June 28,2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

"Having Enough"

Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

June 28, 2026 Based on 1 Timothy 6:6-12, 17-19

Earlier this month, a man became the world's first trillionaire. Sit with that word, because it’s a number our minds can't actually fathom. A million seconds is about 11.5 days, a billion seconds is almost 32 years, and a trillion seconds is a staggering 31,710 years. A billion dollars is enough that you could spend twenty-seven thousand dollars a day and it would take you 100 years to spend that much. A trillion is a thousand of those 100 year sets. One person now holds, on paper, more wealth than most of the countries on this earth. And in this same country, this same month, almost thirty-six million of our neighbors are living below the poverty line. We have kids who skip meals to save money for their family. Parents working full time who still can't make rent. Seniors choosing between medicine and groceries. We live in the country with more billionaires than anywhere on the planet, there are more than nine hundred of them here, and Millionaires? There are around twenty-four million millionaires in this country. And still there’s that number that bears repeating… thirty-six million people living below the poverty line.. to qualify to be in that group it means you earn $16,000 annually for an individual or $33,000 for a family of four. And there are thirty-six million people in this country who fall in this category. This is not an accident. That is a system with intentional design. A system built to let wealth gather at the top and call it success, while it slips its responsibility to the very people Jesus told us to love first. Christianity has a word for the worship of wealth. And it is not a kind one. Listen to Paul, writing to young Timothy. He says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. He says people who chase riches fall into a trap and get pulled down into ruin, and in the Common English Bible there's this almost physical picture. He says they impale themselves on a lot of pain. That's the diagnosis. The chase for wealth itself wounds the one doing the chasing. A few years ago a Dutch historian named Rutger Bregman got invited to Davos. That's the gathering up in the Swiss Alps where the richest and most powerful people on earth fly in to talk about the world's problems. They flew in, by the way, on around fifteen hundred private jets. Many of them to hear a famous naturalist talk about how we are wrecking the planet. And Bregman sat through panel after panel about generosity and justice and the future, and finally he had heard enough. He told the room it felt like he’d been sitting at a firefighters' convention called together to discuss fighting fires but no one was allowed to mention water. He said… Stop talking about charity, talk about taxes. Taxes, taxes, taxes. Pay your fair share. Everything else is a distraction. The room did not love it. But here's why he wasn't wrong. Charity, by itself, can become the thing we do instead of justice. A gift can soothe a conscience while the system underneath it keeps right on grinding. You can cut a check on Sunday to your local food pantry, while lobbying against food assistance programs on Monday, and still call yourself generous. This is the part that gets to me… the Bible is pretty clear about what it thinks about this behavior. It's there in the earliest Hebrew laws, where God tells the harvesters to leave the edges of the field unpicked, so the poor and the immigrant can come and eat. Don't gather all of it to sell. Leave some at the corners to give for free. The edges of your abundance already belong to someone else. It's there in the year of Jubilee, where every fifty years debts and loans are cancelled and land goes back to the people, so that no family ever falls permanently behind. It's there in the song Mary sings before Jesus is even born. God has filled the hungry with good things, she says, and sent the rich away empty. This is not a fringe reading. This is the mainline story of our faith. When wealth piles up in a few hands while neighbors go without, the God of the Bible is not neutral. And when that hoarding gets dressed up in a cross and called Christian, we should be the first ones in the room to say: this is a corruption of the gospel… So that's the clear and obvious hard word this scripture has for the wealthy, which we should shout out loud from the roof tops, because plenty of pulpits won't. But I look out at this room, and I don't see the people Paul is warning. None of us flew a private jet here. We are not the trillionaire. So if this text were only about them, I could preach it, and we’d all nod, and we could all go home feeling righteous about people who aren't here, who we have no relationship with, and nothing changes. And I think we would have missed the message this scripture has for us. Because Paul doesn't actually start with a word against the rich. He starts with a word about faith… he starts with what contentment in the life of faith looks like. And contentment is a word for every single one of us. Here's his line. He says godliness is a great source of profit when it's joined to being happy with what you already have. He takes the language of wealth and finances.. words like profit, gain, the language the market loves, and he hijacks it. You want gains? Real gains in your life? Here it is. A life lived with God, plus the freedom we find in being happy with what you already have. That second part is the hard part. Because oddly enough the sense of scarcity that lives in a man who feels like he needs his second trillion is the same scarcity that lives in me when I scroll past someone's kitchen renovation and think “ooh If I could just update my sink to look like that” … it’s a smaller budget, but its the same voice. Or here's one even closer to home. I have a problem with bicycles. When I first rode Pelotonia, someone gave me a road bike. A really nice one. That's still my main training bike, and I'm grateful for it every time I clip in. But then one summer we went camping, and I wanted to bring a bike along, and I didn't want to haul the nice one out into the mud and the gravel. So I bought a cheap beater bike. Just for trips like that. Made all the sense in the world at the time. And then I got further into the hobby. And I started noticing everybody was riding gravel bikes. Those are road bikes built to handle the rough stuff. And I thought, well, I should probably have one of those too. So I bought one. So now I have three bikes hanging in my garage. And here's the embarrassing part. Most days, I don't ride any of them. I borrow my wife's e-bike. Because it's easy, and it's fun, and it gets me out the door. Three bikes in the garage, and I keep reaching for hers. What would it look like to stand in that garage and finally say, out loud, I have enough? Paul says, remember, we brought nothing into this world, and we are taking nothing out. No one has ever seen a hearse pulling a U-Haul. We come empty-handed and we leave empty-handed, and everything in between is on loan. Jesus once told a story about exactly this. A man has a good harvest. So good that his barns are full. So what does he do? He decides to tear them down and build bigger barns for himself, so he can store it all up and finally relax. And God says to him, you fool. Tonight your life is required of you. And all this you've stored up, whose will it be? The man's sin isn't having good harvest. Good harvests are gifts. His sin is the barn. His instinct, when abundance showed up, was to build a wall around it. To pull it in for himself. To put it somewhere no one else could reach it. He looked at what was more than enough to anyone else, and the only thing he could imagine doing with it was keeping it. That's scarcity thinking. And scarcity is a liar. The author, preacher, and Professor Walter Brueggemann once said our whole culture runs on a myth of scarcity, this gnawing belief that there is never quite enough, so I'd better grab mine first. But the Bible tells a different story from its very first page. A God who makes a world and keeps calling it good, who keeps saying be fruitful, here is more, here is enough, here is plenty. The Bible opens in abundance. We just keep choosing the barn for ourselves. So what does Paul finally tell the rich to do, when he turns to them in verse seventeen? It's not what you'd expect. He doesn't tell them to feel guilty. Guilt builds nothing. He tells them to redirect. Don't set your hope on money, he says, because money is uncertain and it will let you down. Set your hope on God, who gives us everything we need for our joy. And then do good. Be rich in the good you do. Be generous. Share. And then He says when you live like that, you take hold of what is truly life. What is truly life. As if all the rest, the storing and the chasing and the comparing and the bigger barn, was a counterfeit. A life that looks like life but isn't. And the real thing was hiding the whole time in the open hand. So we need both. We need what Bregman was shouting about, and we need what Paul is teaching here. Bregman is right. Charity is no substitute for justice. A single check, however large, cannot buy back a system built to keep the poor poor. Systemic issues need systemic responses. The hungry don't need our crumbs. They need a seat at the table and a fair share of everyone’s harvest. And Paul is right. The open individual hand is not optional. A solution will need everyone’s individual effort. We all need to be generous. Share. Take hold of what is truly life. We don't get to pick one. The gospel asks for both. The just structure and the individual open hand. Anyone who tells you it's only about personal generosity is dodging the prophets. And anyone who tells you it's only about policy has never met the God who counts every sparrow. So here is what the Christian life actually looks like. For us. This week. Not the trillionaire. Us. So what might this look like for us? Not the trillionaire. Us. And hear me before I go further. I'm not handing you a checklist, like do these five things and you've earned your contentment. What follows is a direction we lean. Something we hope for, and long for, and keep reaching toward, even when we struggle with it the whole way. We'll reach and fall short and reach again. That is the life of faith. We practice living out the concept of enough. We learn to say, out loud, this is enough, before the next thing arrives to make it feel small. We give in a way we can feel. A gift that costs us something, because the painless gift never loosens money's grip on the heart. And we aim it at the driest places, the edges of the field, instead of the ground that's already green. And we refuse to let our personal giving become our alibi to numb us to the collective work that still needs to happen. We stay awake to the system. We speak up and we show up for our neighbors, We vote, we hold our leaders to account, because the same faith that stocks a food pantry should also ask why the line keeps getting longer. And we stop building barns. When abundance shows up in your life, and it does, more often than we in a scarcity mindset would like to admit, the question is never how do I store this for myself. The question is where do I scatter it to share this harvest with others. Because that is what seed is for. Seeds locked in a barn rot. Seeds thrown into the world becomes a harvest you will never finish counting. Friends, we have been given a good harvest. A life. People who love us. A God who is present and faithful. This table. This much is enough. God is not asking you to feel bad about any of it. God is asking us to hold it with an open hand. To be happy with what we already have. To care about a world where everyone has enough. And to scatter the rest like seed. And I won't pretend any of that is easy. Loosening our grip might be the hardest work there is. The hand does not want to open. We are going to try this and fall short. We'll say enough on Sunday and be wanting more again by Tuesday. So hear this. There is grace for that. Grace for the slow learners, which is every one of us. We don't have to get this right to be loved by God. We only have to keep leaning toward it. Because this is the freedom we're reaching for. This isn't the myth of scarcity we keep telling ourselves. It's the liturgy of abundance which is another phrase Walter Bruggeman Gives us. It's what it looks like to take hold of what is truly life. When enough of us live as though we have enough, and share what is left over, it turns out there really is enough for everyone. So friends, may we keep reaching for this abundant life. May we keep trying. May we forgive each other, and ourselves, when we fall short. And may we try again. Amen

WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE

PRELUDE                                                      “Hymns of Praise”                                         arr. Phillip Keveren

WELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP                                                                                 

         One: We come from a world that says there is never enough.

Many: We come to a God who has always said there is plenty.

One: We come with our hands closed around what little we think we own.

Many: We come to open them and find them full.

One: Come, let us worship the God of more than enough.

All: Let us worship God.

*HYMN 713                             “Touch the Earth Lightly”                                                         TENDERNESS

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                          Bob Concitis

God of abundance, we confess that we have believed the lie of scarcity. We have looked at our own lives and called them small. We have looked at our neighbors and felt the competition. We have held on tight when you asked us to open our hands.  We have wanted more than we need, and looked away from those who do not have enough.  Hear our prayer…

Silent prayers of confession are offered…

One: Forgive us, God.
All: Loosen our grip. Teach us the freedom of enough, and make us generous, the way you are generous with us. Amen.

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON

*RESPONSE OF PARDON 582 “Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines on Me” GLORY TO GOD

*PASSING OF THE PEACE                                                               

     One: The peace of Christ be with you!

     All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD

ANTHEM                                               “How Firm a Foundation”                                                 Paul E. Koch     Marlon Haughton, Guest Conductor

CHILDREN’S MESSAGE                                                      

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION                                                                   

SCRIPTURE    1 Timothy 6:6-12, 17-19    CEB

 Actually, godliness is a great source of profit when it is combined with being happy with what you already have. We didn’t bring anything into the world and so we can’t take anything out of it: we’ll be happy with food and clothing. But people who are trying to get rich fall into temptation. They are trapped by many stupid and harmful passions that plunge people into ruin and destruction. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Some have wandered away from the faith and have impaled themselves with a lot of pain because they made money their goal.

But as for you, man of God, run away from all these things. Instead, pursue righteousness, holy living, faithfulness, love, endurance, and gentleness. Compete in the good fight of faith. Grab hold of eternal life—you were called to it, and you made a good confession of it in the presence of many witnesses.

Tell people who are rich at this time not to become egotistical and not to place their hope on their finances, which are uncertain. Instead, they need to hope in God, who richly provides everything for our enjoyment. Tell them to do good, to be rich in the good things they do, to be generous, and to share with others. When they do these things, they will save a treasure for themselves that is a good foundation for the future. That way they can take hold of what is truly life.

One: Holy wisdom, Holy Word,

All: Thanks be to God

SERMON                                                                                 Rev. Trip Porch                 

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD 

*HYMN 846                                            “Fight the Good Fight”                                                      DUKE STREET

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.

TIME OF OFFERING   online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                                              “Song without Words”                                            Felix Mendelssohn

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE  709              “God, We Honor You”                                    ABUNDANT BLESSINGS

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION 

God of the harvest, we brought nothing into this world, and we will carry nothing out, and everything in between has been on loan from you. So take these gifts and treat them like seed. Scatter them where the ground is dry. Send them to the edges of the field, to the hungry, the forgotten, the ones the world overlooks. Let all of it become a harvest we will never finish counting. Through Christ, who gave everything. Amen.

*HYMN  766                     “The Church of Christ Cannot Be Bound”                                                   MC KEE

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION                                                                                                

Postlude                                 “How Firm a Foundation”                                            J. Funk arr. K. D. Renfrow 

  Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452