach from this week.
I did a little bit of research into the board game “Monopoly," (did you know that this game is not fun, at all and will ruin your friendships? That’s not from my research, I’m just basing that off of my own experience) and all of that will come out in my sermon in a week.
But I read an article that stood out to me. I lifted it from Rethinking Wesley’s Theology, edited by Randy Maddox and the article was written by M. Douglas Meeks. The article discusses a great deal of content, but a quote at the very beginning of the article stuck withe me:
“Wesley’s view of stewardship [was] the Christian way of being in the world through community as well as the economy through which God works for life against death in the world.”
And so I think I have found a new way to understand my one sermon about generosity. That this is how God has called us to be in community, real community.
Because when I preach against a scarcity mindset, what am I preaching against if not the idea that death will win out in the world? When someone has a mindset rooted in scarcity, they have convinced themselves that what they have is not enough and that what they need will not be met.
The byproduct of that perspective is not just being less generous it is also being hostile to other people who are in need. People begin to fear people who are poor instead of fearing the systems and structures that make people poor. People begin to see other people’s needs as threats to their own security. Scarcity robs joy.
But when we view the world with abundance, we see nothing but opportunity.
When I say “abundance,” I do not mean lying to yourself about the realities of economics. Gas, food, housing, and other very basic necessities for daily life are getting more and more expensive while a very small amount of billionaires are getting much more wealthy. That is a reality that any abundance mindset cannot ignore, nor should it.
An abundance mindset looks at the realities of how the world’s economy is and knows that this is not how it always will be. It also knows, and lives into the reality, that God’s Economy can be real in the here and now.
And so an abundance mindset acknowledges that we may not have enough on our own but also that we have more than enough when we are together.
But this is the opposite of the world’s economy.
To talk about Christian generosity is to offer an alternative to the patterns of this world that make us feel starved and alone.
And that is a story worth telling.
