October 16, 2011
Money & Stuff Part 1, The Ace in the Hole - 1 Kings 3:1-9
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadIt’s a beautiful fall day. We’ve had some rain this week, but the sun is shining brightly now. The leaves are starting to change. College football is in full swing, the world series is shaping up, the chase for the cup ran at Lowes Motor Speedway last night, and the Panthers are finally, finally showing some semblance of hope this year. I love the fall. I absolutely adore the fall. It is by far my favorite time of year. So why can’t we talk about money some other time? Why is it that every year about this time, the Church talks about money? Why do we have to ruin an otherwise perfectly good season? The easy answer to that question is because we’re preparing our budget for next year and we need to build our income for it, and now just happens to be a few months before the new year. I always told myself that when I became a pastor, I would find a better way to talk about money than the annual fall stewardship drive. But here I am, having been a solo pastor for four years, talking about money now. I, too, have reserved money talk only for now. I’ve preached forty eight sermons from this pulpit since our last stewardship campaign, and I may have mentioned money only in passing five times.
Why does money make us so uneasy in Church? Why is it that when we turn on the TV to some televangelist and hear him talk about money (does he ever talk about anything else?) that we get sick to our stomachs? Why is it that we give our credit card information to complete strangers over the internet and phone, we let almost anybody check our credit for almost anything, and yet we often view money as out of bounds for Church? It’s always been an ongoing joke that one day the Church is going to ask you for your bank statement. Well, what if we did? Everybody else does, and you don’t have a problem telling them. Why is that I as a pastor am afraid of, and that all of us cringe when we hear anything about, money in Church?
King Solomon was the wisest man in the world. There is a great deal to like about King Solomon. The thing that I like most about Solomon is this prayer that he prayed in 1 Kings 3. God appeared to him in a dream and told him that he would give him anything he wanted. “I’m only a little child,” he tells God. “I don’t even know how to go out or come in… So give your servant,” he pleads, “an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil.” That’s what he asked for. How can you not like that? How many of us wish our own leaders would humble themselves so much as to pray that prayer? I firmly believe that Solomon meant every word of that prayer. God at least thought so because it pleased God that of all things he could ask for, he asked for that.
And yet, even before then, Solomon had a problem. Solomon’s main problem has always been perceived to be sex. Seven hundred princesses and three hundred concubines is, after all, a little obsessive. Almost all of those women were foreign women, tied to foreign power. Even in this passage, the first thing we read about Solomon is that he made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh. All of those alliances were tied to something else. It wasn’t just sex that messed Solomon up. More than anything it was money. All of those wives represented somebody else’s money. Right after the marriage alliance, we hear that Solomon built his own temple before he built God’s Temple. That tells you something.
You want to know what I think Solomon’s real problem was? I think he wanted to hedge his bets. I think he wanted to make sure that if this little thing with God didn’t work out, then he had an ace in the hole. What if that dream that Solomon had that night when God appeared to him, what if it was because he actually might have had, I don’t know, a few too many glasses of wine? What if the faith that he had learned through his father was not what it was cracked up to be? Solomon had a lot to lose, and, if he dealt his whole hand on this God thing, and the God thing turned out to be a bad move, then Solomon could lose everything. So Solomon had to hedge his bets. Even if the God thing didn’t work out too well, he still had this girl from Egypt betrothed to him, along with Pharaoh’s money, along with every other concubine he had.
I think that Solomon is a lot like us. In our good moments, we know full well that there is a God and we are not him. And we know that if there is any hope for us in the world, it’s that God shows us some mercy, that God gives us an understanding mind. Goodness knows that if the world ever needed some understanding minds, right about now would be the perfect time. I am, for example, a father, and being a father is not easy, and an understanding mind would come in really handy. Knowing that my children’s future rests in the hands of a good and sovereign God is good to hear, because I am afraid for them if it’s all about me. So like Solomon, we pray very noble prayers from time to time and we are very sincere about those prayers.
But this is where I think we get uncomfortable talking about money. In the back of all of our minds, we wonder if it’s all true. We believe it, but we doubt it from time to time. And we all, in the back of our minds, want a little something stashed away in the event that we may be wrong about God. We want a little ace in the hole just in case we’re all we’ve got. And so we go to work, and we work hard, and we build bank accounts, and we build names for ourselves, and then retirements, and houses, and equity, and liquidity, and goodness knows what else. It’s not that any of that is wrong in and of itself, but somehow we hedge more of our bets on those than we do on God. And the next thing we know, those things become our god. And the next thing you know, our ace in the hole has turned into a pit. It gets sort of turned into our own hell. That’s what happened to Solomon eventually.
I think that’s what Adam and Eve did when they ate that apple. The snake just introduced the possibility that maybe, just maybe God was holding something back, that he was pulling a fast one, that he wasn’t all that he was cracked up to be. If they ate the apple, then they’d hedge their bets so to speak. We do the same thing with money, and we know it. So we don’t like to talk about it, and so we don’t. If this country has learned anything in the last three years, it is that money became our god, and we lived within its kingdom, and have now descended into its hell.
Two of Central’s finest saints are dying. JZ Benton and Jimmy Price are very quickly coming to the end of their lives. They both have been members here for many, many years. In fact, I think Jimmy Price was the first person to become a member in this Sanctuary, when it was built around 1940. Both JZ and Jimmy, and their wives, Dot and Wilma have quietly served God in this Church for decades. One of the most meaningful and even beautiful parts of my job is ministering to people and their families while they are dying. That’s when the ace in the whole really gets evident. Death is one place that money just won’t help you much. If money has been your ace in the hole, then it gets really useless when you die. Nobody cares how much money you have then, and if they do, then it doesn’t matter, and death really doesn’t care. And yet it’s such a beautiful thing to see a peace that really does pass understanding when good Christian people die. They have an ace in the hole that really matters.
It’s not that you have an ace in the hole that’s the problem. Everybody does. You’ve got to have an ace in the hole, George Straight says. It’s who that ace in the hole is that matters. I think for so many of us, it has become money. Therefore, money has become very dangerous. Therefore, we’ve got to talk about it, and think about it, and figure out where it fits in the grand scheme of things. Because really, when the dust settles, God has us, all of us. But we’ve got to be careful about how we’re hedging our bets. If we’re doing it with money, then before we know it, it might have us, too.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
