They’ll Know
“They’ll Know” by Pastor Rosanna McFadden
Good morning! Today we are continuing a sermon series on the epistles of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John and their consistent command to love one another. This is the fourth week out. of five, and the only text from 2nd John. Scholars believe that all three of these letters were written by the same author, likely as open letters to churches rather than personal correspondence. So I was briefly excited to see a New Testament letter from an elder to an elder lady with children — see, women DID have an important role in New Testament times! — until I read some commentary which said that the “elder lady” is probably a metaphor for the congregation, and the “children” are the members of that congregation. Especially since the closing of the letter says, “The children of your elder sister send you their greetings.” This is clearly not relatives or cousins we’re talking about, it is fellow sisters and brother in Christ.
Second John is not the shortest letter in the New Testament, but it’s close. It’s only thirteen verses long, it doesn’t even have chapter headings. It has themes we find also in 1st John and 3rd John about loving God and loving one another, but it has its own twist on that by talking about Truth. I’m continuing to draw material from The Little Book of Lykke by Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. “Lykke” is the Danish word for happiness. I’ve been sharing about aspects of happiness such as Community and Kindness, and how those overlap with what Christians are commanded to do For the Love of God. This morning I want to talk about money.
Wiking says that if Money and Happiness were describing their relationship on Facebook, it would read, “It’s complicated.” As someone who researches happiness, he notes that wealthier countries generally report a higher level of happiness than poor ones. This is a bit tricky, because there is definitely a correlation between not having enough money and un-happiness. It’s hard to be happy if you can’t feed your family or keep a roof over your head, but having basic needs covered, but being less un-happy isn’t exactly the same as being happy. We’ll talk about that a bit more later.
It turns out that happiness is partly about how much we have, but it also about how much we have in relation to the people around us. That means money is not just what we have, But if we have what everyone else is having. Analysis of complaints by airline passengers shows that the biggest factor in whether or not passengers complain is not the conditions or the service — whether it’s hot or the stewards are inattentive — the biggest factor in whether passengers complain is if they have to walk through a first class section on their way to economy seating. Of course it’s crowded in economy, it’s the same for everybody. What makes folks upset is that there are people on the same airplane with a lot more room. So they complain: about the temperature, about the air, about the service, about whatever, because they feel like they’re being treated less-well than other folks.
Here’s a simple experiment to illustrate this point. I’m not sure I’d actually try this, but let me know if you do. Take two young children — it’s great if they’re siblings or cousins — and give them each a nice snack: give one kid a cookie. Give the other one two cookies. How do you think that’s gonna go? Of course the kid with one cookie is going to squawk that it isn’t fair! And the other is going to hang on to both of her cookies because they’re hers. An obvious solution would be for the kid with two cookies to give half of one to her brother and then they’d have the same amount. The only problem with this solution is that no toddler in the history of the world has ever voluntarily given away something they wanted without a third party intervening. There you go: a lesson about happiness and economics all in one. A cookie is a fine snack which we’re happy about until we notice that someone else has twice as many cookies as we do.
There is plenty of teaching about money in the Bible: waaay more than teaching about loving one another. I have not done an exhaustive study of all those passages, but some scholars have. I think the crux of those teachings is that if we’re going to be happy, if we’re going to faithful, if we’re going to be open to the truths which God has commanded, we have to keep our priorities straight. Here are a few verses I bet you’re familiar with 1 Timothy 6:10 says, “the love of money is the root of all evil.” This is often mis-quoted as “Money is the root of all evil,” but it’s the love of money which Timothy says will trip us up. Here are a few from the sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6: Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume . . . but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” And even more bluntly, “You cannot serve God and wealth.” Putting our money in the right place is not about what financial institution we bank at, or what stocks we invest in. It isn’t even about whether we give to the church, and if we do, is that to the General Fund or a designated fund. Those are fine conversations for later, and we will give you a chance to talk about that next month, but what I mean by putting our money in the right place, is putting our money into context with our love for God. It is not our money, it’s our relationship with money which we need to put in the right place. That’s what clears the way for happiness.
You may notice, or you would if you turned to 2nd John, that no where in those 13 verses does the word “money” appear. It’s all about walking in the truth and following Christ’s commandments. There’s even a warning about a specific heresy — people who do not believe that Jesus was fully human. I decided to use this text to talk about money because I believe it illustrates in a general way what we need to do to be happy in Jesus: we need to follow his commandments, and the truth of that commandment is that we must love God first. This is a bigger teaching than what we do with our money, but it is the commandment from which the other commandments flow, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” There it is: love God, love one another.
Here’s an uncomfortable reality that Wiking identifies: wealth does not equal well-being. Even more uncomfortably, he uses the United States as an example. The US has achieved economic prosperity and an accumulation of wealth over the past 50 years, but it has not resulted in an increase of happiness. Why? Because that wealth has not been equally distributed. When money becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of the population and the gap between how many cookies I have and how many cookies they have becomes wider, most people are less happy.
I invite you to consider for a moment, the things which make you happy. Let’s assume that you have enough money to meet your basic needs for food and shelter — I realize that’s a big thing to take for granted. What do you want beyond those basic needs to feel like you are happy? Are there things which make us happy which take little or no money? We’ve talked about two of them already: Community and Kindness. You are here, both in-person and on-line, so I assume that a Christian community is of some value to you, or at very least is a curiosity. I said last week that kindness is the currency of our love for each other. Like any currency, kindness needs to stay in circulation, to be used and traded. If you’re trying to see how much kindness you can accumulate for yourself, you have missed the point. Having a healthy relationship with money begins with investing our treasure in heaven, for the love of God. If we have not invested in loving God and loving one another — and all the rewarding and messy and amazing things we are given when we choose community and kindness — we will not have followed Christ’s commandments, and we will never learn the truth of God’s unconditional love for us.God’s love is good for us, of course, but it is also good for other people. You may not believe me, but people know whether we are acting out of love or acting out of self-interest or manipulation. They know. So sisters and brothers, Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. For every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. They will know we are Christians by our love for God and our love for one another. Amen.