Pianist plays stars and stripes while I walk to the podium with a Christian flag and an American flag.  Put the flags in vases on either side of the podium.

I guess the big versions of these are still back-ordered.  But, I guess you just can’t have everything right from the start.  You know what I mean.  Can’t you just picture it.  Christian flag on the right, US flag on the left and in the middle-- a huge, towering pulpit with Vern glowering down on you.  In your nightmares maybe.

No, these patriotic trappings aren’t our cup of tea.  But we are, most of us, Americans.  And having just finished the Fourth of July celebration, I was inspired to look closer at just how our status as Americans affects our Christian faith.

With a sermon title like America, 3M and Christianity, perhaps you thought I would talk about the impact of post-it notes and Scotch tape on Christianity.  Nope.  3M is just an abbreviation for three important cultural facts of life for American Christians:  Money, Marketing and Militarism.  These 3Ms so permeate our society that even we at CMCL cannot escape them.  We can only be aware of their presence and try to compensate for them.

Money
Let’s take a look at money first.  Money, the spending, earning and investing of it, permeates our culture.  We have many words devoted to it-- smackers, a grand, buck, sawbuck, a bit, a fiver, a ten spot, capital,  and assets, to name a few.  Game show contestants on the Wheel of Fortune and the 100,000 Pyramid win and lose it on prime time TV.  And who could forget Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.   Our mailboxes bulge with sweepstakes contests promising to give it away.  We have magazines and newspapers devoted to it.  We have created huge institutions for the investment of it.  It’s ironic, I don’t own any stock, never have, yet I know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached another record high last week falling just short of the 1450 mark, but profit-taking forced the Dow to retreat to 1423 by the week’s end.

We have created a cultural institution:  the American Success Story.  The poor little boy who by the sweat of his brow becomes rich and powerful.  We have bumper stickers proclaiming Born to Shop, and I owe, I owe so off to work I go.  Yes, we live in the land of opportunity.  Anyone can make it in America - - and it happens to be money.

Our American system attempts to supply us with everything we need, want, and then some.  It’s a wonderful system.  Anyone who has lived in a developing country has had the experience of waiting for months to special order a car part that any one of us here could walk down to the local dealer and pick up.  Worst case scenario, the manufacturer ships the part by UPS and it arrives in two days.

This system has also produced the largest population of rich Christians the world has ever seen.  Christians who fly first class and stay in nice hotels, Christians who eat at nice restaurants, Christians who own lake cottages and motorhomes, Christians who drive new cars and live in big houses, Christians who have VCRs and personal computers, Christians who have College degrees and professional careers.  . . . I hope I didn’t leave anybody out.  To paraphrase Pogo, we have seen the rich and they is us.  The trouble is, it’s such good sport to take potshots at the Jim and Tammy Bakers, with their Rolls Royces, summer homes and air conditioned dog houses, that we forget our own stockpiles.

At this point I could try to whip you all into a frenzy of self-loathing for being rich Christians, but that’s not the idea.  Money is not in and of itself bad.  It is a gift from God-- it just happens to be one of those dangerous gifts which so often trip us up.
Money permeates our society, and to similar extent money permeates our churches.  In Luke 16: 13 Jesus says you can’t serve God and money.   Some American Churches try to get around this by saying, If you serve God, he’ll give you money, he’ll bless you.  Money becomes evidence of faithfulness.  Others simply ignore the issue.  You’ve got money, that’s OK.  Now let us take the morning offering.  Either way, the role of money is elevated to the point where it potentially competes with God for our primary allegiance.

 So what’s a group of rich, or potentially rich Christians, like ourselves, to do?  Here are six sketchy points to ponder:

 1.  Recognize that you will be tempted.  Tempted to pervert your attitudes towards money.  Money is wonderful, insidious stuff.  It may not always be fun to earn, but its great to spend, and I feel so much more secure just knowing that I have a few grand in the bank just in case.  Watch out!  As long as you live, you will be tempted to overearn, overspend, and oversave.

2.  Strive for stewardship without stinginess.  Much of what has passed for stewardship is just being plain down tight.  Who's to say that staying home and watching Miami Vice is better stewardship than paying $10 for a ticket to the Fulton.  Furthermore, if you stash away a bundle while tithing cumin and dill that's not stewardship.  Try doing a little frivolous giving.

3.  Let ethics guide your management of money.  We will always have opportunities to make a few shady bucks on the side, whether it be by claiming the unclaimable exemption on your schedule A, or silently accepting the undercharging of a sleepy store clerk.  Put your ethics first.  Better to be a few dollars poorer in heaven . . . .

4.  Learn to celebrate, in moderation.  The jews of Biblical times had a wonderful rhythm of celebration and work.  Life was tough, but the periodic feasts with family and friends made it a little more bearable.  Likewise for us, life shouldn't be one joyless drudge.  It's important to celebrate.   But on a cautionary note, too much celebration degenerates into a lifestyle of joyless overindulgence.

5.  Learn to share, not necessarily to own.  We anglos are not very good at this, as any American indian will tell you.  Sharing promotes simplicity and community.  It's a good idea.

6.  Above all seek your security, not in money, but in God and the community of faith.  We have life insurance, health insurance, fire and home and auto insurance, unemployment insurance, Retirement funds, Social Security, IRAs, trusts and annuities.  With all that we can fend off any calamity without help from anyone.  It's sad but true.

Once again the Amish provide us with a good role model for relying on  God and the community of believers.  In this area they model for us how to be in America but not of it.

--the first M is money, a gift from God, but a potential source of idolatry.

Now on to Marketing

Marketing is probably the most benign of the three M’s.  Business needs to sell goods in a crowded market.  Consumers need to choose between a raft of similar products, and so we need marketing.  It’s a 20th century American art form.  What started as a simple business tool for getting one’s product in front of the consuming public, has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry.  The moguls of Madison Avenue continually study us to find out what we want, where we are, and how to reach us.  And they have reached us.  We expect good marketing, slick packaging, catchy names.  I remember how shocked I was in dealing with the Amish with their utter unconcern for marketing.

Let’s try a little game.  How many of these products can you name from their ad jingles-- The choice of a  new generation, It’s the real thing, Where’s the beef, You deserve a break today, Catch the Spirit, The heartbeat of America, How Do you spell relief.  Did you get them all?  There’s a trick one in there.  Can anyone tell me what product catch the spirit is from?  The United Methodist Church.  When you leave the church, be sure to look at their sign across the street, it has a neat little dove diving down and it says Catch the Spirit.  There must be something special going on there, right?

Well, I probably shouldn’t be razzing the Methodists.  But there is a message here.  In the US we not only use marketing to sell soap, toothpaste, fast food and politicians, we’re using it to sell Christianity.  There’s this notion that if somehow we could package Christianity so that it looks attractive enough, it would sell itself to the unsaved masses.  Much of the Christian media has bought into this notion.  Have you seen, the Book?  Or the Reader’s Digest Bible?  These are attempts to make the Bible more attractive to the average person on the street.  Then for the saved we have Chuck Swindoll, James Dobson, Billy Graham, and a pile of others, in book, record, cassette, Videocassette and radio formats.  Christian Images.  The trouble is that all too often the images we create for ourselves are not borne out by the reality.

We need to focus on the inner spiritual reality.  If the Methodists say catch the spirit, and I go there and there is no spirit to catch, then they’ve failed.  If the images we create doesn't reflect our inner reality we're no better than the pharisees whom Jesus called white-washed tombs, beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everyting unclean.

The Mennonite church’s ten-year goals are in a sense a marketing ploy.  That’s OK, as long as we focus on the inner spiritual reality.  If the Mennonite Church grows to twice the size, but in the process becomes half as faithful, then the goals are a bust.  They’re no good.

Marketing is with us in the Mennonite church, but we dare not let it control us.  I’ll close out this section with a beautiful Biblical example of marketing the Christian faith.  I Peter 3:15-16 --Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.  But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.  No that's not are you-saved-brother evangelism, nor is a cynical private faith.  Just a beautifully simple expression of an inner spiritual reality.  That we're here worshipping today attests to the fact that that approached worked pretty well.

The first two M's-- Money and Marketing we saw are really value neutral cultural tools,  which just happen to be pervertable. Militarism, however, we would all probably peg as a societal evil, and you would be exactly right.

Militarism in a culture is certainly nothing new.  The apocolyptic vision that there will be wars and rumors of wars has had the faithful looking for the second coming for nearly 2,000 years.  Once again, in the United States, the case of militarism is a matter of scope.  The word is out in the business community that the big bucks are in military hardware, so the scramble is on to get a piece of the action.

In the era we live in, which has seen the largest peacetime military buildup in history, it is almost impossible to avoid contact with or participation in the military-industrial complex..  Even here in peaceful Lancaster County.  Our taxes support it, our banks invest in it.  Our employers may have contacts with it, some of our best scientists and engineers work for it.

The pervasiveness of defense dollars in our economy and in our church makes it difficult for the church to take a stand.  Some churches have taken the path of endorsing the military build-up in the name of stopping communism, which they equate with the anti-christ.  Others simply look the other way.

While the peace churches are on record as opposing these huge defense outlays, I sense our resolve is not as high as it was, say during the Viet Nam era.  The carnage on the nightly news is no longer our own doing.   And so next week we’ll go to the Lancaster Square Ice Cream festival which takes place at the doorstep of HamTech, a company that makes fuses for nuclear bombs.  And it won’t bother us because we can’t see what’s going in there or the impact it might have on our future.  It’s much easier to rally people around stopping a war in progress than a war in preparation.

And yet now is the time we as a church need to be speaking out.  The government is using our money to order our priorities.  And they are saying that we value weapons production and research more than the arts, more than education, more than energy research, more than the environment, more than aid to the poor and homeless; in fact they are saying that military expenditures are our number one priority.

To paraphrase a survivor of Nazi Germany, When they cut the programs for the homeless to build the B-1 Bomber, I said nothing.  When they slashed funds for education to build the Trident submarine, I was silent.  When they gutted programs for subsidized housing and job training to build Star Wars, again I said nothing.  Finally, when they took away my tax exemption for charitable contributions to build particle beam weapons, there was no-one left to speak out for me.

How will history judge us, peace churches in an increasingly militarized society?  If we don't have the strength to stop it, may it be said that we had the wisdom to see its evil, the courage to denounce it, and the strength to live out the way of peace.

Summary
 Three M’s:   Money, Marketing, and Militarism.  Each tightly woven into our cultural fabric, each making inroads into our Christian faith.  Living in the United states as we do, we can never totally escape their shaping influence on our lives.  As citizens we may be concerned about the negative effects each may have on society.  But as Christians we need to be concerned about the potential each has for replacing God as the source of our security and the focus of our faith.  When we find ourselves tempted to turn our faith from the Heavenly eternal God to the Earthly and the temporal, may we have the strength and the courage to say with Joshua, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.