You’ve heard of the 4-G network. Did you know that 80 percent of the U.S. population is now connected by cell phones. And there is a race among providers to offer their customers not just 3-G but 4-G coverage with faster download and upload service. Did you know that this is available in this area, in fact it is free of charge to every member of Immanuel—right now, today?! You already have access to God’s 4-G network. The 4 Gs stand for God, Grace, Gratitude, and Generosity.
Today’s gospel seems to indicate that prayer is the key to tapping into this network of God’s grace. And your stewardship theme this year is “To pray, to serve, to give.” These are all spiritual disciplines, and all are motivated by God’s gracious action to us in Jesus Christ. We pray, we serve, we give in response to what God has first done for us.
I had a seminary professor that suggested that the prayer of gratitude is the window that opens heaven’s blessings. Let me repeat that. The prayer of gratitude is the window that opens heaven’s blessings. That is because as we cultivate a spirit of gratitude in our hearts, we are open to recognizing and receiving God’s gifts in our lives—as well as a willingness to use them in service to others.
A lesson from Luke 21:1-4
This gospel story is a familiar one. Jesus observes a rich man and a widow in the temple bringing their offering for the Lord. While the rich man puts in a fair amount, it represents only a very small percentage of what he is worth. Whereas the widow gives only a few pennies that turn out to be all that she has in the world. Jesus asks which one has been the most generous, and the crowd responds—the one who sacrificed the most. They get it, if only for the moment.
I recall a widow in one of my congregations who was on a fixed income. She lived very simply and told me one time that she had promised the Lord to give at least 25 percent of her modest income to the church.
With great joy, she announced that she had not only kept her promise but often was able to do more because God had been so good to her; and I knew this was often at a personal sacrifice. Like the widow in Luke, she practiced great generosity and took her discipleship seriously.
The Life of a Disciple
We too are called to be generous disciples of Jesus. However, the life of discipleship may not be for everyone, because being a disciple involves commitment. It’s not about seeing what options you have, what the alternatives are, but it is devoting your whole life and service to Christ and to one another. That’s true whether you are a husband or wife, a father or mother, a son or daughter, whether you’re a man or woman, neighbor or friend, employer or employee, or whatever.
When a person becomes a U.S. citizen, he/she must renounce all allegiance to the country of their birth and pledge 100 percent commitment to the United States. Only then will the U.S. government grant them citizenship. That’s also the way it is with Jesus Christ. When we became a follower of Christ Jesus, we or our parents renounced Satan totally and completely. One can’t divide their loyalties, splitting half the time with Satan and half the time with Christ Jesus. Or being a Christian on Sundays and doing what we ever we want the rest of the week. When we were baptized or affirmed our baptism in confirmation, we made the commitment to follow Jesus all the way. Following Jesus is not some half-hearted effort. It takes courage, it takes commitment, and it takes determination.
Our Lord does not force us to follow him. He does not stand over us with a club saying, “You must do this and you have to do that or else.” By his grace, by his undeserved love and mercy and his care for us, he simply invites us to follow him. He said whoever wanted to follow him must deny self, take up their cross and follow him. So to follow Jesus means that we may have to deny ourselves and we’re not sure that we want to do that. We would much rather focus on ourselves, on our own issues, our own problems, our own challenges, rather than on the call of Jesus. The self wants the things that the self is interested in—what I can get out of it and what’s good for me. The self doesn’t want to put self aside in favor of God and a relationship with him. To deny the self is more than just giving up our favorite food or entertainment. It’s more than just someone on weight-watchers giving up the gravy and the mashed potatoes or the chocolate ice cream. It’s giving ourselves fully to Jesus Christ in willing obedience to follow his call of discipleship.
God’s Act of Generosity
Those of us who’ve had a loving parent, know a little bit about self-denial, and, if we’ve been a parent, we also know something of self-denial. In a book called The Turning Point, the author talks about a young man who is beginning his senior year in college during the years of the Great Depression. His family did not have the money to afford to send him to college, even though it only cost $20 including the books. The father didn’t have the $20. Yet he said, “Son, don’t worry. We’ll find the money. The next morning, they went to the bank and met with the banker. The banker looked over the loan papers, and said, “I’m sorry; I can’t give you the loan. I wish I could.” It seemed there was no way that Glen would ever be able to go to college to finish his last year.
It was the day before school was to start. A big truck backed up to the house. There was one thing that the mother loved more than anything else, next to Jesus and next to her family, and that was her piano. She loved to play thepiano. She enjoyed the music that came from the piano. It gave her great pleasure and great joy.
Well, the men rolled and they pushed the piano across some boards and onto the truck. Then the driver took some money out of his pocket and he gave some bills to the mother – a $20, a $10 and a $5. The driver got into the truck, and they drove away with the mother’s prize possession, the piano, in the back of the truck. Later the father said to the son, “You can go back to college tomorrow. Your mother sold the piano.” Then he gave him the money. That’s exactly what God is like.
You see, God is the One who took the thing that he loved the most, his Son, and gave him up for you and for me. He did so at the hands of sinners. He was disgraced and rejected, denied and killed, and then passed on the treasure to us – forgiveness, peace, joy, graciousness, grace, kindness, mercy, and hope. Then God said, “From now on you have my grace, and can experience joy, purpose, and meaning in life.”
When Jesus calls us to be a disciple, he’s not asking for anything more than what he has already given himself. And as disciples, there may be times when we have to sacrifice for the sake of Jesus and the gospel.
For Jesus, going to the cross was total commitment. He knew that he must die. It was absolutely necessary. It meant everything to him. It was his mission in life. He did it in order to pay for the sins of the world, yours and mine, and for our eternal life.
Responding to God’s grace
We are called to respond to God’s grace, with lives of generosity and loving service. Martin Luther once said: “We are not saved by good works, but we are saved in order to do good works.” He meant that our lives should reflect grace in our love for God and our neighbor. We should be as generous as God has been generous toward us in Christ.
I was in Africa this past summer and witnessed grace and generosity like never before. We spent three weeks in Tanzania exploring the work of the Lutheran church there—the building of schools, hospitals, churches. The Christian faith is exploding there and the congregations we worshipped in were full to overflowing. Why? Because people there take discipleship seriously. They are willing to sacrifice for the faith. One congregation held at least two processional offerings on a given Sunday.
Then we gathered in the yard outside the church after services for a live auction. Those who had little money to give brought produce and chickens to auction off in order to help the church carry out its mission in the community. These Lutheran disciples also practiced radical hospitality. We met in many homes, all of them very modest by our standards. Many with no electricity or running water. Yet they graciously welcomed us and fed us and gave us gifts. Like the widow, they gave away what little they had to serve God and others.
We are called to be a community of grace, to be gracious and generous in our words and actions toward others, to be loving and welcoming of all people. We rejoice that Immanuel is such a community of grace. Jesus calls us to a life of commitment—of living as generous disciples. He enables us to do that by his Word and by sacrament. He empowers us to live our lives for him – to become better disciples – to become more Christ-like along the way. Every Sunday we get a new start through Christ’s body and blood at the table of grace. We start again as disciples with wholeness and new life. He assures us that all our sin is forgiven and forgotten, so that we can start all over with a clean slate. He gives us the strength to overcome all things, and, through his power we can daily live out our baptism as grace-filled disciples of Jesus.
Giving to God is not meant to be a burden but a joy. Mark Allen Powell is a Bible scholar and Lutheran theologian who has written a best selling book Giving to God: The Bible’s Good News About Living a Generous Life. He talks about giving as the act of living out our baptismal life as Christians. Living by our faith.
Being a good steward means belonging to God. It means allowing God to rule our lives, putting God in charge of everything, including our time and our money. The Bible teaches that generosity is a fruit of the Spirit at work in our lives. It comes from an attitude of gratitude. Our giving is always meant to be in response to what God has already done for us in Jesus Christ. Giving then becomes not something we have to do but something we want to do.
Powell offers three principles of stewardship. First, he says, faithful stewardship involves giving to God as an act of worship. We give out of glad and generous hearts as an expression of love and devotion to a God who is so good to us. Second, faithful stewardship involves giving to God as an expression of our faith. When we give generously and without compulsion, we confess that all we are and everything we have belongs to God and we put this faith into action when we offer ourselves and our possessions to God to be used as God sees fit. Finally, faithful stewardship involves giving to God as a discipline for spiritual growth. Whenever we practice a degree of self-denial, we are stretching our faith muscles, in recognition of the Biblical truth that “where our treasure is, there will our hearts be also.”
What is it that will connect us to God’s 4-G Network? It is God’s grace and in turn our prayerful and generous response. We have only one life to give and a life of generous discipleship is the path we are called to follow. In so doing we experience the abundant life Jesus offers us.
A missionary was pleased when a native boy arrived at the village church with a fish in handful. The boy told the pastor that he was bringing to God his tithe or 10%. When the missionary asked where the other nine fish were, the boy smiled and replied: “I’m just now going back to the river to catch them.” May we too know such joy in giving. Amen
