Preached · October 16, 2022
Series · Kingdom Economics
Text · Exodus 16; Exodus 15:26–16:30
Watch on YouTube · Listen to the audio
Why a Church Like This Is Talking About Money
If you're new, and this is one of your first times at The Table, you might be the sort of person who's deconstructing — dismantling some of the baggage or trauma from prior church experiences — and you went online and searched. I've heard all sorts of search terms for The Table: hipster church, progressive church, affirming church, multi-ethnic church. People find The Table in a variety of ways. But so many of the stories have a similar vibe: "I grew up in the church, or religion-adjacent, and I was looking for a group of people who weren't going to kick me out because of who I loved, or the color of my skin, or the fact that I didn't read my Bible fourteen times a week."
And you might be the sort of person who came from an environment where money, giving, and tithing were really shame-inducing. Somebody would come up on a platform a lot like this one, dressed a lot like me, with a microphone a lot like this, and say: you must give in order for God to bless you, in order for God to do God's work in the church. And if you don't, then something's wrong with your finances — something's wrong with your relationship with God.
So when I tell you that we're going to spend the next few weeks talking about money, communal economics, and generosity, I would perfectly understand if your heart rate went up and you thought, "Damn it. I thought I found a good church, and I didn't."
Now, let me tell you — there is a version of that on this side of the proverbial pulpit. Talking about money in the church is, at least for me, also an anxiety-inducing thing, as a preacher, pastor, Bible communicator, whatever it is I am. Because I've also sat on that side of the pew, and I've also been pressured by others to do the pressuring.
But we feel it's worth pushing through that anxiety — before you slam your laptop lid closed or walk out of the room — because if we're not going to be the ones to talk about our economics and our generosity, then somebody else will on our behalf. And we'll get shaped into a culture and a system and an environment that will turn us into money-making machines rather than the human beings God intended us to be.
We're kicking off a series. Pastor Tonetta and I are co-preaching tonight: I'll do some introductions and storytelling, and Tonetta will lead us in some group discussion and a reflection on Scripture. We're just getting started.
Two Church Stories
The Gymnasium
For my own part: my wife Emily and I went to the same church in college. This church had been around for maybe a decade, on the outskirts of Mishawaka, Indiana, planted in cornfields — yes, it's Indiana — but those cornfields were being turned into subdivisions, suburban neighborhoods. And as the neighborhoods grew, the church did not. It actually shrank over time, down to about fifty to seventy people on a Sunday.
The pastor at the time had a vision from God — that's the way he put it — that in order to reach the families moving into all these things that used to be cornfields, the church was going to build a gymnasium. So a church of fifty to seventy, with a well-appointed new building, needed to build a gymnasium to get all the families to come to church. And we heard sermon series after sermon series, story after story, about why God had given this pastor a vision of building a gymnasium.
Quick aside: I was not a massive fan of this pastor already. This was the pastor who, when I became a biblical studies and Christian ministry major, took me out to eat to tell me, "Anthony, I'm pretty sure that's not the right job for you." Which is rough. So me and him, we had some issues.
But what got interesting as the building campaign went on: people would come up on the platform to give testimony — testimony about how God had led them to sell their car and donate it to the church, or to empty out their retirement account and give it to the church, so that this gymnasium could be built.
So the gymnasium is built. And the pastor burns out and leaves ministry. And the church closes within six months. People had given their savings, had heard this vision from God — and then the church closes its doors.
So when I tell you that talking about generosity in the church gives me bad feelings — I'm not lying. I'm not lying to you.
The Pastor's Discount — and the Overcorrection
The next church, where I served in Iowa, had a pastor before my time who was also manipulative with money. He'd get up on a Sunday behind the pulpit and say things like, "As your pastor, I shouldn't really be paying full price for that car at the dealership, right? I shouldn't really be paying full price at the chiropractor. I mean, I'm your pastor." Just these really manipulative ways of talking about generosity — giving that lined somebody's pockets. It was gross. It was nasty, to be honest.
The next pastor, who I did serve under, just never talked about money. Because of the bad experience the church had, money was simply never talked about. And the church always had financial issues, and people carried this cultural expectation to keep up with the Joneses in our particular neighborhood in Iowa.
Why We're Doing This Anyway
All that to say: I'm not thrilled about any of this. And yet we think it's necessary. I meet regularly as a premarital counselor with couples on the verge of getting married, and hardly anybody I've met has a plan for their money — or a plan for communal economics. In other words: how to be generous, how to think outside our own selves and our own family units, how to build systems of equity when it comes to our finances. If we don't shape the way we use our resources, our resources are going to go ahead and shape us.
So Tonetta and I want to ground this series, first of all, in our own transparency about this — we're going to do some storytelling from our own lives. And we want to ground it in a sense of enough, which Pastor Tonetta will talk more about: asking and answering the questions, What is enough? How do I live with the belief that whatever I have is enough — at least for today?
In a little bit, when we do communion, we're going to pray the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread." And I've heard another preacher say: how many of us would be ticked off if God actually answered that prayer and stopped there? Just our daily bread. That's it. What a stingy God.
So we've got some things to think about. And I'll be honest with you — at some point, in a few weeks, yes, we will talk about The Table Church's finances. We'll talk about how to give. But that's not really our goal. We've got to have some honesty: we're a nonprofit, there are salaries involved, there's a building we rent, there's stuff. But the goal is not just "hey, please give the church more money." The broader goal is this: if we want to create a just and beautiful society, if we want to enact this kingdom that Jesus proclaimed, we wouldn't be being honest if we said it had nothing to do with our money and our resources.
My Money Autobiography
The first thing I want to do is give a little bit of my money autobiography — my money story — in the name of transparency, and because how I grew up, how we all grew up, our families of origin, shapes and changes the way we think about money and resources.
Scarcity: The First Six Years
I spent the first six years of my life growing up poor. The sort of poor where we had an apartment, but the apartment was filled with rats and cockroaches. The utilities would come off and on. There were drug deals going on outside the window. My biological mom, who I lived with, and I would use a food pantry — there are certain smells, like old bread, that bring me right back to that place.
My biological mom wasn't teaching me anything about money, but I was picking things up. That it's scarce. That it's rare. That once you get some, you spend it immediately, lest somebody come collecting on a bill. There are things you learn as a person without financial resources that even today are hard for me to shake.
At the age of six, I ended up living in a car with my mom for a little bit of time, and then ended up in the foster system.
Abundance: Ages Six to Ten
Eventually I started living with biological family — an aunt and uncle who were very much upper middle class. No more scarcity mindset; we had everything we could possibly want. Anybody remember the clear see-through phones in the '90s? We had some of those. We had MTV. We had a big sound system with the five-disc changer that had No Doubt in it. Geriatric millennial — here I am. Nothing was a worry. Private school, all of those things.
I lived in that environment from about six to ten years old. And it was whiplash — from scarcity and critters on the floor to carpet and clear phones and blow-up couches and MTV. So then I learned some other things about money: that if you worked hard, if you did the right things, money would just come flowing freely. And that taught me some lies about honor and dignity — about who deserved money and who didn't.
Stinginess: The Family Who Adopted Me
I didn't end up staying with that family. I got put in the foster system once again, and ended up with the family that would adopt me when I was in my young teens. They were a slightly different story. I was the youngest of six siblings — five older siblings — and there was a single income in the house, so it had to stretch a long way. More lower middle class. My parents could pinch a penny until it bled.
That also taught me some things about money. It led to what I would call stinginess — a certain amount of, well, we've got to hoard as much as we can, because we never know when another bad day is going to come. The idea of debt and borrowing money, at least in my family, was shameful. To the point where, when I was in college, I bought an HP laptop and just kept moving it across 0% credit cards until I got married. Then Emily and I got married and had the finance conversation, and she discovered the couple hundred dollars of debt I had — which doesn't sound like a lot now, but when we were substitute teaching and working odd jobs, it was a lot of money. I had hidden that debt because of the shame it induced — shame that had been passed on to me from my family.
When Emily and I had our first child, Audrey, my parents came and visited for a while, and they watched as a variety of people from our church brought in meals to support us after the birth of a child. Eventually they took me aside and said, "Anthony, I didn't know you were having financial struggles." What do you mean? "Well — people are giving you meals. That must mean you don't have enough money." Because in my parents' world, generosity was something you did for poor people. It wasn't just an act of kindness. The idea of simply giving a meal was a foreign concept.
Rebellion: How I Handle Money Now
All of this — and this is very much my personality — I rebelled against as an adult. My dad is very content with Costco jeans. I'm not. My jeans have a dollar sign and three digits after it. I've got the newest iPhone in my pocket. Our household believes in name-brand peanut butter. Quick poll — who's Jif? There we go. Oh, the Jif people almost seem embarrassed. Jif's okay. It's all right. Peter Pan? That's right. (I did this mostly as an opportunity for Tonetta, too.) Skippy — anybody Skippy? Ooh, fascinating. I'm intrigued by this.
Anyway — I'm the kind of person who would rather have one really nice thing than five so-so things. And that's just a form of rebellion against how I grew up in those last teenage years of my life. And sometimes I wonder if my pursuit of good stuff prevents me from having good experiences — maybe as many good experiences as I could have — or is why I still have student debt that's a little bit higher than maybe it could have been. And I have to check my own motives, as an Enneagram 3 who is obsessed with what you all think of me. Does that obsession prevent me from being more generous? Or even cause my generosity to come from ugly motives — "well, let me tell you about all the places I give to"?
These are all ways in which money — how we talk about it, how it's been handed down to us — shapes us and forms us to be certain kinds of people. So how does a community of, theoretically, Jesus followers — theoretically, people who want to be known as generous and kind and giving — how do we have honest conversations about the ways money shapes us and we shape our money? The way economics shapes us and we shape our economics — what we think is fair, and what we think is just, and what we think is not? These are conversations we need to have, because it's going to happen anyway. We're going to be shaped by it anyway. So we need to be honest about it with ourselves and with our neighbors and with our friends, so that there's some level of accountability, so that we can all be working toward some goal, some end, together. Otherwise the commercials and the economics and the systems will do all of that work on our behalf, whether we want them to or not.
I'm going to pass it to Pastor Tonetta.
Group Discussion (Pastor Tonetta)
We felt it was really important to start this series with vulnerability and storytelling and questions — so even when I reflect in a little bit, there will be more questions than answers. But I want to give us a few minutes to talk to one another about some of this.
When we do this, I'm going to encourage larger groups — more like five to six — so that if you don't want to share, you do not have to share. I want to make sure people feel safe. If you want to share, jump in. There are going to be some questions here to think about. Another way to approach this, if some of it feels like "I don't know if I can talk about this out loud": if you have been a part of church spaces, how was money talked about in those spaces?
[Group discussion]
Prayer
If you're open, would you be willing to pray with me? I just want to hold space for the vulnerability.
Lord, you are the creator of this material world — this world that we so often struggle to know how to steward well, to interact with in healthy ways, and not to idolize. Lord, I recognize in this moment that so many of us in the church have been deeply wounded — by simplistic stories around giving, by manipulative practice, by ideas of generosity that were deeply rooted in *I have, you need* — ideas of generosity that were deeply individualistic instead of communal. Lord, so many of us in this room struggle with shame around how much we have. Whether it's a lot or a little, we struggle. And I pray that as we move forward tonight, and in this series, you would help us to consider what it means to have enough — to experience enough — while always pushing forward for systems of equity and inclusion for all. In Jesus' name, amen.
Reflection: Manna and the Economy of Enough
In the next six or seven minutes, all I want to do is close us out with a pretty brief reflection that I hope grounds the rest of this series. There are literally going to be a lot of questions on the screen — maybe we'll put those in the newsletter, or go back and look at them in the recording — because I really hope, week by week for the next five weeks or so, they shape your thinking about all of this in some of your prayer time.
I'm going to read the story of manna in Exodus, because it is deeply about what it means to have enough, and about God's economy in terms of the world. I'll make a few observations, ask a few questions, and then we'll close out.
Before the Manna: A Sick Society and a Healing God (Exodus 15:26–27)
We're going to start at the very end of Exodus 15, right before the manna story:
He said, "If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God, and do what is right in his sight, and give heed to his commandments and keep all his statutes, I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you." Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees; and they camped there by the water.
The first thing I want to say, before we even look at the manna story: I find it fascinating that before you get into this story that is about enough — God's economy — you get a few verses that contrast a sick society with a society that is leaning into God's healing.
Egypt at the time was — I don't want to use the word industrial, but it was the closest you would have at the time to an industrial society in the Late Bronze Age. It was built on coercive labor. It was deeply administrative, about accumulating and amassing on the backs of certain people. Egypt, historians would say, is a society that invented elite living, luxury living — and you can see that even in the art that comes out of Egypt. In Deuteronomy 4:20, Egypt is called "the iron furnace." So the Israelites are coming out of Egypt — coming out of a society that views what it means to have enough in a particular way, and that way is about accumulation and hoarding.
The Manna Story (Exodus 16)
The whole congregation of the Israelites set out from Elim and came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from the land of Egypt. The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, "If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger." Then the Lord said to Moses, "I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day. In that way I will test them, whether they will follow my instruction or not. On the sixth day, when they prepare what they bring in, it will be twice as much as they gather on other days." So Moses and Aaron said to all the Israelites, "In the evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord." [Skipping down to verse 9:] Then Moses said to Aaron, "Say to the whole congregation of the Israelites, 'Draw near to the Lord, for he has heard your complaining.'" And as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the Israelites, they looked toward the wilderness, and the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud. The Lord spoke to Moses: "I have heard the complaining of the Israelites; say to them, 'At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.'" In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, "What is it?" — which is literally *manna*, "what is it?" — for they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, "It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat. This is what the Lord has commanded: 'Gather as much of it as each of you needs, an omer per person, according to the number of persons.'" The Israelites did so, some gathering more, some gathering less. But when they measured it with an omer, those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed. [Skipping ahead:] On the sixth day they gathered twice as much food, two omers apiece. When all the leaders of the congregation came and told Moses, he said to them, "This is what the Lord has commanded: 'Tomorrow is a day of solemn rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord; bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil, and all that is left over put aside to be kept until morning.'" So they put it aside until morning, just as Moses commanded them.
And then you get into this understanding and description of Sabbath. I'm going to leave it there, hoping that you will spend some time reflecting on it in the weeks to come. A couple of things I want to make note of.
1. What We Remember May Be an Illusion
The first thing is about context. When the Israelites remember their experience in Egypt, they remember sitting by fleshpots full of meat — and yet what they were eating was bread. It's as if they remember themselves eating the meat, but they never ate the meat. They only ate the bread.
So one of the things to consider when we talk about communal economics, when you consider the economic mechanisms: how are we a sick society, as I talked about first? And then, within this society — what is your guiding vision for a secure and happy economic life, and what parts of that vision rest on illusion? Because for the Israelites, what they remembered was actually an illusion — an illusion of the good life that never served them. As a woman who came from a family that had a sense of what the good life was, I also had to wrestle through: is that really what it is? Is that really what I'm going for?
2. Every Family Gathers Just Enough
Note in this story that every family is to gather just enough. There's a sense that in God's economy, there is a too much and a too little — something we don't necessarily talk a lot about. We have a pretty high tolerance in our culture for wealth disparity and inequity, for extreme luxury and extreme poverty. But in this story there is an enough, and you can fall below it or exceed it. That's really important.
So another thing to consider as we move through this series: how do you relate to a theology of enough? I know for some of us that might raise, "I've never had enough — why do we talk about things like abundance and scarcity when there doesn't seem to be enough to go around?" What comes up in you when you think about just having enough? How far are you from that? How do we all move closer to it?
3. The Bread Is Not to Be Stored Up
Notice also that the bread is not to be stored up. Remember that the Israelites have come out of being slaves, and their slavery, their labor, was about amassing grain — storing and hoarding. This is explicitly a counter-narrative to that way of being: not storing up, moving against surplus accumulation, thinking about how you keep wealth and possessions circulating versus concentrating.
And that's a hard thing for me to talk about, I'll be honest. There's not enough time tonight for me to share my own money story, but I've probably shared this before: I think about my kids and the structural inequality they'll face because they're Black, and I think, I can't give it all away — I've got to leave something behind. I want to name that. This is one of the hardest things: how do you know how much to accumulate? How much to pass on?
4. This Economics Is Grounded in Sabbath
The third thing I want you to notice and reflect on as we move through the series: this kind of economics is grounded in Sabbath. Practicing Sabbath — this idea that creation is a good gift, that land is to be shared, that money and possessions are not there for us simply to exploit or be exploited, or to exploit one another. Sabbath essentially means that we can't maximize and maximize. It places a limit on human productivity and leans into the goodness of God — the assumption, as Walter Brueggemann says, that God is willing and able to provide for the good life.
And for Israel there's a whole set of practices — we're going to have a whole sermon on this later in the series — practicing rest on a day, but then, how do you allow your neighbor to rest? And people who don't have as much to rest? And all of those in your sphere to rest? Practicing Sabbath means that you can't amass and essentially practice empire and domination. It places a limit.
So: where are you in your practice of Sabbath? How have you thought about it? And has it ever had anything to do with economics and money? Because it is very linked to those things in the biblical tradition.
Closing Questions and What's Ahead
Three reflection points. Every family is to gather just enough — how do we talk about too much or too little? The bread shouldn't be stored up — how do we talk about accumulating? And Israel is responsible for what it knows about God — and part of that lesson is about restraint and self-limitation as key parts of knowing God. Restraint, in this passage, consists of two practices: not accumulating too much, and keeping Sabbath.
So the last questions to reflect on: what do you make of that idea of restraint? In American society and in Western culture, restraint and being limited are hard things to grapple with — and they're central to knowing God, and imaging God in the world, and becoming more human. And then: how do you measure enough? Maybe that's the key question for tonight, and as we go forward into the next few weeks. How do we measure enough?
So I'm going to stop there. I'm so excited — next week we're going to hear preaching about economic predation in the church, and the ways in which so much of this can go really wrong. We're going to talk about Sabbath economics and shalom. We're going to talk about some of the Jesus stories, because Jesus talked so much about money. And the hope at the end of this series is that we are grounded as a community in our next logical step, whatever that is — deeply apart from any kind of manipulation, and deeply connected to our community outside of these walls.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
