Spend Less

Sermon for Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011 at First UMC of West Newton

Second Sunday in Advent

Scriptures: Matthew 6:19-21, 24-33; Ecclesiastes 2:1-11

This year during Advent, we are participating in the Advent Conspiracy. The Advent Conspiracy is a movement of hundreds of churches – across the world, but primarily in the United States – that seeks the true meaning of Christmas. And that is that Christmas is not about giving or receiving gifts. It’s not about hosting the best holiday party. It’s not simply a way to end the year in a good mood, although it may have that effect. No, Christmas is more than what our culture has turned it into, and as Christians we are called to celebrate Christmas as it was originally intended: as a world changing, transformative event. Christmas is the scandalous, revolutionary, life-changing and world-changing event of God and God’s kingdom breaking into this world.

Through the Advent Conspiracy, we are trying to rediscover this true message of Christmas. Last Sunday, I shared how we may conspire to worship fully – that Christmas is about peaceful moments of rest, as well as revolutionary movements of protest, and both these moments and movements can be forms of worship. Today, we’re going to talk about how together, we might conspire to SPEND LESS this Christmas. By spending less, we can then free ourselves from the burden and obligation of spending so much on Christmas and gifts, and we are freed to give more, worship fully, and love all.

Spending less is important to the Advent Conspiracy, because it is a concrete, counter-cultural action we can take in this season of shopping, sales, and general shopping mall-induced stress and traffic jams. The conspiracy of spending less begins with cutting back on gift giving.

Before you get the wrong idea, this is not a call to eliminate gift-giving completely. I do think it’s monumentally important that we admit gift-giving and receiving is not the point of this season. Christmas is not about getting what you’ve always wanted, nor is it about giving your children everything they’ve always wanted. Christmas is not YOUR birthday, after all. The retail side of Christmas is out of hand and a tragic sign of where our culture’s priorities lie. But the fact is, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with giving and receiving gifts with others, if it’s done out of love for each other and not love of stuff.

However, what we are doing this Advent is asking ourselves if we really need to spend as much on gifts as we do. We are asking if all the gifts we give are really necessary to show someone we care about them. And the call to spend less is not to cut out gift giving completely, but to evaluate our spending and consider cutting back.

Think about this: Americans spend $450 BILLION a year on gifts. Every year. That’s a lot of money. And yet, it has been estimated that just $20 billion per year could solve the world water crisis. That’s less than 5% of our Christmas spending. If we just cut back 5% on our Christmas spending as a nation and gave it away, we could solve the world’s water problems. That’s a big deal, because tens of millions of people each day do not have access to clean, safe drinking water. Without clean, safe drinking water, these people are at significantly increased risk of illness and disease, and the infant mortality rates are sky-high. So, Advent Conspiracy asks that we think about giving one less gift for Christmas, or maybe 5% less than in previous years, and then give away the money we save to Living Water International – or some other organization.

There are many ways to spend less. You can simply buy less, or you can practice alternative gift-giving. You can “tithe” a percentage of your gift budget. 

Spending less frees us to give more – to give in new ways, to give with more love and to give relationally. After all, God gave a relationship at Christmas, and it was the best gift we could ever receive. Next week, we’ll talk further about GIVING MORE – one of the things that spending less frees us to do.

The Gospel lesson this morning is not particularly an Advent or Christmas text, but I do find it to be extraordinarily relevant to this season, in the face of retail mayhem. It is a season of worrying and fretting and anxiety. It is a season where we tend to serve wealth and the “things” of this world rather than serving God.

It is very easy to serve the retail gods around Christmas. This is what we are so tempted to do, is serve and worship the retail season of Christmas. It is a religion unto itself – marked by holy days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, celebrated with the weekly rituals of Saturday traffic jams, requiring the sacrifice of our financial well-being, and proclaiming the fulfillment of promise and hope for our families.

I wish that the passion people display in the wee hours of the morning on Black Friday, lining up and creating riot-like atmospheres just for the best deals on flat-screens, would pale in comparison to the passion people have for God breaking into this world. It’s a stark reminder that everyone seeks fulfillment of some type of promise this season, and we are all in service to someone or something during the holiday season. 

So what are you seeking this Advent with all your heart? Where is your mind? What are you dedicating your time and money to? If someone were to look at your life this December, who would they say you are serving, God or wealth?

Let me tell you – I have found myself serving wealth at times. And I echo the sentiments of the writer of Ecclesiastes: all of it is vanity and chasing after the wind. For the things on this earth are temporal, but God’s kingdom is forever. I hate to break it to you, but even diamonds are not forever in the way that God’s kingdom is.

This morning, we baptized a young child. And when I think about the world this child will grow up in, I hope that the world will be better in the future for him than it is for us today. I think that’s the hope for all our children and grandchildren, all the generations that will follow us. I have hope that many things will be better for him than for us – I pray that he will live in a more tolerant nation than we see today. I pray that the world will be more peaceful than it is now. I pray that the harmful things we’re doing now that we don’t know are harmful – he’ll be warned of them. After all, we younger generations were warned of the harmful effects of smoking, a habit that many people of previous generations did for years without realizing how harmful it was.

And I hope in another way. I really do think it’s possible that Christmas can eventually be not about the stores making profits, but can be about the world being transformed into God’s kingdom. I hope that one day, we’ll tell our children and grandchildren about how people pushed and shoved each other to get a good deal on a TV. We’ll tell them that Saturdays in December were just one big traffic jam, and people spent entire weekends at the mall and it still wasn’t enough to complete all their shopping. We’ll tell these younger generations about the amount of money we spent as a country on a holiday celebrating the birth of a Savior, and our children and grandchildren will look at us in disbelief – there’s no way people were that materialistic and selfish, they’ll say. Didn’t they know that Christmas is a time to participate in God’s work in the world, a time defined by giving from our abundance to those in need, a time to make a positive change in the world? Why did they celebrate selfishly rather than charitably?

And we’ll say, yes, people gave to charity back then, but only to assuage their guilt for spending so much on crap they didn’t need. You see kids, Christmas had lost its nature of being a world-changing event, and had simply become a way of acting out our greed in the worst way. But eventually, the church stood up and created a revolution. The Christians of this nation – just as they had with women’s rights and the abuse of alcohol and with racism and with gambling – they stood up and said, “Enough!” And they committed to spend less, to give more, to worship fully, to love all. They led a revolution that changed Christmas back from the retail holiday it was to the true Holy Day that it was always meant to be.

That’s my hope – that we can tell future generations how bad it used to be, how parents wrestled each other for tickle-me-Elmo dolls. And then, we’ll remember what it was that finally changed things – the Holy Spirit moving through a committed group of individuals, the world changing because people began serving the Messiah rather than wealth. Don’t you want to be a part of that story? Don’t you want to be a part of the revolution, the one where God can transform how we think about Christ’s birth?

Spend less this Christmas. In doing so, you’ll discover that it frees you to: 

• Worship fully – serve and love God, prepare the way of the LORD, more time to worship with family
• Give more – give your time, give relationally, give charitably (join us next week and we’ll talk more about this)
• Love all – Christmas is a time of love – of God’s love coming into our world, of how we may return that love by worshiping God and giving to those in need, and that true love is not defined by the price tag on our gifts.

One final note: spending less has special significance in this season of the year, because the holidays are a time marked by indulgence, over-spending, and perhaps even the accumulation of unmanageable debt. But this is only when we are at our worst. These kinds of consumerist, retail-worshiping actions are practiced by us all year round. So the call to spend less may begin this holiday season, but it is meant to continue all year long.

May it be so. May we spend less, and in doing so, discover anew how we may serve God and God's kingdom rather than the kingdoms of this world. And may it free us, in turn, to give more this Christmas and all year long. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.