October 24, 2010
The Beautiful Contest - 1 Timothy 6:3-21
Pastor: Luke Maybry
Download“Fight the Good Fight.” It has to be one of the most quoted lines in all of Scripture. “Fight the Good Fight.” And yet, it’s not really about a fight at all. It’s more like an athletic contest. And the “good” there could also be morally good, or noble, or even beautiful. “Contest the beautiful contest,” may be the best way to say it. I wait all year long for October because it has the best contests of any month in the whole year: Wofford/Elon, LSU/Auburn, New York Yankees/Texas Rangers, South Carolina/Kentucky (it was beautiful for me), and Clemson/well they haven’t had a beautiful contest all year.
Yet this contest that Paul talks about is different. One way to look at it would be the first ten verses of chapter 6 versus the last eleven. Paul wrote a lot of things in his letter to Timothy: about leadership in the Church, the role of men and women, slavery, and how Christians should relate to civil authority. But Paul caps his final advice to Timothy with this contest that arguably is the hardest contest that he or the early Church (or the current Church for the matter) would face. It’s a contest that’s all about the money. It’s the contest of loving money in the first ten verses, against the contentment of loving God in the last eleven verses. Even more than everything that Paul wrote to Timothy, it’s this misplaced love of money that seemed to concern him the most. “The love of money,” Paul writes, “is a root of all evil,” Paul said. That covers a lot of evil. “In their eagerness to be rich,” Paul went on to write, “some (Christians) have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. But as for you, man of God (or Luke Maybry, or Central Steele Creek) shun all this.” Fight the good fight. Contest the beautiful contest.
So that’s it: the love of God versus the love of money. I had planned on starting stewardship sermons next week, but since Paul did bring it up and all… I heard a statistic this past week at a Presbytery meeting that Presbyterians give an average of 1.8% of their income to charity, only half of which goes to Church. That’s less than 1% of an average Presbyterian’s income to Church. I heard another statistic that said if every Presbyterian was on welfare, and tithed, then the Church would have more than double its current assets. It seems as if we’re having a hard time in this contest. “I fought the law, and the law won,” says an old rock-n-roll song recorded by three different groups. Well, Presbyterians fought the love of money, and the love of money has won. It’s not just Presbyterians, either. Christians or all persuasions have fought the love of money, and throughout the entire history of Christianity, our love of money has trumped our love of God every time.
Who among us does not struggle with money, especially given how much things cost today. I read recently that even water is getting more expensive, and is projected to be a major expense. I even heard that the next global war will be fought over the dwindling resources of water. Healthcare is like another house payment. Education is through the roof. How can I send my children to Wofford, for example, which is where I went, when it’s projected to cost $80,000 per year, per child when they get there? We need lots and lots money for lots and lots of noble things. How can we possibly, as Paul tells Timothy here, just flee from it, or flee from worrying about it, or even flee from loving it? How can we not be consumed with money?
Many of you have given very generously to this Church and beyond. I appreciate that. I don’t tell you that often, but do appreciate your generousity. But even if you do give 10%, like the Church has always preached, is that really enough? Rick Warren, the mega-Church pastor in California reverse-tithes. He gives 90%. Is that enough? Even if you do generously give your money away, even if you don’t despair over affording “the good life” and the American Dream, how can you read the Bible and not walk away with the conviction that you’ve completely blown it when it comes to money? We cannot love God and money, Jesus says. Well so much for that. Where our treasure is, that’s where our hearts are, Jesus says. Do you really want to see what a person believes? Forget the creeds, or church membership. Just look at the checkbook ledger. That’s disturbing. Money is deeply personal, too. “Stay away from my money, Jesus,” I want to say. But He never does. Ever. It’s easier, Jesus says, for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into the Kingdom of heaven. Jesus says that in three of the four Gospels. What do we do with that? What do we do about the rich fool (Jesus’ words not mine) who built and built and built, and stored and stored and stored his treasures away for another day, kind of like we do? Is that not what we’re supposed to do? It’s called saving, responsibility, prudence. Yet the man died that night, and he left this world just as naked as he did when he came into it. In fact, Paul even specifically says that in this passage. How can that not disturb us? What do we do about the parable of Lazarus in Luke 16? A certain rich man ignored a certain poor man named Lazarus. That was it. That’s all Jesus tells us about them. We hear nothing about the rich man’s morals or his faith, or the poor man’s morals or faith. Jesus seems interested solely in the money. The rich man went to hell and the poor man, Lazarus, went to heaven. What do we do with that? Jesus said more about money than anything else, and it doesn’t bode well for us. We can try to comfort ourselves into thinking that this is only about the fat cats on Wall Street or something, but it’s clearly about us, all of us.
Money is one of the biggest struggles that I personally have. If there was ever time when I am most definitely one of you, if there was ever a sinner standing in the pulpit, just about now is the time. How can I not be? We are a money-obsessed culture. We define success purely in terms of money. The American Dream is necessarily a financial dream. It’s about money. We value each other and ourselves based almost solely on money. So if we don’t have it, we borrow it, lots of it. My six-month-old son, Jack, is already $30,400 in debt. His share of the national debt is $30,400. My family’s share of our national debt is over $150,000. And that doesn’t even include household and credit card debt. We are obsessed with money. If this is a contest, and Paul clearly indicates that it is, then we’re losing it.
And yet, Paul never even mentions winning the contest. Never once does Paul mention that. It’s the contest itself, Paul says, that’s beautiful. It’s almost as if Paul expects us to figure out the part about right teaching, and the role of men and women, and right leadership and everything else, but Paul fully expects us to blow this money thing. But it’s the contest itself that Paul lifts up as being good and noble and beautiful. “Fight the good fight,” or better yet, “contest this beautiful contest.” I like that.
The world is one big slice of pie, and we’ve got to get our slice. (This is macro-economics according to Luke Maybry, but it’s true). If we don’t get our slice, then we’ll starve one day, and our children will never be educated, and they won’t have any teeth either because we won’t be able to afford dental care. And we won’t have a retirement. If we don’t get our slice of pie, we will die. It used to be back in the stone ages that some wooly mammoth would eat us for lunch or something. Now it’s just that we won’t get our slice of pie. It’s a primal fear. So we work for our slice of pie, and we get a piece of it, and then a bigger piece, more than enough to survive. Yet we’re never satisfied, are we? My dear old father (who turned 70 yesterday) says that in his experience there’s the fish camp crowd and country club crowd, but there’s not much difference between the two. He has a point. But so be it. That’s the way it is. And so we go back to this grind of grabbing our slice of pie before it’s gone.
Paul tells Timothy and us that that is not the Gospel. In fact, that’s the opposite of the Gospel. John would call that the anti-Christ. Do you see these beautiful autumn colors right about now? Did Bank of America put those up? Was that a government program? Did we chalk that up to debt and make little Jack pay for that? Of course not. That was God’s idea. God created this place, and God created us. God gave us this world to enjoy. And when bought that slice of pie theory that threatened to destroy God’s beautiful creation, God even became one of us and took on that condition and defeated it. “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” we sing. We know that. We believe that. In fact, Paul uses that “good” word, or “beautiful” word, twice. He calls that a beautiful confession, or a beautiful acknowledgement. We know that.
That’s what’s so beautiful about it. I heard a lecture by Eugene Peterson recently. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We know that from John 3:16. We focus a lot on the Truth of Jesus, Peterson claims, but not so much on the Way of Jesus, and you have to focus on both the Way and the Truth before you get to the life. I’m just so far off on this Way, especially financially. Jesus meant all that, you know. He meant what he said about money. Preachers often tell their flock to follow Jesus, but then try to convince them that he never meant what he said, which begs the question of why we’d want to follow him anyway. But he did mean what he said. We’ve just wandered far off of that Way. But the whole point is that we have the Way. Jesus has given us the Way that leads to Life. In fact, Jesus even died to give us that Way. We may not realize that Way yet, and the truth be told, we probably never will this side of heaven. We live in a badly broken world, but we have this small glimmer of eternity, the Way, the Life, Jesus. Hopefully, we realize more and more of that Way. Hopefully we’ll have a better handle on our money next year than this year. In some form or fashion, money has us trapped. We’re enslaved to it. How can John Robertson Maybry already be 30 grand in the hole from our massive spending and anyone claim that we’re not enslaved to money? But there’s a whole other option, called freedom, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. It’s called Jesus. And it’s beautiful. So fight the good fight. Contest the beautiful contest, and take hold of the life that really is life.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
