What are you worth? There are lots of ways to answer that question. Some of us may say that we are worth less than we were a year ago when the economy tanked. Some of us may say that we have never bothered to calculate what the financial types call our “net worth.” Some of us may say that we will never have a chance at being on Forbes magazine’s lists of the wealthiest folks in the world, so why worry? And some of us may say that there are many other ways to calculate a person’s worth that have nothing to do with money. Regardless of what standard we might use to calculate someone’s worth, there are two basic answers to the question. When we think about it, we can either say that someone is worth something or worth nothing. We all know people who are worth a lot, in different ways. We all know people who, even though we hate to admit it, we think are essentially worthless. And we secretly hope that we ourselves are not in the latter category!

We are beginning the Thanksgiving season today here at The Village Church, which also means that we are beginning a season of prayer and commitment concerning the best use of our time, our resources, and our talents, as we live out our lives in relationship with God and with each other. We are going to think about this question of worth. What are you worth? That topic will drive us these first three Sundays of November. And on the fourth Sunday we’ll ask a related question: What is God worth to you? But we’re going to start with us.

What are you worth? As with any deep question like that, we people of faith look to the scriptures for answers. One answer comes from the heart of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah had an amazing vision of the Lord God Almighty, sitting on his heavenly throne, surrounded by fantastic and awesome creatures who were singing God’s praises. Clearly, God is worth something! But in the presence of God, Isaiah felt anything but worthwhile himself. “Woe is me! I am lost…,” he says. No kidding! How high and mighty would you feel if you found yourself at the foot of the throne of the Creator of All That Is? Isaiah felt worthless, and in a sense, he was right. He knew he was a sinner, not worthy of the attention and love of God. But God saw it differently. God saw worth in Isaiah. But Isaiah needed some tweaking and cleaning up and rearranging. A seraph, one of those cool creatures with God, took a burning coal from the altar, touched Isaiah’s lips with it, and then proclaimed that Isaiah’s sin was forgiven and his guilt blotted out. Why did the seraph do that? Because God had plans for Isaiah. Isaiah had a vision of God and then God shared his vision for Isaiah’s life. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us,” God asked, full well knowing who he had in mind! Isaiah got the hint. “Yo, God, how about me?” Isaiah was worth something to God and because of that God had a mission for Isaiah that would involve Isaiah in doing something worthwhile with his life, something worthwhile to God, to the nation of Israel, and even to himself.

Fast forward to the time of Jesus and the disciples. Matthew reports that after Jesus had selected his first followers and then spent some time teaching them about how to live in the powerful reality of the Kingdom of God, Jesus sent them out on a mission. In Jesus’ presence the disciples had discovered what Isaiah discovered: God was with them, helping them get their own act together, and then enlisting them in what God himself was doing in the world. Jesus’ job description for the disciples matched his own: tell the good news about God, cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Don’t miss this: Jesus’ disciples do Jesus-like things, with the same result. Jesus’ disciples bring healing, life, rightness, and goodness into the world, which are all signs of the present reality of God with his world. It is heaven come to earth. It is God’s gifts to the world. And it all comes about because real people living real lives in real time choose to accept the value that God places on them and then they choose to go about their lives creating the most valuable thing in the world: heaven on earth. All of that begins as Isaiah and the disciples chose to use their time on God’s behalf.

One of my favorite cartoons of all time shows a man standing before the desk of his pastor, and the man is saying, “I would like to volunteer my time to fight the chronic ills of humankind and address the pressing needs and complex issues of a Godless society. I am free for an hour in the afternoon every third Thursday of the month.” We know how the guy feels, don’t we? We want to do something worthwhile with our time. But we just don’t seem to have much of it to give. Let’s remember a few things about time. First of all, there is a sense that the only thing we really have in the world is time. Whatever we are trying to do in the world, it always involves the use of time. Second, we cannot help but spend our time. Time passes by at the same rate whether we are doing something useful or useless, something good or bad. Third, everyone has the same amount of time, at least in terms of what we get every day. Some people live longer than others, of course, but while we are alive, we have just as much time as everyone else does! You and I have as much time as the most powerful and the least powerful people on earth. We all have time, we all spend time, we all have equal amounts of time. And so there is a fourth thing we have to say. The big question about time is how we will spend what we have. Here’s the way I think of it: we can either create value or not with our time.

There is a series of great television commercials being aired these days by one of the cell telephone companies. There is a mom and her sons and her husband. In one of them, the teenage son asks his mom for some extra minutes to use on his phone. The mom gives him a handful of “minutes,” symbolized by round, orange disks about the size of silver dollar. But the kid doesn’t want those minutes because they are leftover minutes from last month. He wants new minutes. And of course, the mom goes ballistic about how the family is always wasting their minutes by not using last month’s minutes and instead only spending this month’s minutes. So she finally takes his new minutes and her old minutes and mixes them all together and says, “See, you can’t tell the difference, they’re all the same!”

Sometimes we are sad, other times we are mad, but we are never glad when we say about something, “That was a waste of my time.” The older I get, the more impatient I become with anything that wastes my time. Wasting time is so tragic because time is meant to be a wonderful, fulfilling, beautiful thing. But all of us need to learn how to use our time. A long time ago when I was on a committee that was interviewing candidates for a job at a church, a wise, older business executive told me, “Jack, some people have 30 years of experience, and other people have 1 year of experience 30 times over.” Wasting time is an important spiritual challenge. When Jesus sent the disciples out on their first mission, he told them that if a household or a town would not receive their ministry that they should shake the dust off their feet and move on to someplace they could be productive. They should not waste their time.

Here is my simple point for today. Sometimes you and I feel like we don’t have much to contribute to God, or to the world, or even to ourselves. But God feels differently. We are worth something to God, so much so that God invites and enlists us into his work in the world. What a compliment that is! God wants us to do nothing less than be involved with him in bringing his kingdom into being. God wants us to serve him, to serve others, and also to serve ourselves, as we spend our time wisely to create the love, the power, the joy, and the peace that our world so desperately needs. No one wants to be worthless. No one wants to waste his or her life. And so we need to learn to be good stewards, good managers of our time.

Something has always amused me and also puzzled me. In a football game, when there is just a couple of minutes left to play and one team is behind in the score, that team goes into what is often called the “two minute drill.” The two minute drill is an intensified, hurried up, last ditch effort to score. What I wonder is why don’t they try harder and play faster from the beginning? If they did that, then maybe they wouldn’t be behind? But maybe that’s the way we all are. We laze along, giving half effort, half energy, half focus, until we realize we’re way behind. But we can do it differently. We can learn to do worthwhile things for the Kingdom of God, for the sake of others, for our own personal fulfillment. It all starts with accepting the value that God places on us and then creating value in the wise use of our time.

Amen.