Another Stewardship Sermon?!

This probably isn't a huge revelation for most of us, but I felt compelled to share anyway. We in the church talk alot about stewardship and money. Often, we hear that money (or the love of it) is the root of all evil. We try to focus our listeners on trying to make sure we give to the church and people in need. But we rarely talk about it as a matter of doing that first. That is, we don't encourage people to make their stewardship contribution the first check that they write each month or payday. Rather, I think we ourselves often get caught up in some notion of using "leftovers" for the church. Even if we acknowledge that people ought to contribute as the first thing they do with newly acquired money, we tend to be OK with just settling for what the church can get. Stewardship, I believe, is counter-cultural. We spend our entire lives in this country being taught to look out for ourselves first: buy lots of stuff now to "compete" with the Joneses and try to save for retirement. That's all fine and good, but along with that is tied a notion that giving to the church or a charity is to be secondary, tertiary or worse. It seems to me that all too often, we simply stand back and allow people to just give using what's left: "take care of yourself and your family first, then come to the church." We do this instead of pointing out that we are obligated to give back to God first, and that we can trust God will provide what we need out of what is left. I don't know if it's fear, a defense mechanism or simple idolatry, but whatever we call it, it's not putting our full trust in God. In short, it's sin because we are denying God to take care of us and telling him to "shove off because I can take care of myself; then I will give you some later to take care of others."

In contrast to what we learn in this culture, we see in the Bible many stories of putting others first by giving to them. In the story of the rich young man (Matt 19:16-22; Mark 10:17-22; Luke 18:18-23), Jesus tells the man to sell his possessions and give to poor - even before the man is to follow Jesus! Again, in the story of the widow's mite (Mark 12:41-44; Luke 21:1-4), Jesus praises the widow who gave the only 2 coins she had, compared with the other people who gave out of their abundance.

I know that in many respects this blog post is much the same thing we preach about and hear in sermons on Sunday; but I do think that too often we lose sight of the 'stewardship first' idea and we tend to settle for whatever the church can get because "at least they're giving something." Where's the redemption in that?