Series: “Jesus’ Message: You Are Integral For Unity Being One Race And One Blood”
“Take Courage and Do Not Worry” – Job 1:1; 2:1-10
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12, Mark 10: 2-16 (13-16)
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. Twenty-five years ago, Gladwell published The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. This month he published Revenge of the Tipping Point. Gladwell writes, “The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea,” I began, “and the idea is very simple.”[1]
It is that best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.[2]
Ideas and behaviors follow strange pathways in Wichita, Sedgwick County, Kansas, The United States of America, and the world.
And so, we face a tipping point in our approach to the 2024 Operating Budget and the 2024Generosity Campaign for the 2025 Operating Budget. Finances, a social epidemic for institutions, individuals, families, and churches are at a tipping point. Listen to our sibling in Christ and Trustee Tom Rhoads. Tom…
Jesus teaches that healthy change occurs from a base of child-like dependence on God. To make any relationship work obstacles need to be embraced as opportunities for making things better. For Christians, having a child-like dependence on God is the best approach. In this regard, Bobby Schuller in Change Your Thoughts Change Your World writes, “When we face setbacks in life, our temptation will be to curse them, dwell on self-pity, blame others, or hurry on to something that isn’t meant to be…. There is no tragedy [setback] God can’t redeem. Though you cannot see it now, God will get you through whatever it is you’re facing, and you might even find a gift within.”[3] Believe that God is with you. Believe that God will see you through to a better outcome. Therein lies the significance of thinking and self-examination: Learn. Evaluate. Plan. Dream. Get back up after a fall. Press through the pain.[4] See obstacles, things that are in the way, as opportunities to grow. The Old Testament and Gospel Readings remind us that obstacles emerge for all people that can become opportunities for growth as a person. Satan tells God that Job only loves God for the things God does for him.
Job 1:1, 12 reads, There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil….The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!” So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord. And Mark 10:15 reads, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” Remember, everything works for good for those who love Jesus, who place child-like dependance on God.
The Pharisees often attempted to trap Jesus over his abandonment of traditional thought and practice in Judaism. And Job teaches us to ask hard questions of God and patiently listen for the answers as an act of depending on God and being faithful to God.[5]
And so here we are experiencing a tipping point. Yes, the financial woes facing Grace Presbyterian Church are staggering, in fact insurmountable. Yes, insurmountable when we try to muster up our strength to solve them. But here is the tipping point. Jesus states that a child-like dependency on God combines God’s action and human action into experiencing the kingdom of God. To trust that God will lead each one of us to sacrifice by increasing our pledge in 2025 and make a sacrificial gift to replenish our cash reserves….is embracing the tipping point idea and its corresponding solution, behavior of sacrificial giving.
Depend on God as you ponder your 2025 Pledge and a gift to replenish our cash reserves. Be that dependent child believing that dependence on God will lead you to obedient and sacrificial behavior in the financial aspect of your Christian discipleship. Remember the tipping point is the unfolding of an idea that develops behaviors of transformation. As Gladwell writes so eloquently, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.[6]
See God work things out to a good and kingdom end in the obedience and sacrifice of following Jesus in your financial giving. Take courage and do not worry. Amen.
This sermon was preached the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost on Sunday, 6 October 2024
by the Rev. Dr. Steven M. Marsh in the Sanctuary at Grace Presbyterian Church in Wichita, Kansas
Copyright 2024
Steven M. Marsh
All rights reserved.
[1]Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2024), ix.
[2]Ibid.
[3]Bobby Schuller, Change Your Thoughts Change Your World (Nashville, Tennessee: Nelson Books, 2019), 147.
[4]Adapted from Bobby Schuller, Change Your Thoughts Change Your World, 33.
[5]In the two paragraphs of textual analysis above, I have benefited from the thinking of Rebecca Abts Wright, Jill Duffield, Kimberly Bracken Long, Osvaldo D. Vena, Michael Lodahl, Leticia A. Guardiola-Saenz, and Peter J. Paris in Joel B. Green, Thomas G. Long, Luke A. Powery, Cynthia L. Rigby and Carolyn J. Sharp, editors, Connections, Year B, Volume 3 (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 353-356, 356-358, 359-361, 362-364, 364-366, 367-369 and 369-371.
[6]Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point, ix.
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