Grace Presbyterian Church
October 18, 2015; Ordinary 29B
2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Mark 12:38-44
The Inevitable, Necessary Stewardship Sermon
It is one of those
things for a new pastor. You know it’s coming. It’s inevitable. It doesn’t
quite fall into the category of “things they didn’t teach you in seminary,” but
it’s close.
It’s stewardship
time! Woohoo!
In all
seriousness, this is nobody’s idea of fun. Nobody, except possibly certain
folks who gravitate to public radio or television, likes to ask for money. I
certainly don’t. I’m quite sure Lois would rather not have to go through this.
We’d really rather be able to go on about things and not have to go through the
whole business of pledge cards and all that.
I’d certainly
rather not have to conjure up a “stewardship sermon” out of scripture that
really doesn’t want to be used that way. While in the Old Testament, or at
least much of it, the people of Israel did have an established Temple that
certainly required financial maintenance, in the New Testament there wasn’t
really a “church” out there that was in need of a financial plan. By the time
Paul and his contemporaries are helping the body of Christ spread across Asia
Minor and into southeastern Europe, there are a handful of “house churches,”
meeting primarily in the homes of some of its members, without the overhead of
a modern church building. When money was required, for care for the poor or
sometimes for taking care of a visiting teacher like Paul or others, it was
collected.
That’s the kind of
collection going on as Paul writes to the Christ-following community in Corinth
in today’s epistle reading. Paul is trying to gather up funds for the believers
at Jerusalem (who had fallen on hard times), and he begins the chapter by
telling the Corinthians about the generosity of the Christians in Macedonia,
who despite their own hardships had given with great generosity towards this
collection. We do that kind of collection on occasion; we have, you might have
noticed, been seeking contributions for the purchase of new hymnals for the
sanctuary, and on occasion we collect goods for individuals served by the various
ministries in which we participate.
But as far as
regular budgets go, that’s obviously not how this church, and most modern
churches in the US, work. We have a building. It’s a good building. There are
some repairs needed, as most of us can see. There are regular expenses for
things like electricity and water, keeping the grass from getting too long, having
materials for study, and so forth. The choir needs music. Committees need funds
to varying degrees to carry out their work. Staff people need to be paid, even
me. And to be certain that we can meet those obligations, we ask that our
members commit to giving as we are able to do.
Paul’s verses
sound quite uplifiting; “God loves a
cheerful giver” … “God is able to
provide you with every blessing in abundance” … “You will be enriched
in every way for your great generosity” … really, some great stuff there.
And Jesus’s comments about the widow also are pretty effective at encouraging
us, those of us who are not blessed with great material wealth, that our
generosity matters, and that our generosity will be rewarded.
It all sounds so
good, doesn’t it?
But there’s also a
very disturbing and dismaying aspect to verses and stories like these, of which
we are reminded in the verses before
Jesus points out the widow to us. Teaching in the Temple, during the last week
of his life, Jesus calls his disciples’ attentions to the scribes. It’s pretty
unlikely that Jesus means to sweep every single scribe into this condemnation,
as only a few verses before he has had a much more encouraging encounter with
one of their number, but he’s had enough bad experiences with the scribes that
he’s drawn some sharp and critical observations about them.
One of the behaviors
Jesus calls out involves the very kind of people he observes in the later
verses of our reading today. First of all Jesus disdains their propensity for
seeking attention and flattery, for claiming the best seats at the table and generally
being quite impressed with their own authority and power. But amidst this is an
accusation that might catch us off guard: “They
devour widows’ houses…”. We
don’t have an absolute fix on just what kind of action Jesus is condemning
here; it might be the practice of “Corban” that was mentioned earlier in this
gospel (declaring resources that might support such a person as “dedicated to
God”), or it might be the exploitation of widows by traveling teachers who make
themselves guests in those widows’ homes and consume their limited resources.
Whatever it is, Jesus calls it out, and puts forward the declaration that for
their excesses “Whatever it is, Jesus calls it out, and puts forward the
declaration that for their excesses “They
will receive the greater condemnation.”
It’s not hard to
find modern descendents of those scribes – in fact, if you’re of my generation
it’s hard not to. It’s pretty easy to draw a line between these scribes and
their modern descendents, if you’ve grown up in and lived in the age of the
televangelist. I know some of you, maybe a lot of you, remember the likes of
the Bakkers, the Swaggarts, and so many more who became infamous for extracting
sums of money from the widows of our own day, persons on fixed incomes giving
large chunks of those fixed incomes to those televised preachers. Frankly, any
preacher of my generation trembles at preaching from these verses just because
of that ugly abuse for which they’ve been used before.
So to some degree
a stewardship drive, in which we ask you at least in part for your money, needs
to be accompanied by a pledge by those charged to lead the church – from me and
other staff members through the session and committee chairs – that we will not
be exploiters of what you pledge and give. We must commit to you that what you
give will be used wisely, prayerfully, and with no other goal than the support
of this church in its ongoing call to do Christ’s work in God’s world.
Even with this
past hanging over today’s scripture, we can’t just dismiss the widow in the
Temple as some kind of dupe. We don’t know her individual story; were it not
for Jesus’s description we wouldn’t necessarily even know that she was giving
everything she had. We’ve never heard of her before, and we never hear of her
again.
But for all of the
mystery about this woman, one thing we can know is that she is the opposite of
the protagonist of last week’s sermon. Remember him? The so-called “rich young
ruler,” who came asking Jesus what he needed to do to inherit eternal life only
to go away sorrowing because Jesus told him to sell it all and follow? He was too
attached to his possessions to follow. He was plenty willing to give his
actions – remember how he declared he had kept the law since his youth? His
wealth, though…another matter entirely. He had to hold on, to keep control of
his stuff.
Our widow, though?
No such fear. To borrow a slang term from modern poker, the widow has chosen to
go “all in.” A player whose chips are limited might choose to push them “all
in” when a hand demands it. The widow has little else to fall back on; she
chooses to commit it all in the Temple.
We do not ask for
all your money. We do, however, ask for all of you. We need not just your money
– though we do need that – but we do need your time. We need your gifts of
talent, your ability to teach or sing or give or lead or anything you can do.
We need you, and we need all that you have to offer.
Yes, fill out
those pledge cards and turn them in. But that’s only a first step.
For commitments
large and small, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns:
“God of the Fertile Fields” (GtG 714);
“As Those of Old Their Firstfruits Brought” (PH 414), “We Give Thee But Thine Own” (PH 428), “God, Whose Giving Knows No Ending” (PH 422)
Again, from the indispensible agnusday.org
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