Blessing and Joy

Luke 1:39-56

Many years ago I had a conversation with a good friend and she coined a phrase I had never heard before and it sounded strange to me.  She said, “I’ve lost my joy.”  She was a Christian of a more charismatic variety than me.  She had been taught that joy is one of the fruits of the spirit that Christians receive through the workings of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22,23).  These spiritual fruits like fruit on a tree develop and ripen over time in followers of Jesus as a result of a deepening devotional life. 

Being raised your typical Presbyterian I had hardly heard of the Holy Spirit let alone that the Spirit works in us and brings forth these fruits.  I thought being a Christian simply meant being good and sticking to God’s rules all on your own efforts because that’s the deal if you want God on your side. 

My friend was the most committed and devout Christian I knew at the time and always seemed so joyful.  She was the first person I met who went to church and actually worshipped.  She said she lost her joy, that at the end of the day she wasn’t feeling joy anymore, but rather profound disappointment.  People she loved had let her down and hurt her.  These people wouldn’t give her the space to sort things out.  On top of all that she didn’t feel close to God anymore.  She lost her joy.  It even came to the point that this worship-filled person pulled away from church.  For a couple of years, she couldn’t worship.  She lost her joy.

Thankfully, her story is not tragic.  In time her joy returned.  God brought her life together in the way she felt he promised he would.  She married, became an elementary teacher, and had children.  She had hit a period where she just needed to walk alone, a period of time for God to heal some deeper hurts in her than just her present ones.

This friend is one of those people I think of when I hear Mary’s Song.  Let me give a rather expanded translation.  “My soul, the entirety of my being, worships the Lord and my spirit, that within me that makes me feel alive, rejoices greatly in the God of my salvation.  For, He has looked with favour on his overwhelmed servant.  From now on people will call me blessed!  God has done great things for me that only God can do.  His mercy is for all those who trust their whole lives to him.”  Mary sang that song the moment she realized that God truly did have his hand in her troubling circumstances.  The angel had told her that her elderly relative Elizabeth was pregnant and so she was.

There is great joy in Mary’s Song, in Mary, but it leaves me with a few questions.  I don’t think that what she means by joy and by being blessed is what we think they mean.  Let me start with what it is to be blessed.

These are holiday times and most of us gather together with our families and have a big meal.  Usually someone will say grace and then begin to count the many blessings the family enjoys.  Everybody is reasonably healthy.  Everybody enjoys a comfortable life.  The family has a good name.  We give thanks that God has blessed us in so many ways.  Gratitude is a good thing to feel towards God, but I don’t think this sort of “count your many blessings” is what Mary meant when she said people would call her blessed.

For Mary, being blessed meant God had included her in his mission to bring salvation to the world.  This blessing came by means of an unexpected pregnancy that would have blemished the family name.  Not to mention the health risks to her for she was somewhere between 13-15 years old.  Nobody but Elizabeth and Joseph believed her that the child in her was the Son of God conceived by the Holy Spirit.  Then, when Jesus was born Joseph and Mary had to become refugees in Egypt because jealous King Herod wanted to kill the baby.  That meant Joseph had to leave his job as a respected carpenter.  Then, as Jesus progressed through childhood, he apparently wasn’t your "normal" child and people knew it.  So, Mary had to bear the stigma of having a child who appeared mentally unstable.  Then, Jesus started his “Kingdom of God” ministry on the coattails of crazy cousin John - John the Baptizer...locusts, honey, camel hair.  Then, Jesus was arrested and tried for treason.  Then, she had to watch her son die a public execution by crucifixion and as she stood there utterly heartbroken people certainly would have mocked her for being the mother of this humiliated false Messiah.  Whatever she felt when she encountered Jesus raised from the dead would have certainly been tempered with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Mary is called blessed not because she was a good, hardworking person and so God rewarded her with health, wealth, and a respected family name.  Mary is called blessed because God was working through her and she remained faithful through all that she suffered for being the mother of Jesus. 

Blessedness always comes in the face of suffering.  In this fallen world full of evil, God’s workings, his mission to save and heal it will always meet with adversity.  Yet, the blessing one receives for being a disciple of Jesus and living according to him who is the light of the world is, well, him; the assurance of his presence personally with us and God’s favour, his faithfulness to us.  Health, wealth, and a good name are quite often distractions that keep us from being faithful and enjoying the fullness of life that Jesus has for us.  

If blessedness comes in the face of suffering, what does this say about joy?  We live in a culture that sees the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right.  But, we also live in a culture in which corporate advertisers tell us we can’t be happy unless we have this or have that and there’s never enough.  True happiness in this broken world is not found in wealth and security.  It’s when your whole being rejoices from saying “I know my Jesus is with me and that he is working through me and that my dis-ease at not having the “good life” that so many around me enjoy is not in vain.  Yes, God is working through me.  I am blessed!”

At the end of the day when we are alone with ourselves, what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Do we lift our hearts in the wonder that we belong to Jesus, that he is with us and we are a part of his reign in this hurting world?  At the end of the day what do we come back to?  Is it joy?  Amen.

When Jesus Comes

Isaiah 40:1-11

This passage from Isaiah portrays the very powerful moment of God declaring he would restore his people living in exile in Babylon.  God had decided that they had suffered enough for the real life consequences of their not acting like the people of their steadfastly loving and ever-faithful God.  It was now time for God himsefl to come and shepherd his people and nothing was going tp stop God from doing it.  So, God tells Isaiah to cry out with words of comfort and to beckon all of creation to prepare the way for this small remnant who had not made Babylon their home and whose hearts rather longed for their own homeland in Palestine.

God told Isaiah to cry out and speak tenderly to the heart of God’s people with a message of good news, but it seems Isaiah was a bit reluctant.  To paraphrase Isaiah’s answer, it would sound more like, “God, what could I possibly say to this people that would comfort them?  You have leveled them to the extent that they more readily believe that bad things come from you than good.  They are grass and you have withered them with the scorching heat of your judgment.” 

And to paraphrase God’s response, “Just as sure as my Word was to destroy them so now is my Word that I am coming to them tenderly to gather them up and to be their shepherd.  The whole world will see it and know that I am God.  I am coming to them and there is nothing they can do but watch in awe.”  That’s a very powerful image there, God’s just going to do it.

Well, this passage is special to me because I saw something very much like it happen.  It was during my last two years of seminary.  I was serving as the volunteer chaplain at the Masonic Home of Virginia, which is a retirement community.  About all I did there was conduct worship at their Sunday evening chapel service and occasionally visit.  So, what happened there wasn’t my doings.  It was God.  He took a chapel of very elderly exiles and turned it into a vibrant church.

When I first started, the chapel service, and I hate to say it, was a depressing sight.  There were about 35 mostly drowsy people because of the heat in there and a very screechy choir of 5 or 6 fronted by Mr. Helsabeck who was stone deaf, loud, and monotone.  More somberly, and I say this with great respect, they were exiles of life much like the Jews in Babylon.  Old age had taken from them their independence, their homes, their ability to care for themselves, their life-long friends, and their spouses.   Many had even outlived their children.  Mostly, they were there to be in a safe place while waiting their turn to die.  Death was all they had to look forward to.  There wasn’t much hope there.

For me this was my first real regular preaching work.  I was inexperienced and at a loss as to what I could possibly preach that would be of any kind of comfort to them at all.  Well, I prayed on the matter and fortunately the first Sunday I preached there was Easter Sunday and that was my answer.  Preach on the hope of our faith.  For the two years I was there it seemed that nearly every time I sat down to write the sermon what came out was in someway about hope and continuing to live as those who have hope in the face of death. 

You’d think they would have grown tired of hearing that same central message week after week, but hope was what they needed, Christian hope.  Our hope is founded on Christ’s living presence with and in us through the Holy Spirit.  We have the friendship and companionship of the Holy Spirit who renews and reinvigorates our lives daily and even moment-to-moment.  He’s a constant companion and it is his renewing presence that will flow forth through us making us to be harbingers of hope.

Those beloved children of God took the message seriously. I actually got many of my sermons from just watching how they lived and commending them for it.  From what I saw of their life together in that very close-knit community they definitively lived as those who had hope.  They visited each other in illness and supported each other when yet more bad news came.  They helped one another in small daily tasks like meals.  They prayed for each other.  Played games together.  They had a way of understanding when so and so was a little grouchy today.  These exiles knew how to live in a community-centered way that cried out, “We have hope.  We are still alive.”  Christ’s life was living in them and they were living according to it. 

Well, something began to happen there at the Masonic Home and the only way I can explain it is that Christ Jesus showed up in a powerfully obvious way.  It seemed every month attendance grew at the chapel service.  In the two years that I was there it went from 35 to nearly 90.  The choir blossomed to over 20 members.

If you will allow me to coin the terminology of the study of how churches grow, Christ gifted and equipped this little fellowship for his ministry.  There were folks there who were just natural pastors who did a lot of visiting and seeing that needs were being met throughout the community.  They had evangelists and teachers.  New residents and old did not go without an invitation to come to the chapel service and the Wednesday night Bible study, which they taught themselves and the people were excited to participate in it and learn.  They had justice advocates who requested the administration to provide extra staff on Sunday nights to help wheel the wheelchair bound folks to chapel and they did.  In fact, the administration was so impressed with how important the chapel had become in the community that they remodeled the chapel, put in a new sound system, and made space for wheelchairs.  The chapel folk even had a vision.  They didn’t go through months of congregational studies to find it.  It was more like, “Oh my God we’ve got a church here.”  And they got excited and just did what they knew they were supposed to do.  They loved to do it because ministry had become their purpose to live.  They found and lived hope.

This transformation just happened.  I couldn’t believe it.  They couldn’t believe it.  It was wonderful to see.  Here was a growing and vibrant church in a retirement home where the average age was 83.  No longer was it just some religious adjunct to the programming.  The only way we could explain it was with this image that Isaiah portrays here.  God just decided it was time to come and shepherd his people and he did it in such a way that the residents, staff, administration, and family members could only say, “Here is God.” 

Well, I’ve abstained from giving examples from the personal lives of my friends there at the Masonic Home and how they knew Christ was there personally comforting them through their hardest days.  I will just say that God who was there in a big way building up the chapel was also there in even greater proportion for these people whom he loved.  Christ was with his people giving them hope that he would continue to increase in their lives and what happened with the chapel was visible proof of it.

Well, it’s Advent and as the preacher here today I guess it’s my responsibility to proclaim that God is coming into our lives in a very wonderful way and there’s nothing we can do about it except prepare for it.  And how do we prepare for it?  How do we latch on to hope and then begin to live as those who have hope especially in a world were people are prone either to hope in the wrong things and even worse have no hope at all?  Well, the secret I believe lies in just letting God be God, letting God prove himself to the world through what he does in us.  Well, it begins with tending to God’s presence with us now in worship, prayer, studying the Scriptures, and just being still inside to feel God’s presence, letting go of this life to find his.   Sitting at Christ's feet is where we find hope.   As we do this I can say with certainty because I’ve seen it happen that God will give us a clear sense of what he put us here to do and through each of us individually and this congregation God will prove himself.

Keeping Awake

Isaiah 64:1-9

I grew up Presbyterian, but I didn’t discover until I was 19 that God was communicative and could be really felt and experienced and that Church was more than something people did who were inclined to be “good”.  At that time I took an excursion among Christians of the Nazarene persuasion.   It was a fellowship of about 30 people who met in an elementary school cafeteria on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night.  They loved the Lord and wanted to serve him.  They felt in their hearts the worship they raised.  There was a sweet, sweet Spirit in that place.

That congregation started as a small handful of people a good 15 years before I ever went there.  I was with them roughly three years and in that time they tripled in number.  They raised enough money among themselves to buy a piece of property and build a church building with a paved parking lot debt free.  It seemed so easy, effortless.  The Lord was present with them.  That was the ‘80’s, Bible-belt, USA.

I went from that church back to my Presbyterian roots and became active in a small town Presbyterian church that had a very active family and youth ministry.  We had about 125 on a Sunday.  That church overflowed in hospitality, maturity, friendship, and support.  We grew and had to do some building modification for the afterschool ministry we had.  We did it debt free.  It was so easy.  That was the early ‘90’s.

That was all nearly thirty years ago and I humbly admit that how we did church back then is my default.  Today, I look back on those times and like Isaiah I say “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence—as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil—to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!  When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, You came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.”  That, of course, was Isaiah remembering God giving the Law to the Israelites at Mt. Sinai.

Isaiah was voicing the lament of a faithful remnant whom God had brought home to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon.  They came home only to find the good ole days were not a possibility anymore.  Those living on the Land didn’t want them back and were hostile about it.  The glory-filled life they had hoped for would prove too difficult for them to build.  It’s like Canadian Geese returning after their southern migration only to find that the site of their idyllic northern home has become an adult lifestyle gated community of condos and the residents don’t won’t their teeny yards covered in geese poo like Centre Island, Toronto.  What are the poor geese to do?

This remnant of the faithful felt God had abandoned them, that God had hidden his presence from them.  It seemed God had acted from a distance to get them home but God just wasn’t with them because their hopes, their expectations of the way things could be were not being realized.  They struggled sometimes violently to reclaim their ancestral lands.  The Temple, the place where God would live, lay in ruins for generations.  The former glory of Solomon’s Temple wouldn’t be realized for over 400 years when Herod the Great “restored” it in the years immediately preceding Jesus’ ministry.  Yet, historical accounts tell us that the institution of religion surrounding Herod's temple was so corrupt that most Israelites did not believe the presence of God ever graced the place.

But what about Isaiah’s prayer that God would tear open the heavens and come and be present with great acts among his people?  Did it go unanswered?  No.  Mark recounts in his Gospel account of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordon by John the Baptist that just as Jesus was coming up out of the water John saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit of God came down upon Jesus and a voice came from heaven saying “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  The heavens did get torn open and the Presence of God did return to be with his people to live in the new living Temple of Jesus the Christ.  Then, following Jesus resurrection and ascension, God poured the Spirit upon Jesus’ followers (another faithful remnant) in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, the national feast at which the Jews celebrated the giving of the Law at Sinai.

Well, here we sit like a faithful remnant, waiting for, longing for a new revival, waiting for God to show up and be present and make things like they were thirty years ago when we knew how to do church.   What do we do?  

Well, Jesus promised he would return and he told his disciples to “Keep awake”.  It’s been 2,000 years now.  In that span of time the church has had periods of sleeping and awakening.  Today, we are the by-product of a church, a faithful remnant, that woke up 500 years ago when Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation in conjunction with the invention of the printing press. 

As a faithful remnant of the Protestant awakening we live in the day when the printed page has been superseded by the webpage.  Information is disseminated and processed radically differently now than it was just 30 years ago.  Church isn’t where people come to find religious information.  They get it off the Internet and talk about it in coffee shops among small groups of friends.  This is a huge factor as to why when our snowbirds return in the spring they find their home churches growing smaller.  We need to adapt but simply learning how to use social media, though helpful and necessary, won’t bring people back to church.  You can build a coffee shop and people will come; but build a church…meh.

Just days before his saving death Jesus told his disciples to keep awake while they wait, so also we who live in the days of the death of the institutional church need to keep awake while we wait for God to tear open the heavens and come be present with us today.  Awake doesn’t mean be gimmicky like a multi-national fast food chain that’s the same wherever you go.  We need to be a local, slow food, home-grown feast devoted to Jesus and committed to being his disciples.  Facebook and blogging on the Internet isn’t the highway home for the church.  The road home is the long, slow road of discipleship – the living embodiment of the Jesus who gave his life for this world to feast.  Jesus’ life symbolized, signified and tasted in the meal of Holy Communion abides in the feast of the Holy Spirit-filled fellowship enjoyed by Jesus’ disciples gathered around him.

We and the Holy Spirit-filled fellowship we share rather than the Internet must be the living source of the Jesus whom people should be talking about in small groups in coffee shops.  It would be great if we as a church took the task to hand of taking a year to equip ourselves for taking our Jesus-embodied fellowship to where people meet today.  I’m talking a congregation-wide discipleship course.  This will require more from us than Sunday attendance, but will transform us.  Here’s the program – Greg Ogden’s Discipleship Essentials.  This is not fast food.  It is a sit-down meal.  But, it’s the kind of focusing on Jesus that will wake us up and keep us awake.  Amen.

A Talent of Hope

Matthew 25:14-30, Romans 15:1-13

Several weeks ago you would have heard a sermon on the Parable of the Talents.  I don’t know how Timothy preached it over here, but in the past I would have launched out talking about Stewardship from the perspective of what we do with the Time, Talents, and Money that God has entrusted to us.  Do we invest them, put them to work for Christ Jesus and his kingdom work or do we simply in fear bury them in the ground.  This year, over on the other side, I took a different route saying that it is pointless to talk about stewardship of Time, Talent, and Money, without first talking about what we do with that one small talent of God’s own life, the Holy Spirit, that God has placed in us in Christ. 

The Holy Spirit is our personal bond to Jesus in whom we share in Jesus’ own relationship to God the Father and in turn know ourselves to be beloved children of God.  The Stewardship questions that surround this talent are “are we devoting ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and letting the Holy Spirit do his transforming work in us while we commit ourselves to being discipled and discipling others?”  It is in the context of a discipling relationship with others that our identity as beloved children of God begins to blossom and we are changed to be more Jesus-like and the abundance of life that God has to give overflows.

Well, that in a nutshell was the sermon series that I preached over on the other side of the Cooperative.  This morning I wish to come back to the text on the talents and address it not from the perspective of us as individuals but rather of us as a community of faith.  God gives his Spirit to us not simply to fill us individuals but also to fill us as congregations.  So, we must ask how are we, together, stewarding the gift of God’s self to this congregation, the Holy Spirit who shapes us to be a unique body of Christ geared for God’s work in this particularly community.  The Living God of hope has called us each to this particular congregation in order to send us together into this particular community to be his living witnesses.

In our reading from Romans Paul gives us a very general parameter for how the Holy Spirit is at work in us, a parameter that’s true for all churches.  Verses 5 and 6 read: “May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  The Holy Spirit is with us to give this congregation endurance and encouragement to continue running in this difficult race of being the body of Christ in a culture that could either care less about Jesus or can be outright against us.  So, the Holy Spirit, the presence of Jesus, is with us.

So also, the Holy Spirit works in us to give us unity of attitude, the mindedness of Christ Jesus.  He gives us love for one another that is the same love that Jesus has for us.  This love, his love manifests among us when we bear with each other’s failings rather than judging and ostracising; when we seek the good of each other and our neighbours and to build one another up rather than just seeking to please ourselves.  In Jesus love we accept one another as Jesus has accepted us and we help one another become more like him.  This love, his love, is powerful and when we put it into action real hope begins to overflow from us.  Unity in the wonder-working, powerful love of Christ is the basic parameter of the Holy Spirit’s working in our midst.  It is the one small talent God entrusts to every congregation.

Building from there, in our Appreciative Inquiry work we identified more of our particular giftedness for ministry in Christ that the Holy Spirit has been working in us.  Do you remember our “Thrive Statements”?

St. Andrew’s Thrives when…we get involved in the Southampton community…we work in conjunction with other churches…we are being a vital, family-like Christian fellowship…we have quality worship services with inspiring music and message…we conduct special events that reach beyond ourselves…we show compassion…we are welcoming and show hospitality…we serve according to our giftedness…our leadership is strong…we are teaching and living unconditional acceptance…we are being an example in faith to young families…our men are involved.

In the past two years we have been acting accordingly to these “Thrive Statements” and indeed a spirit of thriving, a spirit of hope overflowing is arising here.  St. Andrew’s feels like a different place than it did three years ago.  We have a Men’s Group now and a Friday Café that reach people that otherwise won’t show up on Sunday morning but who greatly benefit from the friendships they have with us.  We’ve enjoyed mixing with our neighbours across the river of the Saugeen First Nation through our concerts and fundraisers with Wesley United.  We’ve a monthly games night.  We sponsored a community skate last January up at the Arena.  Our Lenten organ meditations and Luncheons are much enjoyed by many in the area who are contemplatively and musically inclined.  These are just drops added to our bucket of hope which is beginning to overflow again to the Southampton community as it has in years past.  And you know what?  We’re having fun!

These are difficult days to be the church in our culture, a culture that can now no longer be called Christian.  The Church is no longer the predominant undergirding social institution in our society.  This means that people aren’t just going to up and come to church anymore.  North America is now a mission field.  We the church must embrace this reality and go outside our walls into our community overflowing in the joy, peace, and hope that are ours in Christ.  We must wear the love of Christ like a church sign with neon letters.

We will have to make some real infrastructure-like changes. It may mean leaving behind buildings to meet in homes, coffee shops, bars or downtown storefronts.  It is likely to mean changing when we have worship services.  Sunday morning really is no longer a viable time option if we want young families.  How we worship is not likely to make much of a difference as long as we are sincere in our praise and authentic in our fellowship.

These days for generating ideas and experimenting with reaching out in creative ways but ways that are in accordance with who the Holy Spirit has shaped us to be.  There are no bad ideas, but we must be aware that if it is outside of the “comfort zone” we’ve identified in our “Thriving Statements” it may be a difficult row to hoe.  These are the days to start having fun again as church but realizing the fun in Christ isn’t just for us.  We’ve got to bring our neighbours along.  Amen.

Giving That Takes on the Poverty of Others

2 Corinthians 8, Deuteronomy 26:1-15

This morning we’re winding down a three sermon series on Stewardship.  In the first sermon I said that it’s pointless to talk about what we do with the time, talent, and money that God has entrusted to us without first talking about what we are doing with that one small talent of God’s life, the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus and the Father have given to dwell in us.  Have we devoted ourselves to Jesus’ Lordship over our lives and are we letting the Holy Spirit do his transforming work in us to make us more Jesus-like?   Are we faithful disciples who truly believe in and follow Jesus to the extent that we will take the time to be discipled and then to disciple others?  That’s where talk on Stewardship needs to start.

 Last week the topic was sharing in God’s abundance.  The abundant life God has for us, for all of humanity, is like a feast or a potluck.  There’s more than enough for everyone as long as we take on a lifestyle of hospitality and generosity as opposed to the lifestyle of hoarding to which we are accustomed.  

This week we’ll take a quick look at how we give to the church simply because no series on Stewardship would be complete without “The Ask”.  If you remember in the first sermon I noted that recent studies on how much and to what people give their money found that although church-goers give regularly to their church, the majority of church-goers tend to give less to their church than they do to other organizations such as hospitals, universities, disaster relief, and disease research because they see such organizations as more able to make a real difference in the lives of people than what the local church can.  This rings as true for big, one-time gifts as it does regular, patterned giving. 

This lack of confidence in God being able to make a real difference by working through us as the body of Christ is something from which we need to repent because it is killing us as a congregation.  Focusing on our commitment to Jesus and being his disciples is a good place to start and so I did.  Last week, I hoped you caught an imaginative glimpse of what could happen through us if we took up the practices of hospitality and generosity.  This week, we need to talk about getting out and staying out of the financial crunch this congregation is in.

When we talk about giving to the church the first word that comes up is tithing, giving ten percent to the church.  I’m sure you’ve heard it said that if everybody in the church tithed we have so much money we wouldn’t know what to do with it.  Tithing seems to be the ideal, but on the whole it is not practiced.  I suspect this is nothing new.

The tithe in the Old Testament, which was ten percent of one’s harvest or income otherwise, was for all shapes and purposes the national taxation system of the theocracy of ancient Israel in which God was the monarch and the priests were the government.  The tithe was to be from the yield of every third year and was to support the priest, foreigners or refugees, widows and orphans.  We have no idea if it was ever practised on the scale of the whole nation doing it.

When ancient Israel instituted a monarchy I suspect that tithing became even less practiced because the kings started taxing the people for funding armies and building palaces and enforced it.  As far as the societal needs that tithing was meant to remedy, I suspect that in the days of the kings idol worship became the chief source of income for the priests.  As far as how they looked after the poor, if you know anything about ancient warfare, war was a good way to get rid of the poor, sick, and disabled.  They were your first line of defence.

Looking to the New Testament, there is no evidence that a practice of tithing ever existed in the early church.  In fact, there was no institution called the church with buildings and priests that needed a regular means of support until the later 300’s A.D.  Though Paul does argue that those who regularly preach should be remunerated, ministry tasks were otherwise shared among the congregants who didn’t get paid.  Travelling missionaries, evangelists, and apostles usually elicited the support of wealthy patrons along the way by means of letters of reference.  Yet, Paul himself was a tentmaker and self-supporting. 

I wish to highlight that the church depicted in the New Testament did not have the institutional needs of supporting buildings, ministry programs, or full-time clergy with pensions and benefits that we, the church today, have.  The New Testament churches were small congregations like ours who usually met in homes, usually the home of a wealthier member.  The tasks of ministry were shared among the people.  So, no building, no salaried clergy.

 That being said, when the New Testament and Jesus himself spoke of giving it is for taking care of the needy among them.  As I’ve said many times, the early church nearly eradicated poverty amongst themselves. The New Testament indicates that the first Christians strove to live in the present in the way they would be living when Jesus returned and established his earthly kingdom. 

This means early Christians strove towards enacting the expected reality of the end of times Kingdom of God in which all people will have enough.  And so, they shared their wealth.  This does not mean that it was the practice that wealthy Christians would totally divest themselves of their wealth.  It means that everybody gave to take care of the poor in their midst.  Everybody gave.  They were taught to give generously as Jesus gave – sacrificially, to the extent of his own life.  Jesus was rich, the Son of God, but became poor, human, for our sake.  They were encouraged to give generously according to their means and beyond. 

In our reading from 2 Corinthians Paul notes that the Macedonians, though they were extremely poor, were able to put together a “wealth of generosity” with the gift they sent to the Judean church for famine relief.  Though they themselves were poor they begged Paul earnestly for the privilege of sharing in that ministry of famine relief in Judea.  They took the hardship that the Judean churches were suffering upon themselves by giving sacrificially to the extent of increasing their own hardship.

That kind of giving, giving that takes on or shares in the poverty of others, fits in well with what I said last week about sharing in God’s abundance and undertaking a lifestyle of hospitality and generosity.  I believe this is the way our Lord calls us, his disciples, to live especially in this materialistic, consumeristic culture that hoards wealth. 

But…as far as how and what we give to this church I think that model is unrealistic and so also tithing.  The largest expense this congregation has is paying for the ministers and I don’t want anyone living on less on my account.  We ministers have a Scripture-based right to be paid for the work we do and to be paid a fair wage, but don’t go hungry on my account.

Nevertheless, this church is poor.  It is behind and if it weren’t for money in the bank and a grant from Presbyterians Sharing, the doors would be closed.  To break even and be grant free there needs to be roughly $14,000 ($9,000) more a year coming in.  If there are 20 envelopes a week coming in and we were to share the debt evenly without doing more fundraisers, then each giver needs to give $700 ($450) more a year.  That’s roughly $59 ($38) more a month or $14 ($9) a week.  “The Ask” – can you do that?  Just write your check for that much more a week and you won’t miss it, but the ministry of this church and of the Cooperative will be all the more strengthened for ministry.

Or, are there any of you out there who can do this?  In my church in West Virginia Fred and Lucille Burns used to call the Treasurer at years end and ask what was still needed and they would write a check for anywhere from $5,000-$10,000 and that was on top of their regularly giving.  God bless them.

That’s just talking money.  The ultimate solution to our problem is we need to take discipleship more seriously than we do.  Train ourselves to disciple others.  Every one of us here has people in our lives whom the Lord is calling us to share him with.  That is very difficult to do if we feel like we don’t know what we’re doing.  Regardless, has your life in the Lord been enriched by the wealth of hospitality, friendship, compassion, and joy that is abundant in this Christian fellowship?  If so, consider “the Ask” that I’ve put before you and follow through.  The wealth of God’s abundance is found in generosity.  Let’s not miss that boat.  Amen.

Sharing in God's Abundance

2 Corinthians 9, Isaiah 25:6-9

When the Bible speaks of abundance it is exclusively not in the terms of wealth stored up in the bank so that I can live a more than comfortable life doing things I want to do.  In the Bible abundance is a feast, a full table to be shared in celebration with others.  Abundance is the feast that comes at the end of the harvest when the owner of the fields and the workers sit together around a huge table filled with food and gratefully celebrate God’s goodness towards them.  Abundance is an open table to which all are welcome.

My grandmother, we called her Mawmaw, she knew abundance.  She came from a farming family, the youngest of sixteen.  She said they came in two waves of eight, but the siblings in the second wave were the only ones she ever talked about.  Being the youngest girl, I suppose, meant she spent a lot of time in the kitchen and you could tell.  Mawmaw could cook.  A meal at her house was always a semblance of a feast spread out.  There was always a little of this and a little of that, some were leftovers, and some made that day and it all amounted to a lot.  Sometimes it seemed there was so much food on the table, it was hard to find a place to set a plate.  This was every evening meal.  My grandparents didn’t have a lot, but they had abundance.

My best friend growing up, his mother, Mom Landis, she knew abundance as well.  There was always a place at her table and lots to eat.  There were always people, family and friends coming and going at their house and if you were there at dinnertime you ate.  Sometimes there would just be a pot of something going on the stove and it didn’t matter what time it was you just grabbed a bowl and ate.  She made the best chicken and dumplings, oyster stew, and spaghetti sauce.

In the Bible abundance, God’s abundance, is that there is always enough, more than enough for people to gather around a table and be well fed and enjoy each other.  There’s always a pot of something for anyone and everyone to draw on.  In God’s abundance nothing keeps forever so share what you’ve got now. 

That being said we have to stand under the conviction that there is something fundamentally un-Kingdom of God-like with a lifestyle that demands we work for a number of years putting aside whatever we can so that we have something to live on when we can’t work anymore.  Moreover, this idea we have that abundance is a big bank account and a productive stock portfolio is foolish.  Take that barn-building rich fool in the parable for example.   Hoarding is not what God has in mind for humanity.  There is and can be abundance in this world, God’s abundance, for everybody to share in and have enough.  Yet, when people start stockpiling it means a few start getting it all while most everybody else ceases to have enough; and, the resources that the earth has to give us become polluted and depleted.

Our passage from Isaiah begins with “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast” and there also the Lord will destroy death.  With that prophecy Isaiah was pointing forwards to the day of the end times that began in Jerusalem (Mt. Zion) with Jesus’ resurrection.  A feast began back then in the early church in Jerusalem.  The first Christians began to share what they had.  Those who owned fields that they didn’t need sold them and gave to others in the church who had need.  Widows and orphans, the most vulnerable in that day, were well taken care of.  In effect, the early Christians eliminated poverty among themselves there in Jerusalem by living in God’s abundance.

Paul tried to extend this practice to the church on a more global scale.  The collection he speaks of in 2 Corinthians was an effort at this.  The Jerusalem churches had suffered a great famine and so Paul was getting the churches in Turkey and Greece to help them out.  He was trying to enact God’s abundance. 

Unfortunately, he found a bit of reluctance in Corinth, which was a very wealthy area.  When he first asked them to help, they were very willing.  But, a year had past and he was finally coming to them to collect the money and he was hearing that they hadn’t been saving anything up for him. 

Paul reminds them that in God’s abundance, those who sow generously reap generously.  This is not a TV ministry ploy where the TV preacher says send me $1,000 and God will reward you 100 fold duping you to think that $100,000 is headed your way.  One doesn’t give generously expecting a reward back in money, but rather a reward in righteousness.  The more we share the abundance we have the more God fills our lives with what I would call the joy of feast-fellowship and the certainty that we will never want.  I can truly say I felt joy around Mawmaw’s and Mom Landis' tables and that’s the way it is to be around the table of God’s abundance.

This is why churches need to potluck as much as they can and, if they can find a way, feed the community around them.  On this mountain, inside the walls of this church and in our homes the Lord Almighty is preparing that end of times feast where he swallows up the pall of death and wipes away tears.  Christians potlucking is a powerful sign to what God is up to in history.

Sharing in God’s abundance requires that we exercise two qualities of character that God has given to everyone in Christ Jesus by his Spirit: hospitality and generosity.  Hospitality, God has opened up and welcomed us into his very life, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  So also, when we open up our churches and our homes to share meals with neighbours and friends in Jesus name, he is in our midst and he makes himself and his abundance known.

Generosity, Paul says God loves a cheerful giver.  The Greek word for cheerful is hilarios from which we get our word "hilarious".  God loves it when we are generous to the point of what the world would call "joyfully ridiculous".  God the Father gave the Son who gave himself over to death that we might have life filled with the Holy Spirit.  I'm not going to call that joyfully ridiculous, but it is the extent that God went to destroy death for us.  The least we can do is discover the joy of not hoarding and rather being ridiculously generous knowing God will always meet our every need.

We Christians have an acute responsibility to model hospitality and generosity as a way of life.  God’s abundance is available in this world and we are those whom he has called and made able to be the living testimony to this Kingdom of God reality.  The first Christians did it to the extent that they eliminated poverty in their midst.  Are we up to the challenge?  Or, maybe I should ask that question in a different way:  Would you like to know the abundant joy of the Lord?  Amen. 

One Small Talent

Matthew 25:14-30

It’s stewardship time of the year again.  It’s the time we talk about how we use those things that God has entrusted to us; our time, our talents, and…wait for it…our money.  The pulpiteers get up and remind us that everything we are and have comes from and belongs to God and so we can’t talk about how it’s our time, our talent, and…wait for it…our money.  It’s God’s time, God’s talent, and…wait for it…God’s money and therefore, we are only stewards of God’s resources.  Then, in the midst of that stewardship sermon the preacher usually asks the congregation how they are doing with giving to the church of that God entrusted time, talent, and…wait for it…money.  Then, it ends with a challenge to do better.

 Well, that’s not the stewardship sermon you’re going to get from me today.  I’m not going to prod us on how good of a steward we each have been of God’s time, God’s talent, and…wait for it…God’s money.  No, rather I am going to inquire into what we each have done with the new life God has given us in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.  You see, before we can talk about what we do with the “stuff” God has entrusted to us, we must first reflect on what we do with the life of Jesus Christ that he has entrusted to us.

One of the most basic teachings of the New Testament on this subject has to do with Baptism: when we were baptised we actually participated in Jesus' death and resurrection.  This means that as followers of Jesus Christ we are DOA for any understanding at all that the life we live is in any kind of way life on “my terms”.  We have to throw Sinatra’s mantra of “I did it my way” into the grave where it belongs and live in the resurrection life of Jesus Christ filled with and led by the Holy Spirit.  Jesus said as much when he said, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”  That means we must daily die to self to live in Christ.

Paul also wrote in his letter to the Galatian churches: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).  The lives we now live as Jesus’ disciples are not our own.  We belong to Jesus who faithfully loves us and out of that love gave his life for us that we may live a new life in him in which we are becoming ever freer from the oppressions of sin as we follow him living life on his terms.  It is a great comfort that God is for us and that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ and that God will work all things to the good for us who love him.  Jesus is our loving Saviour, but he is also our Lord and so we must ask ourselves “How am I doing with the Lordship of Jesus Christ over my life?”

God has given us each who live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ one small talent.  A talent was almost 59 kgs. or 130 lbs. of gold.  Metaphorically, this talent is the personal power of Jesus and his resurrection life.  It is his very self, the Holy Spirit.  And, in accordance with The Parable of the Talents, are we going to invest this talent of Jesus’ living in us and let it grow?  Are we going to abide in Jesus (live in him) and be fruitful (for he will transform us to be more and more as he is and use us to draw others to himself)?  Or, are we simply going to bury it in the ground where we just keep him as a matter of private religious belief as we continue to live our lives on our own terms.

This way of looking at stewardship in terms of what we do with Jesus’ life in us is to think of it in terms of discipleship.  A good way to start doing this is to look at what happened when he called his first disciples.  I like how he called Peter, James, and John to be his disciples in Luke’s Gospel. 

It was the morning of a new day.  They had been fishing all night and caught nothing.  They sat on the beach cleaning their nets.  Jesus comes up and a crowd gathers.  Jesus gets Peter to row him out a little from shore and he teaches for a while.  Then Jesus told Peter, James, and John to go fishing again, but this time fish the deep water. Peter agreed but only because it was Jesus asking.  Peter had had Jesus as a house guest a few nights prior.  Jesus healed his mother-in-law and many others as well as cast out demons from people who screamed out that Jesus was the Son of God as they left.

They go fishing and they have the greatest catch, the greatest business success they had ever had.  The nets were so full that they were near bursting. Peter fell at Jesus’ knees in worship and said “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”   Peter realized that Jesus was somehow God with them there in the boat.  He was amazed and afraid.  Jesus had done things for others.  Now he had done something for Peter that would forever change the circumstances of a poor fisherman.  Jesus looked at Peter, James, and John and said, “Do not be afraid.  From now on you will fish for people.”  When they got to shore they left behind the enormous wealth of their catch.  They left behind their boats and nets, the means of their livelihood.  They left everything and went and followed Jesus.

Reflecting on this experience, it was on the basis of their personal encounter of the living Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, that they left everything they had to rely on in this life to follow him.  The impact Jesus has is powerful.  Then, they spent the next three years wandering about with Jesus getting to know him and working out what it meant for him to be the Messiah and them to be his disciples.  They experienced his arrest, death by crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.  Then, they spent the rest of their lives proclaiming Jesus and his Kingdom and discipling others while awaiting his return.

The personal encounter with the living Lord Jesus Christ leads to the devotion of one’s life to proclaiming Jesus and his Kingdom and discipling others.  To speak of stewardship in terms of Jesus Lordship and discipleship then is to talk about how we each have been brought under Jesus Lordship by personal encounter with him and how our lives are being totally changed and redirected by him in the power of the Holy Spirit with the result that we are reaching out and discipling others. 

So, how are we doing in terms of proclaiming Christ and discipling others?  There have been quite a few studies done in the last twenty years on the giving patterns of church members.  One of the things these studies brought to light is that most Christians do give to the church.  In North America, though the percentage has dropped dramatically, the church is still the biggest receiver of charitable donations.  But, they also found that most Christians don’t give to the church as much as they do to things like universities, disaster relief, disease research, and hospitals because they see these causes as being able to make a bigger difference in the lives of people than the church.  They give to the church because they see it as a requirement of faith rather than as the primary means of bringing about real change and the healing of people in our society.  The end result is that churches struggle financially, have difficulty finding help, and dwindle off in membership. This pattern of giving is evidence that we have buried the one small talent of personal encounter with Jesus Christ our living Lord into the tomb of “my private faith” and me living “my life on my own terms”.

So, how are we each doing with the one small talent of Jesus' life that he has entrusted to us.  Are we living it under his Lordship?  Are we devoting ourselves to letting him change us?  How are we doing with his charge to us to devote ourselves to discipling others?  Pray on these things?  Amen.