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Stewardship Sermon, St. Augustine Fall 2007 by The Rev. Hartshorn Murphy For the past three weeks, ending this morning, we have heard personal testimonies from four leaders in our parish. Each one of them gave us a personal account of their struggle with stewardship. They gave us hope about our faith journey and hope about our relationship with God. They revealed to us personal stories, they talked to us about money, what they believe to be true about their commitment to this church and how they have experienced blessing, hope, love and faithfulness while struggling to tithe. My family is also with them on the journey toward the tithe. I have been ordained a priest for 4 years in January. I am still paying off my seminary loans and trying to figure out how to survive in LA county on an priest's salary. Money was always an issue in my family of origin. We never had enough. When my father died at age 48, he barely left enough money to bury him. I always wanted to be an Architect. When I graduated from high school, I found myself struggling to complete the foundational courses in junior college while working full-time and attending evening classes 4 nights a week. If I had not received benefits from the Veterans Administration because of my father's military service, I probably would never have received my degree. Somewhere along the way I realized that I wanted to be in a profession that dealt with people. I wanted to give back to the community. I was ridiculed by my family because having been raised by a widowed teacher, we learned early on that people in professions like teaching; non-profit, church work did not promise great financial reward. Despite this, I pursued a vocation in the non-profit world and then as a lay professional in the church and eventually as a priest because I believe in the hope that Jesus brought to the world. In stewardship class at seminary, it was suggested that the junior warden be asked to say a few words about the subject when it was time to do the annual campaign. In one congregation I served, the junior warden stood up and said, "Some of you in this congregation give too little." There was a gasp. Taking stock of an increasingly hostile audience, he then said, "But most of you give too much." Needless to say the campaign turned to dust before our very eyes. Then there is the story about the very wealthy man who was asked to give a talk during the service as part of the program. The man stood up and said, "You know me as a very wealthy man and that is true. I am a millionaire many times over. But I want to tell you I owe it all to the Lord. When I was just a young boy and I had earned my first dollar cutting my neighbors grass, I went to church. The minister spoke and he said we should all give sacrificially. I only had one dollar but I knew I had to give it all. So I made my decision and gave my only dollar to God. And the Lord blessed that decision and I am a multimillionaire today." As he went back to the pew, one of the older ladies in the congregation called out, "I dare you to do it again." The point of the story, I think, is that it is a lot easier to give away all you have when you only have a dollar. It is much harder to give away millions. Money and possessions seem to grow on us and it seems we are less free when we have a lot than when we have nothing. Our relationship to things is really complicated by our own history and that of our family. It doesn't seem to matter if we have little or a lot. We are driven, as Fr. Keating says, by our desires for power, control, affection, esteem, security and survival often represented by what we have and what we think ourselves entitled to possess. If we feel really nervous, maybe a little queasy just by the thought of giving some of it away, it is probably one of the most essential things we need to do. Otherwise why would the Bible talk about money so much? In the Gospels, 2/3 of the sayings of Jesus are about the use of money. In the Old Testament, the prophets never tire of warning about the danger of worshiping money and there are passages all throughout the Torah where laws and requirements are set down about how we use money, how much to give, to whom and when. There are speeches, laws, and stories throughout scripture where a lot of time is spent talking about money. Here at St. Augustine's, we ask for money for a variety of purposes-for Outreach to send to the children of Sudan, for the Corazon building project, to bake pies for the homeless, to fund the flowers for Christmas & Easter. Over the years we have asked for capital dollars to renovate the kitchen, to build the columbarium, and for the Organ fund. These funds are requested to help fund our mission and ministry in our community and in the world. It would not surprise me if you felt you had heard more about money and the church than you want to. I am learning that it is really dangerous to preach on stewardship. We are so tightly bound with our money and our things that we just don't want to talk or hear about it, especially in church. But if we don't think often and deeply about our relationship to our possessions from the viewpoint of our faith, not only would we be unfaithful to our Christian Witness about something that is central to our lives, but we would allow the world to form our attitudes and opinions about money by default. So how do we escape being possessed by what we possess? How do we free ourselves from our fear that if we give generously, we are taking an unnecessary risk with our lives? There is a story from scripture about the Prophet Elijah and a Widow that might help us here (see I Kings 17:7-16). There was a widow living on her own with no means of support and not much of a possibility of getting any help. Worse, she was living in a time of drought and suffering. Worse, she was not even Jewish. She was an alien living in Hebrew land. Her whole day was focused on staying alive. She was a squatter eeking out a living. And things were getting worse. Into all of this came a strange holy man who shows up at her door and says, "Can I have a drink and while you are at it something to eat?" She says, "Look around; does it look to you like I have something to eat? I was just fixing a last meal for my son and then I am going to die." "Don't worry," he says. "Go fix your son something and then give me a bite and you and your son can have the rest." Then Elijah makes his pronouncement: "Thus says the Lord your God: the bowl will not run out of flour or the jar run out of oil before the day I, the Lord, send rain." For the widow it is the moment of truth. It is now decision time. What is this widow going to bet her life on? On whom does she ultimately depend? And that is the question that is really at the heart of any stewardship campaign. "Who do we trust with our lives?" "On whom do we really depend?" Sooner or later that question will come into our lives. It will come whether we confront it as the widow of Zarephath did or whether we drift into that decision by default, which I suspect is the more common practice. We all have a worldview, a vision of ultimate reality out of which we make our decisions. The widow had as many conflicts and demands as we do today. She had obligations to a guest, and feeding her family. She and her son feed Elijah and are nourished through the drought by flour that never runs out and oil that never runs dry. In the end, she puts her trust not in what little she had, but in the Word of God as it came to her through the prophet Elijah. And she discovered that this God of Elijah, probably to her great surprise, keeps his word. Our giving to God reminds all of us that we are not self-made. We gather together possessions and things to try and keep at bay the truth which is "we are not in control of our own lives." This past month with all of the wild fires makes that very clear. Disaster lurks out there, we are not self-made and we are not self-sufficient. We are totally dependent on God and upon other people for every breath we take, every bite of food we eat, and every luxury we consume. Whether we are millionaires or paupers, we are not the authors of our own fate and we need to learn again and again and again, what all of our money and goods make it so easy to temporarily forget. That is: we always live by the grace of God, always in utter dependence and interdependence. Stewardship is not about the money we have, or the rising and falling of the stock market. It is not about what we think we can afford. It has everything to do with acknowledging our dependence upon God and our interdependence on each other. So the question is - on who or what do you depend for your life? With the wild fires over the last month here in Southern California, we have had a reminder of how easy it is to lose that which we have worked a lifetime to build. Will our gift to God represent our commitment to be a steward? To be a steward is to acknowledge that I am not an owner, but a manager; a caretaker of all that God has given me. Will our gift reflect what ministries God is calling us to do here at St Augustine's? Will our gift express not just our sense of what our fair share is or the least we can get by with, or will our gift reflect our hopes and dreams of what God may do through us in 2008? Will the promise in faith we make in the coming weeks when we pray about and complete our pledge card not be what we think we can afford but be a bold declaration of our trust in God and our common life together here at St Augustine? The decision you make, when grounded in prayer, will be both right and good. Copyright © 2008 St. Augustine by-the-Sea
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