FIGURING THE COST — DON’T CLOSE OUT THE SPIRIT!

(Preached on Sunday, May 30, 2004)

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost to see whether he has enough to complete it?                   -Luke 14:28

 

Jesus is a fanatic.  Jesus was clearly a fanatic for God and God’s way of doing things — which is loving others. 

The great passion of Jesus was God: God’s purposes, God’s truth, God’s compassion, God’s love.

So, when Jesus says: “If you are going to follow me” he is saying: “If you are going to share my passion for God...my enthusiasm...my task....my reason for living....the true love of my life.”

To put God first means not only putting God before loved ones but also putting God before your own life.

In the eyes of the world, that is fanatical.

 

So, when Jesus uses that strong word, “hate”, he is using hyperbole, extreme exaggeration, to make a point.

When Jesus says his followers must be prepared to “hate” loved ones and “hate” our own lives, he is trying to convey the utter primacy of God.  He is not a half-bored philosopher reading a carefully prepared paper to students. 

Jesus is a passionate person caught up in a vision of God’s new world, yet already aware that it will cost him loved ones, friends and life itself.

 

Remembering the outcome of Jesus’ life helps put this in perspective.

Jesus’ life was totally devoted to living God’s way of life: showing love compassion, care and concern for everyone.

A way that said nothing was more important in life than loving God and the way we love God is to love everyone.

For Jesus, that is who God is: the Creator of all Life that loves everything and everyone created.

All other loves are less than that. 

Anything else that commands our ultimate loyalty will lead us to love less than that.

Family, nation, school, the corporation, church: all these are lesser loves that call for our total focus to the exclusion of others.

But God, takes our love and directs it outward, to include everyone and everything — including family, nation, school, the corporation, the church, but also, the poor, the criminal, the terrorist, the homeless, the jobless, the lazy, the ill, the oppressed, the disenfanchised.

God’s love is an ever expanding, all-embracing reality.

That is what Jesus is fanatical about and what Jesus invites us to become fanatical about, too.

 

This is not easy to do.

Jesus acknowledges this, in fact, he is trying to make sure we understand how difficult it is to embrace God and life in this way.

He shares two little examples that we all understand.

When we set out to build something, we sit down and figure the cost and make sure we can pay it. 

When a nation goes to war, it first plans and strategizes whether it has the resources to win. 

So Jesus says, if you want to embrace his way of life, his passion for the things of God — if you think Jesus has the key to abundant life, then first figure the cost.  It means renouncing all our possessions.

It means recognizing to whom we truly belong — God.

 

Jesus begins this teaching with hyperbole and he concludes it with hyperbole.  He does not really want his followers to become destitute and poverty-stricken citizens.  But he is trying to make a point of how difficult is this choice of embracing God and God’s ways.

 

We are good at playing games.  We know that God is to be the center of our lives, the end for which we live.

We know money is to be only a means by which we serve God.

We know how to say the right words, while living the wrong lifestyle.

We say that we are accumulating wealth so that we can better serve God and give more to charitable work. 

(But don’t bring up the fact that we only give, on average, two percent to charity.)

We tell ourselves that we accumulate wealth so that we can (someday) do charitable things. 

Discipleship is hypothetical.

We do this as churches, as well.

“We are putting money into the church building and the church staff so that our expected growth in wealth can produce mission.  Of course this year we have to cut mission because the utility bills and personnel budget are so high.”

“It is our intention to feed the hungry.  That is why we are having this capital campaign; so that, when we have spent on ourselves, we will be stronger.  Then we can do something for those less fortunate.”

Never mind that those who are weakest and have the least give the highest percentage of what they have.

We play religious-sounding word games to draw attention away from a greedy present lifestyle and the revelation that we have confused means and ends. 

With high-sounding statements, we have actually placed ourselves, or our church, above God in receiving our loyalty.

 

John T. Galloway, Jr., a Presbyterian pastor in Pennsylvania, tells the story of a church he served in Pittsburgh a few years ago as it faced its annual moment of decision, with the stakes very high.

Every year like clockwork their finance committee faced a gap between what funds church organizations said they needed for their programs and what funds the saints actually pledged during the Stewardship Campaign.

Every year they gathered the committee heads on a Saturday morning for a bloodletting to pare the budget down to balance.  Every year they curtailed their dreams, put off programs and squeezed mission.

And every year they balanced the budget.  It was their annual ritual.

 

This particular year, however, they still faced a $125,000 gap after even the most brutal of Saturday morning massacres.

To put the numbers in perspective, closing their gap would require an additional 15 percent increase over an already substantially increased pledge total, something the finance folks deemed impossible.

It was decision time, the obvious decision being to cut mission by $125,000. 

After all that’s what was usually done.

 

The discussion of the next finance committee meeting was one of the most improbable and productive that pastor had ever witnessed.

The committee realized its own bondage to fiscal prudence.  They realized that a balanced budget had become the great end of the church.

Faith, trust, vision, mission were not the end, but merely means at best.

Committee members realized further that in practice once they adopted the final budget, flexibility ended.

God’s work was frozen for 12 months.

They realized further that they were on the verge of becoming a church that took no vision seriously because vision was annually dismissed so that the lord of the ledger could be served.

 

That night they decided to change the church. 

They declared budgets are to articulate what God is calling us to become over the next year; they are not to lock us into last month’s spiritual state.

They sought a budget that would be a means to the greater of God’s ongoing work in their midst. 

At the end of the evening the finance committee voted unanimously that mission was not to be cut.

A budget with a $125,000 deficit was approved.

The outrage from the congregation was deafening.

But when an additional unpledged $70,000 came in within a month, hysteria subsided, and they finished the year with a $45,000 surplus.

 

What they experienced was Pentecost. 

What they experienced was the power of God’s Spirit at work in their lives and the church.

That is why, when figuring the cost of embracing God’s way of living, we must not count out the Spirit of God.

For the Holy Spirit is a mind-blowing, heart-warming, life-changing power that can invade the body, inflate the mind, swell the soul, lift the Spirit and make us more than we ever imagined.

It is God’s Spirit that renews the whole face of the earth.

It is God’s Spirit that changes chaos into creation, the Red Sea into a highway for freedom, takes a young woman’s “yes” and begins a revolution of love. 

It is God’s Spirit that breaks barriers, forms communities, reconciles opposites, establishes unity, cures diseases, breaks addictions, renews cities, reconciles races, establishes hope, blesses people and calls the church into being.

It is because of the Spirit of God that the world is lifted up.  Because of the Spirit of God, all things are possible to those who have figured the cost and have willingly embraced God’s vision of love for the world.

 

When a church refuses to let budgeting matters be the end for which it lives, and when money becomes merely a means to serving the living God, amazing things do happen.

I confess to you that I have not allowed that to happen for us.

My entire career I have led church leaders to strive to balance budgets, primarily out of my need for approval and affirmation from you.

But my calling to ministry is not about trying to make people happy, or even about having a thriving congregation that never has money troubles.

This calling is about serving God and the good news that God loves the world and wants justice and mercy and abundance for all people.  So, I promise you that this year I will offer you different leadership.