This Week's Sermon: "Giving More"

Jeremiah 22:13-16

13 “Woe to him who builds his palace by unrighteousness,
his upper rooms by injustice,
making his subjects work for nothing,
not paying them for their labor.
14 He says, ‘I will build myself a great palace
with spacious upper rooms.’
So he makes large windows in it,
panels it with cedar
and decorates it in red.

15 “Does it make you a king
to have more and more cedar?
Did not your father have food and drink?
He did what was right and just,
so all went well with him.
16 He defended the cause of the poor and needy,
and so all went well.
Is that not what it means to know me?”
declares the LORD. (TNIV)


“The Advent Conspiracy: Spending Less, Giving More, Worshiping Fully, Loving All,” Week Two

A Christmas tree stood in the family’s living room, when one day underneath it appeared a water bottle filled to the brim with loose change and bills, just like we do for the emergency support shelter. The father, noticing the bottle and not knowing where it came from, sat his six-year-old son down and asked him about it. His son told him that he had saved up money and, as well, had taken the water bottle to school and told his classmates and teachers about the clean water shortage in the world. Sublimely, neither of the boy’s parents knew that he had done this.

Elsewhere, another six-year-old asked her parents not to spend any money on Christmas gifts for her that year, asking instead that the money they would have spent on her be given to a charity that digs wells so that other kids could have clean water to drink. And still another child, a five-year-old, wrote a letter to Santa Claus, explaining his wish for the other children in the world to receive food and water from Santa, and that he, this little boy, had his own bucket of money to give to Santa if it would help. I could follow this up with the clichéd sermon of how children really know more than we adults do. But that oversimplifies the Biblical importance of these types of stories—children are not simply the most humble, they are the most vulnerable among us as well—like the widow in Mark’s Gospel who gives the only two coins she has, despite the vulnerability that a widow unattached to a family would have in ancient Israel. That kind of charity in the midst of vulnerability is what makes stories like those remarkable.

Last Sunday began a new sermon series for us, as well as a new church year for us. This is the Second Sunday of Advent, the season the church traditionally dedicates to preparing the way for the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day. And…well, we do prepare for Christmas Day, but these days, it feels like it is more for the arrival of Santa Claus than the arrival of Jesus—the arrival of presents and stocking stuffers, rather than the arrival of our salvation. And so in response to this, three pastors across America started this project a few years ago called “The Advent Conspiracy: Can Christmas Still Change the World?” as a means to preach preparing for Christ’s coming by giving differently. This project promoting charity revolves around four main themes—spending less, giving more, worshiping fully, and loving all Via the major prophets who preceded Christ—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel—plus Jesus’s mother, Mary, we’ll explore a different theme in each of the 4 Sundays of Advent, and this Sunday’s theme is “Giving More.”

Jeremiah prophesies to a wide array of audiences throughout the 51 chapters of his book, but in this chapter, chapter 22, he is speaking directly to King Jehoiakim, whose name is heavily laced with irony—his name literally means “the one who YHWH has set up,” which makes sense when you remember that his father was King Josiah, who is credited with re-discovering the law of Moses in the Temple, many centuries after Moses’s life and death, many centuries after which Israelite and Judean kings from Rehoboam and Jeroboam to Omri and Ahab had all strayed from the path of the Lord. But Jehoiakim does not live up to his father’s expectations, and Jeremiah’s prophecy today makes that abundantly clear. Contrast King Jehoiakim with the children I told you of at the beginning of my message—out of vulnerability, our children give of themselves. And out of a place where he is likely the least vulnerable of all, the richest, the most well-guarded, the king of Judah seeks only to take and to take to make himself even less vulnerable than he already was—stronger, tougher, greater palaces, built on the backs of injustice and slavery, whatever it took to make this king invulnerable and comfortable in his invulnerability. And in making himself even more invulnerable, by building his upper rooms of cedar, by raising even higher walls to protect those upper rooms, Jehoiakim was further separating himself from his people—he was creating more impediments to being able to give more to them as their king.

This is the part of the Bible’s central message that is almost Zen-like in its paradoxical nature—in order to give more of ourselves, we have to empty ourselves first of whatever it is we have left to give. In order to give fully, we must have so little to give to begin with. This was not the case for Jehoiakim, because as Jeremiah points out to him, and to us, this was not simply a matter of national security—Israelite and Lebanese cedar was highly valued, and red paint was greatly prized. This was a matter of giving yourself more and more, of Caesar rendering unto Caesar, and rather than emptying himself, Jehoiakim is content to fill himself to the brim.

But this was the case for the Messiah whose birth we are preparing to celebrate—as the Gospel of John writes, what was truly extraordinary about the Word of God was that it became flesh, that it dwelled among us, made its home with our homes, spoke our language, and died as one of us. Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians that Jesus, for all his power and splendor in heaven, decided instead to empty Himself and take the most humble of forms, the form of a human servant, and then, only then, could He die upon the cross. Fundamentally, Jesus was incapable of being our Messiah and Savior until He emptied himself of everything He had left—only then could He, in ways only He can, give more. Only then could He give fully of himself.

Meanwhile, those with much, our latter-day King Jehoiakims, still also continue to hoard. But when our kings and men of power are incapable of giving from the depths of their souls—to give out of their own vulnerability, let us step up in their place, in the place of the kings of Israel and Judah who did not have it in themselves to give out of their abundance, in the place of the churches of old that chose to sell indulgences rather than clothe the naked and feed the hungry, and in the place of the churches of today that choose to install Jumbotrons in their sanctuaries-turned-auditoriums rather than to use those sums of money to heed the fundamental command of Christ in the Gospels, to give away all that we have and follow Him without condition.

How to do that, though? When presented with Christ’s command, with Jeremiah’s prophecy against the tiny bit of King Jehoiakim that we know deep down resides in us all, what on earth are we to do? This is the how-to of the entire Advent Conspiracy project, and it boils down, in its most pure and simple form, into two straightforward steps: to engage in alternate gift giving, and to use the funds you save from alternate gift giving to turn into charity and mission. Alternate gift giving is not giving gifts on the cheap—it is finding value in gifts that are not monetary in nature, the gifts that convey sentimental and emotional value, the gifts whose worth is not wrapped up in their price tags, but in their symbolization of love, of including as much of that person, of their relationship with you, in the essence of the gift. It can be the giving of a gift that was made with your time and energy rather than with your money, it can be the giving of a gift to a charity in the name of the person you love, it could be making a gift to be shared between the two of you in a uniquely meaningful way. But in any case, its message is meant to be very different than the plasma flatscreen HD TV or the Starbucks-replica espresso machine that says, “I love you this many dollars much.” And when you turn from expressing love in terms of monetary expense, and instead in terms of emotional expense, it surprisingly can free you to give on behalf of a better world—the kingdom of God that Jesus Christ was born for, preached for, and died for. The kingdom in which our kings and men of power do not content themselves with their vast palaces of cedar, expensive paint, and lavish décor, but who instead are courageous enough to give of themselves until there is nothing left to give. Even if others won’t, may we do likewise, in the name of the child whose birth we await. By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
December 4, 2011