Gollum and God

Matthew 6: 19-30

One of the more challenging topics to address in the life of the church is the issue of our financial stewardship. Many of us were brought up to think that money is a matter for private, not public discussion. So let us confess right up front that when money matters are discussed in church, clergy can often feel a little uncomfortable (a feeling of who am I to speak to you about your finances?); members often feel a little bit…what’s the right word? Judged or scolded or defensive (perhaps like when my doctor talks to me about my weight or my dentist tells me I should floss more); and guests often think, “I wish I’d come on a different Sunday….I’d like to hear about God, and they’re talking about money.”

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To be frank, therefore, we talk about the topic as little as possible. In most churches, money matters are addressed with an occasional sermon, a sort of a soft-sell annual campaign asking members to pledge to support the budget, and a periodic urging from the church treasurer or the finance committee if the budget starts to grow tight. But other than that, money and our handling of it is considered very, very personal, and so financial stewardship isn’t dwelt upon. Money is an individual and practical matter, we seem to feel, and the church should attend to more spiritual things, like prayer, and faith, and discipleship.

Well, I’d like to ask you to share in an experiment with me this morning. I’d like to see if we can talk earnestly together about financial stewardship, and do so in a way that leaves nobody feeling uncomfortable or guilty or like the church has a hand in their pocket.

You see, we need, as people of faith, to be able to speak together about what the Bible speaks about: and the Bible speaks often and plainly about money and our use of it as a spiritual matter,

2 something that is of great consequence to our spiritual health and our lives of faith.

In his book, Money IS Everything: What Jesus Said About the Spiritual Power of Money, Herb Miller observes that Twenty-seven of the forty-three recorded parables of Jesus talk about money and possessions—that’s 62 percent. One out of every ten verses in the Gospels deals with money (that’s

288 verses). And the Bible as a whole includes about 500 verses on prayer, fewer than 500 verses on faith, and more than 2,000 verses on money and what it buys.1 Clearly, then, in the Bible, money is not a taboo subject as it is in our culture. But interestingly, with all of that discussion about money, not once does Jesus mention a church budget, or a pledge, or a stewardship campaign.

Now do not leave here saying that I said those matters were unimportant:

There is a time and a place and a need for such discussions—churches, like families, have expenses and need to make budgets, and as those who share in the life and ministry of the church, we need to be informed of those practical concerns.

1 Statistics quoted in Herb Miller’s Money Isn’t…Is Everything (Nashville: Discipleship Resources, 1994, p.3) 3

But Jesus is far more concerned with money in regard to how it impacts our relationship with

God…and he speaks in some pretty strong terms in our scripture lesson for this morning…some terms that are a little challenging for us to hear as residents of the most affluent country in the world.

He says things like,

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven;”

And he says things like “The eye is the lamp of the body, and if the eye is sound the body is full of light, but if your eye is not sound, the body is full of darkness.” A modern-day paraphrase might be,

“Whatever you keep your sights set on, that is what your heart will be set on.”

And he says, “No one can serve two masters; you cannot serve God and wealth.”

Now if you listen carefully to those warnings, or if you go back and read our scripture lesson later, as I encourage you to do, you will find a single unifying theme—essentially, all of these statements say, in different ways, “Be very careful, lest what you own should begin to own you.”

Now I’m not sure we really have a good sense of how we can be owned by what we own—it happens much more subtly than we recognize, I believe… so I think a wonderful way to illustrate the concept is by looking at a story.

Many of you may be familiar with J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the

Rings, which vaulted back into popular culture some years back with the release of Peter Jackson’s movie adaptations.

4 In any event, one of the characters in Tolkien’s works is a pitiful creature named Gollum.

Way, way back in time, as the story goes, Gollum was a little man originally named Smeagol, who, along with a friend, happened across a magical ring. The ring was very special and very beautiful, and, he would later discover, it gave to its wearer the power to become invisible.

Immediately captivated by its beauty, Smeagol prized the ring above all other things. He killed his friend in an argument over it. But then he worried that someone else would take the ring from him.

He took to wearing the ring all the time so that he wouldn’t lose it…but as a result of wearing it, in his state of constant invisibility, he became sensitive to the light of the sun, and so he hid himself deep in a cave beneath the mountains….and there the ring became his entire world and defined his entire existence.

Wearing the ring all the time seemed to drain Smeagol somehow, so he sometimes took it off and hid it under a rock—but when he didn’t have it with him, he fretted over it, making a worried sound in his throat, Gollum, Gollum—which would eventually become his name. His old identity, Smeagol, gradually faded from memory.

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The ring preyed upon Gollum’s mind, so that he was constantly going back to it and checking on it, making sure that his precious, as he called it, was okay. His mind seldom left the ring, everything he did was to hold on to and to assure the security of the ring, so that he loved it and yet in a way, he also hated it, and at last, he could not put it down even if he wanted to. That, I think, is a good illustration of how what we own can come to own us.

And using this fictional character, we can see exactly what Jesus is talking about—do not lay up for yourselves treasures on the earth, fixing your mind upon those things, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. Gollum’s greatest fear is thieves taking his precious possession.

Putting our stock in possessions or wealth breeds anxiety, Jesus teaches, as we can see with poor

Gollum, who worries constantly about how to keep, protect and preserve that which he has acquired.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be, Jesus says. So also with Gollum—the ring becomes more important to him than his relationships, it is more important to him than all the wonders and

6 simple gifts that the world holds; he hides himself away in a cave, cuts himself off from others who might desire his ring, all the better to protect the ring and keep it to himself; it, and it alone, is his precious.

You cannot serve two masters, Jesus says—and again we see this case with Gollum. If his life is built around preserving and protecting his treasure, he can give his life to no other purpose or person or cause. The ring is his master, and nothing else can be.

So we can see in the fictitious character of Gollum an illustration, in the extreme, of what Jesus warns about. Thankfully, we don’t really resemble Gollum…at least not TOO CLOSELY.

But can we at least take a warning from Gollum’s wretched life? Can we at least confess that much of our life is, in fact, tied up in concerns about earning and spending money and accumulating things?

That our thoughts are often upon what we have and don’t have, what we need and what we want?

Because other nations of the world do not have the things we do. We live in a very wealthy country, so wealthy that even while owning what 90% of the world can never dream of, we manage to think of ourselves as average, or just scraping by. In truth, if we have safe physical shelter and daily bread, that is an abundance by the world’s standards.

We enjoy our wealth and our possessions. These things offer us comfort, and pleasure. But they also breed a certain anxiety. Are the things that I have good enough—or do I need more and better things, like the advertisers constantly tell me? Do I have enough money to keep up with my expenses? Wouldn’t life be better if only I had…..and you can fill in the blank. You can recognize that pull, can’t you? We swim in a sea of acquisition and desire, hardly recognizing that we’re wet.

We need storage units because our barns are not big enough.

7 And while we might like to say that our possessions and our wealth do not matter greatly to us, or at least do not matter ultimately to us, my guess is that the last meeting of “The neighborhood society for people who want to have less” didn’t have very many people. I don’t know, because I, myself, wasn’t there.

Now the problem, we may remind ourselves, is that as Jesus has so pointedly proclaimed, and as

Gollum so poignantly illustrates, there is a spiritual price to be paid for my heart’s desires, if I set the desires of my heart upon anything other than God. You cannot serve God and wealth, Jesus says, you cannot serve God and wealth.

Now we come to the heart of the stewardship issue, then. Financial stewardship isn’t about the church budget…or my share of that….it isn’t about guilt…it is about how I, in my life, keep my eye squarely upon God. It is about how I keep my life in perspective, it is about how I remind myself of what is ultimately important to me and of the source of all my sustenance. My stewardship is how I set limits upon my consumption and expand my generosity. Remember, what your eye is set upon, that is what your life is filled with.

That is the whole Biblical notion of sacrifice. Sacrifice is the setting down of something that is semi- precious in acknowledgement of that which is most precious. Sacrifice is saying, I will not hold two things most dear…I will lay down other things which would claim me, and I will invest myself and my life in relationship with God.

And it is about the spiritual practice of generosity. Generosity is my acting upon the awareness that my abundance is connected to other’s needs, an act of caring and of sharing.

8 If I may now quit preaching and go to meddling, I would say that one problem that we have, in the church today, is that we talk about stewardship too much as charitable giving toward a budget, and too little as the spiritual discipline of sacrifice. We think of our giving to God as a donation, maybe as a tax write-off, rather than a spiritual act of generosity or gratitude.

And we might pause to ask the difficult question—is my giving to God sacrificial?

You see, sacrificial giving requires that we restructure our lives: I cannot do this, because I have instead chosen this. It forces us to make choices or to make decisions, or to say aloud to ourselves,

“My life of faith is of utmost importance to me, and all the rest is window dressing.”

In the end, Jesus tells us in our scripture lesson, we are willing to give up a lot for what we hold most precious. We organize our thoughts and our lives around “our precious.” The stewardship question we answer to ourselves and to God is, “What in fact is…….”my precious?”

We do not give to meet a budget…we give to become more generous. We give to express joyous gratitude. We give to move our lives farther from Gollum and closer to God. Amen.

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