The Sermon on the Amount (2001)
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday December 9, 2001
READINGS: Acts 4:32 - 5:11.
from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (see below)
***
I’ve always admired Benjamin Franklin. He was a truly extraordinary man, and someone who in many ways provides a very able orientation to our topic for this morning. Popular culture knows Franklin best for his penchant for flying kites in foul weather, as the inventor of bifocals and the potbelly stove, and as the author and publisher of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” with its pithy maxims of frugality and self-reliance: “A penny saved is a penny got,” “God helps them that help themselves,” “Little Strokes fell Great Oaks” and many others which even today remain part of our common-sense cultural wisdom. Slightly more sophisticated students of history may remember him for his participation in the Continental Congress, and in particular his advice to the other delegates who assembled there in Philadelphia in 1776 to plot a Revolution: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
As ambassador to France during the Revolutionary War, Franklin was responsible, virtually single-handedly, for enlisting French support in the American cause — without which it would have been impossible for the American colonists to have thrown off British rule. Afterwards, one Frenchman observed: “He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven, then the scepter from tyrants.” Yet even this eulogy only scratches the surface of Franklin’s accomplishments. As a private citizen in colonial Philadelphia, Franklin organized America’s first subscription library, restructured the constabulary and organized the first volunteer fire company, founded a school, a hospital, and the American Philosophical Society, arranged for paved streets, street lamps, and a variety of other civil reforms, all while publishing Philadelphia’s most widely-read newspaper (another enterprise he started from scratch) and operating a successful printing business which enabled him essentially to retire at the age of 42 in order to devote himself exclusively to public service and his scientific and philosophical pursuits. And he had very specific advice to religious leaders about gathering financial support for their endeavors. This passage also comes from his Autobiography:
...It was about this time that another projector, the Rev. Gilbert Tennent, came to me with a request that I would assist him in procuring a subscription for erecting a new meetinghouse. It was to be for the use of a congregation he had gathered among Presbyterians who were originally disciples of Mr. Whitfield. Unwilling to make myself disagreeable to my fellow citizens by too frequently soliciting their contributions, I absolutely refused. He then desired I would furnish him with a list of the names of persons I knew by experience to be generous and public-spirited. I thought it would be unbecoming in me, after their kind compliance with my solicitations, to mark them out to be worried by other beggers, and therefore refused also to give such a list. He then desired I would at least give him my advice. “That I will readily do,” I said, “in the first place, I advise you to apply to all those who you know will give something; next, to those who you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not, and show them the list of those who have given; and lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of them you may have been mistaken.” He laughed and thanked me, and said he would take my advice. He did so, for he asked of everybody; and he obtained a much larger sum than he expected, with which he erected the capacious and very elegant meetinghouse that stands in Arch Street....
It’s interesting to reflect about what has changed and what has remained the same in the two and a half centuries since Franklin first offered this advice to Reverend Tennent. I doubt, for example, that the meetinghouse still exists, but the congregation still may (in some form or another), and the advice is as good as ever. The biggest change though, it seems to me, can be seen in the things we now take for granted that in Franklin’s day were virtually unheard of. Police protection, the fire department, schools, hospitals, libraries, paved streets and street lights — these things are now all typically provided to us, as citizens and taxpayers, by our local government. We may not always like the taxes we pay, but we have come to take the services for granted. In eighteenth-century colonial America, however, all of these services were nonexistent until Franklin and others like him organized themselves in order to create them. “When the Well’s dry, they know the Worth of Water,” Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Often we simply don't know how much we value something until that thing is no longer around to be enjoyed.
I think most people intuitively understand these correlation's, but it’s harder to see them at work in some areas of our lives than it is in others. And it seems to me that the area of Religion is among the most difficult of these areas, principally because there is such a strong association within the Judeo-Christian tradition between concern about money and lack of concern about religion. “Ye cannot serve [both] God and Mammon;” “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and to God the things that are God’s.” “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Sayings of similar sentiment permeate the Gospel, carrying with them the message that religion should be free, that faith is a gift from God, that concerns about money, treasures here on earth, distract us from our more important duties to the object of our Ultimate Concern, our Divine Creator. Money (or at least the love of it) is the root of all evil; something dirty, tainted, bad — a barrier to the authentic religious life, and a source of profound hypocrisy within the institutional church as well, which often seems more concerned about the status of the building fund than it is with the spiritual lives of its members. It’s OK to chuckle over these stereotypes when we recognize them, but it would be a mistake to take them too lightly, because they reflect a deeply-rooted, fundamental ambivalence about money and religion which I suspect, to some degree or another, we all share simply as participants in the larger culture which surrounds us.
And when we look back in history, not just to Franklin’s day, but to the very beginnings of Christianity itself, we discover that this tension about money, often framed in the context of a conflict between the sacred and the secular, the eternal and the temporal, is an excellent candidate for being the definitive theological problem which has been the driving force behind the development of Western Christianity as we know it today, in all its many manifestations, including Unitarian Universalism. Think about this with me for a moment. As best we can tell, Jesus and his disciples lived lives as wandering mendicants. They traveled by foot from town to town, sleeping out-of-doors or staying in the homes of people they met along the way, subsisting on the hospitality of others or perhaps what they could forage along the road. Even if we take at face value the possibility that the disciples were traveling with someone who could turn water into wine, or feed thousands with the substance of just a few loaves and fishes, it was still a pretty simple lifestyle. We do know they had some money (Judas Iscariot, after all, was their treasurer), but principally they subsisted because their needs were few, and thus easily satisfied.
Likewise, in the book of Acts we read that after the Crucifixion, the early Christian Community organized itself as a primitive form of Communism: everyone was expect to deliver all of their worldly goods into a common pot, which would then be administered by the elders and deacons of the community based on the needs of its members. Yet there was also resistance to this idea (as we saw in the reading); and as the Apostle Paul traveled through Asia minor, not only did he frequently remind people of the Old Testament proverb not to muzzle the ox as it pulled the millstone over the grain (that is to say, if the critter is going to do the work it ought at least be allowed to eat), but he also took up a collection in every city he visited for the support of the Saints who were living in Jerusalem, implying that even the expedient of withdrawing from the world and holding all property in common was not enough to make the Church self-sufficient, and that it still required the support of individuals living and working in the temporal world in order to make ends meet. Even Paul himself had a “day-job;” he worked as a tent-maker in addition to being an apostle, which is the origin of the term “tent-making ministry,” which refers to someone who both works in a secular occupation and likewise preaches on Sundays.
And all this was in a time when the Church was still essentially an underground organization, meeting in secret in people’s homes, often under threat of persecution by Roman authorities. After the fourth century, when the church became, literally, a part of the “Establishment,” its financial situation changed considerably. Over time, and within the context of a Medieval, feudal economy, the church (through various means) acquired considerable amounts of property in the form of land, art, gold, jewels and whatever else passed for legal tender in its day. As a landholder, the church received revenues in the form of tithes of agricultural produce; and historically, this particular economic arrangement is the source of Roman Catholicism’s on-going doctrine of clerical celibacy, and the traditional monastic vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience: rules designed to prevent the problem of Church officials attempting to pass on Church property which they administered into the hands of their own offspring, rather than maintaining it under the control of the church.
But for raising ready money, nothing beat the sale of Indulgences: essentially certificates guaranteeing the forgiveness of sin (and thus the avoidance of punishment in the afterlife) which were offered for sale by roving venders to anyone who had the cash to buy their way out of eternal damnation. Historians generally agree that it was the abuse of this system of church fundraising, as much as any other factor, which helped to undermine the credibility of the Papacy in the sixteenth century, and thus produced the Protestant Reformation.
Yet the coming of the Reformation was not necessarily accompanied by the reform of church finance. In England, for example, Henry the Eighth made himself head of the Church of England, and appropriated the bulk of church property for the crown; the Church became, in effect, a semi-autonomous branch of the state, and was supported by state revenue. This pattern, with modification, persisted in Puritan New England as well. Clergy were considered public officials, not unlike a magistrate or a Justice of the Peace, with specific responsibilities for the spiritual well-being of the communities they served. Their salaries were voted by the parish (which was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the county or township), and paid through the property taxes of every landowner in the jurisdiction, whether or not they were formally members of the church. A similar levy was likewise assessed for the maintenance of the Meeting House: a system which persisted in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1833.
Members of dissenting churches (such as Quakers and Universalists, and I suspect the original members of this “Second Congregational Society” as well) were eventually allowed to indicate that they wished for their taxes to go to the support of a preacher of their own denomination, a sort of “voucher system” of church finance. Capital funds were typically raised by selling title to the pews within the new Meeting House as if, in effect, they were condominiums; the “proprietor of the pew” would literally receive a deed for his family’s sixteen square feet of real estate, and then would be assessed an annual “pew rent” in order to pay for building upkeep. The less tangible property of the church: special funds and bequests, communion silver, and the like, were held in trust by the Deacons of the church; and it was in fact a dispute among the Deacons of the First Church in Dedham over control of that congregation’s communion silver in the aftermath of a disagreement between the liberals and the orthodox concerning the tenure of a minister which led to the lawsuit that became the ultimate catalyst of the so-called Unitarian controversy of 1820.
I share all this historical trivia with you not only because I hope you will find it as fascinating as I do, but also because I think it provides an important perspective on the patterns of financial management practiced by mainline denominations such as ours today, patterns which for the most part we take for granted as if they were Gospel, but are actually of relatively recent origin. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a little over a century and a half ago, the so-called “voluntary principle” had become virtually universal in American church life: the doors came off of those old box pews, individuals no longer had to rent a seat in order to hear a sermon, and the bills were paid by voluntary contributions on the part of the members, as the collection plate gradually replaced the pew deed as the fundamental symbol of financial stewardship.
There were some obvious advantages to this system, but there were some serious drawbacks as well. The church was no longer a public, tax-supported institution, nor was it simply a private “club” of dissenters. Rather, it took on some of the best qualities of both, as well as some of the worst. At its best, when congregations took seriously their role of public ministry, the institution of the Church became a gift from the worshiping community to the wider community: an oasis for people who needed it regardless of their financial circumstances. Yet there was also a tendency to grow distracted by the entrepreneurial quality of the voluntary church. Over time, people naturally became less and less concerned about the wider mission of the church, and more focused specifically on whether they were getting their “money’s worth” out of their local congregation. Contributions to world missions tapered off as the “unified budget” replaced dedicated funds; clergy became viewed not just as leaders, but as employees; and the notion of church membership consisting of the “proprietors of the pews” was replaced by the metaphor of “parishioners as customers,” in which individuals “shopped” for “services” to be provided through “church programs” — a euphemism for the “product” which the church now “markets” to the world.
I realize that it’s hard to frame the religious enterprise in these terms without it sounding just a little cynical, but I hope you’ll be able to set that aside for just a moment, because, for better or worse, this is the environment within which the church now exists here at the dawn of the twenty-first century. We can’t really avoid it, but we shouldn't allow it to distract us either from all the other things that a church can be and should be. Because as we look back over two thousand years of the history of church finance — from the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon on the Amount — certain timeless themes emerge which transcend the context of the moment.
And the first of these is that an effective congregation is in essence a partnership, a community, a fellowship of individuals who, literally, share things in common (which is what the Greek word koinania, often translated as “fellowship,” really means). And it is this experience of partnership — which the early church often spoke of not only in terms of the metaphor of one family, the children of God; but of one body, the body of Christ — this experience of partnership defines the church experience, and gives it its meaning. This partnership is one in which all are called to do their share, each according to their ability to do so; and all are invited to share in the fruits, each according to their need or interest. So when your canvasser comes to call on you in the next two weeks, I hope you will remember that they are not there to ask you to give them your money. They are there to share with you their vision of this church and its future, to listen to your ideas about these same topics, and to invite you to become their partner in helping to create it.
The second point flows from this first, and basically states that church, therefore, is not so much a service that we buy for ourselves, as it is a gift that we give to one another. It is service, not in the sense of a product we acquire, but rather in the sense of a ministry we deliver: a public service which we perform in our community, not only for ourselves, but for all who need it. When you contribute to the church, you are in fact committing a literal act of philanthropy: philio-anthropos, the love of humankind. It is an act of charity in the original sense: charitas -- a freely-given gift, given out of love; the same word which the New Testament uses to denote God’s loving gift of grace to us. In other words, the ability to be generous, the ability to generate a gift motivated by the willingness to share freely from the many gifts that we have received, is one way in which we might be said to have been created in the likeness of God, and by which we express and honor the divine spark within us all.
The last point I will make (although it is by no means the final point I could make), is that the church as an institution (and by this I mean not only this local congregation, but also our larger religious denomination) is something that we have received in trust from a previous generation, and which we hold in trust for a generation which will follow. We are not really its owners, we are merely its custodians; and yet, in some ways, this makes our responsibility all the greater. Because, you see, (to continue the metaphor of the moment), we are not really purchasing a service for ourselves, we are investing in the infrastructure of our larger community; we are not simply paying to have free water piped to our house, we are insuring that the well will always be there, so that no one in our community need go thirsty again. That is the program we’re working toward. That is what gives our efforts a significance beyond ourselves and our own needs alone. When you start to think about your support of this church in terms of an investment in the future, it changes one’s notion of “the bottom line” significantly. The question is no longer one of “getting your money’s worth” this week, or this month, or this year; rather, the question becomes how important is it that a liberal religious institution such as this one continues to survive and thrive here on Nantucket far into the unforeseeable future.
At the conclusion of Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes: “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
This coming week, as your canvassers contact you about your pledge for the coming year, I hope that you will welcome them into your homes with generous hospitality, and that together you will dream bold dreams of what this church might become if money were no object. And then I hope that each of you will do your part to help make that vision a reality. When we think of South Church we often think of the clocktower as a symbol of all that this church has historically stood for. Remember also that you, and your generous support, are the foundation that keeps that tower and all that it continues to stand for aloft, not just today, but as a legacy for the generations that will follow you.
***
READING: from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
In 1739 arrived among us from England the Rev. Mr. Whitfield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher. He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches; but the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in the fields.... And it being found inconvenient to assemble in the open air subject to its inclemencies, the building of a house to meet in was no sooner proposed and persons appointed to receive contributions, but sufficient sums were soon received to procure the ground and erect the building which was one hundred feet long and seventy broad, about the size of Westminster Hall; and the work was carried on with such spirit as to be finished in a much shorter time than could have been expected. Both house and ground were vested in trustees expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people of Philadelphia, the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect but the inhabitants in general, so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohometanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.
Mr. Whitfield, in leaving us, went preaching all the way thro’ the Colonies to Georgia. The settlement of that province had been lately begun; but instead of being made with hardy, industrious husbandmen accustomed to labour, the only people fit for such an enterprise, it was with families of broken shopkeepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the gaols — who, being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. The sight of their miserable situation inspired the benevolent heart of Mr. Whitfield with the idea of building an orphan house there in which they might be supported and educated. Returning northward he preached up this charity and made large collections; for his eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance. I did not disapprove of the design, but as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expence, I thought it would have been better to have built the house here and brought the children to it. This I advised, but he was resolute in his first project and rejected my counsel, and I thereupon refused to contribute. I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved that he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded, I began to soften and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all. At this sermon there was also one of our club, who being of my sentiments respecting the building in Georgia and suspecting a collection might be intended, had by precaution emptied his pockets before he came from home; towards the conclusion of the discourse, however, he felt a strong desire to give and applied to a neighbor who stood near him to borrow some money for the purpose. The application was unfortunately made to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be affected by the preacher. His answer was “At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely, but not now; for thee seems to be out of thy right senses.”
Some of Mr. Whitfield’s enemies affected to suppose that he would apply these collections to his own private emolument, but I who was intimately acquainted with him (being employed in printing his sermons and journals, etc.) never had the least suspicion of his integrity, but am to this day decidedly of opinion that he was in all his conduct a perfectly honest man. And methinks my testimony in his favour ought to have the more weight as we had no religious connection. He used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard. Ours was a mere civil friendship, sincere on both sides, and lasted to his death.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday December 9, 2001
READINGS: Acts 4:32 - 5:11.
from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (see below)
***
I’ve always admired Benjamin Franklin. He was a truly extraordinary man, and someone who in many ways provides a very able orientation to our topic for this morning. Popular culture knows Franklin best for his penchant for flying kites in foul weather, as the inventor of bifocals and the potbelly stove, and as the author and publisher of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” with its pithy maxims of frugality and self-reliance: “A penny saved is a penny got,” “God helps them that help themselves,” “Little Strokes fell Great Oaks” and many others which even today remain part of our common-sense cultural wisdom. Slightly more sophisticated students of history may remember him for his participation in the Continental Congress, and in particular his advice to the other delegates who assembled there in Philadelphia in 1776 to plot a Revolution: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
As ambassador to France during the Revolutionary War, Franklin was responsible, virtually single-handedly, for enlisting French support in the American cause — without which it would have been impossible for the American colonists to have thrown off British rule. Afterwards, one Frenchman observed: “He snatched the thunderbolt from heaven, then the scepter from tyrants.” Yet even this eulogy only scratches the surface of Franklin’s accomplishments. As a private citizen in colonial Philadelphia, Franklin organized America’s first subscription library, restructured the constabulary and organized the first volunteer fire company, founded a school, a hospital, and the American Philosophical Society, arranged for paved streets, street lamps, and a variety of other civil reforms, all while publishing Philadelphia’s most widely-read newspaper (another enterprise he started from scratch) and operating a successful printing business which enabled him essentially to retire at the age of 42 in order to devote himself exclusively to public service and his scientific and philosophical pursuits. And he had very specific advice to religious leaders about gathering financial support for their endeavors. This passage also comes from his Autobiography:
...It was about this time that another projector, the Rev. Gilbert Tennent, came to me with a request that I would assist him in procuring a subscription for erecting a new meetinghouse. It was to be for the use of a congregation he had gathered among Presbyterians who were originally disciples of Mr. Whitfield. Unwilling to make myself disagreeable to my fellow citizens by too frequently soliciting their contributions, I absolutely refused. He then desired I would furnish him with a list of the names of persons I knew by experience to be generous and public-spirited. I thought it would be unbecoming in me, after their kind compliance with my solicitations, to mark them out to be worried by other beggers, and therefore refused also to give such a list. He then desired I would at least give him my advice. “That I will readily do,” I said, “in the first place, I advise you to apply to all those who you know will give something; next, to those who you are uncertain whether they will give anything or not, and show them the list of those who have given; and lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of them you may have been mistaken.” He laughed and thanked me, and said he would take my advice. He did so, for he asked of everybody; and he obtained a much larger sum than he expected, with which he erected the capacious and very elegant meetinghouse that stands in Arch Street....
It’s interesting to reflect about what has changed and what has remained the same in the two and a half centuries since Franklin first offered this advice to Reverend Tennent. I doubt, for example, that the meetinghouse still exists, but the congregation still may (in some form or another), and the advice is as good as ever. The biggest change though, it seems to me, can be seen in the things we now take for granted that in Franklin’s day were virtually unheard of. Police protection, the fire department, schools, hospitals, libraries, paved streets and street lights — these things are now all typically provided to us, as citizens and taxpayers, by our local government. We may not always like the taxes we pay, but we have come to take the services for granted. In eighteenth-century colonial America, however, all of these services were nonexistent until Franklin and others like him organized themselves in order to create them. “When the Well’s dry, they know the Worth of Water,” Franklin wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanac. Often we simply don't know how much we value something until that thing is no longer around to be enjoyed.
I think most people intuitively understand these correlation's, but it’s harder to see them at work in some areas of our lives than it is in others. And it seems to me that the area of Religion is among the most difficult of these areas, principally because there is such a strong association within the Judeo-Christian tradition between concern about money and lack of concern about religion. “Ye cannot serve [both] God and Mammon;” “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and to God the things that are God’s.” “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Sayings of similar sentiment permeate the Gospel, carrying with them the message that religion should be free, that faith is a gift from God, that concerns about money, treasures here on earth, distract us from our more important duties to the object of our Ultimate Concern, our Divine Creator. Money (or at least the love of it) is the root of all evil; something dirty, tainted, bad — a barrier to the authentic religious life, and a source of profound hypocrisy within the institutional church as well, which often seems more concerned about the status of the building fund than it is with the spiritual lives of its members. It’s OK to chuckle over these stereotypes when we recognize them, but it would be a mistake to take them too lightly, because they reflect a deeply-rooted, fundamental ambivalence about money and religion which I suspect, to some degree or another, we all share simply as participants in the larger culture which surrounds us.
And when we look back in history, not just to Franklin’s day, but to the very beginnings of Christianity itself, we discover that this tension about money, often framed in the context of a conflict between the sacred and the secular, the eternal and the temporal, is an excellent candidate for being the definitive theological problem which has been the driving force behind the development of Western Christianity as we know it today, in all its many manifestations, including Unitarian Universalism. Think about this with me for a moment. As best we can tell, Jesus and his disciples lived lives as wandering mendicants. They traveled by foot from town to town, sleeping out-of-doors or staying in the homes of people they met along the way, subsisting on the hospitality of others or perhaps what they could forage along the road. Even if we take at face value the possibility that the disciples were traveling with someone who could turn water into wine, or feed thousands with the substance of just a few loaves and fishes, it was still a pretty simple lifestyle. We do know they had some money (Judas Iscariot, after all, was their treasurer), but principally they subsisted because their needs were few, and thus easily satisfied.
Likewise, in the book of Acts we read that after the Crucifixion, the early Christian Community organized itself as a primitive form of Communism: everyone was expect to deliver all of their worldly goods into a common pot, which would then be administered by the elders and deacons of the community based on the needs of its members. Yet there was also resistance to this idea (as we saw in the reading); and as the Apostle Paul traveled through Asia minor, not only did he frequently remind people of the Old Testament proverb not to muzzle the ox as it pulled the millstone over the grain (that is to say, if the critter is going to do the work it ought at least be allowed to eat), but he also took up a collection in every city he visited for the support of the Saints who were living in Jerusalem, implying that even the expedient of withdrawing from the world and holding all property in common was not enough to make the Church self-sufficient, and that it still required the support of individuals living and working in the temporal world in order to make ends meet. Even Paul himself had a “day-job;” he worked as a tent-maker in addition to being an apostle, which is the origin of the term “tent-making ministry,” which refers to someone who both works in a secular occupation and likewise preaches on Sundays.
And all this was in a time when the Church was still essentially an underground organization, meeting in secret in people’s homes, often under threat of persecution by Roman authorities. After the fourth century, when the church became, literally, a part of the “Establishment,” its financial situation changed considerably. Over time, and within the context of a Medieval, feudal economy, the church (through various means) acquired considerable amounts of property in the form of land, art, gold, jewels and whatever else passed for legal tender in its day. As a landholder, the church received revenues in the form of tithes of agricultural produce; and historically, this particular economic arrangement is the source of Roman Catholicism’s on-going doctrine of clerical celibacy, and the traditional monastic vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience: rules designed to prevent the problem of Church officials attempting to pass on Church property which they administered into the hands of their own offspring, rather than maintaining it under the control of the church.
But for raising ready money, nothing beat the sale of Indulgences: essentially certificates guaranteeing the forgiveness of sin (and thus the avoidance of punishment in the afterlife) which were offered for sale by roving venders to anyone who had the cash to buy their way out of eternal damnation. Historians generally agree that it was the abuse of this system of church fundraising, as much as any other factor, which helped to undermine the credibility of the Papacy in the sixteenth century, and thus produced the Protestant Reformation.
Yet the coming of the Reformation was not necessarily accompanied by the reform of church finance. In England, for example, Henry the Eighth made himself head of the Church of England, and appropriated the bulk of church property for the crown; the Church became, in effect, a semi-autonomous branch of the state, and was supported by state revenue. This pattern, with modification, persisted in Puritan New England as well. Clergy were considered public officials, not unlike a magistrate or a Justice of the Peace, with specific responsibilities for the spiritual well-being of the communities they served. Their salaries were voted by the parish (which was the ecclesiastical equivalent of the county or township), and paid through the property taxes of every landowner in the jurisdiction, whether or not they were formally members of the church. A similar levy was likewise assessed for the maintenance of the Meeting House: a system which persisted in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts until 1833.
Members of dissenting churches (such as Quakers and Universalists, and I suspect the original members of this “Second Congregational Society” as well) were eventually allowed to indicate that they wished for their taxes to go to the support of a preacher of their own denomination, a sort of “voucher system” of church finance. Capital funds were typically raised by selling title to the pews within the new Meeting House as if, in effect, they were condominiums; the “proprietor of the pew” would literally receive a deed for his family’s sixteen square feet of real estate, and then would be assessed an annual “pew rent” in order to pay for building upkeep. The less tangible property of the church: special funds and bequests, communion silver, and the like, were held in trust by the Deacons of the church; and it was in fact a dispute among the Deacons of the First Church in Dedham over control of that congregation’s communion silver in the aftermath of a disagreement between the liberals and the orthodox concerning the tenure of a minister which led to the lawsuit that became the ultimate catalyst of the so-called Unitarian controversy of 1820.
I share all this historical trivia with you not only because I hope you will find it as fascinating as I do, but also because I think it provides an important perspective on the patterns of financial management practiced by mainline denominations such as ours today, patterns which for the most part we take for granted as if they were Gospel, but are actually of relatively recent origin. By the middle of the nineteenth century, a little over a century and a half ago, the so-called “voluntary principle” had become virtually universal in American church life: the doors came off of those old box pews, individuals no longer had to rent a seat in order to hear a sermon, and the bills were paid by voluntary contributions on the part of the members, as the collection plate gradually replaced the pew deed as the fundamental symbol of financial stewardship.
There were some obvious advantages to this system, but there were some serious drawbacks as well. The church was no longer a public, tax-supported institution, nor was it simply a private “club” of dissenters. Rather, it took on some of the best qualities of both, as well as some of the worst. At its best, when congregations took seriously their role of public ministry, the institution of the Church became a gift from the worshiping community to the wider community: an oasis for people who needed it regardless of their financial circumstances. Yet there was also a tendency to grow distracted by the entrepreneurial quality of the voluntary church. Over time, people naturally became less and less concerned about the wider mission of the church, and more focused specifically on whether they were getting their “money’s worth” out of their local congregation. Contributions to world missions tapered off as the “unified budget” replaced dedicated funds; clergy became viewed not just as leaders, but as employees; and the notion of church membership consisting of the “proprietors of the pews” was replaced by the metaphor of “parishioners as customers,” in which individuals “shopped” for “services” to be provided through “church programs” — a euphemism for the “product” which the church now “markets” to the world.
I realize that it’s hard to frame the religious enterprise in these terms without it sounding just a little cynical, but I hope you’ll be able to set that aside for just a moment, because, for better or worse, this is the environment within which the church now exists here at the dawn of the twenty-first century. We can’t really avoid it, but we shouldn't allow it to distract us either from all the other things that a church can be and should be. Because as we look back over two thousand years of the history of church finance — from the Sermon on the Mount to the Sermon on the Amount — certain timeless themes emerge which transcend the context of the moment.
And the first of these is that an effective congregation is in essence a partnership, a community, a fellowship of individuals who, literally, share things in common (which is what the Greek word koinania, often translated as “fellowship,” really means). And it is this experience of partnership — which the early church often spoke of not only in terms of the metaphor of one family, the children of God; but of one body, the body of Christ — this experience of partnership defines the church experience, and gives it its meaning. This partnership is one in which all are called to do their share, each according to their ability to do so; and all are invited to share in the fruits, each according to their need or interest. So when your canvasser comes to call on you in the next two weeks, I hope you will remember that they are not there to ask you to give them your money. They are there to share with you their vision of this church and its future, to listen to your ideas about these same topics, and to invite you to become their partner in helping to create it.
The second point flows from this first, and basically states that church, therefore, is not so much a service that we buy for ourselves, as it is a gift that we give to one another. It is service, not in the sense of a product we acquire, but rather in the sense of a ministry we deliver: a public service which we perform in our community, not only for ourselves, but for all who need it. When you contribute to the church, you are in fact committing a literal act of philanthropy: philio-anthropos, the love of humankind. It is an act of charity in the original sense: charitas -- a freely-given gift, given out of love; the same word which the New Testament uses to denote God’s loving gift of grace to us. In other words, the ability to be generous, the ability to generate a gift motivated by the willingness to share freely from the many gifts that we have received, is one way in which we might be said to have been created in the likeness of God, and by which we express and honor the divine spark within us all.
The last point I will make (although it is by no means the final point I could make), is that the church as an institution (and by this I mean not only this local congregation, but also our larger religious denomination) is something that we have received in trust from a previous generation, and which we hold in trust for a generation which will follow. We are not really its owners, we are merely its custodians; and yet, in some ways, this makes our responsibility all the greater. Because, you see, (to continue the metaphor of the moment), we are not really purchasing a service for ourselves, we are investing in the infrastructure of our larger community; we are not simply paying to have free water piped to our house, we are insuring that the well will always be there, so that no one in our community need go thirsty again. That is the program we’re working toward. That is what gives our efforts a significance beyond ourselves and our own needs alone. When you start to think about your support of this church in terms of an investment in the future, it changes one’s notion of “the bottom line” significantly. The question is no longer one of “getting your money’s worth” this week, or this month, or this year; rather, the question becomes how important is it that a liberal religious institution such as this one continues to survive and thrive here on Nantucket far into the unforeseeable future.
At the conclusion of Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes: “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
This coming week, as your canvassers contact you about your pledge for the coming year, I hope that you will welcome them into your homes with generous hospitality, and that together you will dream bold dreams of what this church might become if money were no object. And then I hope that each of you will do your part to help make that vision a reality. When we think of South Church we often think of the clocktower as a symbol of all that this church has historically stood for. Remember also that you, and your generous support, are the foundation that keeps that tower and all that it continues to stand for aloft, not just today, but as a legacy for the generations that will follow you.
***
READING: from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
In 1739 arrived among us from England the Rev. Mr. Whitfield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher. He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches; but the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in the fields.... And it being found inconvenient to assemble in the open air subject to its inclemencies, the building of a house to meet in was no sooner proposed and persons appointed to receive contributions, but sufficient sums were soon received to procure the ground and erect the building which was one hundred feet long and seventy broad, about the size of Westminster Hall; and the work was carried on with such spirit as to be finished in a much shorter time than could have been expected. Both house and ground were vested in trustees expressly for the use of any preacher of any religious persuasion who might desire to say something to the people of Philadelphia, the design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect but the inhabitants in general, so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohometanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.
Mr. Whitfield, in leaving us, went preaching all the way thro’ the Colonies to Georgia. The settlement of that province had been lately begun; but instead of being made with hardy, industrious husbandmen accustomed to labour, the only people fit for such an enterprise, it was with families of broken shopkeepers and other insolvent debtors, many of indolent and idle habits, taken out of the gaols — who, being set down in the woods, unqualified for clearing land and unable to endure the hardships of a new settlement, perished in numbers, leaving many helpless children unprovided for. The sight of their miserable situation inspired the benevolent heart of Mr. Whitfield with the idea of building an orphan house there in which they might be supported and educated. Returning northward he preached up this charity and made large collections; for his eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance. I did not disapprove of the design, but as Georgia was then destitute of materials and workmen and it was proposed to send them from Philadelphia at a great expence, I thought it would have been better to have built the house here and brought the children to it. This I advised, but he was resolute in his first project and rejected my counsel, and I thereupon refused to contribute. I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the course of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved that he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, three or four silver dollars, and five pistoles in gold. As he proceeded, I began to soften and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all. At this sermon there was also one of our club, who being of my sentiments respecting the building in Georgia and suspecting a collection might be intended, had by precaution emptied his pockets before he came from home; towards the conclusion of the discourse, however, he felt a strong desire to give and applied to a neighbor who stood near him to borrow some money for the purpose. The application was unfortunately made to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be affected by the preacher. His answer was “At any other time, Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely, but not now; for thee seems to be out of thy right senses.”
Some of Mr. Whitfield’s enemies affected to suppose that he would apply these collections to his own private emolument, but I who was intimately acquainted with him (being employed in printing his sermons and journals, etc.) never had the least suspicion of his integrity, but am to this day decidedly of opinion that he was in all his conduct a perfectly honest man. And methinks my testimony in his favour ought to have the more weight as we had no religious connection. He used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard. Ours was a mere civil friendship, sincere on both sides, and lasted to his death.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 9:56 AM
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