Sermon: Money, Spirit, and Life – Rev. Eric Banner

It has been a week of holy days and holidays all around the world. This past week people celebrated the Lunar New Year, the start of Ramadan, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. While Lent is technically the observance of 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness, it leads its way to the Easter season, and so it seems fitting that this week, as we continue our leadership lessons series, we do so while talking about money. Religious messages and meaning about money are about as varied as can be, from Jesus himself coming into Jerusalem on that fateful last visit, and starting it off with turning over the tables of the merchants and money changers in the temple, to the kinds of passages that get promoted in prosperity gospel churches that let you know that if you just give 10% to the church, God will get you that sports car and mansion you’ve always wanted.

And in this church, we joke from time to time that we have a lot easier time talking about sex at church than we do talking about money.

So let me tell you where we’re going, because the one thing I want you to know is that this is not a Sunday when I give you what so many have so un-funnily called “the sermon on the amount,” or the kickoff of the stewardship season, which will actually start with the musical Sarah was telling us about in the weeks ahead. No, this Sunday is about making space to talk about what is so often hard to talk about, and that is the way that we all have a relationship with money, and we all have different relationships about money, and that if we can’t talk about it as a tool, used in conjunction with our values, we lose power to shape the world we hope will one day come. The Dalai Lama himself has said –

“Money is good. It is important. Without money, daily survival – not to mention further development – is impossible. So,” he said, “we are not even questioning its importance. At the same time, it is wrong to consider money as a substance endowed with some power of its own. To think that money is everything and that just by having lots of it all our problems will be solved is a serious mistake.”

But, if we’re going to talk about it, we probably all need at least some space to talk about why it’s so hard to talk about it. We hardly need look past the recent headlines, the stories of powerful and wealthy elites, hiding behind their money and their connections to engage with notorious pedophile predators like Jeffery Epstein. Money often feels dirty. And it’s often used to buy influence in ways that are only good for the ones offering the bribes and the “campaign contributions” but no one else. Or worse, used to buy silence, to protect people from the public reckoning for the crimes they have committed and the harms they have caused.

I tell you, I too, have struggled, for years, to come to terms with my own relationship with money. While I’ve never sought after wealth for it’s own sake, I have struggled to know what to do with the money I’ve had, or did not have. My family has been part of this journey, together, from the times when we faced challenges, to the times when we’ve asked what good our funds might do the world, once we have what we need. My shelves are filled with books with titles like

Your Money or Your Life
Freedom Through Frugality
The Soul of Money
Money and the Meaning of Life
Theology of Money
The Millionaire Next Door
and The Seven Stages of Money Maturity, from which our reading was drawn this morning.

In that book, George Kinder says the quiet part out loud, the way that we often feel trapped by money in our lives, because we struggle to align our lives, and our values, and our funds. Right in the beginning he offers a list of statements that his financial planning clients have said to him. Things like –

“I want to be wealthy in life, but not necessarily in money, but I know the two are related.”

 

“I want to be able to do whatever I want to do without thinking about money.”

 

“I want to get what I need without feeling guilty about it.”

 

“I want to feel that I don’t have to give up who I am or violate my deepest values just to get money.”

But here is what I know about churches in general, and about this church specifically. Conversations about money all too often break things apart, instead of drawing us together. You might not know it, but a big part of what led to the breakup of Christianity in Europe during the Protestant Reformation was a conversation about money, the sale of indulgences to fund the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. I’ve heard stories around here about times before I came, when people were upset because there was some sense that a focus on money made for different categories of membership, or recognition. I’ve heard about hurt feelings all around, and efforts to find a way forward that recognized that many different gifts that people bring here, and I’ve heard people tell stories that we are “the way that we are” because we are a “wealthy church,” or that access is somehow limited to those with financial means. It’s not true, but I get it.

Here’s some things to know about this church:

In this church we have people on public assistance, and we have people who are financially well off

In this church we have people who themselves are living on fixed incomes, and we have people who are in the prime of their earning years

In this church we have people who had to retire well before they intended to stop working, and we have people who feel great about working well into their 70s or even 80s

In this church we have people who show up to move tables, weed gardens, protest fascism, lead songs, teach classes, and make coffee, some of them doing all of those things, and we have people whose bodies no longer allow them to participate in those ways, but can write a check that keeps the lights on, resurfaces the parking lot, pays salaries, and renovates whole buildings

In this church we have people who have given generously to support the ministerial discretionary fund, and we have people for whom we have fixed their cars, paid their rent, and bought their groceries.

And all of those people belong here. All of them are welcome here. All of them are needed in this community.

Money is a form of capital. Of that there can be no doubt. And keeping this church running takes capital of all kinds, just as our households do. All the thoughts and prayers in the world won’t keep the lights on, or pay the garbage bill.

And there are other kinds of capital, too. Social capital. Relational capital. Time.

Just for a minute, indulge me the question of how many hours of volunteer, unpaid time, went into making this one hour we are together right now happen.

Behind me we’ve got the choir. Let’s say there’s 50 people there. Now they came to rehearsal this week.

That was two hours per person. Actually, they come to rehearsal every week, but we’ll stick with this week.

They came early to practice before service. Another two hours by the time service is over. Let’s just call it 200 hours of time for them.

Now, I am going to forget someone, so I need to apologize in advance, but the list goes on-

There’s the Safety and Security Team who greeted you when you arrived, another 4 people, there’s the ambassadors, the welcome desk, the ushers, the Sunday manager, the people who make the coffee and tea, the religious education volunteers, another 8 or 10 of them, and not just the ones in the classrooms, the ones who have been building curriculum to ensure our kids know our UU values, our UU stories, our religious neighbors, our sexuality education volunteers so they know their own bodies, that training is at least 20 hours per person, and we’ve got five people signed up to take that training right now, and the program will start very soon.

How can I forget, the social justice teams that work behind the scenes to support programs like our Compassion in Action offering. To connect us with people in need in our community by hosting tables on Sunday morning to help you get connected.

Hundreds, and hundreds of hours, just for this one hour. To say nothing of the other programs and projects this congregation supports. Let’s just say 400 hours for round numbers. Let’s just say that the kind of expertise, and I do mean expertise, that it takes to do what we do together would cost $35/hr. That’s $14,000 in value, freely given, and deeply appreciated.

And, there are other things that money helps us do. I was astonished these last few years to hear about the green energy revolution, and the manufacturing facilities needed to make it possible. A typical battery storage factory costs billions of dollars to build. Money that has moved through bank accounts, and retirement funds, that has paid carpenters and concrete finishers, electricians and engineers, and so much more. It’s the kind of revolution that just isn’t possible if we all had to figure out how many chickens we needed to barter to get our next smartphone. And the same is true here. We have a mortgage. We have equipment that wears out over time. We have employees who need to buy groceries and pay for housing and who hope to retire someday.

So often we avoid talking about money because we think that money is the problem, when it’s much more often about what money means, or what stories we tell, truthful stories or half-truth stories, as George Kinder suggested in our reading. Lynne Twist put it this way, in her book “The Soul of Money,”

“When we enter the domain of money, there often seems to be a disconnect from the soulful person we have known ourselves to be. It is as if we are suddenly transported to a different playing field were all the rules have changed. In the grip of money, those wonderful qualities of soul seem to be less available. We become smaller. We scramble or race to ‘get what’s ours.’… The result is a deep division in our way of being, in our behavior, and in our sense of our own character and integrity. This dichotomy, this break in our truth, not only confuses us around the issue of money; it also keeps us from integrating our inner and outer worlds to experience wholeness in our lives.”

For a church like ours to exist, it takes all kinds. Our budget this year is just over a million dollars. The budget that was proposed by the Board at the congregational meeting for next year is even more. Our story is one of thriving, growing, community and connection, spiritual depth, and public witness all in one place. But this message isn’t really about church. It’s about you, and me, and all of us. We each have a story about money. I know I do. I’ve had to have some hard conversations with myself about what money means in my life, and when I need to spend some, and what we need to save. When we bought our home many years ago, it felt like the most outrageous sum of money we’d ever spend, and, at least so far, it has been. And it was hard. And I know that you all have stories like that. Stories about difficult decisions about whether to go to a food bank, because you’d lost your job, or couldn’t work anymore. Difficult decisions about whether you could afford to chase your dreams. Difficult decisions about life, your life, and what it means, and somewhere in there, the dollars and cents of it all came to bear. And stories about when the ability to do something important brought joy and possibility to your life. A trip of a lifetime, a vehicle that replaced the jalopy hanging on by a thread, the flex that let you welcome a new life into your home, and so much more. It’s all in there, mixed up together.

My message this morning is this – I can’t make it easy to talk about money, but together we can make it easier. We can tell our stories. We can hear each other. And we can put the funds we have to work to build the future we want to have. Money isn’t everything, but it’s one thing, and that one thing is a powerful tool, when we harness it to live lives of wholeness, integrity, connection, and coherence, in the places we work, in the places we play, in the places where our spirit comes alive. And you don’t have to do it all at once. And you don’t have to be a millionaire to take your next step. You just have to be willing to take the next right step, for you and the ones you love, and see where the journey of life takes you, and find your way on the path of money, spirit, and life.

So may it be,
Amen

Rev. Eric Banner
Senior Minister