When you
harvest your land’s produce, you must not harvest all the way to the edge of
your field; and don’t gather up every remaining bit of your harvest. 10 Also do not pick your
vineyard clean or gather up all the grapes that have fallen there. Leave these
items for the poor and the immigrant; I am the Lord your God.
42 The believers
devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared
meals, and to their prayers. 43 A sense of awe came over
everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. 44 All
the believers were united and shared everything. 45 They
would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to
everyone who needed them. 46 Every day, they met together
in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and
simplicity. 47 They praised God and demonstrated God’s
goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were
being saved.
If you’re just joining us today, we are in the middle
of a sermon series on “Faith that’s Bigger than a Bumper Sticker.” We are looking at so-called “Christian”
platitudes, axioms, and clichés that can easily fit on a bumper sticker or in a
greeting card – easy to memorize and most of us have heard these phrases bandied
about our entire lives. Some may even
believe that they are from the Bible or perhaps even the words of Jesus,
himself.
And yet, not only are
these phrases nowhere to be found in Scripture, but much of bumper sticker
theology represents only half-truths about God at best, and at worst, many of
these phrases even do more harm in God’s name than they do good.
My goal in this series is
for you to have a faith and a theology that is rooted in Scripture and the
living core of the Christian tradition, not one inspired by a bumper sticker. We’ve already challenged the idea that God
won’t give you more than you can handle.
We’ve already peeled away the idea that wealth and possessions are a
sign of God’s blessing. Today we’ll shed
the notion that God helps those who help themselves. May we pray.
We human beings can be a
very self-centered bunch, can’t we?
That’s a value we don’t have to learn or be taught – it comes naturally
to us. Just watch a couple of
two-year-olds playing in a room full of toys.
The second one child reaches for a specific toy, 9 times out of 10, the
other child will go into a screaming fit
because now, all of a sudden, they
want to play with it. They’ve never
showed any interest in it before, but now that someone else has it, well, now that’s
a problem.
Adults do it, too. In fact, the most childish behavior I have
ever witnessed wasn’t by children, but adults.
How many times has someone died, and the body is still warm and the
family are arguing with each other about who’s going to get what – and no one
stops to say, “Hey, is any of this fighting actually worth it?”
Think of the Cinderella story, where she has made her
dress for the ball out of the discarded scraps that were no longer wanted by
her step-sisters, but as soon as they see her wearing them, they are thrown
into a fit of rage and literally
shred her dress to pieces. Why would we
rather see something of ours go into the trash when we’re done with it instead
of being used by another human being?
It all stems from one word
– “mine.” That one word, “mine,” is
quite possibly the most damaging and
destructive concept in human history.
Think about it. Wars have been
fought over this word. Blood spilt. Families destroyed. Communities fractured. Churches split. Everyone wants as much as possible to be
“mine.”
Enter the phrase, “God
helps those who help themselves.” That’s
just a socially-acceptable way of saying, “I don’t want to give you what is
mine.” I don’t want to share, I don’t want
to give, I don’t want you to have what I have, Even though I have plenty and
then some, I don’t want to have just a little bit less so that you can have
just enough.
“God helps those who help themselves” is just
a pious way of saying “I do what I want, and I don’t really care what happens
to you because I don’t care about you.”
I’d rather people leave God out of it altogether, and just call it what
it is – selfish, callous, and cruel.
Like so
many of the phrases of bumper sticker theology, we see how this phrase does
more harm in God’s name than good.
God’s idea is different
than helping those who help themselves.
God wants us to help each other. In
the text we read from Leviticus, we hear God’s
instruction to the owners of farms and vineyards about how they should
harvest. Don’t harvest the whole field,
but leave some at the edges. Leave some
grapes on the vine, don’t gather up what falls on the ground. Leave it!
The landowners of the day
would have been among the wealthy members of society. These instructions for leaving some of the
harvest behind is a way of caring for the poor – those without land, those
without work, those who have no harvest to sell. God is saying, “Leave some behind. You already have more than enough to turn a
good profit. Rather than adding to your
wealth, leave it for those who are barely scraping by.”
You can anticipate the
protest from the landowner: “The poor haven’t earned it. They haven’t worked for it. They haven’t planted and harvested, they are
taking money out of my pocket! If they
want help, they should help themselves!”
Yet God’s directive
stands. “For the wealthy, a few more
bucks in your already well-padded pocket is the difference between food and no
food in the already empty stomachs of the poor, so leave it. Ultimately, it means far more to them than it
does to you.”
God’s idea is not that God
helps those who help themselves. It’s
that we help each other, particularly those who can’t help themselves.
That’s one reason we have
the Church. The Church is not a
collection of individuals, but the unified body of Christ. We are first and foremost the living,
breathing, body of Christ – knit together in God’s grace as we grow in God’s
love. We start with the body, and then
look at how the parts work together to support and share with each other for
the good of the whole.
Bodies are fascinating
things – they have the ability to heal themselves. Say you have an infection somewhere in your
body – the entire body responds to fight it.
What if one or more parts of the body said, “I don’t want to help. I don’t want to share. There’s an infection in the leg? That’s the leg’s problem. I’m not sharing any of my white cells with
that leg. The leg needs to pull itself
up by its own bootstraps. God helps the
leg that helps itself.”
Ultimately, who does that
hurt? Everybody. Thankfully, the whole body gets in on
it. Your temperature will rise, your
whole body ramps up white cell production and sends it to the infection site,
and you get tired – your body forces you to rest, because your body is putting
all of its energy into fighting the infection, and doesn’t want you wasting
energy by moving around or going to work or whatever. The whole body responds.
The same is true for the
body of Christ, the Church. When there
is a need somewhere else in the body, we respond. We make food, we make visits and phone calls,
we provide a ride, we paint a house, whatever.
What affects one of us affects all of us.
In the Church, our motto
is never “Every man for himself” or
any other version of “God helps those who help themselves.” It is no coincidence that we follow a crucified Christ – the one we worship
and follow didn’t simply look out for his own interests and leave the rest of
us to fend for ourselves. No. Jesus is the penultimate expression of God’s
infinite love and grace – a life lived not for himself but for others, and Jesus
says, “Go, and do likewise.”
For me, the remarkable
thing is not that Jesus taught us to give of ourselves as he gave for us, but
that some have actually done it! When the people of a church each lay aside
their collective individualism and put their energy into loving God and loving
their neighbors ahead of each person’s individual desires or opinions, well,
the result is something like what is described in what we read from the 2nd
chapter of Acts:
42 The believers devoted themselves to the
apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their
prayers. 43 A sense of awe came over everyone. God
performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. 44 All
the believers were united and shared everything. 45 They
would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to
everyone who needed them. 46 Every day, they met together
in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and
simplicity. 47 They praised God and demonstrated God’s
goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were
being saved.
This passage describes Christian
community at its best – a picture of what the Church can, and should, be! When a church wholeheartedly dedicates itself
to loving God and our neighbor, we find a sense of purpose and unity that
simply outshines individual opinions, agendas, and desires. We find ourselves of one heart and mind, that
resources are freely and generously shared, and those who give them are glad to
do so.
That sharing is rooted in
our understanding of God’s grace is that is freely, abundantly,
indiscriminately lavished upon all
people. We call this prevenient grace – from the Latin,
meaning “to go before.” God’s grace goes
before everyone – before we have done a thing to help ourselves, God has
already done more for us than we will ever know, and church becomes a place of
glad celebration of all God’s gifts for all God’s people. Wouldn’t you rather be part of a church like
that than one in which people are stingy and ungenerous and hold back from God
and one another? I know I would, and God
would rather be there, too.
Communities of faith that
are generous and grace-filled, and joyful – the Scriptures say those are the
ones God grows. Adds to their
number. Gives them more people to share
God’s love with. People are
naturally-drawn to the places where that is happening, because something about
that resonates with people, and they’re able to say, “Yes, this feels
right. This is what it’s about. I want to be part of something like this” –
something that’s bigger than ourselves and connects us with God and God’s people
in a way we simply can’t do on our own.
I think about that at tax season. Tax season, of all places! I don’t necessarily enjoy the paperwork of
tax season, but what Ashley and I both enjoy is being able to look back and
realize that everything we gave away, we didn’t miss. We don’t have vineyards or farmland, but it’s
one way for us to leave something at the edges, so to speak. And what we gave, we didn’t miss.
I know a man who has spent
his entire adult life trying to get rich.
He’s always got an angle, always investing in the newest thing, always
scrapping to make a buck. He’s in his
60s now, had some success in some of his ventures, but he’s still a tightwad,
and is more miserable than ever. He’s
60-something, and all he has to show for his life’s work, is more misery than
he’s ever had before.
The description of the
Church in Acts says that they all
had glad and generous hearts. Take note
of the correlation, here! Gladness and
generosity go hand-in-hand. Giving makes
us happy.
God helps those who help
themselves? Sure, but that’s not the
whole story, because God helps everybody.
God also helps those who don’t, or can’t help themselves. God helps the helpers and the helpless. God helps those who don’t even want help. God helps those who don’t believe in God,
don’t know God, and have done nothing to earn anything from God. God’s gifts to us are always greater than our
response back to God, and yet God keeps helping us, anyway. There’s nothing we can do to make ourselves
deserving of God’s goodness in our lives.
Thank God, that when it
came to sharing God’s goodness and grace in our lives, God didn’t just cross
his arms and say, “Mine.” God didn’t
say, “I’m gonna hold onto this grace for myself, thank you very much,” but
shares it freely with us.
In the life of faith,
sharing what we have needs to become as second nature as our instinct to grasp
and scream, “Mine!” That one doesn’t
come naturally; it’s something we need to learn. There are some things it will take a lifetime
and maybe then some for us to learn, and sharing is one of them. Don’t miss your opportunities to practice.
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