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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's message is entitled "The High Cost of Low Living." Let us continue in worship by giving attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 5, beginning the reading at the verse numbered 1.

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"But a man named Ananias with his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property, and with his wife's knowledge he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles' feet. But Peter said, 'Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? While it remained unsold, did it not remain your

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own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have lied to men and to God.' When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died, and great fear came upon all who heard of it. The young men rose and wrapped him up and carried him out and buried him. After an interval of about three hours, his wife came in, not knowing

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what had happened. And Peter said to her, 'Tell me whether you sold the land for so much.' And she said, 'Yes, for so much.' But Peter said to her, 'How is it that you have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? Hark, the feet of those that have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out immediately.' She fell down at his feet and died. When the young

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men came in, they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. And great fear came upon the whole church and upon all who heard of these things." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his Word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. I feel very much this morning like the preacher

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who came into his pulpit one day and, looking at his congregation, said, "I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I have not prepared a sermon. The bad news is I'm going to preach anyway." The early chapters of the book of the Acts of the Apostles are radiant with spangled victory after victory for the early church. But then at the beginning of chapter 5, for the first

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time a blotch appears upon the church's scutcheon. For the first time there is a moment of darkness and shadow, and that moment is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Now because those names carry with them thoughts of long ago, and because this story is altogether contemporary in its point and purpose, let's call them this morning Al and Sue. Now Al and Sue had a friend named Barney.

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His story is told in Acts 4. And Barney went out and sold a field, and he gave all the proceeds of the field to the church for the benefit of those who had particular need. And this gift was received with great gratitude. And when Al and Sue saw the praise which was heaped upon Barney for his generosity, they decided that they would copy him, that they wanted some of that applause as well.

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So they went out and they sold a field. But when they got the cash into their hands, they couldn't quite bring themselves to turning it all over to the church as Barney had done. So they turned over only part of it, but claimed that they were turning over all of it. Now when Al comes with the gift and the claim, Peter confronts him. "Why are you doing this?" he says. "You own the field.

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No one asked you to sell it. After you sold it, the cash was yours. No one asked you to give it or any portion of it to the church. But you have chosen to give part of it and claim that you have given all of it. You have lied to the Holy Spirit." And Al was so ashamed before the eyes of all the assembled Christians that he dropped red and was immediately, because of the hot temperature in

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that land, taken out and buried. Now a few minutes later, Sue comes upon the scene, and Peter says to her, "Al said that you sold this field and all the money that you got for it you turned over to the church. Is that true?" And she said, "Yes, that is absolutely true." And Peter said, "You are a liar even as your husband is a liar. And as he accused Al, so he now accused her. And he said, 'As your

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husband is now dead, so you too will die, because you have compounded the lie.'" And she died, and they were buried, according to the narrative, side by side, which is altogether appropriate. After all, they were side by side in their ambition. They wanted to be like Barney. They were side by side in their avarice. They agreed to hold something back. They were side by side in their hypocrisy.

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They were seeking a grace which was not properly theirs. They were side by side in their deceit. One lied and the other swore to it. It is altogether fitting, then, that when they were buried, it was side by side. Here we see the high cost of low living. You see, Al and Sue sinned against God. Now, they must have been well off, because in those days only people with money had property.

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And most of the property was owned by the entire family, but these two evidently had sufficient of this world's goods to own their own fields. And not only that, but they could afford to sell one, because evidently they had other property as well. So they did not have to do what they did. But in their wealth, they chose to do it, but they then kept something back. And that's the great

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problem in the stewardship of so many people. You see, the essence of stewardship is not what we give. The essence of stewardship is to be found in what we keep. Look at the New Testament. Whom did Jesus praise for her giving? The woman who gave everything. She kept nothing back. I knew a man who did that. He was an orange farmer in Southern California, and he became a Christian

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when he was 30 years old, and he immediately began to tithe. And then one day it dawned on him that he had lived and worked for some 30 years until he was brought to Christ, and in all of that time he had given nothing to God. He had, to use the words of the prophet Malachi, robbed God. So he decided it is not adequate for me to give only the tithe, and so he doubled it, and then he tripled it.

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And as he continued to grow older and was moderately successful, he continued to give higher and higher percentages of his income until, in the last 10 years of his life, Dewey Lockman was giving every dime that he earned to the extension of Christ's kingdom on the earth. He kept nothing back. Now those are the people that Christ puts at the very top of the list of givers.

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Now Zacchaeus was a man who gave 50% and kept 50%, and Christ also praises him for the new dimensions of faith which are to be found in him. The average first century Jewish Pharisee or Sadducee would give 30%, 10% was a tithe, and 20% were gifts to God over and above the tithe. Today, lower on the poll, we have the tither, who is to be found occasionally in the pews of our churches,

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who gives 10%, keeping 90% for himself. And sad to say, the average gift per member of this congregation is a little less than 5%. They keep 95% for themselves. Now you see, the person at the top of the list is not necessarily poor or rich. That widow who gave everything that she had was quite poor. Dewey Lockman, at the time when he began to turn over all of his income to God, had become

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very successful. What determines where you are on the list is how much you are keeping back. It's interesting to notice that Paul, when he writes to the Corinthians, in the sixth chapter, gives us the grisliest list of sins in all of the New Testament. He says, "Do not be deceived. Neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals,

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nor thieves, nor greedy people, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers, shall enter the kingdom of God." Now notice what he does here. He equates greed with idolatry, and with adultery, and with thievery. Greed, you see, is measured by how much we keep to ourselves. So Al and Sue sinned against God, but they did more than that. They also sinned against the church.

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You have heard me say on more than one occasion from this sacred desk that the more on fire for Christ you become, the more the enemies of Christ will try to extinguish your flame. To change the metaphor, a cat does not chase a dead mouse. The more you move in Christ, the more opposition you can expect. Now, the early church began to move out aggressively in the name

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of Christ, and it was attacked from all different perspectives, and it repulsed all of these attacks. But here, in this story, we have evil scoring its first points. And how does evil do it? It attacks the church from the inside. Death first strikes the church with a lie from inside. The ultimate fear of the church should not be anything on the outside,

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not the communists, or the capitalists, or the libertarians, not the Democrats, or the Republicans, or the media, or the moguls of industry, not topless, or bottomless, or heartless, or headless dancers. No, the thing the church has to be most concerned about is that which comes from the inside. The history of the church shows it victorious over persecutions

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from the outside ten thousand times. But Jesus says, "Beware of wolves in sheep's clothing." This matter of deceitful giving is very serious to Peter. His comments to Al and to Sue are very harsh and very sharp, and there's no mercy included in them. As he is with one, so he is with the other. He quite literally scares them to death, not because he was lacking in love,

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but because he loved Christ and Christ's people most of all. And in doing this, Peter was doing just what his Lord would have done. You never see Jesus becoming angry because of someone's disagreement with him. The rich young ruler, for example, listened to Jesus and said, "Sorry, I'm not going to follow you."

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It says that Jesus was hurt, but it doesn't say that he was angry. When Jesus got to Bethany, where Lazarus had died, and Martha comes up and says, "If you'd have been here a little more quickly, this wouldn't have happened," Jesus might have felt some frustration at her lack of understanding and her lack of sensitivity, but there is no anger

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displayed in him. When you see anger displayed in Christ is when this one who is the truth confronts that which pretends to be truth and is in fact a lie. It is hypocrisy which angers the Lord, and when he encounters it, he says, "You are whitewashed tombs. You sparkle with whiteness on the outside, but you are full of the stink of dead men's bones." To Peter and to Christ,

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to lie to the Church is to sin against the Holy Spirit. Those are the very words he uses, "You have sinned against the Holy Spirit." Al and Sue had attacked God's forever family, and whenever you attack God's family, you attack God. You see, the unity of the family of God is essential, and what Al and Sue did served only to rupture it. You know, for example, how the Apostle Paul

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often speaks of the Church as being the body of Christ, and you're familiar with how your body works. If you cut your finger, immediately millions of little thrombocytes, platelets, rush to the scene to clot the blood, and the white corpuscles rush to the scene to kill any infection that might be trying to enter. Your brain is sending signals to your nerves, and your

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nerves cause your intercostal muscle system to begin to move with greater exercise, and as a result, your lungs begin to fill with greater amounts of air, and your blood becomes more aerated than it was before. Every part of the body responds when one part of the body is hurt. That's what Paul means when he says, "If one of us suffers, then all of us suffer together."

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But Al and Sue violated this. They were not ready to risk the commitment which membership in the family of God calls us to. Once, a good number of years ago, I was in Philadelphia with a group of other ministers, and we were visiting a hotel, and in the lobby of that hotel, they had a waterbed,

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which was quite a new thing in that time. And there was a big sign there that invited you to go over and lie down on it and try it out. Well, as you can imagine, businessmen and businesswomen and distinguished clergy would never think of lying down on a waterbed in the middle of a hotel lobby. They'd go by and give it a little push, but that's all. And then a pack of cub scouts came

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through the door, and they came over and they examined this waterbed very thoroughly. And then one of these little cubs--well, he wasn't so little, he was as wide as he was tall--walked back over to the door, and letting out a yell, ran 50 feet across the lobby and leaped right into the middle of the bed. I've never forgotten him and his courage, and I've never forgotten him

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also because that's a picture of what it is to be a part of the Church. You leap into the fellowship trusting that the Church will catch you, and you are caught by the Church. Now, Al and Sue were not willing to catch anybody else, and because they weren't willing to catch other people, they anticipated that they themselves would not be caught and held up by the body of belief.

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They sinned against the Church when they so thought. They broke its hold. And of course they also sinned against themselves. The word "belief" means literally "be life." Your belief is supposed to be the way that you live. If you are without belief, you are without life, that is, you are in death. And because Al and Sue showed such a poverty of belief,

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I boldly call them spiritual suicides. You see, they told a lie, and lies separate people. You can never really have an intimate relationship with someone if you know that there is a lie between you which keeps you separated one from the other. Secrets destroy intimacy. And because they lied, they also built up within themselves a kind of insensitivity.

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They became more interested in themselves than in anybody else. That's the reason they kept part of it back. And when you separate yourself that way, when you isolate yourself from full involvement in the body of Christ, the result of that inevitably is ignorance. And the ignorance does not lead to bliss, it leads to blasphemy. I shall never forget a pledge card that was handed

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in in the second church that it was my joy to serve. A woman had signed her name on the pledge card and she had written across it in bold letters, "Please do not bother me again." And no amount was filled in on the card. She wanted to be cut off. She wanted to be isolated. And she was. She was separated from the body of belief. And that's just what happened to Al and

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Sue. They weren't put out of the church. They, in a sense, found their own way out of the church. And then finally were carried out of the church. About 30 years ago, I was visiting a minister friend in another city, and he was called upon to fulfill a sad responsibility. He had to go to the morgue to identify a body.

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And I went down with him. And while he was about the sad business which was his, I walked into this room. I'd never been in a morgue before. And I saw something which I suppose was common then, but it certainly isn't common anymore. In this room, they had taken all of the unidentified bodies, and each one was in a glass box, refrigerated, with a sheet pulled over them

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up to here. And you could see the faces. I suppose that was so that you could perhaps identify someone who was lying there. I'll never forget the sheeted dead beneath that cold glass, tossed up on the shore of life by a restless sea, and no one claimed them. They were cut off. And I found myself thinking, "What woman waited for you to come home? What mother held you in her

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arms? What father was so proud of you that he would die a thousand deaths if he knew where you were this day? What ambitions did your heart once dream about? What love kissed your frozen lips? What temptation did you yield to that led you to this? What treachery on your part so desecrated your soul and your spirit? What bitterness made you an enemy or a nobody? What fair ideals were

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once part of your imagination and now have vanished forever? Did any tears of regret ever roll down your icy cheeks?" And they stretched out beneath the sheets, were silent, and as I turned to leave the room, I saw on the wall a sign which said, "Gentlemen, please remove your hats." Why? Well, it wasn't out of tribute to the dead,

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because the dead were not there in spirit, just their bodies were left behind. And it was certainly not in tribute to life, because in this place was the epitome of death, not only death physically, but death in every other way as well. And they didn't tip their hats to love, because you felt no love in there at all.

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I decided that the reason gentlemen were asked to tip their hats was to acknowledge that every one of those people had been fashioned by him, by God, as the temple of his Holy Spirit. This was what they were meant to be, and they had allowed themselves to come to ruin.

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You lifted your hat to what could have been. Now, those who so ruin themselves do not do this so much by what they do do as by what they don't do. Well, the story closes. It says that great awe and fear and terror came upon the Church. The Church, you see, was so shocked when they heard about this deceit on the part of Al and Sue

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that this shock showed on their faces. And Al and Sue died of shame and humiliation. You've heard people say, "I wish I were dead." Well, they were. That kind of thing can happen, you know. Any minister will tell you of knowing individuals who have willed their own deaths and have accomplished their will in a very short time.

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And missionaries will tell you how those in other cultures will will their own deaths, or will, because of something that they have done, become so overwhelmed with their guilt that they will literally die. Well, that's what happened here. And it leads me to ask, suppose someone were to stand up right now and read out our names, each of us,

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and after our names, the amount we had pledged to the work of Christ and his kingdom for the year that is to be, when we heard our name and the amount read out, would our faces redden with embarrassment? Would we feel uncomfortable when everyone looked at us?

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When we saw the black and blue face of this city and all the needs that are part of it and the life of this congregation and all the thousands that it reaches here and through its ministries on radio and television, when we saw all of that, would we be able to stand up and say, "I had to keep this much of it back"?

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See, it all comes down to this. If there would be in any of us any hesitation for our pledge to be read, then we are in spiritual danger, because such shame is the prelude to spiritual perishing. I am no Peter. I do not have the authority of Peter. But I have taken a solemn vow

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to speak to you the truth. I offer you, then, this word of God on this morning. I have set before you the path of life and the path of death. Choose life that you may live. Let us pray. Let us pray.

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In this quiet moment, our Father, each of us comes before thee in our own way to speak to what your Spirit says to ours. May we be temples of thy Spirit, not in ruins, but regnant with thy strength and glory. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen.

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