One of the great joys I have in ministry these days is spending time with young people who are either exploring ministry as a vocation or pursuing training for pastoral leadership. I served as a faculty mentor last week in Atlanta for about 15 young people that have completed their first year of seminary. The conference brought together 130 young people that ranged from juniors in college to second-year seminarians of all denominations, and its intent was to nurture and support some of the brightest and most promising leaders of tomorrow’s church. I loved their surging enthusiasm, but I was conscious of a seeping cynicism that I pray does not take root in them. As they look at the church, they are concerned that many pastors and church people are in collusion to keep quiet about some of the key moral issues of the day, because they all know that something insidious is always at stake. Anyone? Let me spell it out for you: M-O-N-E-Y.

If a pastor preaches on money — or on greed or welfare or taxes or the right to spend the way you choose, or even if the sermon sounds too liberal or conservative — then he or she has left the spiritual behind for the material and gone to meddling.  Pastors know they need the people to be happy in order to keep the offerings coming in, so they tend not to talk about those things. A recent survey of church people in America reports that only 40 percent claim to have heard a sermon on stewardship in the past year. What’s worse, 68 percent claim that money is one thing; morals and values are completely separate. And yet these same people agree that being greedy is a sin against God, and that our society is much too materialistic. The study concluded that the average church member gives 2.5 percent of income to the church, and that figure hasn’t changed for decades. Go figure.  [Robert Wuthnow, “The Future of Mainline Protestantism,” in The Drew Connection (Winter 1994): 9, citied in Pulpit Resource 31.2 (April-June 2003): 60.]

Well, the early church preachers did not shy away from the subject any more than Jesus did. In fact, the Apostle Paul launched into his appeal to the church at Corinth by challenging the church to be as good in this matter as every other. Just as you excel in everything — in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and our love for — so excel in this matter of giving, too. He might have been preaching to us here at Wilshire. This is a marvelous church, and if I weren’t the pastor, I would wish I were. You do excel in everything. Faith? It’s evident everywhere here. Speech? Many of you could preach a pretty fair sermon yourselves. Knowledge? You’d all make high marks in Bible trivia.  Eagerness? You want to do the right thing and don’t make excuses for sloppy efforts when it comes to teaching a class, caring for little ones, singing an anthem, or seeing to it that the floors are spit-shined and the grass is green and mowed. And finally, you love one another and you love God.  But Paul thinks that while you get points for all that, there’s another test you have to pass.

Paul has the gall to do what we hate: he compares the giving of the Corinthians to the giving of others.  He pits their generosity against each other. Imagine me doing that? He brags on the Macedonian church for the way they gave sacrificially out of their poverty for the famine relief effort in Jerusalem. They didn’t have the means to give much in total talents — that’s talents as in money, don’t you know?!, but they gave beyond their means out of love.

And here’s the other thing we know statistically: the poorer you are, the higher percentage of your means you give; the wealthier you get the lower your percentage giving. People complain about a progressive tax system — the more you make, the higher your percentage tax rate, but we have a regressive tithe system in the church — the less you make, the higher percentage you give! Shouldn’t someone be complaining about the injustice of that?

But the supreme example of giving is Jesus himself, Paul says. He was rich, and he became poor in order that we might become rich. Paul sees a material application in the spiritual example of Jesus, and he doesn’t back away from it. If we paid attention to the giving of people with less than we, it ought to make us want to raise our test score to please God instead of holding down the curve. But usually we compare ourselves to people who have more than we, so that we can feel better about our wealth. This makes us think we are not as responsible as they, because they can do more (even if they don’t). So because we think we have less, we succeed in keeping our stuff and thereby fail the giving test. Paul trumps the whole system of comparison, though, when he plays the Jesus card. When we compare ourselves to Jesus, we lose every time.

For years now there has been a debate about how to fix Social Security.  There is simply not enough money in the system to pay the full benefits of 75 million baby boomers who are living longer than their parents. So a means test has been proposed that will limit the benefits of those who don’t need the retirement income as much as others. The goal is to get a fair balance, to see that everyone has enough rather than too much or too little. No matter the noble aim, all government action is compulsory, though, while Paul is teaching that the voluntary church must make this the foundation of its economic life. We should want this fair balance because we all belong to Christ equally and to one another.

Some of this is happening in our church already. Any time someone is unemployed, people rally around that person. Some give money to the benevolence fund so that we can help with bills in a quiet way that protects the dignity of our sisters and brothers.  We cannot do everything, but we can do some things. We network with them for jobs, we pray, and we give.  The same is true for missions work.  When we give — even through the church budget — a hunk of that goes to address needs in our community and around the world. We are not like TV ministries that ask for money for the poor and then spend it on themselves. It goes where it needs to go to do the most good. Check us out. We will never forsake our mission responsibility, even if we have to cut back on ourselves at the same time.  Some of you figure that’s why I’m preaching this today, that we must be behind in the budget and this is a pick-me-up plea. No, actually we are ahead. The lectionary suggested this text today, and it’s well for us not to wait until stewardship season to hear a sermon on giving.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 this week that a race test was permissible in the University of Michigan’s law school admissions program. In an effort to advance diversity in the student body, and thus to close the social and economic gap between whites and blacks in society, consideration can be given to admitting black students with lower achievement in other areas than whites. By a 6-3 vote, however, they also said that undergraduate admissions could not take shortcuts in affirmative action by simply assigning extra points to minorities. Other factors must be considered. The assumption underlying all of this is that some students are advantaged and others disadvantaged by historic forces that have favored whites over blacks. And while a pure merit system is the American ideal of equal opportunity, until inequities are corrected at lower levels of education, some compensation is called for.  Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said that the court hoped that this ruling would be unnecessary in 25 years as minority achievement catches up.  And African-American Justice Clarence Thomas voted against it on principle because he believes it creates excuses rather than achievement among minorities.

Well and good, but how will that happen as long as the white and black middle class keep abandoning urban schools and voting against tax changes or bond issues that would help correct the inequity? We have the means to help, but we don’t mean to help. How can that be justified by the models of Jesus and the Macedonian church? Here again is Paul’s language — it is a question of fair balance between your abundance and their need.

But there is another side to this. Paul claims that those in material need are spiritually rich and have something to offer us that we will not receive if we are not in a mutual relationship to them. The fair balance thing goes both ways. So if you want to be strong spiritually, you cannot do it without being in contact with those who may be poor in things but are rich toward God. One of the reasons we do missions work is for those we help; but another reason is for the help we get from them as we do. We serve and end up being served. We give and we receive because we are changed in the giving.

The happiest people I know in the world are generous people. Whether rich or poor, they have a sense that their lives matter to God and to others. Instead of worrying about their stuff and how to protect it from people who want to take it, they are always looking for ways to give it to people and things that make a difference. And they get joy out of seeing what it does.

I was walking on the Emory University campus in Atlanta last weekend. Everywhere I went I saw beautiful buildings with the donors’ names on them. I met teachers who occupy chairs that have been endowed in people’s names. I saw trees and gardens and footbridges dedicated to the generosity of donors. Now I don’t want our church littered with monuments to individuals, but my point is that there are no great educational or medical or benevolent institutions in this country that could survive without people of means who understand that God has given them wealth to share, not to hoard. And that includes the church.

Tony Campolo spoke at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship meeting in Charlotte on Thursday night. He teaches at Eastern University in Philadelphia. At one point he turned to the address the 200 or so in the youth choir behind him.  He said: Have you heard these words from your parents? You have to make good grades so that you can get into a good college, so that you can get a good … what?  ‘JOB,’ right? There was a day when we thought of education as a stretching of the soul for the sake of society’s well-being.  You get a good education so that you can be good. But now you get a good education so that you can get a good job, so that you can buy lots of stuff that you can nervously protect for the rest of your life. And all of this to distinguish you from the person two elbows down from you in the pew? All this to keep you from contact with other people for whom Christ has died? Does that make any sense?

We ought to be using our money to put us in closer relationship with people by our solidarity with them, not keeping us from them. But to do that we have to pass another means test: we have to pass from meaning to give to actually giving. Paul says the Corinthians have to move from what they pledged or earnestly desired to doing it. We are fond of saying, It’s the thought that counts. But you can’t count thoughts; you can only count gifts.

If you love someone and never tell her, how will she know? If you mean to live the Christian life, you need to pass the means test. Give proportionately, give generously, but most of all, do more than mean to give. Give.

If one test of your spiritual life is actual giving, how are you doing? There’s still time before the final exam.