Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was
Luke 12:13-21:
A
clergy friend of mine told me about a member of his church who was very
wealthy, or at least everyone thought he was very wealthy. That was the rumor,
although no one was really sure if it was true, and there was much speculation
as to his true worth. Well, one day he died, and as the ladies of the church
were gathering to prepare a reception at his funeral, one of them said, sort of
casually, “I wonder how much he left behind.” There was sort of an awkward
pause, and then one of the other women responded, “all of it. He left all of it
behind.” Although you don’t see it much anymore, there was a time, and many of
you remember it, when you were prone to see the bumper sticker that said, “He
who dies with the most toys wins.” What they won was never really clear, and I
think part of the reason you don’t see that anymore is because people came to
realize that you didn’t really win anything, because, in fact, you did leave it
all behind. That you can’t take it with you, and so while it might help here in
this life, and we might argue about the true merits of that, it doesn’t matter
in the next life. And so perhaps the other bumper sticker that says, “we are spending
our children’s inheritance” might be a better way to think about it, and yet we
are also called to be good stewards of the resources with which we have been
entrusted, and what we hear in Proverbs is that the good leave an inheritance
for their children’s children. But simultaneously, Jesus tells us not to save
earthly treasurers were moth and rust can eat them, and don’t worry about
tomorrow, so which are we to do?
With
those questions in mind, we continue in our series on the money rules of John Wesley,
which are to earn all you can, which we covered last week, to give all you can,
which we will cover next week, and today we discuss his rule to save all you
can. As I’ve been saying for the past few weeks, when the Methodist movement
began, John Wesley laid down some rules, three of them, that people had to
agree to abide by if they were going to become a Methodist. They were to first
do no harm, second was to do good and the third was to attend upon all the
ordinances of God, which Bishop Job changed to stay in love with God. Among the
things that it meant to do no harm, which was not just to others, but also to
yourself, was not to buy spiritous liquors, love that phrasing, or to drink
them, which sort of closes the loophole of someone else buying it for you. Not
buying things on interest, that is not buying anything you can’t afford to pay
cash for, and not wearing gold or expensive clothing. What Wesley, and those in
the church found, was that when people started doing these things, especially
not wasting money on alcohol, which is still an enormous amount of money, that
people then had more disposable income which could then be used for other
things, like education, which then allowed people to get better jobs, which
paid better, and thus more income, and so that was the reason why Wesley then established
his rules
