speaker-0: First reading this morning is from 2 Thessalonians chapter 3 verses 6 through 12.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: Now we command you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to keep away from every brother or sister living irresponsibly and not according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to imitate us. We were not irresponsible when we were with you. We did not eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor, we worked night and day so that we We might not burden any of you. This was not because we do not have that right, but in order to give you an example to imitate. For even when we are with you, we gave you this command, anyone unwilling to work should not eat. For we hear that some of you are living irresponsibly, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now, such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. The word of the Lord.

speaker-1: So last year, when I came up with the idea of this sermon series, I thought it would be fun and kind of helpful to end the summer with talking about Christian ethics by way of Christian cliches, those pesky little maxims that sound just sh sage enough to lodge themselves in a common pool of wisdom. And I figured that to sum up the sort of pithy nature of these sayings, we could call this series bumper sticker theology. And I have to tell you, because I'm not super petty, but I am a little petty. That I was driving down the road about a month and a half ago and I saw a sign outside of Treach that said bumper sticker theology. And so I'm here to tell you that my files have been hacked by a local church. Somebody call the Cross Timbers Gazette. Now, as it turns out, I did look. They've not chosen the same bumper stickers as me. So I'm not pressing charges. I'm cool. Instead, we're gonna start, we're gonna start this morning with a saying that you have all heard before. and that most take to be gospel truth, mostly based on the reading that Al shared this morning from Thessalonians. And that saying is: if you give a man a fifth, You feed him for a day. But if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. And just to get this out of the way, Straight straight at the top. This isn't in scripture. This is not a Bible verse. And if it shows up on your daily Bible verse calendar, rip that page out and throw it away. However, we've got plenty of stories actually about how Jesus deals with need and with fish, and in fact, both at the same time. So let's listen together for the word of the Lord today from the Gospel of John, chapter six, and verses one through thirty. For one such example. Listen here for the word of the Lord. After this, Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias. A large crowd kept following him because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. And Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near, and when he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat? He said this to test him. For he himself knew what he was going to do. And Philip answered him, Two hundred denarii wouldn't buy enough bread. That's a lot of money, by the way. 200 denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little. And one of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, Hey, there's a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. but what are they among so many people? Jesus said, make the people sit down. Now there was a great deal of grass in the place. So they sat down, about 5,000 in all. By the way, this 5,000 doesn't include women and children, never would in the in ancient times. So there are lots and lots of people here. And then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, He distributed them to those who were seated, so also the fish, as much as they wanted. And when they were satisfied, he told his disciples, gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost. So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. O God, you help the helpless, you satisfy our hungry hearts, and you care for the poor and the downtrodden. As is our daily prayer, O Lord, make us more like you, and give us clarity of heart to discern what is true. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. So I chose this fishy statement. because it's one of those sayings that sounds like it could be biblical in the same way that saying like God helps them those who help themselves sounds like it could be biblical, like somebody had the audacity to throw God's name into that one. Give a man a fish has been attributed to just about everyone under the sun because it's just straight up valor stealing, right? People have wrongly tied it to Maimonides. Mao Tzu, Native American wisdom, Mao Zedong, Jesus, the saying is literally begging for gravitas because it has none on its own. And somewhere deep down, we know this to be true. But this half-truth nonsense persists. It's a real the emperor has no clothes situation. And here's why. I'll just put the cards out on the table. Here's why this is nonsense. If we are really honest, really honest, about give a man a fish, we know that no one has ever used that saying to increase their desire and capability of generosity and charitability. Nobody if you have, I would invite you to come to the mic at this moment and tell us that story. It doesn't happen. And that is enough for me to throw a flag on this play. It's only ever used to make us more stingy. If you give a man a fish, nobody I'm I'm sorry, if you've just never heard anybody say, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. And by golly, that's good enough for me. Look at the life of Jesus. He gave people fish. That's never the way that that ends. Never. It's always some mealy-mouth nonsense from the right about making sure we aren't creating more people looking for a handout, which then leads to more mealy-mouth nonsense from the left, about a hand up, not a handout. All the while people are standing there, stomach scrumbling, right? Good Lord. Let's just give some fish away. Meanwhile, if you look at the life of Jesus, doesn't it seem to you, or does it seem to you, like he's trying to make sure that he balances the amount of good that he does with how lazy he perceives people to be? Not really, right? Like I spent this week thinking about not just this feeding story,

speaker-0: But

speaker-1: essentially everything that Jesus does. His healing stories, the other miracles he performs, and it just doesn't seem like Jesus cares at all about how quote-unquote deserving people are of these gifts. That just isn't how Jesus works. He doesn't ever chide the poor for being poor. He doesn't blame the sick for their sickness or assume that they deserve to be in such pitiable a state because they didn't think to have earn the ability to get health insurance or see a proper doctor. He doesn't Take this particular crowd to task for their irresponsibility in forgetting to bring a sack lunch that day, right? He doesn't leave people in their hurt or offer some poorly timed lesson about character and hard work. He just heals. He just feeds. He gives without monitoring monitoring worthiness. And as we found out a couple of weeks ago, when we read the story of the woman caught in the very act of adultery. In Jesus' gentleness, he withholds condemnation often to offer the grace of a new day. Jesus is the embodiment. Of the invisible God of the universe. And he lives the refrain the Hebrew scriptures offer to us again and again about the nature of that God, the Lord, the Lord, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God, it turns out, is committed to our good and to the giving of God's self and God's good gifts to us over and over and over again, regardless of whether we think we deserve it or somebody else deserves it or not. The Apostle Paul puts it this way: when he says that God demonstrates God's love for us in this. We were still sinners. While we wanted nothing to do with God, while we were turned completely away from the Lord, Christ died for us. The economy of salvation is not based on our ability to earn a gift from God, but only on, only ever on God's desire to give us gifts in the first place. So if we are to model our lives after Jesus, then why would our love, our charity to others be based on what they could earn? Or what we believe they deserve. It feels very much like Jesus could have saved us some syllables in our Christian cliche today. If you give a man a fish, he might say, you feed him for a day. That's it. It's good enough, right? Now, if there is so-called biblical support for a careful paucity of charity, it is found in our scripture from Thessalonians that Al read this morning. It has harsh words for those who would be, quote, living irresponsibly, mere busybodies, not doing any work. including the exhortation that those who don't work shouldn't eat. Now I was not alive in 1967, but some of you were. And I bet that you remember when we created the boogeyman, I'm sorry, the boogie woman of the welfare queen. I bet that this scripture got thrown around a lot. It certainly did in the 80s and 90s when it really when that phrase really picked up steam. No more lobster on the working man's dime. You don't work. You don't eat. It's right there in the Bible. By the way. Most of the stories that you've heard on people on about people on assistance are absolute nonsense. If you've ever actually shared life with folks on assistance, you'll know that it is barely enough to survive on. And all the more, after recent cuts to those programs to the Big Beautiful Bill, that took $187 billion away from people on assistance, like my Uncle Lauren, who is disabled, pretty much lives on peanut butter and jelly, and won't ever be able to work. Should he not be able To eat? Just saying. But using this Thessalonians passage as a proof for why social welfare programs are bad and teach a fish is wise, or teach a man to fish is wise, is desperately missing context on both sides of that equation. Do you know why those Thessalonians weren't working? It was not, in fact, because they were lazy. If you carefully read or carefully listened to that passage, that charge isn't brought up against them. They aren't told that they're being lazy. They're called irresponsible, and they're called busybodies. Their lack of motivation, and this is a theme throughout the book of Thessalonians, their lack of motivation is because the Thessalonians believed that Jesus was gonna return like right now. Or that he had in fact already returned and they were just waiting on the entire universe to be changed. So, like, why bother going to work if everything is gonna change tomorrow? This passage isn't about assistance for the lazy or the unwilling to work. It's about how to wait for Christ to return and how to keep putting your nose to the grindstone of all that is good in this interim period. In the same way, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, and if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime, didn't in fact begin as Christian advice for those in need of that good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic. Instead, its origin story is bathed in good old-fashioned distaste for the poor. The first time it shows up is in 198 or 1885 through the pen of Anne Isabel Thackeray Ritchie, who writes this. I suppose the patron that's just how she sounds in my head. I suppose the patron meant that if you give a man a fish, he's hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish, you do him a good turn. I say good turn, sir. But these very listen, these very elementary principles are apt to clash with the leisure of the cultivated classes. She tells on herself. These elementary principles are apt to clash with the leisure of the cultivated classes, which is to say that the uber wealthy who do not need to work aren't going to like the insinuation that they are lazy, right? I'd remind you that Ritchia's writing, 1885, in the midst of the second industrial revolution, which is a time of incredible progress and wealth that we call the Gilded Age. That progress and wealth, however, is created at the expense of the teeming masses who, if they could find work, labored long hours in factories for wages that barely covered the basic necessities of of living. It was an age gilded in filth and desperation for most. Here's another example. eighteen eighty nine. Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest men in America at the time, and one of my hometown's personal villains, asked me about the Johnstown Flood Museum after worship today, and how he was essentially responsible for the killing of thousands of people in Johnstown for his negligence. At any rate, he wrote about his personal views about what he's called indiscriminate charity. And he wrote this. He doesn't get an accent. He doesn't deserve one. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich Not the rich themselves, but their millions, that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea, then so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. So spent indeed as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure. Gosh, that must be easy to say for one of the wealthiest men on earth. Better to throw my money into the ocean than to give it to someone who needs it and have them then become a drunkard. Every age in which our fishy bumper sticker has had another resurgence, it's had a target. Every time. It's been an excuse, wrapped in the flavor of Christianity, to withhold from the needs of those who are suffering. In the late 1880s, it was the poor who found themselves helplessly outside the flood of wealth the Industrial Revolution brought. For the next 80 years or so, it would take a couple of different forms. And finally, in 1961, it would land in the form that we have heard it, that I invited you to participate in the back and forth with earlier in the in the sermon. And I will give you one guess to whom it was directed at in 1961. One. You get one guess. Don't waste it. Yeah. Those black members of our society who were in need of public assistance because they were lazy. And by lazy, I mean because they had been systematically and intentionally kept from the ability to build wealth in this country while that same devilish society was built on their lives and labor. From slavery and lies about 40 acres and a mule, to interrupted reconstruction and Jim Crow to redlining and thinly veiled racist epithets of welfare queen. Teach a man to fish. And God helps those who help themselves. And cool quotes like: if you don't work, you don't eat, thus says the Lord, have all been just used as a shield to keep us from the self-sacrificial call of the Lord to give to everyone who asks. So listen, we are actually working here as a congregation, as a people. to be the flagrantly generous people of God that God is calling us to be. We set a goal as a congregation and as a session, as a leadership, to give more than 10% of our budget away, and we've been succeeding in that. As part of that, when we give direct benevolence out to people who ask, I gotta be very honest with you, we don't do a whole lot of due diligence. Like if you are in bad enough shape to call this church and to lie about the fact that you need to get your electric bill paid, you gotta.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: You really pulled one over on me. Okay, right? And I'm not trying to be health and wealthy gospel guy here, but you know what? We've been able to pay all of our bills as a congregation. Even when we give more than 10% of our collected resources away. There have been, in fact, leftover baskets of fish and bread in this congregation. God has provided when we open our hands out to the world around us instead of trying to find ways to not be generous. Right? I don't know about you, but I'm not trying to invite a couple of Christmas spirits to visit me at night.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: The Holy Spirit is good enough for me. So, my friends, what's the final word on our fishy saying? Is work important and good? Yeah. Yeah. We get to participate with the Lord in doing things excellently and as if everything that we do is for God Himself. We get to do good in this world. We get to create so that we have something to share with the world around us. We get to work so that the systems that we set up work for everybody. Is charity and generosity also good? Yeah, yeah, you bet it is. We get to in our charitability and in our generosity, we get to be like Jesus. Who is the most generous, gives even of his very life, right? We get to mirror the character of God into the world through our giving of ourselves. We get a glimpse of what it's like to give without hope of return, just like Jesus. So keep giving people fish. Feeding them for a day is good. And keep teaching people how to fish because fishing is fun. And let's make sure that the system isn't breaking people's rods in half and blaming them for being hungry. Because Jesus loves justice too. Now all that might be a little bit much for a bumper sticker, but your life can hold it. Thanks be to God. Amen.

speaker-0: Yeah.