THE MONEY SHELF

The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel

October 19, 2008

First Congregational Church, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, UCC

www.firstconge.org

630-469-3096

Scripture: Deuteronomy 14:22-29

²²Set apart a tithe of all the yield of your seed that is brought in yearly from the field.  ²³In the presence of the Lord your God, in the place that he will choose as a dwelling for his name, you shall eat the tithe of your grain, your wine, and your oil, as well as the firstlings of your herd and flock, so that you may learn to fear the Lord your God always.  ²⁴But if, when the Lord your God has blessed you, the distance is so great that you are unable to transport it, because the place where the Lord your God will choose to set his name is too far away from you, ²⁵then you may turn it into money. With the money secure in hand, go to the place that the Lord your God will choose; ²⁶spend the money for whatever you wish—oxen, sheep, wine, strong drink, or whatever you desire. And you shall eat there in the presence of the Lord your God, you and your household rejoicing together.  ²⁷As for the Levites resident in your towns, do not neglect them, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you.

²⁸Every third year you shall bring out the full tithe of your produce for that year, and store it within your towns; ²⁹the Levites, because they have no allotment or inheritance with you, as well as the resident aliens, the orphans, and the widows in your towns, may come and eat their fill so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work that you undertake.

Sermon:

I remember the day I decided that I would never be a tither. I was sitting in the pews as an associate minister, listening to the senior minister preach. The senior minister, who was a tither, was telling us about it. He was explaining that being a tither meant that he had always given the Biblically commended tithe, ten percent of his income, to the church, then still more to other causes, and that God had blessed him for it. This wasn’t hypocrisy. He was sixty four years old, really did it, and he believed that financial peace had come to him as a result.

I couldn’t stand to hear it. I was paying off massive student loans, full time day care for my first baby, and to be honest, even though I lived in a lovely parsonage, I was seriously underpaid by that church. Newly married, my husband and I had discovered that we were no different from most couples in that the major stress in our nascent marriage was money. In fact, we had just had an argument about our spending the night before that had ended without answers, but no shortage of hurt feelings. I was in no mood to hear about tithing. As he preached, I told myself and God, “I don’t ever want to be a tither.”

I felt that my colleague, a widower whose children were grown and whose house was paid off, had absolutely no understanding of my situation. It seemed unimaginable to me that I could be a tither when I had so little to begin with, and the idea of giving such a large sum to an institution that wasn’t paying me enough seemed absurd.

I want to be very honest here. In that first job out of school, my anger was intense around these issues, but there was no place, in my vocational life, that I could express it. I believed in the Biblical teachings of generosity and grace but at the same time, inside I personally felt worry and resentment. I had a bi-polar ministry of money going on. But I came to it naturally, for I was behaving exactly as I had been taught as a child.

In my family, growing up, when it came to money, you did not tell the truth. I remember my parents fighting late into the night, always about money, and in particular, my mother’s spending. Now, what fell into the category of “her” spending was just about everything, from groceries, to car payments, to my school supplies and clothes. And because of this, my father was basically unaware of what anything cost. Yet every now and then he would see a bill or a receipt and become irate at the amount.

So to avoid such scenes, I was taught never to tell my father what anything cost. If I had a new coat, I learned in my early childhood to say, “I’ve had it for years.” When I needed movie money, he would give me enough for a ticket ten years ago, and my mother would surreptitiously slip the difference into my pocket on the way out. “Why can’t we tell Daddy what the movie really costs?” I asked. “Why can’t we tell him I needed a new outfit for the dance?”

“Shhh…it will only upset him.”

I remember as a little girl delighting in my brand new blue coat, but being afraid to wear it out the door past my father. From an early age, material things elicited in me both inordinate delight and misplaced shame.

Since then, I have discovered in the ministry, that I am no different from many other people, a complex mass of contradictions when it comes to money. But one thing I took from my childhood was this. Arguing about money does not work. Worrying about money does not help. And lying about money serves no one. I decided that as far as my ministry would go, it was time to start telling the truth about money.

That meant telling my first congregation that I was not on the same track as their generous and disciplined senior minister. When it came to stewardship sermons, I confessed to the congregation that I loved cars, clothes, and restaurants; that I wanted to travel everywhere in the world and not worry about what I spent; that like most Americans I carried significant debt, including the kind we are least likely to tell each other about, credit card debt. I told them that when I gave money to the church, it actually was a sacrifice, because I really wanted the things I saw advertised on television. I wasn’t some holy, un-materialistic person, and just to make my point, I told them there was no way in heaven I was ever going to give ten percent of my income away.

It wasn’t the best stewardship sermon they had heard, but it generated a lot of good conversation, especially with the tithing senior minister whom I was contradicting. In telling the truth, I got a strong response. We started talking together about money. I did not need to be a perfect, altruistic role model for God to use me in a ministry of money. But I remember what the senior minister told me. He said, “If you tithe, so much of your anxiety around this will go away,” and I filed it under “Advice from people who do not understand my situation at all.”

When I moved to be the solo minister at my second church, in New Haven, my fervor to tell the truth about money was seriously challenged by the culture of that church. I hadn’t been there long before I saw that each Sunday we collected the offering with extreme awkwardness. This was a congregation that had not heard anyone talk about tithing in decades, maybe ever, or even really about money. There was an embarrassed fanfare around the offertory that seemed to suggest that while we needed money to exist, we found the enterprise of asking for it somewhat distasteful.

The fanfare came from the outstanding choir, who saved their biggest anthem for the offertory moment. Yet I came to suspect that the anthem was not there to draw attention to the offering, but rather to distract us from it. The plates were passed apologetically, as people tried not to look at what others had put there. Then those plates were shuffled forward, but then they disappeared. The ushers literally scurried away with the plates during the doxology, but not to an altar or a communion table. In that church the plates ended up on a specially constructed tiny shelf behind the organ, around a doorjamb, completely out of sight. It was very strange. They had a name for it: “the money shelf.”

The congregational lore had it that this little shelf was the invention of an atheist church treasurer. Apparently, he had so little taste for worship and talk of God that the shelf was placed out of view so that he could sneak the offering out through the door into a tiny room and count the money during the sermon.

Later I discovered that the architectural plans of the church actually included this little shelf from the very beginning. The congregation had at that time prided itself on the theological reflection behind the shelf: the communion table was so “highly” regarded that they decided it should never be “soiled or sullied” with something as crass as money.

At the time I served there, this congregation, which once boasted a large membership of wealthy business and civic leaders, had declined over the decades to paltry pledging levels and low attendance, supported by an endowment that allowed the church to exist longer than it would have otherwise. The message within the congregation was that financial matters were taboo in the church, and the effect was low giving and unspoken anxiety around money.

When I arrived, I knew that this church had gone through two church splits, when they lost about half their members, twice: one each decade. Add to that the fact that my two ministerial predecessors had been forced out, well, let’s just say, it made me wary of speaking about money. I was afraid to look like I was singing for my own supper to a crowd that might not be interested in cooking. As a new pastor, ordained just four years, I was being pulled into a church culture that began long before I was even born, and it was a culture of keeping the money out of sight and on the shelf.

It was the classic ministerial dilemma around stewardship, and here I am going to state it plainly, because it’s the elephant in the living room. Ministers are called to preach generosity, particularly toward the church, but we, through our salaries, will be among the beneficiaries. There, I have said it. You must have thought it, and now you know I’ve thought about it, too, and so has every minister. Isn’t it refreshing to just acknowledge that awkwardness and be open? For I don’t want that awkwardness to get in the way of one of the Bible’s key conversations, so let me continue this story.

In my early days of ministry at that congregation, my own financial pressures had not gone away. (Do they ever?) Now, I was the parent of a toddler and a new born baby, both of whom were in full time day care that cost as much as community college tuition. My husband was a labor organizer in a local union that had a policy that when the workers were on strike, the organizers also gave up their pay. The workers were on strike. I wasn’t underpaid, at least not for clergy, but I wasn’t making enough to support our whole family. There were tense conversations late at night about which bills to pay first, and whether or not my three-year-old son would get a tricycle for his birthday.

Sometimes, in a moment of stress, I would find myself doing the very thing I ought to hate, but had been taught by my mother was the first thing you did in a financial crisis: I went shopping. A new pair of shoes I did not need would be discovered in my closet, (“What? I’ve had these for years…”) and my husband would look at me dumbfounded, (“But they were on sale…”) as we wondered how to pay the day care bill. It was no wonder I was not particularly emboldened to challenge my new church on their money issues, when I had a barrel full of my own.

Wise mentors have told me that in many churches, the congregation’s issues with money can be traced to those of the pastor. Sometimes, we clergy can also be shaped by the congregation. Most often, I suspect, we find each other in the night, like two star-crossed lovers who should or shouldn’t get together but are oddly drawn to one another’s neuroses.

When it comes to anxiety around money, the church and the pastor share something in common: our sin. We are all shaped by a world of greed and materialism, and from deep within, the worst part of us participates. So together, sometimes, we may make a silent pact not to talk about money, and spend time in church thinking about more pleasant things. At that church we weren’t ignoring money. We couldn’t, because we needed it to survive. We collected it and put it quickly on its own little money shelf.

Then I learned that not everybody in church wanted to put money on the shelf. I remember in those years, there were times when people would come to me and recommend the best-selling book, The Prayer of Jabez. Or they might tell me about preachers they watched on television who promised financial wealth as a result of prayer. These proponents of the “prosperity gospel” certainly had taken money off the shelf, but what were they doing with it? I took the time to read The Prayer of Jabez. While encouraging prayer, it mostly encouraged “enlarging one’s territory,” something the little known biblical figure, Jabez, prayed for and got. While “enlarging one’s territory” may have been important to Jabez, I remain convinced it was not very important to Jesus. Clearly, in reading these books and watching these prosperity preachers on television, my parishioners were looking for something they were not getting at the church that put money on the shelf. I needed to step up, not so much because they needed it, but because I did.

In the preaching moment each week, clergy are given the privilege and the challenge of engaging money through the eyes of the One who provides for us in more ultimate ways. I believe our work as clergy actually shapes us, and makes it impossible for us to believe the simple theories and easy answers. We cannot help but wrestle with money in complex ways, given a typical workweek.

One Sunday we preach about Jesus saying, “Woe to you Pharisees! For you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God.” Luke 11:42 and then that night, we go home to unpaid bills, and prepare the next Monday morning for the upcoming pledge drive. Any pastor who delivers the easy prosperity answers can’t really believe them. Paying attention to our own lives does not permit it.

In my own life, my heart was transformed around economic justice issues long before it was transformed around personal giving issues. In my younger days, I was much quicker to point out a materialistic society’s evils than to look at my own habits. If it had been left up to me, I doubt I ever would have gotten around to it.

A few years into my ministry at the New Haven church, I was sitting in a traffic jam on the highway, on my way back from a meeting in Hartford, late to pick up my children from daycare, a mistake that would result in a fine. It was a small fine, but a bigger reminder that I had tried to pack too much into a day that had no margins. It was a good metaphor for my financial life. I tried to put far too much into a budget that had no margins, and the overflow had ended up in serious credit card debt. There is nothing like being late, broke, stressed out and in a traffic jam to turn a person to prayer. I prayed for a way out of the cycle.

Suddenly, the view from my stuck car changed. Hartford, not usually beautiful from the highway, appeared to be gleaming, as if bathed in gold light. The ordinary buildings were shining, and the sky seemed to drip into them in an embrace. And then suddenly, the heavenly veneer disappeared and it looked just like Hartford again.

Let me take a moment to clarify that I am not a person who regularly has visions. And that the last place I expected to have one was on the highway outside of Hartford, Connecticut. (Furthermore, in the circles I run in, when you speak to God in prayer you are considered religious, but when you say God speaks to you people suspect that you are psychotic. Particularly if God speaks to you about money.) But this is what I saw, and I was amazedly baffled.

So I closed my eyes tight, and then opened them again. Gleaming, and then gone. Heavenly city, and then Hartford again. I did this several times, until the traffic abated and I had to pull forward. I could not recapture the vision.

Stunned, I prayed again. The car was once again stopped so please don’t worry when I tell you I closed my eyes, and saw in my mind’s eye three things, none of which were very difficult to interpret. The first was a credit card, being cut up into pieces by a giant pair of scissors. The second image was a present, gift-wrapped with a flamboyant bow, the sort of package one would delight in seeing under a Christmas tree. And the last image was the figure 10%. Then the traffic moved, my eyes were opened and I was on my way.

I got home and told my husband the news. “I’ve just had a vision from God. We’re meant to cut up our credit cards and start tithing.”

I didn’t know what I expected but his answer surprised me. “You know, I’ve been waiting years for you to walk through the door and say that,” he said. And here I think he was referring less to my vision, and more to the financial plan. After all, he wasn’t the one who liked to go shopping. “But just how are we going to pay off the credit cards?”

I told him about the three-part vision, (repeat) with a special focus on part two. “We’re going to get a present,” I said, “A big gift, a financial windfall. Now, is there anyone in your extended family who might be planning to send us a check?” He shook his head, and I knew that no one in my family was planning such a thing. I was sure at the time that I had the correct interpretation of the vision. I was going to win some kind of lottery. We cut up the credit cards, sent in our church pledge form and started giving ten percent, right then and there, automatic withdrawal, so that the money was never in our hands. I felt an enormous relief, a sense of excitement, like I had taken a bold risk and that fear no longer had power over me. I was giddy, as I then waited for the gift.

I would check the mail daily, and there was nothing. Do you actually have to buy a lottery ticket to win? Apparently so. The windfall check never arrived.

I felt both disillusioned and foolish for even imagining that such a thing would happen. I felt naïve and wondered if the vision was nothing but my latest self-help scheme destined to last as long as the average diet.

But God had made the city of Hartford look heavenly on a hot day in a traffic jam, and that was a scene I would never forget. We kept tithing, and somehow, in time and in ways that I cannot fully account for, we started getting rid of the debt until after a couple of years it was gone. And since the gift, the big financial windfall, never came, we were on our own, setting new patterns of giving, to church, charities, people in need. And it was possible, even though the gift never arrived. Or had it?

I later came to understand that the second part of my three-part vision had actually come true. The big gift had arrived after all. It was in the wise words of one Christian to another, telling me that the way to reduce anxiety is to increase generosity, words it took me years to believe. It was in the generosity of my parents and in-laws, who had stepped in over the years to cover camp fees and instrument lessons when times were hard. It was in the health of our children, the kindness of friends who covered for one another in lean times, dinner parties when we couldn’t afford to go out, the countless little gifts and kindnesses that come our way all the time.

Most importantly, the gift was Christ, in whom my debt had long since been paid.

At this time of such economic uncertainty, I know a lot of people are struggling with anxiety about what may happen, or the reality of what already has. Many people these days are having mood swings that directly follow the ups and downs of the stock market, and these days that does not make for a winning personality.

Because I have known the joy of giving, I feel an obligation to testify to a different way of reading the numbers. I am aware that I now stand in a long line of followers of Jesus who say things about money that make no sense—at least, as the world calculates such things. I don’t feel awkward or self serving in talking about this with my church any more. I think I have stumbled on a secret that goes back to the ancient Israelites, but only registered with me eleven years ago. People should give not because the church needs it, or the school needs it, or the charity needs it. We need it.

We need to give in order to live full and beautiful lives. We need to give in order to remind ourselves that our things are not who we are. I believe that picking a percentage to give away, and feeling good about it, is the most counter-cultural thing you can do. When the rest of the world is freaking out over the stock market, you can remember that you live according to more timeless principles. Whatever you have, take a portion of it and give it away. When times are good and when times are bad, do this as a reminder that you are not your possessions, you are a child of God, a giver.

I know there may be people who are listening to me the way I listened to my first senior minister, during his tithing sermon, with a sense that this stuff simply does not apply. Every time I stand in the pulpit to preach on giving, I remember my old self, sitting in the pews. It is humbling. Today may be the day that as a result of my preaching, someone here decides she will never, ever be a tither.

And fortunately, God can work with that.