“The Gospel According to a Run-away Trunk”

• Scriptural Reference: Luke 14:25-33; Luke 12:34
• September 9, 2007

Before I turned 16, my dad owned a 1956 Chevrolet. I’ve already told y’all about that wonderful car. It had a 409, Holly 4-barrel, modified suspension – ah it was a beauty. And as you may remember, my dad sold it, either to save me from a sure death proving my manhood in back county quarter mile drag races, or to save himself from a sky high insurance bill. What I didn’t tell you was that like any two income family in the suburbs of a southern city without any form of public transportation, and since my mom and dad had radically different schedules, we had two cars – from about 1963 on. And the car my dad bought to supplement the family fleet was a 1962 Chevrolet Impala, four-door, bronze-brown with a cream colored stripe down the side. When you rolled down the windows, there was no door post, so they called it a hardtop convertible. That was the car I inherited when I went to college at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, which beat Michigan this past week – in the Big House.

One evening during the spring of my junior year, I was late for an engagement with my band at a ski resort up on Sugar Mountain, about 17 miles from Boone. I ran out to the ‘62 Chevy, sitting like an old friend in the gravel driveway of my rented mountain house. I slung open the cavernous trunk and dumped in the six heavy microphone stands and weighted stand bottoms. As they hit the floor of the trunk, the rear end sagged about an inch.

I hit the highway 105 heading south out of Boone toward Grandfather Mountain with about 30 minutes of daylight left. Near a crossroads known as Valley Crucis, a construction crew digging a trench across the road had just knocked off for the day. They had put a heavy metal sheet across the road, but this time, they didn’t secure it like they should have. When the large dump truck in front of me hit the sheet, it slid away from the hole leaving about a ten-inch wide gap and exposed a six-foot deep trench. I tried to brake, but I still hit the trench at about 50 mph. There was a stout jolt as my front tires struck the far edge and the front of the ‘62 gave an abrupt jump. A split second later my rear tires struck the edge – but instead of the sharp BAMM, I heard a deafening, explosive, grinding percussion. Instead of a little jump, the rear end lifted high into the air. I was staring through the windshield directly at the pavement. Evidently, my car was virtually standing on its front bumper! Then in another split second, the rear slammed back down with a sickening whack and bounced several times as if the rear were suspended from bungee cords.

There was no power and I was coasting down a slight grade to the left, so I pulled over toward the shoulder and looked in my rearview mirror. A large rectangular object was sliding down the road behind me while the smell of gasoline met my nose. I stopped on the shoulder and saw that the red generator light was on. The car sputtered a couple of times when I tried to restart it, but just coughed. I got out and looked back up the road through the fading light at the rectangular object. I knew it hadn’t been there before and I wondered what I’d hit. As I walked up the road toward the object, a state trooper arrived on the scene, and seeing the road blocked, turned on the blue lights. He then got out of the squad car, pulled on his hat and the two of us converged on the object together.

Folks, there in the middle of the road, complete with six microphone stands, were the trunk of my ‘62 Chevy, with a gasoline tank underneath leaking about 15 gallons of fuel into state route 105, all of it evidently jolted loose by the trench. The trooper removed his hat and scratched his head. “I ain’t never seen nothing like that before,” he said with a snicker. “Looks like the salt done ate away at your trunk almost as cleanly as if someone had used an acetylene torch.” Yes, folks, I’d lost my trunk.

Well, to make a long story longer, I bought a drag racer’s 20 gallon tank and bolted it to the inside of the trunk on a piece of sheet metal. Dad and I eventually traded it, and we stood with our hands in our pockets sort of whistling a tune as the salesman checked every aspect of the care except whether or not it still had a trunk. We thought, well, if he’s not going to look in the trunk, then it doesn’t matter to him whether it’s got one or not. The last time I saw that ‘62, it was still sitting on that used car lot, parked in a distant corner away from the night lights where no one could see it.

I have to admit, it made me sad to see it sitting there as I thought of how my dad and I had overhauled the engine between two pine trees in the back yard. That was with 160 thousand miles on it – and after the overhaul, it went another 98,000 before that fateful trench rendered it trunk-less. How much time and effort went into that machine! How much prestige I’d derived from it! Now it was no longer mine. It was a piece of junk.

My dad saw I was sad about leaving the car behind. He was just happy the salesman didn’t open the trunk lid. “Aren’t you gonna miss that car, dad?”

“Well, not really. I’ll enjoy the next car, and besides, I’ve had enough now to know that cars are just tools to get you from point A to point B. If it takes a car to make you feel big, then you ain’t driving the car, it’s driving you.”

Ouch. That’s not the sort of thing a bona fide redneck likes to hear.

Now I bring up that story because that’s exactly what the early Christians knew when it came to money and possessions and their lives of faith. If it takes money and possessions to make you feel big, then you don’t possess money, money possesses you, and you don’t live a life of faith.

The early Christians lived by this truth. Nothing is clearer from reading the New Testament than the fact that the first Christian church didn’t place much weight on their possessions at all. Those first church members, the ones who were closest to the actual ministry of Jesus, felt that possessions were not ends. They evidently saw their possessions as means toward another end, namely, making certain that everyone had what everyone needed to live a wholesome life. And look what kind of people they were! The book of Acts tells us that they had “glad and sincere hearts.” In other words, these people were completely satisfied. Their lives were full of meaning. They were chocked through and through with joy. The reason why their lives were so full of joy is that they didn’t place much weight on their possessions at all but rather loved Jesus more than anything in their lives.

They counted the cost and decided that it would be much costlier NOT to give their all to their savior than to horde anything for themselves.

In fact, if we are to trust what Paul advised all the early churches, the only Christian justification for having wealth is for the purpose of being generous. What did Paul say in I Corinthians, for example? “You will be made rich in every way SO THAT you can be generous on every occasion.” Wealth is not given to a Christian so that the Christian can smear himself in it. It’s not given as a status symbol. Jesus said that we were to do our giving in secret. “Don’t’ let the right hand know what the left is doing.” Possessions and wealth are status symbols for those who do not model their lives after Christ. But for the Christian, wealth is given for no other purpose than to be used for the well-being of others and in great generosity.

Now most everyone in this room will agree with this. “Yes, yes, pastor. Possessions are not important. Money can’t buy you love.” Certainly those among you who listen to country music will remember the song from a few years back that said, “Love can get you through the times of no money but money can’t get you through the times of no love.” We all agree with it, don’t we?

At least we agree with it when we talk about it, or hear a sermon about it. When it comes to acting on it, we simply don’t believe it.

It has become almost a cliché to speak of the minimum expected amount of giving for people of faith is the tithe that is 10%. In 2002, we Protestants gave only 2.6% of net income to our churches. Note: that’s average. Many people do much less. On the other hand, we’re perfectly willing to pay 16, 19, even 24 percent on the unpaid balances of our credit cards. This despite the fact that the Bible has 500 verses on prayer, 500 on faith, and over 2,000 on money and possessions. And of Jesus 38 parables, 16 are about money. (The remaining 22 are divided among the other topics Jesus addresses.)

One other thing: a professor at SBTS noted to a bunch of us preacher wanna-be's one day that after his considerable years of experience, he’d noted that the larger the average income of a typical Southern Baptist church, the less likely they were to meet their budget. One simple thing explains all this: we’ve forgotten the lesson of the runaway trunk. We don’t possess money – it possesses us.

Why is that?

Well, I have a simple explanation. As I get more and more things which I can call “mine,” the whole idea of “mine” grows bigger and bigger in my thinking. And the greater the concept of “mine” becomes in my thinking, the lesser becomes the concept of “yours” and “ours.” I become extremely concerned with wanting to protect what’s mine, and what’s rightfully mine, and MY rights, and MY property. Mine, mine, mine. Me, me, me. My, my, my.

It’s budget time at Walnut Grove Baptist Church, sure, but this isn’t a sermon about tithing. I think I’ve done this before, but always remember that tithing is the minimum. That hymn doesn’t go, “I surrender one tenth. I surrender one tenth.” That’s one of those hymns that we sing without meaning it. Lyrics ricochet off our teeth without striking our hearts. “I surrender ALL?”

This is a sermon about stewardship, about the fact that when we are redeemed by Christ, for us to live is Christ, and to die is gain. We’ve discovered that God has called us and empowered us to live a life of meaning he has prepared for us. Faith is a matter of aligning all of one’s self with God’s purposes and when we do that God will see to it that we have all we need to live, and more, to accomplish the purpose he has for us, and when we do that our lives will be chocked full of joy! It’s about GOD, not about mine, mine, mine, me, me, me! When we focus on God’s purpose and how we can be engaged in it, we’re free! We’re empowered! We have all the money we’ll ever need. The fact is, folks, the budget you have is WAY below what you’re capable of giving. If you don’t meet your budget, a rather unchallenging one, it’s because you prefer your credit card debt to the empowerment of God’s purpose. If you’re doing what God has called you to do, he’ll finance it.

When you forget God and concentrate on yourself, you get nervous, worry about the future, and you immediately begin to miss opportunities.

When you plan your budget putting God first, it’s amazing how the rest of the budget falls in place and how you never do without. When I told my mom that we were having a stewardship emphasis, she asked me if I was going to tell you about my first job.

I asked her to clarify.

She said, “Oh, you know. When you had that job picking up trash in the yard of the chiropractor whose office was right across the street from us on Unaka Avenue.”

“What about it?”

“Well, you were paid one dollar a week to go over there and pick up trash. He paid you every two weeks, a check of two dollars. You immediately went down to the North Carolina Savings and Loan, deposited $1.80 and then turned around and put two dimes into your offering envelope.”

I said, “Mom, I’m not going to tell that story. First of all, it’s so cheesy! And second of all, it would sound like I was setting myself up as some kind of righteous paradigm. I’m not going to tell that story.”

She said, “But that taught you to tithe, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” I answered, “and Julie and I have always tithed.”
She asked, “Have you ever been without? Think about it.”

And I thought it through. Never in my life have I had financial problems. Oh, it’s been tight. During seminary, while I was a chaplain, through my first three pastorates, while I was a denominational bureaucrat – in all cases Julie and I were making slightly less than the national average as far as salary is concerned and never have we been in trouble. We’ve always had what we needed, and then some. I said that to my mom.

She said, “So tell your congregation that.”

I said, “Okay, I’ll tell ‘em that God will take care of them if they’re faithful to him. It just works out that way. When you organize your whole life around serving God, things fall into place. But I’m not going to tell the story about the two dime thing.”

“Suit yourself,” she said.