Preached · November 24, 2024
Series · A Future With Hope
Text · Luke 12:32-34; Luke 12
Good morning, everybody. My name is Anthony. I get to serve as one of the co-lead pastors here at The Table, and just last week we started a real brief series called A Future with Hope.
A Future with Hope: Jeremiah 29
Pastor Tonetta introduced us, or reintroduced us, to the passage, the chapter Jeremiah 29. Jeremiah 29 is the passage where we get:
I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. Promote the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because your future depends on its welfare. I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the Lord. They are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. — Jeremiah 29
There are two extremes that you can go with this passage. You can either make it hyper-individualized — you can stick it on a graduation card and make it solely about you and your success — or you can go to the other extreme of, this has to do with nothing but ancient Israel in exile in Babylon, and then not do anything with it.
Pastor Tonetta tried to help us reclaim this passage in its appropriate context, reminding us that a church that is faithful to the way of Jesus, a church that is about centering the margins, a church that is about empowering those who have had their power stolen, is in many ways in America a church in exile. And I don't want to confuse us with the idea that we're persecuted — we're clearly not persecuted. We're sitting here, we're free, we're able to meet together. And yet there are many of those in this room, online, represented in this congregation, that when you put together their particular marginalized identity and the fact that they're a Christian, for many folks this does not compute. And so it's a form of cultural exile. And as cultural exiles who choose to believe that the way of Jesus is worth following — and because of that, we want to bring God's kingdom here on earth — then we have some responsibility to work and promote the welfare of the city where we are living. A city which is having its own turmoil, having its own people put into positions of power, and those people would have many of you suffer. And so God knows the plans that God has for us, and those plans are for peace, not disaster — a future with hope.
We're going to continue in the same vein. We're going to talk about a passage from the words of Jesus, Luke chapter 12. I'm going to give a few comments on the passage, I'm going to give us an update on our annual fundraiser, and then we're going to do a contemplative or meditative scriptural exercise together.
So before we do that, would you pray with me? Good and gracious God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Mother of us all, we thank you that you are here and that you are in this place. And God, we have already named the many fears and anxieties that are rocking us, our families, our friends, those close to us. And God, we bring those anxieties to you, because we know that you care for us, you care about us. God, I pray that as we turn our attention to your scripture today, that you would illuminate it for us, that you would make it come alive, that we would be not only hearers of the word but doers as well — that we would not merely be here to get a little bit scripturally or theologically smarter, but rather that we would be formed into the character and likeness of Jesus Christ. We pray these things in the unity of the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Don't Be Afraid, Little Flock
This is what Luke chapter 12, verses 32 through 34, says in the words of Jesus:
Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out — a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too. — Luke 12:32-34
First of all, Jesus begins by saying, "Do not be afraid." And I want to ask us, rhetorically, how we might imagine how Jesus says, "Don't be afraid." Or, if you go up the chapter a little bit, Jesus says, "Be anxious for nothing," or, "Do not be worried." I can imagine that there's a certain posture or a certain way that maybe you've heard words like, "Calm down, don't be afraid, don't be anxious, don't worry" — a sort of chiding "don't be afraid." Versus something I have to do as a parent quite often: picking up my child, holding them close, and saying, "Don't be afraid." Even when things are scary, even when things are enshadowed, even when things are worth being afraid about, there can be this posture, this act of love, that gets close to someone that you care about and says, "I've got you. Don't be afraid."
And you can hear the tone of affection: "Don't be afraid, little flock." If it were in Spanish, "flaquito" — this term of endearment. Jesus often compares himself to a shepherd, and the people that follow him — his congregation, the crowds — as a flock without a shepherd that he is getting close to. This is not a denial of fear. It's not a denial of anxiety. It's recognizing that there are lots of things to be afraid about. And so Jesus says, "Little flock, don't be afraid."
Getting Cozy with the Fear
Now, fear has this interesting quality to it, like many of our emotions: the further that we push away from it, the larger it gets. I have had the honor recently of being alongside somebody who experienced what's called exposure response prevention therapy. ERP — exposure response prevention therapy — helps people who have these large anxieties, some might call them irrational anxieties, and helps them learn how to live with that anxiety. The technique that a therapist is going to use for ERP is not to rationalize — "Well, let me tell you all the reasons you shouldn't be afraid of that." That doesn't work. It's not to build up a bunch of defenses — "Okay, if you're afraid of this, then do these six things." Rather, it's getting really, really cozy with the fear. So I watched somebody go into a therapy session in a sort of freak-out mode, with all of these anxieties and fears that they have, particularly around a fear of death. And their hour together in that session was just making a list and talking in explicit detail about all the ways that they could die. And I'm sitting here thinking, that sucks. But by the end of the session, this person said, "I feel so much better."
Now, the Stoic philosophers, a couple thousand years ago, sort of realized what modern psychologists are figuring out today. They had a tool called premeditatio malorum — in other words, pre-contemplating, pre-thinking about the worst that can happen. Visualizing it in their brain: what's the worst that can happen? Getting real and honest and explicit about the worst, so that the fear isn't just some nebulous shadow, but rather something you're deeply comfortable with, intimate with.
So when I think about Jesus' words, "Don't be afraid, little flock," I think about the fact that this is not a denial. This is the same Jesus who goes into a garden and kneels down and prays to God, "Would you take this future away from me?" This is a Jesus who does not deny the hardship, does not deny the difficulty, but rather gets close to those he cares about and says, "Do not be afraid."
Because Your Father Delights in Giving You the Kingdom
Now, this is attached to a reason. "Don't be afraid, little flock." What's the next word? "Because." Because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Some translations — the NIV, the NASB — sort of neuter the power of what's being said here. They just say things like "is pleased" or "has chosen to give you the kingdom." But this translation, the Common English Bible, gets at the word here. It's delight, it's joy, it's the superabundance of God's generosity — that God is not stingy, God does not hold back. And this pairs with what the prophet Jeremiah says: that God has plans to prosper, to give you a future with hope. And so the reason to not be afraid, the reason why Jesus embraces us and says, "I've got you, don't be afraid," is because the God that we worship is not a stingy, miserly God, but is a God who delights in giving you the kingdom. We'll talk about what the kingdom is in just a minute.
Sell Your Possessions and Give
Jesus goes on: "Sell your possessions and give to those in need." Sell and give — in this economy? This, of course, is the hardest part of the text to wrap our arms around. How many of my possessions? All of them? Some of them? Who do I give it to? Everybody in need? Just the people that make the right checklist, that meet the means test? Christians, followers of Jesus, have wrestled with this for 2,000 years. Do not expect me to give you quick, clean answers today.
But there is some sort of relationship between a lack of anxiety — or an embracing of the fear, an understanding of the fear, letting that fear release us and being released from it — and understanding God's generosity, that somehow leads to our own generosity. So much of our own personal stinginess — I'll speak for myself — my own personal stinginess and anxiety around money has to do with what I'm afraid of. The reason that I can be afraid to just hand it off to somebody, to give it away, is because of my own fears. But if I believe Jesus — that Jesus treats me with affection, that God is as good as Jesus says God is — then perhaps I will know that I have been released from fear when generosity springs from my own life.
No matter what, it's hard to avoid Jesus' message that wealth isn't necessarily a sign of God's blessing — and, in fact, wealth could be a sign that you're missing out on God's blessing. And it's hard to miss that hoarding is one of the worst sins of all, one of the quickest ways to break shalom and wholeness and relationship between human beings.
Wallets That Don't Wear Out
Jesus says, "Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out." I just want to give a quick note here. Basically, this is an idiom for: wherever you're putting your wealth, make sure it's in a place that's semi-permanent. Because you didn't have banking like you have today. You had purses, you had wallets, you had literal bags. Jesus' disciple Judas was said "to hold the bag," which is this idiom for managing the finances of Jesus' ministry. So "make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out" doesn't mean sell your leather and get vinyl. It just means make sure that wherever you're putting your wealth, it's in a place that doesn't wear out — which goes into the next phrase, "a treasure in heaven that never wears out."
Treasure in Heaven, Here and Now
Now — treasure in heaven. Heaven. I've been preaching about the topic of heaven for nearly 15 years. And I have preached in those 15 years basically the same fundamental message: that when we read the word heaven — kingdom of heaven, kingdom of God — particularly in the New Testament, we should not think of the place we go when we die, or something that happens in the far-off future. I can tell you the exact book, author, and location I was as a junior in college when I made these connections as a budding theologian and preacher about what heaven is and is not in the New Testament. It is not the place you go when you die. It is about what God is doing here on earth, now.
And it was also only this week, embarrassingly enough, that I realized that "store up your treasures in heaven" is also not a reference to the afterlife or the new creation. It is also a reference to the here and now. It took 15 years of deprogramming myself around how to think about heaven to finally realize that the treasures-in-heaven thing isn't just about some far-off future.
The church — the thing that all of us are doing right now — is, according to one biblical scholar and theologian, N.T. Wright, meant to be a small working model of the kingdom of God. All those things that we pray about in the Lord's Prayer — that your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, that we have bread, that debts are forgiven, that no one's going to prison — all of that, the church is meant to be the small working model of, today. All the things that we are hoping for, aspiring for in our society — a society that, according to 1 Peter, is meant to be a place where justice can make its home, a society where there is equity and equality, where there is reparation for prior harm, where there is no individual or community or group that is seen as less than or subhuman compared to someone else — all of those things that we wish for, if we want to see them happen in society, then we've got to figure it out here first.
And this is also true in the ways that we handle our wealth and our money and our wallets and where we store all that stuff. Do we store it in the wealth-flows-up streams of racial capitalism? Or do we store it in communities of abundance where, according to the book of Acts, there are no poor among us?
Now, a quick addendum here. I'm not saying store up your treasures in the organization, the 501(c)(3), of this church. We're not trying to replicate those wealth-flows-up ways either. Rather, we store up treasures in each other. The church is not an organization — that's not what Jesus would have understood; it's not what the authors or the practitioners of the book of Acts would have understood. The church was the group, the assembly, the collection of human beings that get together. And so when we store up our treasures in heaven, we're storing up in the relationships that we have together, so that we are all taken care of in appropriate ways.
Cooperative Economies
It's what the Black social movement has called cooperative societies, or cooperative economies. We all know the name Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks was the woman chosen to kickstart the Montgomery bus boycott. And just as important is a woman by the name of Jo Ann Robinson. Because if you're going to boycott a bus system for 371-odd days, guess what? You're going to need to figure out another way to provide rides for everyone. And so Jo Ann Robinson — herself, a student, and another administrator — were the ones who handed out 55,000 leaflets across Montgomery to make sure that there were ways that everybody could get to their jobs and have transportation and not use the bus system. That's creating an alternative economy in order to challenge the unjust one that had kept Jo Ann and Rosa and King and so many others down. So when you talk about boycotts, when you talk about pushing back against racial capitalism, that also has to be paired with the work of: what are we mantling instead? What are we building together instead? Sometimes it takes a Jo Ann Robinson and 55,000 leaflets and a year-plus of work to organize carpools so that you can push back against an unjust bus system.
So we too, as the church, are creating our own miniature cooperative economy. We too are putting our treasure in heaven — which is to say, our treasure in all these relationships where God dwells in our midst and amongst us. We put our treasure there as a way to boycott, to push back against the unjust economies.
Fundraiser Update: A Future with Hope
Now, we have our own miniature cooperative economy here. That's part of what our year-end fundraiser is about. Let me remind you about our fundraiser and give you a quick update.
Our fundraiser is called A Future With Hope. We have a goal of raising 20,000 extra dollars by year's end — particularly, hopefully, by Giving Tuesday, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving — and having 10 new recurring givers. We're asking for folks to give a gift above and beyond their regular gift, or the gift that they might regularly give to the church, and to make it their first gift of the holidays.
The way that we're going to use this $20,000 is, one, to make sure that our income matches our expenses this year. By the end of October, we are about $10,000 off — we had spent about $10,000 more than we had brought in. We hope to get that into alignment by year's end, always trying to move closer to an operating reserve of about three months as an initial target. We have about one month's savings right now.
And then we want to fund a benevolence fund. When I first got here about four and a half years ago, in 2020, we were hit by a pandemic. Part of the church's response to that pandemic was providing meals, and transportation to get those meals to people, because people were either immunocompromised, shut in their homes, unable to travel, unable to get groceries. We raised something like $60,000 that year in order to provide meals during COVID. And then that wound down. And since then, the church — I'll say this honestly — has been in a bit of a scarcity mentality, where we've had a shoestring budget. And it funds — completely honestly — 60% of it funds me and Tonetta's salaries, insurance, benefits, things like that. The other 40% funds rents, ministries, snacks in Table Kids and first-impression stuff, and then some amount to our justice and compassion partnerships — a food pantry, a drop-in center, sometimes a soup kitchen that we help partner with.
But if somebody — and this happens quite often, multiple times a month — if somebody comes to us and says, hey, I can't make rent, I can't pay this utility bill, I can't pay off this parking ticket to get my car back to get to my job — do you have money to help us out? We don't. We have to say no. What a benevolence fund does is: you fund it with some cash, you provide a team or committee who receives those requests, and then they can answer those requests with disbursements of funds to help people out. What we want to do with this $20,000 — with the first $4,000 of it — is to have an initial fund for our benevolence, so that when those requests come in, the team can say, yes, we can help you. And anything that we raise over the $20,000, half of every dollar is going to our friends at Transmission Ministry Collective, which is a ministry specifically focused on trans folks — which, of course, is more necessary than ever now.
So the first $4,000 goes to benevolence, $16,000 to finishing our year strong, and then half of every dollar above $20,000 goes to Transmission. As of this morning, we are at $4,500 — so 22%. Which means that we can start January 2025 with a benevolence fund, which is good, good news.
Now, something I want to point out about these numbers. $4,500 with 16 donations means something like an average of $300 per donation. I want to bring that average way, way down. Our newsletter goes out to 1,500 people. Our Instagram is seen by 1,500 people. There are about 300 or 400 people involved in classes and groups and things like that. It makes much more sense for hundreds of people to give $25 or $30 than 16 people giving $300. So this is my plea to you: if you're thinking "my donation is too small" — no. We need everybody to think, "my donation is just large enough to help us meet our goals."
Lectio Divina
Now, because I knew I had to give a finance fundraising update, I knew I would feel sort of icky after that — it's not my favorite thing to do. So I wanted to come back from that with a contemplative exercise on Scripture. This is something we've done very rarely — a skill that we sometimes do in groups, but we can do in large group settings — and that is the skill of what's called Lectio Divina. Lectio Divina is just a Latin phrase; it means divine reading. It's a way of slowing down and approaching Scripture in a much more intentional, slow way, with the idea that Scripture is not always meant to be something that we go at with just "give me more knowledge, give me more words," but rather — the way that the church has seen it throughout the centuries — a way to encounter the presence of God.
Now, we are Trinitarian, meaning that we believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are not Trinitarian meaning Father, Son, and Holy Bible. So we do not confuse the Bible with God. But the Bible can be a window through which we can experience or glimpse God.
What Lectio does is invite us through four movements of reading. The first is just the simple act of reading. I'm going to read this passage slowly three times, and I just invite you to pay attention to the words or phrases, ideas, or concepts that might pop up at you. The second movement — we're going to read the Scripture again, but this time in a more meditative place. I might invite you to use your imagination, or the senses of your imagination: what would it be like to actually hear Jesus speaking these words? What might you taste, smell, feel? What might you be hearing? What might you be sensing or emoting inside of you as you heard Jesus? The third movement is to pray these words — to use these words as a launching point for how to speak to God. And the fourth movement is that of contemplation, where we try to move out of words and into mere experience, with the belief that God is actually in this place — and that sometimes, with those closest, most intimate, dear friends or companions, you don't need words to feel close.
I invite you to find a posture that is comfortable for you. That might be both feet on the ground. It might be cross-legged, if that's comfortable. It might be to close your eyes, or to find a point of light somewhere — just a way that you can feel most settled. I also want to say, if you want to move your body as you do this, that's completely welcome too. During our worship night, I really appreciated the fact that there were people who were worshiping and just moving about the room. That's how I often feel most comfortable when I pray — when I'm moving or walking. So, whatever works.
I invite you just to hear and listen to the words of Jesus from Luke chapter 12. Pay attention to whatever words, phrases, or ideas might pop up at you — whatever the Holy Spirit might be asking you to pay attention to.
Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out — a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too. — Luke 12:32-34
I'm going to read the passage again. We're staying just in the movement of reading — so just paying attention to words or phrases.
Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out — a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too.
And one more time — again, we're still in just the movement of reading.
Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out — a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too.
If there's a word or phrase or idea that's speaking to you, I invite you just to speak it out loud, quietly — or you can shout it so everyone can hear. If you're online, you can put it in the chat.
Now we're going to move a little bit beyond just words, and into our emotions — believing that God can speak in our feelings as well. I invite you even to use your imagination, as if you were there, sitting in a grassy field with Jesus, hearing his words. What might you be sensing or experiencing? What emotions might be coming to the surface? Again, the words of Jesus:
Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out — a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too.
What feelings or senses or emotions are coming forward for you?
And again: Don't be afraid, little flock, because your Father delights in giving you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give to those in need. Make for yourselves wallets that don't wear out — a treasure in heaven that never runs out. No thief comes near there, and no moth destroys. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be too.
And again: Don't be afraid.
Jesus, help me to not be afraid. Help me to see you as a shepherd, and help me to experience God as delighting in giving me the kingdom. God, I don't want to sell my possessions. I don't always want to give to those in need. Help me, God. Help me to know what it is to invest in a way that does not wear out — to invest in a heaven here on earth that never runs out. And God, would you protect us from the thief who comes to kill and steal and destroy. God, help my heart to be where my treasure is, and my treasure to be here among your people.
And finally, we move into contemplation. To behold a God who delights in you. And to be held by God, who delights in you. Contemplation is a place where words fade to thoughts, thoughts to feelings, feelings to a comfortable silence with the divine. So we'll spend just a couple of minutes here.
God, we thank you that you are here and in this place. As we turn our attention from your word, we now turn it to the greatest act of generosity ever known. Help us to be at peace and to know that we are held by you. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
