Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: II Corinthians 9:6-15
October 31, 2004
Several of you asked whether I went outside on Wednesday evening to watch the lunar eclipse. To which I replied: “No, I stayed in the house to watch the Red Sox win the World Series.” As I told Kris, you can always watch a lunar eclipse. But there are people in Boston who have been on life support for sixty….seventy….eighty years, who can now die with smiles on their faces and go home to their Maker, because the “Curse of the Bambino” has been lifted and the faithful of Fenway have been rewarded. Now, with that behind us, let us fervently pray that the Cubs will catch the spirit next year. Because, should that happen, it will fall to my successor to mount this very pulpit some 52 weeks hence and greet you with the joyous pronouncement that hell has, indeed, frozen over.
If there is a message to be taken from this long-overdue accomplishment, it is that you who number yourselves among life’s beleaguered should not lose heart. Because when you lose heart, you’ve pretty much lost it all. Cardiac arrest can be as fatal spiritually as it is physically.
I never thought much about my heart until last summer. My wife said I had a good heart. My kids said I had a good heart. People in my previous churches said: “Bill, you have a good heart.” And as for my family physician, who, every year, smears that chilly goop on various parts of my chest….attaches those little suction cups to the gooped-up areas of my anatomy….passes a little current through the connecting wires…and then reads the picture of cardiac perfection that emerges on those narrow pieces of paper….he also said: “Ritter, you have a good heart.”
Which was why I stared at the phone in disbelief one Friday in July, when he called the church and said: “Go to the emergency room immediately.” On the cusp of a vacation weekend, having promised to take Kris antiquing, I replied: “I can’t go to Beaumont. I’m headed for Shipshewana.” But he won, as I knew he would. My enzymes were elevated to a level that usually means “heart attack.” Which diagnosis I challenged. “I think I’d know if I had one,” I said. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Some don’t. And given your capacity for denial, you might not.”
As it turned out, I was right and he was wrong. I hadn’t had a heart attack. Although I did need to go to the hospital. That’s because I had a heart problem. More to the point, I had a heart infection. Nobody seems to know why most viruses result in colds or the flu, while one or two percent head straight for the heart or the brain. But this one did. And the other thing I knew, but had forgotten, is that fighting and defeating a virus is pretty much an inside job. You can’t just take an antibiotic and be done with it. And when the virus is in the heart, one recovers over months, not days….time being the must trustable ally.
I did eventually have a cardiac catheterization to confirm the “no attack” part of the diagnosis. Which was nice to know. But then I began to wonder: How do you diagnose a virus in the heart? And how do you measure success (or failure) in defeating it? Which was when I learned abouta phenomenon that cardiologists call “the ejection fraction.”
Keeping things simple, picture your heart (at any given moment) as being full of blood. Not pumping blood. Just storing blood. Then attach a number to that fullness. Call it 100 percent. Next, picture your heart pumping that blood throughout your body. Except, at any given moment, your heart never pumps (ejects) all the blood it is holding. Some of the blood stays behind. How much stays behind? About 35 percent of it. So if your heart is working normally, your ejection fraction is 65 percent. For purposes of review, remember the following. A heart full of blood….one hundred percent. A normal heart pumping blood….65 percent disperses, 35 percent stays home.
When you have an infection, your heart gets bigger. But since your heart is a muscle, bigger is not necessarily better. Instead, bigger is harder….stiffer….less able to pulsate or pump, if you will. So when the heart is enlarged, less blood is ejected and more blood stays home.
I learned that there are people who eject only 15 percent of their heart’s blood at any given moment. They may be alive, but they are completely sedentary. At 30 percent they can go to work. But they had better have a desk job….along with a reserved parking place by the front door.
When measured at the time of my hospitalization, my ejection fraction was 40 percent….25 percent above minimal, but 25 percent below optimal. Within a matter of weeks (aided and abetted by better exercise, better diet, an almost total retreat from salt, and a little heart-strengthening medication), I was at 55 percent. And given how I feel presently, I may be closing on normality. At least, it is getting to be later in the evening when, suddenly and mysteriously, all of the air escapes from my balloon.
But I tell you this for reasons having less to do with sympathy than theology. Three weeks ago in Atlanta, I was sitting around the table with several of my colleagues who pastor large-membership churches like this one. And, as it does every year, the talk eventually turned to that aspect of our job having to do with raising money. Which was when Kent Millard said a fascinating thing. Kent pastors St. Luke’s UMC in Indianapolis….which has been, for some time, the only Methodist church in the Rust Belt (meaning the industrial north….and the northeast, for that matter) larger than we are. Kent talks in homey, folksy images, whereupon he proceeded to share an image that had recently connected with his people. Said Kent:
I told them to picture a conversation between the heart and the rest of the organs. Then I told them to picture the heart saying: “Hey, it’s my blood and I see absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to keep it.” So what do you think would happen if the heart couldn’t be persuaded otherwise? Death, that’s what would happen. True, the organs might die first. But the death of the heart would quickly follow.
In every area of life, the ejection fraction is operative. Once you have something, it is your privilege to keep it and not part with it. But, sooner or later, it’ll kill you. Surer than shooting. Which was when I thought of Jesus’ word about treasures and hearts….the implication being that only when you let some of your treasure flow beyond you, will your heart be able to thrive within you.
Every year when the Garrett-Evangelical students come from the seminary in January, Lindsay Hinz and I teach a two-hour module on fundraising. It usually occurs late in their visit. By that time, they are ready to learn….having been forewarned that we know some secrets. But I shock them when I spend the first hour forcing them to confront their personal attitudes toward money. Simply put:
· Most seminary students don’t come from money.
· Most seminary students don’t have money.
· Most seminary students owe, at the start of their ministry, a ton of money.
· Most seminary students fear it will take them twenty years (if then) to get right-side-up when it comes to money.
· Most seminary students have, from their professors, heard far more lectures on the evils than on the virtues of money.
· Most seminary students, on the day they graduate, have more in common with closet socialists than free-wheeling capitalists when it comes to theories about the distribution of money.
· Most seminary students will equate poverty with virtue in the very first sermon they ever preach about money.
· (In part because) most seminary students don’t understand, can’t relate to, and even unconsciously resent people who have money.
· Most seminary students figure that Jeff Nelson, Lynn Hasley and Carl Gladstone have sold their souls by starting their ministry in the midst of money.
· (Which is why it is hard for) most seminary students to ask their people for money….and why most churches served by pastors right out of seminary are hurting for money.
At which point I tell them three things.
First, I tell them they need to get in touch with their feelings about money….having it or not having it….desiring it or disdaining it. Because unexamined feelings will eventually bleed into everything they write in their stewardship letters, preach from their pulpits, or suggest in their finance committee meetings. Truth be told, most young preachers hate finance committee meetings….not because they feel that such meetings are beneath their calling, but because they haven’t figured out how, if at all, the work of the finance committee fits into their calling.
Second, I tell them that money is both a gift and a tool….and that their job is to teach people how to open gifts graciously and use tools widely.
Third, I tell them that they should not go anywhere near a pulpit to talk about money unless they truly believe:
· that the Gospel is true.
· that it really is in giving that we receive.
· that people are created by God with a need to give.
· that generous people really are the happiest people on the face of the earth.
· and that what preachers are doing when they talk about giving is not extracting money, but saving lives.
True, there are times when preachers need to talk about the fact that churches need money. But there’s nothing new in that. Churches have always needed money. Probably always will. But the biggest defense people raise against the argument that the church needs money is “So do I….so do my kids….so does my bank, my boat, my bookie….along with my insatiable love of stuff or my ongoing quest for the good life.” Preachers need to be able to tell their people that giving is the door to the good life and that tithing is God’s blueprint for the good life.
Then I say to the seminarians: “But you won’t know that until you’ve tested it for yourselves.” Following which I ask them if they, themselves, tithe. And if not, why not? And even though I don’t ask for responses (or confessions), someone will inevitably say that they know they should, but can’t….given that there is never anything left over to tithe with.
Leading me to counter:
Look, tithing (or proportional giving if you can’t begin at 10 percent) is not about your surplus but your substance….not about your leftover contribution but your initial allocation. It’s what you do first, not last. That’s the beauty of God’s plan. When you get your priorities in order, the rest falls into place. In a strange, yet wonderful, way, when you start with God’s way of living beyond yourself, you learn how to live within yourself.
Over and over again, you’ve heard me say that I’ve yet to meet an unhappy tither. But it suddenly occurred to me, I’ve never met a bankrupt tither either….or even a tither who told me he couldn’t pay his bills.
I tell young preachers that if they are waiting until they have leftover money, they’ll wait from here to eternity. I know very few people who have leftover money. Church people don’t have leftover money (although most church people believe other church people have leftover money….because they sometimes name them and tell me to go see them). Then I tell young preachers that the best time to learn God’s plan for giving is precisely when they don’t have any money. When Kris and I made $4,000 a year in 1966, a tithe was eight bucks a Sunday. Well, we always had eight bucks a Sunday. Now, on my salary alone, I’ve got to come up with more than 25 times that amount a Sunday. Which is anything but walking around money (unless you walk around with a heck of a lot more than I do). And for Kris and myself, capital campaigns, college gifts, contributions to other churches and offerings to charities customarily push our percentage over the 15-16 mark.
But it works. I wish I could convince you that it works. I find it frustrating to realize that this may be my last opportunity to tell you that it works. Money is a tool. Time is a tool. Talent, energy and experience, they are tools, too. If I don’t use them, they get rusty. And so do I.
As Paul says, God loves a cheerful giver. Although God will take from a grouch. But most of us givers are cheerful. Not because God tilts a trough from heaven so that all manners of goodies slide down our chimneys. But because the ejection fraction really does work. When we open our hands, the heart gets warmer.
So what about Kent Millard’s question: “What if the heart said to the rest of the organs, ‘It’s my blood and I see absolutely no reason I shouldn’t keep it?’” Let me answer by asking if you’ve ever watched chickens eat. When the feed is put in the trough, chickens will stuff their craws until they’re so tight, there isn’t room for even one more grain, kernel or pellet. But let a few new chickens….late arriving chickens….deaf-to-the-dinner-bell chickens….suddenly approach the trough that the full chickens just left, and they will return. Whereupon they will push their way through to the food supply and eat what they do not need….or even want….until they die.
Oh, how I wish I were just describing chickens.
Note: As you might have guessed, the “chicken story” comes from the CD reproduction of a sermon by Fred Craddock (who knows a lot more about the table manners of
