Sermons from Past Years

Matthew 6:19-34 "Not to Worry" Scott Hoezee

Some years back there was an advertisement in Fortune magazine which depicted a chauffeur standing next to the open door of a limousine. The caption on the ad was: "Drive yourself today, be driven tomorrow. Let Fortune show you how." In other words, be an enterprising person with a lot of drive and initiative, set your goals and standards high today, and tomorrow the pay-off could be precisely the pampered good life everyone dreams about.

"The business of America is business," President Calvin Coolidge once said. Indeed, everyone these days wants to "make it," preferably make it big. Last spring the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the ideas, habits, and lifestyles of some of those who have been made hugely rich by the stock market boom of the last ten years.

One 28-year-old man who founded a computer company is now worth $12 million. His first move upon getting rich was to buy a $500,000 San Francisco house. Soon thereafter he heard of something even better: a $1.2 million, six-story home. Upon the successful purchase of this house, he threw himself a $12,000 party to celebrate with his friends. "It's incredible," he gushes. "Biting off more than I can chew motivates me to play at the next level, to scale up my business and then figure out how to get back to the comfort zone. Each time I overextend on luxuries, I know I have to work harder to stay afloat."

Speaking of luxuries, the magazine also featured a selection of popular items on which the new rich are spending their money these days. An upscale beauty salon charges $300 for a single haircut, and it takes two months to get an appointment. You can also have your pet groomed at a firm called Doggie Do and Pussycats Too! This costs $250 per animal and has a one-month waiting list. Saks Fifth Avenue has quite a long list of women awaiting the delivery of their Gucci cashmere sweater twin-set which runs a cool $4,045 per outfit.

Working hard, making it big, playing the market, keeping your eye on the brass ring, throttling up to bring yourself to the next level of fiscal adventure: these are the pursuits that consume many today. Yet our Thanksgiving Day passage has Jesus telling us not to worry about any of that. It's an odd text to think about on a day like today.

After all, some of you may recall that in past years on Thanksgiving Day, I have encouraged all of us to move beyond generic words of thanks--throwaway prayers in which we never get more detailed than saying, "Dear God, thank you for all your many blessings, Amen." Instead I've said that we need to make our thanksgiving as specific as the blessings themselves. We need to be grateful for things like a box of Rice Krispies or a warm piece of whole wheat toast, for gas in our car's tank and the CD collection that helps us to fill our homes with music.

Our lives are awash in blessings and if our thanksgiving is to mean anything, then it's something to which we should devote careful forethought as we take inventory of the detailed ways by which God takes care of us. Well and good. And yet here we are on this Thanksgiving Day hearing Jesus say that not only should we not pile up possessions and treasures in this life, we should not even devote much thought to what we already have. So which is it for the Christian life? Should we lift up and dedicate to God our bank accounts and food pantries or would God prefer that we not have them in the first place?

"Don't store up treasures on earth," Jesus says. I don't know how it was for the people in first-century Palestine but I do know that twenty centuries later we have greatly multiplied the possibilities for storing up treasures. What does Matthew 6 have to say on the subject of IRAs, 401k plans, checking and savings accounts, pension plans, and Social Security? What are we doing each time we contribute to a retirement plan or to Social Security if not storing up treasures for the future? What are we doing each time we buy a stock or deposit money at an ATM if not storing up treasures which moth, rust, a bear market, a thief, or a California real estate firm can destroy?

So what does God make of the thanks we render for these blessings? Is it pleasing to him or does he look askance at us for violating his Son's command not to focus on such matters? What is going on in Matthew 6 and what does it suggest for us not only on a holiday of gratitude but every day? Well, in general Jesus is asking us to ponder what constitutes the focus of our lives. What is your goal in life? What's the one center without which you would no longer be able to function?

Jesus says that the answer must be God and his kingdom. The goal of our lives should be service to God in the hope that maybe we can make this world better by bringing it back to the designs God had in mind in the beginning. "Pile up treasure in heaven," Jesus says, and when we hear that we assume he means a treasure that will benefit us after we die.

But what Jesus is really getting at is not something for the sweet hereafter but for right now. Already today God is the One in whom we are thoroughly invested. He is the bedrock not just of the life to come but of this life. If you aim for God's ways above all, then you're not going to do "whatever it takes" to increase your own bottom line. If you have "treasure in heaven," then your life on earth changes in most every way.

But if your treasures are only on this earth, then you will be far more likely to conduct "business as usual" instead of business as God might want it to be. If you set your sites mostly on goals of personal advancement and on making it big, then if you see a practice that works for someone else in terms of doling out a big pay-off, you're more likely to imitate that practice without even wondering whether or not it's ethical.

Of course, by now some of you may be thinking that most of this doesn't have much to do with you. Few of us would ever consider $300 haircuts or $4,000 sweaters. Most of us do not live in a high-pressured business environment where the possibility of making it big is just around the corner. And so perhaps some of us have started to cast furtive glances across the aisle at old so-and-so who we know is well off and we hope that he is listening!

And let's admit that this passage does have a strong application to the wealthy. But

let's also admit that this hits all of us with equal force--you don't need to be a wheeler and dealer, you don't need to have millions in the bank to fall prey to the mentality of storing up treasures on earth. After all, the desire to achieve a lofty standard of living can be as rampant in Joe Sixpack as in Bill Gates. Every day millions of people line up to buy lottery tickets which they can ill afford but you're not going to see Bill Gates in any of those lotto lines. The desire to "make it" can be as big on Wall Street as on Main Street.

Author Tom Wolfe has just come out with another novel. But when he published The Bonfire of the Vanities back in 1986, he said that his research in New York City led him to an astonishing discovery: whether he was in the upscale, 50^th floor environment of high-octane bond brokers in three-piece Armani suits or down on the streets of the Bronx in the company of drug dealers wearing leather jackets, many things were the same.

Both the Harvard-educated bond trader and the dropout drug lord used foul language. The rich man drove a Mercedes as a status symbol, the thug on the street would steal the Mercedes hood ornament and wear it around his neck also as a status symbol. And above all, Wolfe observed, the one constant among the elite and the street dwellers was money. Whether it was money gained on stock deals or money gained on crack deals, what motivated and drove folks in high-end New York and low-end New York was bucks.

The desire to make it big leads Bill Gates to crush competitors with dirty tactics but it can lead the average person to some equally bad practices. It tempts us to cheat on taxes, to gamble, to buy lottery tickets, to cut corners at work, to buy cars and clothes as status symbols, to discard from our lives those who won't help us get more prestige.

In ways subtle and obvious, among the upper crust and the middle class, the desire to make treasures on earth the driving goal of our lives is always present. But this leads us back to where we were a few minutes ago: namely, wondering what, if anything, is the difference between properly having jobs and possessions and improperly having them as the ruling gods of our lives? If you have talents--and all of us do--then those are gifts from God which you must exercise. In the exercise of those gifts, you will earn money--money which allows you to provide for your family and enjoy the life God has given.

Throughout the Bible you can find a lot of guidance on how to respect one another's property and on how to use food and drink and leisure time to celebrate life and so praise God for his creation abundances. So the difference between the Christian and the non-Christian is not that the Christian owns virtually nothing while the non-Christian owns a lot. Jesus himself never envisioned his disciples cutting themselves off from the real, workaday world. Jesus was no religious mystic who urged his followers to purge themselves of all emotion so as to meditate their way into a wispy spiritual realm where they would never again have to eat, work, or buy anything. If you want that kind of world-shunning spirituality, become a Buddhist.

However, in the midst of working, earning, and owning, Jesus still wants the focus of our lives to be God's kindgom above all else. So if we are to serve God in the midst of owning cars and working at our jobs and depositing money into the bank, then somehow we need to find ways for those possessions to help us to serve God and his people. However, if getting more stuff means we have less time to give to the church or to our family or to our neighbors, then earthly treasures go from being our servants to being our masters.

It's one thing to own a car, it's another to worry about it day and night. It's one thing to have money in the bank, it's another thing to spend every week scrutinizing your balance sheet and wondering how to increase the bottom line. It's one thing to do work to earn a living and exercise your talents, it's quite another to throw so much of yourself into that work that you can never say "Yes" when the church needs volunteers; that you work 16-hour days which prohibit your spending much time with your spouse or kids; that even when you go away for the weekend, the laptop and cell phone and beeper come along; that you work so hard six days a week many times when Sunday rolls around you can't make it to church because it's the only time when maybe you could see your family. We all own things and do work. The question is: do the things we have and the work we do help us serve God or take us away from God?

The Puritans said we need to develop weaned affections: loving our work without loving it too much. How can we do that? Let me close with three brief suggestions. First, pray over your work. Bring your work to church with you in the best sense of always wanting to check what you do and how you do it against the baseline of God's designs. Pray that God will be glorified in your work and ask the Holy Spirit to show you new ways how that could be done. And if sometimes doing that means you make less, work less, have less, then ask God for the courage to follow where the Spirit leads.

Second, be a giver. All of us serve God through our jobs and through the exercise of our talents at home and at work. As a preacher, I am thrilled when some of you tell me how the worship here at Calvin helps you be a better Christian doctor, lawyer, mechanic, shopkeeper, mom, dad, teacher, or salesperson. We do serve God's kingdom through our Monday-Friday vocations.

But we regularly need to serve God in other ways, too. We also need those times when we help others without getting paid for it. We need to do things when no one is looking or keeping track of our hours or evaluating us for a promotion. The reality of life is that most of our weeks are going to be spent on the job, and we can be thankful for the Reformed vision that sees work as a contribution to God's kingdom. But we also need to practice being generous givers of time, talent, and money beyond our jobs. Maybe times of helping ICCF build a house, helping the deacons minister to widows, spending some time with the homeless through IHN will introduce some much-needed balance to our lives.

Third, we need simply to be in the habit of thinking about other people. We need to do this when we pray, perhaps using the telephone prayer line as a way to keep before our minds the folks in this community who need prayers. We need to focus on people through sending thoughtful notes or cards to others who have done a good job, who are down and need some encouragement, who are grieving and lonely.

The problem with keeping your nose to the grindstone is that after a while you can't see anything but grindstone. Jesus had a divine knack for always seeing people--that vision was the foundation of his worldclass compassion. Through the discipline of prayer, through slowing down enough to simply look around us, we may find it possible to lift our noses from the grindstone so we can look lovingly at those around us who need Jesus' love.

We have so much for which to be very specifically grateful this day and every day. As Christians who believe in the providence of God, it is absolutely proper that we give God thanks for all we have. At the same time, however, those very possessions and gifts must never become the center of life. They are at best things we pick up along the way but they should never be allowed to weigh us down so much that we find ourselves too encumbered to lend the kingdom a hand.

People who worry too much about things tend to have little time left for people. In the concluding essay of the New York Times Magazine to which I referred earlier writer Jeffrey Goldberg explained why he recently canceled his all subscriptions to magazines devoted to money and finances. Last year, Goldberg said, one of his money magazines hired a fund manager who had been observing the Asian markets for years. This man's job would be to contribute articles designed to help American investors succeed in Asian markets.

What made Goldberg cancel his subscription was when he read one of the articles written by this financial guru in which this man went on and on about the disastrous effect Tiananmen Square had on the Hong Kong markets in 1989. Yet in the course of the entire article, this fund manager never once mentioned the disastrous effect Tiananmen Square had on the people whom the Chinese government killed and maimed there. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also," our Lord said. May it be that somehow, by God's grace, the thanks we give on this Thanksgiving Day and every day will lead us closer to people than it will to things. Amen.