Pigs and Pearls
“Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you.” – Matthew 7:6 NRSV
Who are dogs and who are pigs? Just before this verse, Jesus spent time instructing us not to judge others. Then, it appears he refers to some people as dogs and others as pigs. Sounds a bit judgy, doesn’t it? Jesus was not inviting us to categorize people into columns of dogs/pigs and those who were not. We already do this without his instruction, don’t we? Seeing Jesus’ comment gives license for some to do this, but I think it misses the point. In Jesus’ day, dogs weren’t the lovable companions we spent billions of dollars on but more likely wild, dirty animals that may be dangerous and vile. Religious Jewish adherents viewed pigs as unholy, unclean animals. Taken together, Jesus is telling us not to waste that which is holy on that which is not.
What are today’s dogs and pigs? What are today’s pearls?
Several weeks ago, I confessed my love and lack of control for delicious cookies. As my wife would say, “I eat the like chips.” Give me a plate of cookies and there won’t be any cookies in a few minutes. Chips... My wife will also tell you that I can easily get drawn into a movie that might be playing on TV. Sometimes it’s a movie I’ve seen a dozen times, and I get hooked. Sometimes it’s a movie I’ve never seen, and I get hooked. Sometimes it’s a movie I’ve never seen, and I begin watching halfway through, and I get hooked. There have been multiple occasions when, after I’ve watched a movie – especially a bad one – that I will say to myself, “well, I’m never going to get those hours back again.”
Have you ever done something that took time or resources and after the fact (or sometimes in the middle) you realize you’ve wasted it? That’s part of what Jesus is getting at here. Stop wasting your precious time on things that aren’t worth it. Time is a pearl, and lousy movies are the dogs and pigs to which we throw them.
We cast our pearls to pigs all the time in myriad ways if we think about it. Have you ever eaten a full plate of lousy or mediocre food because it was simply there when you had better choices? Have you ever kept reading a book you didn’t like because you told yourself you should finish what you started? Ever binged a show and afterwards wish you could get that time back? Have you ever done those things and realized that the waste wasn’t just with the activity, but in what you could have done otherwise? A better food option. A better book. A better show. Pearls to pigs instead of something better.
Jesus may be getting at something deeper, something more profound than simply “make good choices” even though ongoing assessment of what we do with our lives is a good idea. He throws the word “holy” into the mix. And since he then mentions “our” pearls, he is suggesting that what we are playing with, what we are making decisions about in our lives, about us, is holy. That little word has huge ramifications.
Holiness was attributed to God and the things most closely related to God. People in Jesus’ day and before took the holiness of God incredibly seriously. Holiness spoke into God’s essence as pure, perfect, and blameless. To honor God’s holiness, great care was taken to not do things that might offend that holiness, especially in acts of worship. Only certain people were allowed to enter especially holy chambers of the Temple, and great care was taken by worshippers to prepare themselves for worship so as not to offend God. All of this was to help keep us in a state of reverence, which is not a bad thing at all.
There was threat involved as well. It was believed that God was so holy that if we stood in God’s full presence, we would essentially die from holiness exposure! A famous story about the calling of the Prophet Isaiah depicts him having a vision where he is in heaven, in God’s presence. He freaks out, sure that he will die because he was a man of unclean lips. In Luke’s Christmas story, the elderly priest, Zechariah, was offering the prayers for the people and having an exchange with God that left him speechless until John the Baptist was born. There is a reason why the Hebrew word that is translated as reverence is also translated as fear.
I don’t think fear is a keeper given Jesus’ continued assurance that God is loving like a good Abba/Daddy should be. But I do think we need more reverence. Some churches are “high churches” with very orchestrated worship movements and liturgy and space to foster that. CrossWalk is on the other end of the spectrum, focusing on coming as you are into a space that feels comfortable and down to earth. High churches struggle to help people let their guard down, to be real, as they revere God. We, on the other hand, may need help revering our Good Buddy God because of our informality. Where are you on the reverence spectrum when it comes to interfacing with God? In your cozy familiarity with God, have you lost the awe due to the Divine?
In humanity’s desire or need to keep God holy and distant, we forgot that God also declared that we are holy and that God wants faithful people to stay holy. The book of Leviticus in what we call the Old Testament, the focus is all about staying pure in our relationship with God, which included how we live our lives. It has lots of laws – some of them horrifically anachronistic – yet all with the purpose of helping the Jewish people stay on the path of holiness. Early Christians picked up on this vision as well. In the New Testament’s 1 Peter 2:9, the writer declares:
You are a chosen people. You are royal priests, a holy nation, God’s very own possession. As a result, you can show others the goodness of God, for he called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light. (New Living Translation)
The Message Translation offers it this way:
You are the ones chosen by God, chosen for the high calling of priestly work, chosen to be a holy people, God’s instruments to do his work and speak out for him, to tell others of the night-and-day difference he made for you—from nothing to something, from rejected to accepted.
I don’t think God is looking for perfection here, but rather alignment. Are we aligned in our lives with the flow of the Spirit of God, with the Kingdom of God that Jesus talked about, with Shalom? How do we know if we are? As you leave our parking lot you will pass a sign that serves as a reminder of what we are called to do: Go Be Jesus. This is what we are invited to be and do in the world. Jesus is our model and guide. That means we are people dedicated to the same means and end, which is love, which is shalom – wellbeing for all, fostering it even if it’s tough.
Here at CrossWalk, we talk frequently about the moves we see depicted in Jesus’ life for us to follow: stretching our minds as lifelong learners, kneeling in service to all, standing for justice and grace with and for those who need it most, communing with God using various means and disciplines, and connecting with each other. These five moves, these five choices set us up to be more like Jesus. Want to Go Be Jesus? Develop the five moves.
Fleshing these moves out in daily life can be challenging at times. We want to live the Jesus life, but what’s it look like on the daily? Angie Barker-Jackson introduced me to a book we will be tag-team teaching in February: Holy Currencies by Eric Law. In his book, Law identifies a range of currencies we use in our lives for the good work of Shalom. They have to do with promoting wellness, healthy relationships, speaking truth, offering our leadership, giving our time, creating spaces and places, and being generous with our money. It’s going to be a fun, engaging, and insightful series that will help us all take everything we’ve been learning this year Following the Call of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the next level. Look forward to that!
I want to focus today on casting our literal pearls – our treasure, our money – and invite you to think through how our desire to invest in holiness as holy people shows up in monthly reports. Right now, is there anything you know you spend money on that may be more in the dogs and pigs column? My guess is that we all have some cleanup work to do on this front. Subscriptions we don’t use much, or more coffee shops or wine clubs or clothes or whatever. My hunch is that even when we’re not paying attention that much, we have some ideas about where we can improve immediately. Don’t have a clue? Financial advisors routinely encourage their clients to track their spending – every penny – for a month to see where it all goes. If you’ve never done that, or haven’t done it in a while, do it! You’ll be kind of glad you did – it’s a sobering exercise. Consistent tracking can keep a lot of pearls from making it into the pigpen.
Being wise stewards of our financial resources is part of our holiness process. I’m asking you today to consider or reevaluate how CrossWalk is part of your pearl casting strategy. I’m inviting you to consider generously investing in what God is doing through this incredible community called CrossWalk.
When you cast some of your pearls toward CrossWalk, you provide Shelter in Life’s Storms for many people. We are shelter in the following ways:
OASIS for people reconstructing their faith.
SANCTUARY for immigrants seeking documentation.
REFUGE for people evacuated by Mother Nature.
HAVEN for people mistreated due to sexuality or race.
SAFE SPACE for people seeking healing in recovery.
HARBOR for people seeking loving community.
When you support our General Fund, you support all of that and more. When you support our General Fund, you’re also supporting what we do for CrossWalk littles in our WeeCare space (re-opening soon), elementary age kids in KidsCrossing and Middle Schoolers in The 412 Lounge. Those spaces are great and offer well-planned and well-led experiences for those age groups – theology they won’t have to unlearn once they hit high school. It costs money for staff and supplies to pull that off.
If you have never contributed toward our General Fund, will you please consider what that might look like for you? If you already do, would you please consider two things? First, if you haven’t already, please consider setting up automated giving through our Realm system or your local bank. It’s easy and takes the pearl casting out of your monthly decision-making process. You know that your support will be given on time. Why does this matter to CrossWalk? Because we’ll know it, too. The second thing I ask you to consider is giving CrossWalk a boost, because we’re going to need it. Last year, Angie invited everyone to consider a 10% jump from whatever you’re giving this year as we go into 2026. That might not make a huge difference to your budget to do that, but collectively, it makes a huge difference.
Of course, being a Shelter in Life’s Storms requires that we can actually provide literal shelter! Our Capital Campaign has goals to improve our campus so that we can continue to provide myriad forms of shelter for years to come. We have already addressed our flat roofs and paid cash thanks to your support. We have also raised enough to fulfill our Phase 1 goals, which means you’re going to see some great, overdue changes that will beautify our sanctuary while improving our sound and energy efficiency when we address the ceiling in January. We will enhance our ministry to kids, too, with updates to care for our littlest CrossWalkers as well as our older ones. And we will be investing in our music program here as well in a creative way we couldn’t have anticipated when we launched this campaign last Spring. Your generosity made that happen! Thank you!
What remains, however, is a whopper. The parking lot is the biggest of all our projects, and it is long overdue for replacement or repair. It’s going to cost somewhere in the $400,000 neighborhood. And there are more improvements we want to make in our sanctuary, like the floor and the stage and all of the walls. Pretty much a full remodel. We have a team that has great ideas for this space which we will roll out soon. But all of it costs a lot of money.
If you have yet to donate toward our Capital Campaign, would you please consider helping us? Any amount will help! I would ask you to consider an estate gift as well, either remembering CrossWalk in your estate plans or, if you have been the beneficiary of someone else’s estate, consider investing some of those pearls in CrossWalk. Some of our most beautiful and functional spaces exist only because of the generosity of folks who received funds from an estate and shared it generously with CrossWalk. Fifteen years ago, a gift was given that resulted in our 412 Lounge – still a really cool space in use now. Within the last 10 years, funds from an estate helped completely remodel our admin wing kitchen that serves literally a 1,000 people a week seeking recovery. What an investment! Whenever we give tours, we still have people comment on how beautiful our kitchen is. By the way, it wasn’t just one person’s check-cutting that brought that dream to reality, but also the sweat and a little blood from Ted Valencia and his Merry Men preparing the space for four convection ovens, Jim DellaSanta who assembled and installed the kitchen cabinets, and Loren Haas who built the cabinets for the recovery spaces (among other things). Incredible generosity! Incredible results!
Our gym locker rooms and gym lobby bathrooms were completely renovated y volunteers to provide support for access and functional needs neighbors because one person wanted to be generous after a loved one passed on. That donation plus a range of other sources of support resulted in beautiful, functional space used every week by people who use our gym. The CrossWalk sign on our building? That was a memorial gift honoring Fred Tremewan who loved this church. Will you who have not yet contributed get in on the fun? We need you! And even if you have contributed already, as we near the end of the year, would you consider even more?
There are some challenges ahead that add urgency to those requests. As you are aware, our government is shut down, and it appears that it will be unstable for the near future. The current shutdown threatens support of basic necessities for millions of people nationwide and thousands here in Napa. Our Food Pantry is on the front line of this problem, serving those who have been unable to use the Food Bank for schedule or dietary reasons. Through the hard work of Karie Nuccio and Linda Smetzer, CrossWalk sets up pantries for those moving off the street or out of domestic violence into new homes. Rising costs due to tariffs and decreasing support due to politics means more pressure on organizations like our Food Pantry. In addition, if the Affordable Care Act is not funded, that will impact CrossWalk’s monthly expenses. Rising costs and decreasing support make it harder on churches.
One more serious concern needs to be shared. A few years ago, an incredibly generous and gracious fan of CrossWalk shared their desire to commit $50,000 a year for ten years to support our Children and Family ministries. They didn’t want any fanfare or recognition. They simply loved all that CrossWalk does for the community and were in a position to help. In times past we haven’t been able to afford keeping staff for that ministry due to lack of financial support. We would get things rolling and then have to pull back, causing the program to stutter. The vision with this generous support was that we would be able to build a sustainable ministry over that decade and be able to keep it going when the clock ran out. We have been on pace for that to happen as the ministry has grown.
I received communication a couple of months ago, however, that our benefactor has moved out of the area and wants to support initiatives in their new locale. In short, the donor will provide only half of next year’s contribution and then be finished. That means we need to make up those funds if want to see our Children’s Ministry continue to flourish. I am deeply grateful for the generosity of the donor, and yet deeply disappointed that the plan got cut short.
I want you to know that I am not asking only as CrossWalk’s Pastor, an employee of this organization that depends on your generosity (for which I am deeply grateful). My wife, Lynne, and I practice what I preach. From day one we have sacrificed other things in order to support CrossWalk generously. We are co-contributors with you in support of this incredible place. What I ask of you we ask of ourselves.
On Saturday, November 15, we invite you to come for a Thanksgiving Feast with two purposes in mind. First, to simply come together as a faith community with love and gratitude. Second, to raise funds. The meal is provided by CrossWalk; the costs are part of our hospitality budget. As you come to this family dinner, would you consider bringing some of your pearls? Maybe many of them to generously support all that CrossWalk is and does?
We are in this space because people who died long ago made decisions about where they cast their pearls. We have benefitted along with thousands who have found hope and help here. What can you give so that someone now and long after now can say the same of us?