“Mine! Mine! Mine!”

Exodus 20:1-6, 15, 17

Exodus 20: 2-6, 15, 17 (Excerpts): I am the Lord your God [therefore]… you shall have no other gods before me… you shall not make for yourself any idol… you shall not steal… you shall not covet…

[Prayer]

The title of today’s sermon comes out of a phone conversation I had with my daughter a year or so ago. It was nothing that she said. It was what I heard being energetically said in the background. Granddaughter Alisa was holding tightly onto something she probably wasn’t supposed to have while running through the house saying, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!” Cute, maybe, coming from a two year old, but sad and tragic when uttered by adult Christians.

Robert Bohl, former Moderator of our General Assembly, writing in Stewardship, states, “Everything a person does, once they confess that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior, is stewardship. It involves what we believe about our possessions and what we do with them and what we believe about life and how we live.” Running around saying, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!” says a lot about us no matter what our age.

William Barclay, commenting on the First Commandment, wrote, “A person’s ‘god’ dictates a person’s conscious and unconscious behavior.”

According to Paul Tillich, that in which we place our faith is our Ultimate Concern. Jesus said something very similar, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

The First Commandment, indeed, all of Scripture makes it clear that no other god is to come before the Lord God Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. No idol is to stand in his place, not in the world and not in our hearts. God and God alone is to be our Ultimate Concern. It is his Holy Spirit that is to dictate our conscious and unconscious behavior. It is his Son Jesus Christ who is to be our only Lord and Savior. Once we profess our faith everything and everyone must take a backseat to God in our lives, especially those things we most often want to call “mine.”

The Eighth Commandment prohibits stealing what belongs to another person: their possessions, their money, or their spouse – that one even has its own commandment. We do not unlawfully take anything from anyone, including his or her life and freedom.

The commandment doesn’t explicitly say so, but we are not to steal from God either. Jesus said, “Render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and render unto God that which belongs to God.” At issue for the Christian is that everything ultimately belongs to God. There is nothing about which we can honestly say, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!” We don’t possess anything. God graciously lets us be stewards of whatever it is we have. In the Old Testament all he ever demanded was the first tenth, the first fruits, of what we earn – a tithe, ten percent. He actually lets us keep ninety percent of his stuff. That’s pretty gracious.

You may have noticed that I no longer announce the offering by saying, “Let us bring our tithes and offerings to the Lord.” I now say, “Let us bring God’s tithes and our offerings to the Lord.” The tithe is God’s, period. Only that which surpasses a tithe is an offering or gift. As we meet our obligations, it is God to whom we must give first: the cream off the top of our money, time, energy, and talents. The choice cuts and not the leavings. If we think of our money as fried chicken, God should get his first choice of breast, leg, or thigh. Never ever do we wait until we’re done, and then give him the necks, wings, and backs.

Jeremiah Wright, a UCC pastor from Chicago puts it this way. Would we want elders and deacons who steal from us to take up the collection? No. Why then, he went on to say, do we allow elders and deacons to lead us who do not tithe? It is his contention that giving God less than a tithe is an act of theft. We’re stealing God’s money.

Although I would try to make that point with more tact and sensitivity than did Rev. Wright, I still agree with his basic premise: to give God less than our best is to rob God of what belongs to him. So, why do we steal from God?

Mostly it’s because he really isn’t our Ultimate Concern. We may say that he is. We may even believe that he is, but it is not enough to just say it or to believe it on an intellectual level. Our lives must reflect it. If God really is our ultimate Concern – if he is the true object of our faith – if it is only Jesus Christ whom we trust as Lord and Savior, then every aspect of our lives must model that reality. That includes our financial stewardship.

I never tithed until after Sandy and I attended a conference on stewardship. For whatever reason, the concept finally made sense. We got it! From that time since we have given a tithe of our net income to God’s work. We stopped stealing from God. Or to continue with the theme of the sermon, we stopped running around with it saying, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!”

None of us is righteous, no not even one of us. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Between here and heaven none of us will ever be perfect stewards, financial or otherwise. We will each continue to be seduced by a variety of idols, some tangible, most intangible. At various times we’ll put other concerns ahead of God. It is our nature to do so.

Sandy and I never consciously decided to steal from God. We weren’t even aware that we were stealing. But we had been seduced by the gods of this world. My primary issue was debt. I was a credit card junkie. In pursuit of the so-called good life I kept buying things that I mostly didn’t need. I truly believed that I had to have a new car every two years.

After taking care of life’s real necessities and juggling all of those various minimum payments, there wasn’t a lot left over – and God only got part of that! As long as that was going on I could not, with a straight face, faithfully and honestly preach about stewardship. What was I supposed to tell folks: do as I say, not as I do? I think we call that hypocrisy.

The saddest thing about all that was that instead of owning all those things I ended up being owned by them. I was possessed by my possessions. I was a slave, not only to the credit card companies, but to my own addiction to having stuff. Addiction is at its roots the worship of a false god. Whatever we’re addicted to takes the place of God in our lives. It matters not how much we buy, own, or possess; none of it can fill that yawning emptiness created when we shut God out of our hearts.

I digress. The biggest sin I committed when I made an idol out of things was coveting. I wanted what I didn’t have, especially if other people had it. I wanted to dress for success, drive a new car, eat at the best restaurants, and travel to places I’d never been. I was extremely aware of the image I projected. Did I look successful? Was I living the middle-class dream that our consumer oriented culture told me I was supposed to be living? Did I have all the stuff I was supposed to have? Would I be a winner when I died because I’d accumulated the most toys?

Covetousness is a horrible sin. It’s most likely the underlying reason for theft, adultery, and idolatry. In order to get what we covet we often have to take it from somebody else. In the end I coveted what belonged to God. I wanted to hang on to God’s share of the goodies in order to buy more of those goodies for myself. I didn’t just rob Peter to pay Paul, although there was a lot of that going on; I robbed God in order to pay myself. I took God’s money and spent it as if it were “mine!”

Let me make a few things clear. This sermon is not intended to make anyone guilty or ashamed. In sharing my own experiences I’m definitely not trying to be self-righteous about the tithing Sandy and I do. If anything, I’m trying to help you avoid becoming the possessions junkie and credit card slave I used to be. I truly believe that the life I lived once upon a time was a preview of hell. It’s a scary place to be. It was as if the devil had me by nose and was dragging me around saying, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!”

Following Jesus involves a daily journey into faithful discipleship. Faithful discipleship involves every aspect of our lives, including our morals, ethics, behavior toward others, care of our health, and relationships with those we love. It also involves faithful stewardship of our time, talents, and money. In terms of money, it involves how we make and spend it and our attitude toward it. Do we have it, or does it have us? Are we so tied to it that we can’t let it go even if following Jesus requires us to? Do we see it as God’s money that we’re blessed to use? Or do we look at it and say, “Mine, mine, mine, mine, mine!” Amen.