1 Timothy 6:6-19 NRSVUE

6 Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment, 7 for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it, 8 but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. 9 But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. 10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.

11 But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 13 In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you 14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 which he will bring about at the right time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. 16 It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

17 As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches but rather on God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. 18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, 19 thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

This month I’ve been preaching a sort of loose sermon series catching you all up on the things Spirit has been up to in my life over the summer.

The first Sunday,  September 7th, I shared about my experiences doing Clergy Accompaniment at the Federal Courthouse and the ICE Facility, and talked about the origin of the term Woke, from passages like Romans 13.

September 14,  I talked about Paul’s instructions in Romans 14 to not judge one another on how we each live out our calling from God.  Remember friends,  Boundaries are Holy!

Last week, I talked about how the word we translate as salvation, sothe, has a much larger meaning of holistic wellness and how salvation is something we participate in here on earth as it is in heaven.  And I shared the hilarious story of my Great Aunt Alice’s funeral. O Jerusalem!

All of these sermons are available on the church website if you’d like to take another look, or missed church that morning.

In July, I traveled to South Dakota to begin the Practical Church Leadership program at Dakota Wesleyan University.  Practical Church Leadership is basically ?’s of an MBA in Nonprofit Leadership designed for Pastors actively serving a congregation.  I signed up for this because it has a year long Applied Project where we learn how to use Project Management tools in our church setting, and they did not teach us how to  manage a Housing Project in Seminary!

So I applied for some scholarships and the program is very reasonably priced, and if I keep going next year, I’ll have a Masters in Business Administration in Nonprofit Leadership in July 2027, and more importantly, I’ll have access to experts from the College of Business to help us navigate this whole Housing Process!

I always have 2 classes, the year long Applied Project and another 7 week topical class.  My current topical Class is Financial Resource Development.  And it’s really pushing all of my money issues buttons!

First of all,  I want to issue a “Not A Trigger Warning,” because this is NOT a Stewardship Sermon.  I will NOT be asking you to give more, or to fill out a pledge card, or to consider moving towards tithing.

One of my money issues, as a Pastor, is that it genuinely makes me sad when I hear people say that they think their church only cares about their money.  I have also been in churches where I felt like I was just a “giving unit,” to them, not a beloved child of God, and I just don’t want to do that to anybody.  So I very rarely do a direct ask for money.

For me, Stewardship really is my favorite spiritual practice.  Tom and I have tithed our entire 32 years of marriage, not out of a legalistic or fundamentalist reading of the Bible, but because giving away 10% of our income is so delightfully, radically, countercultural.  It’s so countercultural that we have, in fact, been audited by the IRS twice for, and I quote, “excessive charitable giving.”  I find it deeply ironic that a nation that prints, In God We Trust, on our currency, finds tithing suspicious!

When we give, whether to the church, to charities that serve the poor, or to political campaigns that are seeking justice, it makes me happy that we are pulling money out of the systems of consumerism, capitalism, and patriarchy that reduce beloved children of God into units of labor, units of consumption, and units of dependants.  

Believe it or not, Tom and I are not members of the Socialist Party!  We enjoy giving our hard earned money away to causes that support the belovedness of all people, because we find joy in following the teachings of Jesus.

We’re not socialists, we’re Christians who actually read the Bible!

Today’s Bible reading is from First Timothy.

It’s important to realize that First Timothy, Second Timothy and Titus are “Fan Fiction.”  Paul did not write these letters, because Paul was dead at the time they were written, sometime around 100-120 AD.  We know it was written before 125 AD, because Polycarp alludes to 1 Timothy in his book, Letter to the Philippians, which was published sometime between 125-135 AD.  There’s a lot of inaccuracies in the first and early second century timelines because the Romans literally lost track of time in the midst of a series of military coops.

At any rate,  First Timothy is fan fiction, which explains some of the blatant sexism found in other portions of the letter.  The authentic Paul wrote letters to the women he placed in church leadership, so clearly he wasn’t sexist, but Roman culture was extremely sexist, and we are all influenced by our culture!

However, there’s still some good stuff in First Timothy especially about our relationship with money.  The early second Century Church had grown enough that there were rich people in the church.  The Jesus movement very much started out as a group of people who were at the bottom of the economic ladder.  The first disciples were primarily working class, poor people, disabled people, women, and slaves.  So the Second Century Church didn’t quite know how to deal with success.

So the author of First Timothy is writing fan fiction for fellow Pastors, as if Paul was writing a letter to Timothy as a young leader.

In our reading for today, the author is trying to help us understand that money is not evil.  Money is just a tool that should be used for food and clothing and the basics of life.  But the lust for money and the love of money can plunge people into ruin and destruction.

I feel like the misunderstanding of this good teaching has caused a lot of money issues both within the church and in people’s everyday lives.

Too many people forget that verse 10 reads, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”  Verse 10 does NOT read “money is the root of all evil.”

This inaccurate reading combined with the also inaccurate idea that being content means that being content with poverty and suffering is somehow godly is exactly what Karl Marx was complaining about when he called religion, “the opiate of the masses.” 

Unfortunately Marx doesn’t seem to have read the Bible to find out that it doesn’t actually say that!

But when people think that being content with poverty and suffering is somehow holy, and that money is evil, that belief can be used to shame them into not asking for fair wages, not asking for safe working conditions, not joining a union, and even not taking a promotion because they have been taught to view bettering themselves as a sin.

What is actually written in First Timothy chapter 6 is that as followers of God, we are to shun wandering away from the faith in our pursuit of wealth.

The other problem with this bad interpretation where money is considered evil is that then we don’t want to talk about something evil in Church, right?

Which puts us as believers in a little bit of a pickle, because the secular world is dominated by money.

I absolutely believe in the pursuit of righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.  But my mortgage company does not accept them as valid forms of payment.

We live in a world where we need money.

And where money and our relationship to money massively impacts our lives!  But somehow we’re not supposed to talk about this very important part of our lives at church?

And then outside of church, we’re not supposed to talk about money either.

You’re not supposed to talk about how much you make with your coworkers.

You’re not supposed to talk about how much things cost.

You’re not supposed to comment on how rich people use their money…. although it seems perfectly acceptable to criticize how the poor use their money.

We’re not supposed to talk about money, and yet, in our culture, we are expected to admire those who have the most money, and despise those who have the least.

One of the guest speakers in my Financial Resource Development class posited a theory about the meaning of this cult of silence around money.

He said that people are typically silent before their God.

That just as Job and Elijah were silent when God appeared before them, this culture is silent before money.

We are afraid to question the evil that is done for the sake of money, because:

Money is the God of our culture.

So many of us have been left feeling divided by the silence of the Church when what we need is a healthy conversation about money.

We need to have money to survive – just physically survive in this economic system.

But we want to be good followers of God.

And Matthew 6:24 says that we cannot serve both God and money.

So how do we live as Christians in this money worshiping economic system? 

Look at verse 17 and following.

Money isn’t evil, it’s just not something to put your trust in.

We need to keep our focus on God’s abundance and be rich in what really matters.

• Doing good, 
• loving our neighbors, 
• And, going back to verse 8, IF we have more than enough to cover the basics, sharing what we have.

But if we don’t have enough to be content, then asking for more and working for more, in order to get the basics covered, is not worshiping money.  It’s just the daily grind of trying to keep body and soul on speaking terms!

So let’s not be silent about money.

Let’s be honest about money.

Money is not our God.

Money is not evil.

Money is just a tool.

A tool that we can choose to do good with.

Good for our own lives and good for the lives of others.