My brothers and sisters, what good is it if people say they have faith but do nothing to show it? Claiming to have faith can’t save anyone, can it? 15 Imagine a brother or sister who is naked and never has enough food to eat. 16 What if one of you said, “Go in peace! Stay warm! Have a nice meal!”? What good is it if you don’t actually give them what their body needs? 17 In the same way, faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.
18 Someone
might claim, “You have faith and I have action.” But how can I see your
faith apart from your actions? Instead, I’ll show you my faith by
putting it into practice in faithful action. 19 It’s good that you believe that God is one. Ha! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble with fear. 20 Are you so slow? Do you need to be shown that faith without actions has no value at all? (Common English Bible)
“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Five
I still remember, amusingly, the surprised faces of my friends as they would return from using the bathroom of my apartment my senior year of college. I saw their faces and I knew—they had seen the brochures I had put there as an ill-humored joke that were from an apocalyptic, end-times televangelist who marketed things like a videotape to set aside for your left behind, unbelieving loved ones after you had been raptured and a series of Bible studies that would rapidly become obsolete as one global threat after another failed to bring forth the Biblical Antichrist.
I was given these brochures by a very devout older relative of mine who has been a devoted follower of this televangelist. The nature of what this televangelist was selling left no doubt in my mind that this person was a con artist, a huckster preying on people like my relative, a true believer who has given this televangelist literally thousands of dollars until my family intervened to make it stop. Even though I disagree with significant portions of my relative’s theology, I cannot, and never have, doubted their faithfulness. And so part of my own faith formation, as a Christian and as an ordained pastor, has been witnessing up close and personal the fleecing of the faithful by snake oil salespersons who make silver-tongued proclamations with the Bible in one hand and a pickpocket’s dexterity with the other.
I still remember learning when and how my family had finally put an end to my relative’s donations, and I remember the feeling of uncensored betrayal I felt at this televangelist for taking advantage of my loved one. But far from making me more reticent to talk about matters of money and stewardship in church, that memory has steeled my resolve to ensure that we talk about such things responsibly and healthily. And as we are now in the swing of our autumn stewardship season, that feeling—that lesson, really—feels especially relevant.
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
Today’s question is, “What about the hypocrisy?” This particular whatabout has been one of the questions most frequently posed to me as a pastor, because Christians have been the church’s own worst PR. the hypocrisy of many visible Christians has been on display for decades, from the financial scandals of popular televangelists in the 1980s and 90s to the cover-up of abusive priests in the Roman Catholic Church uncovered in the 00s, to the lack of care many churches have shown for the effects of the coronavirus today. Each of these examples has in common a disregard for the spiritual practice of stewardship, of caring for God’s people and their resources. As we come to you to ask you to pledge to our 2021 budget, this is a particularly timely whatabout for us to be asked.
I could just as easily have gone in direction of stewardship to begin our sermon series a few weeks ago, with the Genesis 1 story and specifically God’s mandate to keep the earth as its stewards. Especially given the green ministry presence here at Valley, that would have been a great fit. But—and I think especially after the dramatic news this week—a message on the importance of science and medical science especially felt important and relevant as well.
The good thing about stewardship, though, is that it is not limited to just one Biblical passage, but is rather a recurring and predominant value throughout Scripture, and the epistle of James, the brother of Jesus, addresses it at some length in a few different ways.
For James, stewardship is as much about equity as anything else—about ensuring that the church, in its stewardship, is doing right by the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the worker, and his words here in 2:14-20 lie at the heart of that concern. James’s epistle functions largely as an authority on Christian ethics, and this passage explains James’s focus on ethics—on our decisions between right and wrong that define us as people and as Christians.
To James, being Christian cannot be pinned down solely to your baptism, or your recitation of the Sinner’s Prayer, or any such one-off event. To James, every day when you wake up, you decide with your actions that day whether you will be a good Christian…or not.
This admonition from the brother of Jesus to not let our faith be limited to our words, lest it die off, is our foundation
for good stewardship, because it is an all-encompassing rule to live by.
Whatever the circumstance is, whether it is giving a hungry person something to
eat, or an exposed person something to wear, or our church something to turn
into ministry, stewardship is about recognizing that there is a need, and then
rising to meet that need.
We ask you to recognize the need of the church to have a solvent budget each autumn with our
stewardship campaign, and to rise to meet that need with your generosity of time and finances. To a cynic, it simply looks like us asking you for money.
But here’s the thing—because of those stories I mentioned earlier, of the
financial improprieties of televangelists and the lack of regard for the safety
of children, I get completely where those cynics are coming from. Especially when those are the stories that make the news--when was the last time you saw a church on the news for its financial transparency?--that may be the exposure others have to us. And what
they see in these stories is not the fruits of stewardship, but of hypocrisy, and stewardship
can be its antidote.
Because when we ask you to give to Valley Christian Church, it isn’t me getting on television asking you to give to my ministry that you have no say-so in or any idea where the money is really going. We elect people to specifically watch over the gifts we raise, and to account for those gifts in a clear and responsible manner. We communicate with transparency about where our funds come from, and what they are spent on. And all these practices do not indicate a lack of trust in one another, on the contrary, they are meant to build trust. If you do not have to worry about where your generous gifts are going because you know you can trust the people accounting for those gifts, it makes it infinitely easier to be fully present in the fellowship and ministry of the church.
Good stewardship, then, isn’t simply an ask for money. It’s an honoring of peoples’ generosity in doing right by their gifts. That is a very spiritual, very faithful thing for us to do.
That is why I have no compunctions of giving ten percent of my net income back to the church—and I say that as a promise, as a pledge to you, that I will never ask you to do something that I am not willing to do myself.
We do this stewardship work together, and the fruits of it are borne out across the ministry of the church, but it all starts as pieces of paper—we talk plenty about the fruits of stewardship, yet its seeds look like pledge cards and envelopes, church budgets and financial reports. Each of these, even if they’re primarily numbers on a page, are Biblical, theological documents, because they are reflecting our practice of James’s exhortation to not let our faith be limited to our words alone. This is what it means to put your money where your mouth is—literally what the idiom means. We proclaim with our speech that Jesus is our Lord and Savior, and our pledges and budgets are our way of putting our money to what comes out of our mouths.
I wish the church—not Valley, but the wider, universal church—were more associated with that practice than I’ve experienced it being. That, ultimately, is up to us. Even if we feel like we are faithfully going about the building of the kingdom without fanfare, without anyone from the media watching and telling us what a good job we are doing, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount God still sees what we do, and how we give, in secret, and rewards us accordingly.
So, what about hypocrisy? It is too easy to simply say, “Well, the church will never be perfect—we are all sinners after all.” Yes, we are, but we are also sinners called and redeemed, striving to become better creations. That is what pained me so much to see my family financially taken advantage of by a televangelist—there was no striving to become better on the part of the televangelism, there was only the fleecing.
The opposite of hypocrisy isn’t perfection, because while hypocrisy is sadly very, very attainable, perfection is not, at least in this lifetime. Rather, the opposite of hypocrisy is stewardship—the responsible, accountable, and transparent cultivation of gifts, talents, and generosity of spirit. It is being faithful in the very truest sense, by upholding the oldest mandate in the (good) book: to keep and steward that which God has created and entrusted to us. It is an eternal mandate, one that transcends time and geography, to fall upon our shoulders as one church of many, with a message and a ministry to offer to the world.
It is time for us to support that message and that ministry—not for ourselves, but for the church of future days, and future people, who will come to know God as we have, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Savior.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
October 11, 2020