Sermon Outline/Notes for Proper 8-B

(Summer Sermons are usually preached extemporaneously.)

4 Pentecost

July 2, 2006

St. Luke’s Church

This past week investor and guru Warren Buffett shocked the world by announcing that he was giving most of his enormous fortune to charity.  $31 billion will go to the Gates Foundation over the next several years.  An additional $6 billion will go to other family-run charities.

That’s a staggering amount of money.  It’s a staggering amount for one man to have amassed in his career and it’s a staggering amount to consider giving away.  It will leave him with a mere $7 billion or so to survive on.

"There is no reason we can't cure the top 20 diseases," Gates said while appearing with Buffett during a donation ceremony at the New York Public Library.  The Buffett and Gates families, as well as onlookers, were beaming as the so-called Oracle of Omaha officially made his benevolence a reality.   "There is more than one way to get to heaven, but this is a great way," said Buffett. He presented the biggest gift to Gates, and $1 billion donations to his own foundation and the foundations run by each of his three children. ^[1]

I thought about this historic gift as I was reading our Scriptures for today.  In his letter to Corinth, St. Paul is essentially writing a begging letter.  He is very concerned about the desperate condition of the Christians in Jerusalem, and he is asking wealthier Christians in places like Corinth to help them out.  We get these kinds of letters every day from hundreds of organizations.  And most of the time we feel overwhelmed.  How can I, how can we possibly make a difference when problems are so big?

8:13 I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between 8:14 your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.  8:15 As it is written, "The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little."

There are, however, real barriers to generosity.

Thanks to the Church Pension Fund, I recently had the opportunity to be part of a pilot program in financial planning.  By using an online service, I was able to receive professional financial advice, including things like retirement, saving for college and buying a house.  You would think that this advice would help reduce anxiety, but for me it actually made me worry more.  No one seems to be able to say exactly how much you need to save for retirement, for example.  It depends on how much you need to live and how long you will live and whether you are lucky enough to stay reasonably healthy.

But whatever amount you need to save is more than most of us have saved.  I believe this chronic worry about the future is the biggest barrier to generosity.  The other major barrier is our culture’s terrible consumerism.  We suffer from chronic affluenza.  We have a higher standard of living than any group of people in human history—better nutrition, clean water, and so much stuff that we need bigger and bigger houses to store it in.  Yet, somehow, enough is never enough.  We are told and we believe that we will never have enough, even though we have more than 99% of the world’s population.  The poorest person in Jamestown has more than the average person in most countries. 

So why should we care?  What is our obligation to others anyway?  I would suggest that it is a matter of priorities and balance.  We have many obligations in our lives.  We do need to be careful stewards of what we have.  We do need to plan carefully for our own future and for our children’s future.  But as Christians our obligations go further.  We are our brothers’ keepers, whether our brothers are next door or halfway around the world.  Each of us can make a difference.

An economist calculated what it would take to eradicate the worst causes of poverty in the world.  Then he calculated that if every person, government and institution in the developed world could chip in .7% of their budget, we could actually solve these global problems.  Get that.  We could actually end global poverty—at least in its most extreme forms.  In 2000 every member nation of the UN adopted what are called the Millennium Development Goals.  There are eight of them.

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

2. Achieve universal primary education

3. Promote gender equality and empower women

4. Reduce child mortality

5. Improve maternal health

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

7. Ensure environmental sustainability

8. Develop a global partnership for development

It was totally overshadowed by the Windsor Report and the election of the new presiding bishop, but one of the most important things the 2006 General Convention did was to make the Millennium Development Goals a stated mission priority of the Episcopal Church for the next three years.  Among other things this means that each diocese, congregation and parishioner is urged to give 0.7 percent toward the MDGs by July 7, 2007; i.e. by 07/07/07.

That is what St. Paul is talking about in a nutshell.  A fair balance between our abundance and others’ need.  .7% does not sound like very much.  But if you add my .7% to yours and so on, suddenly we are making a difference.