The Preaching Life

by William H. Willimon

In this issue we have once again expanded “The Preaching Life” feature in order to bring you the insightful comments of one of North America’s finest preachers. William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University. He is author of over 40 books on pastoral theology, the Christian faith, and church renewal.

Preaching on Stewardship

Because I am a preacher, I am in the business of words. Augustine referred to himself as a “word peddler.” That’s me. That’s you.

As a sideline, sometimes I am summoned to speak a word for a word. One of my first public speaking engagements outside my church was when I was asked to fly to somewhere in the Midwest to speak at a retirement dinner for a word. They called me and asked me to speak at the retirement of the word “celebrate.”

“Is he old enough to retire?” I asked.

“Well,” said my host, “celebrate really isn’t all that old; he has only been active since the mid-’60s. However, the trouble is that the church got hold of him, overused him, even abused him, and he just wore out. We started ‘celebrating worship,’ and then we ‘celebrated being at this meeting,’ and before long, after the church had ‘celebrated’ everything, there was nothing left to celebrate, and he just went limp. It was time to send him to the home.”

Sometime shortly thereafter, I was summoned to an even sadder occasion—a funeral in behalf of a word. It was a funeral for the word “charity.”

“You didn’t know charity in the early days,” said an older pastor.

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” I replied.

“Charity had a wonderful early life, one of the most beloved words in the church. Then, beginning sometime about mid-century, charity got ugly. People started accusing him of manipulation, abuse even. People learned that, though he had a bright face, he could have an ugly side as well.”

After that funeral, that is about the last I ever heard of charity.
Thus it was perhaps inevitable that a little church should call me to speak in behalf of a word. The word was “stewardship.”

“Come to Atlanta and say a word or two in behalf of stewardship,” they asked.
“Is he still with us?” I asked. I thought he had died. “Why, I haven’t heard of stewardship in years. Do you mean money?”

“Well, some people have known him by that name. We prefer also to think of him as time, talent, as well as a number of other attributes.”

“Now I have heard of stewardship being active in the fall, say around October, or if our pledge campaign planning committee fell through, sometime in mid-November, but I have never known him to be out and about in July. I had always thought that stewardship was on his last legs. I am glad to know that he is still up and about,” I said.

In the fall you may be asked in your congregation to say a word or two in behalf of stewardship.

“For of every one to whom much is given, much will be required,” said Jesus (Luke 12:48, MLB). In saying that, Jesus provoked a head-on collision with some of this society’s most widely held and deeply cherished values. In this pithy saying, Jesus dares to speak of our lives, of all that we are and all that we have, as gift. You and I are not conditioned to think like that. We live in a society, ruled over by something called the Constitution, in which our lives are seen as entitlements rather than as gifts. We live in a society of rights. The function of government is to give me the maximum room to exercise my inalienable rights.

In this sort of society, there is not much room for gift. Furthermore, there is no place for gratitude. If you give me my rights, you really haven’t given me anything. Nobody I know thanks the government when he or she receives his or her social security check.

“I earned it,” we will say. This is my just dessert.

Thus for Jesus to speak of our lives as something that we have been given sounds strange. Furthermore, every gift entails a giver, entails certain responsibilities and obligations. When we have no sense of our lives as gifts, we have no sense of obligation. To those who have been given nothing, nothing is required.

I was recently in a dinnertime conversation with a group of people who were talking about the then-current debate over affirmative action. Most of the people at that table could be fairly described as “self-made men.” I therefore expected them to have a uniformly negative view of affirmative action, the notion that the government ought to take measures that would enable some people to have a hand up, a first chance.

You can imagine my surprise, therefore, when one of the older men in the group looked around and said, “Every person seated at this table has been the beneficiary of ‘affirmative action.’ We didn’t call it that. What we called it was asking for help from someone who knew your father, or calling up someone who owed your mother a favor. When I graduated from the University of North Carolina in the depression, my daddy called me and told me don’t take the trouble to come home because there was no work. He advised me to go to Raleigh and to go to the office of a man whom he had once befriended and ask the man if he would hire me. I did so, and the man was good enough to give me a job, out of respect for my father. That’s affirmative action the old way.”

The person who said that had been a United States senator, governor of our state, and president of our university. I thought it rather amazing, and even wonderful, that even in our society of allegedly self-made men and women, he could still see his own life as a gift, a hand up offered to him by others.

The poet Maya Angelou, speaking to our first-year students on the first day they arrive on campus, said to them, “You have been the beneficiaries of the best that this society has to offer. We have given you the best education we know how to give. We have told you all that we know. Now, you owe us something.”

And then Ms. Angelou quoted Jesus: “For of every one to whom much is given, much will be required.”

In my last congregation, if you were to ask me the number one family, pastoral care problem, I would have to say that it was money. This might have been a surprising thing to say, since we were a blue-collar, inner-city congregation. Almost no one in that congregation was “rich” by our standards of judgment. However, we were, most of us, the first in our families to have a surplus of funds. This meant that we were among the first in our family to have to make definite choices about how we would spend our money. We had not made much money, but enough to get us beyond providing the basic necessities.

My single-parent, schoolteacher mother did not have to agonize over whether or not to buy me a car when I earned my license to drive. It was not even in the realm of possibility. However, by the time that I had children, I could afford to buy a car for my children if we decided that was important. We had to make a conscious decision about these matters.

I think that our congregations could do a better job of helping us to make better choices about money. Many of us are showing that we do not have the skills or the values to make wise decisions about money. We act as if the acquisition of things, as if participation in the treadmill of materialism, is a neutral affair. And yet, the Bible would say that our souls are at stake in these transactions.

The good news is that there are lots of people who are making certain conscious choices not to get on the materialistic treadmill.

As Jesus says, where our money is, there is our heart also. Will we treat our lives as our possessions, our achievements, or will we come to view our lives as God’s gifts? Will what we have be seen as an obligation to accumulate, to insulate, and to keep up things for ourselves? Or will our possessions be seen as a wonderful opportunity exuberantly to reach out to others?

During the tragic aftermath of the Heaven’s Gate suicides in California, a group of us pastors were discussing the tragedy. We agreed that it was tragic that these people ended their lives for a false god and a false faith. How could anyone do such a thing?
One of the pastors observed that in the news reports about Heaven’s Gate the news reporter seemed either outraged or bemused that someone in contemporary America would still die for religion. “A curious thing in my congregation is that almost nobody has given his or her life for religion. And yet, in the past year, I’ve had a half-dozen people either die or come near death with heart attacks, high blood pressure, and other diseases brought on by stress related to work. In our society you are considered crazy if you give your life for your faith, but you are considered normal if you drop dead for a dollar!”

Think about it.