Love not Charity: A Sermon for Proper 25

I’d like to begin this morning with a Prayer Book lesson. So, if you’ll humor me for a moment, please open a Book of Common Prayer to page 324. As you will see, this is the opening section of the Rite I service for the Holy Eucharist. The top of page 324 comes immediately after the Collect for Purity – “Almighty God, to you, all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid…”. What comes next is a rubric that says:

Then the Ten Commandments may be said, or the following

Hear what our Lord Jesus Christ saith:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great
commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments
hang all the Law and the Prophets.

The first thing we should notice is that we are not required to recite the Ten Commandments or the Summary of the Law. The rubric in italics says that we “may” say them. As the celebrant, I almost always choose to include the Summary of the Law. I believe that it’s simply too important - and too foundational to the Christian faith - to leave out. 

Now, turn to the opening section of the Rite II service for the Holy Eucharist, which is found on pages 355 and 356. Here, you’ll notice that we are not given the option of reciting the Ten Commandments or the Summary of the Law. And I think that omission is a grievous mistake. As I said before, I believe that it’s simply too important - and too foundational to the Christian faith - to leave out. 

Now, under normal circumstances, we typically have an 8:00 Rite I service and a 10:30 Rite II service here at Christ the King,. And since I am the only priest here, I have the privilege of serving as the celebrant at both services every week. And early on in my time here, I began notice and deeply miss the inclusion of the Summary of the Law in the Rite II service. So, at some point, I made the choice to include the Summary of the Law in every service we have – whether it is Rite I or Rite II. The bottom line is, we forget most sermons we hear. In the Anglican tradition, we believe that our primary vehicle for formation is the liturgy – as the saying goes – “our prayer shapes our belief.”  So, if you worship here at Christ the King regularly, if you remember only one thing, I want it to be Jesus’ Summary of the Law. I want you to hear, mark, and inwardly digest the two commandments upon which hang all the law and prophets. And I don’t want you to have to come at 8:00am to experience that.

Now that I’ve explained why I include it in our weekly celebration of the Eucharist – regardless of whether we are using Rite I or Rite II – let’s move on to the fact that today, we heard the Summary of the Law twice, as it was also in our Gospel lesson. And the timing of this Summary of the Law two-fer couldn’t have been more providential. This past Friday, we mailed the 2021 Annual Giving Pledge packets to the congregation. Please be on the lookout for it, and if you don’t receive one this week, please let us know and we will send you one. 

In last week’s Gospel lesson, Jesus told his antagonists that we are to give to the emperor what is the emperor’s and give to God what is God’s. And that is a classic text for a stewardship sermon, and it is timely, as most churches are thinking about stewardship this time of year. But I think today’s lesson is just as appropriate for helping us think about how we order our priorities as it relates to stewardship.

Like last week, Jesus has been put into a potential bind when his antagonists asked him a question that appears to leave no room for an acceptable answer. It’s like when someone asks who your favorite child is. But like last week, Jesus doesn’t take their bait today, and instead offers an answer that ends up being one of his most-quoted lines in all of scripture. Instead of neglecting to see the forest for the trees by trying to choose a most important commandment, Jesus is able to see the bigger picture and purpose of the Law. In his answer, Jesus is reminding his antagonists – and us – that at the end of the day, our religious life can be boiled down to two things – loving God and loving our neighbor – in that order. As a side note - I’m always nervous about preachers and churches who talk a lot about loving and doing nice things for their neighbors without drawing the connection to the Ultimate Source of love, God himself. So just like Jesus did, we are to first love God, and from there that love will extend to our neighbors. 

One of the essential elements of our religious life is stewardship. How we make use of – how we steward - the gifts we have been given by God is a true mark of our spiritual maturity as individuals, households, and as a parish church. And I think that Jesus’ approach to the Law can help us with our approach to becoming mature stewards of God’s gifts. Again, when Jesus narrowed the Law down to two essential elements - loving God and loving our neighbor- he was asserting the importance of priorities and perspective. And priorities and perspective are what stewardship is all about. When we are invited to make a pledge to our parish church, we are being invited to articulate and embody our love for God and our neighbor. If we say that we love God and our neighbor, but don’t make a sacrificial financial commitment to our church, then there is a disconnect that needs to be explored.

Though there are more non-profits competing for charitable gifts than ever before, I believe that the parish church is the best and most reliable vehicle for allowing us to embody our love for God and our neighbor. This is because the parish church is not asking us to be charitable. We are being invited into something much deeper than charity. We are being asked to faithfully, graciously, and sacrificially embody our love of God and our neighbor. As such, all of our missional outreach is grounded first and foremost in our love for God. Therefore, as Christians, the primary motive for serving others is gratitude, not guilt, pity, or even charity. This is because as Christians, we recognize that everything we have is a gift from God – the Great Gift Giver. So, our offering to the church is simply our grateful response to God. And we must remember that our outreach and mission to the world must always flow from the baptismal font to the altar, and from the altar into the world. 

When we look at our annual budget at Christ the King – when we look at the funding of our mission and ministries – we will see a reflection of our values as a parish church. A question we should always ask is, “Does this budget show a church that loves God and our neighbor above everything else?” Another way of talking about this evaluation is in terms of employing a Strategic Filter. Whenever we are faced with a large budgeting decision, a Strategic Filter that we could apply to the decision is – “Does this ministry expense assist us in furthering our missional priority of loving God and our neighbor?” 

And the same goes for us an individuals and families. What are our priorities? If someone were to look at my personal calendar and my household budget, what priorities would they see? Would they see to someone who is seeking to love God and their neighbor over and above anything else? Whenever Emily and I are faced with a big purchase, we oftentimes end up having to admit – if we buy this, we will not be able to afford our 10% tithe to the church. We can’t do both. And the tithe always wins out. And we have never regretted making our tithe a priority, because the more we give, the more gratified we feel. It helps us keep our priorities in line.

A fairly clever stewardship pamphlet published by Forward Movement draws a comparison between pledging to our parish church and tipping at a restaurant. It asserts that when we tip at a restaurant, we do so after we have received our meal, and we usually base it on how satisfied we were with the service and overall dining experience. Our tip is a conditional – “after the fact” transaction that says, “Thank you for your service.” 

Most of us begin our journey of financial giving to the church in a similar fashion – we may drop a “tip” in the offering plate on a Sunday if we are particularly moved by our worship experience. Our next step might be when we move from being occasional plate givers to pledgers. But our annual pledge still might be more like a “tip” for a job well-done by the church. In this scenario, the annual pledge is based primarily on one’s level of satisfaction with the clergy, staff, worship, and ministries of the church. The more satisfied we are - the more our personal needs and expectations are met – the more we will give. 

The previous two scenarios aren’t inherently bad -  we are all on the journey towards more faithful and sacrificial giving and none of us have fully “arrived.” But these approaches to giving back to God through the church aren’t where we should ultimately strive to be. Dare I say that our giving should be grounded not in how much we like our parish church, but rather, how much we seek to love God and our neighbor. Our parish church is simply the vehicle through which we are able to best embody our love for God and our neighbor. It is where we worship and commune with God through the sacramental life of the church. It is where we are able to share our love for God – as well as God’s love for us - with others. The parish church is where we are best able to be reminded of and embody our belief that “All things come of the Thee, and of Thy own have we given Thee.”  It is where God is best able to, as our Collect of the Day says, “… obtain what [God] promise[s],” and where God has chosen to  “make us love what [God] commands.” 

When you receive your Annual Giving packet in the mail this week, please prayerfully consider how God is calling you – and calling us as a parish church – to be faithful stewards of the gifts God has given us. And to echo what we heard today from the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians, “our appeal does not spring from deceit or impure motives or trickery, but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts.”