One Moment, One Penny, One Dollar ...
... making a difference in our world:
In the Jimmie Stewart movie “Mr Smith goes to Washington” it is observed that “all good things in the world come from fools with faith.” As I reflected on our readings today, and moved through my week, I realized the truth of that statement, and how through faith our world has been shaped and changed for the better. It’s all part of being a Good steward, and as we move into the season of Lent and the preparations it embodies, we face the challenge of thinking about how we can live as Good Stewards in our world today.
To be honest, I think I’ve offered maybe 3 or 4 Stewardship sermons in my twenty some years of ministry. But today, the readings combined with ongoing conversations and worries about our budget here, drew me to the realization that offering one today wouldn’t be a bad idea.
My previous forays into preaching about stewardship have been in similar moments of convergence where the need was pressing. In Bella Coola I offered a “dig deep into your pockets” reflection that hoped people would come up with more than just lint … I think I even invoked that image of Jack Benny and his legendary frugalness along with jokes about moths fluttering out of wallets when they get opened.
My favourite Stewardship sermon though began with the joke: “The Minister rose on a Sunday morning to address the congregation and said, I have bad news, I have good news and I have the absolute most horrible news of all … he continued the bad news is the roof is leaking, the furnace packed it in last night, the back stairs have collapsed and thanks to a computer hacker ALL of our computers and electronics need to be replaced. But the good news is we have the money. In fact we have more than enough to cover ALL these expenses and more. HOWEVER, the most horrible news of all is that every dime of that money is in your wallets, purses and pockets and you’ve been pretty cheap lately …”
I tend to avoid stewardship sermons. I’m not particularly comfortable offering them, and I chose instead to weave the idea of stewardship throughout my preaching and reflections on an ongoing basis. Too often the tone of Stewardship sermons is uncomfortable and laced with guilt and the overarching theme of “here I stand in the pulpit, and my salary is paid by you – so you better do better” SO I tend to avoid that theme all together, choosing instead to celebrate our achievements and encourage us to work together in a positive way … but often stewardship themes are met by the response of “how dare he suggest I give more …” and the oppose reaction kicks in and we end up with fewer people pulling MORE of the weight … and everyone feels bad …
So, having set the context I would like to point out that if we were to consult the Stewardship guides and books written on the topic for Churches, we will discover that as a Community of faith, we’re doing pretty good in our stewardship. We can pat ourselves on the back for the simple fact that we are doing ‘all the right things’ according to the gurus of things Stewardship in the United Church, and we have a pretty good level of givings and support – so I don’t offer this reflection with a tone or even a suggestion of guilt, but rather as a means of opening up the discussion as it pertains to our current situation.
The reality is that as a Church we can’t avoid Stewardship, and we should avoid speaking of it on an ongoing basis. I have in my office a tiny selection of the Stewardship books and resources that are created regularly for Church use. It’s part of who we are – but in the United Church, we’ve shyed away from the discussion for fear of offending the very people who put their donations of time, talent and treasures up for use every week. We don’t want to offend anyone, so we don’t talk about it … we don’t talk about it despite the reality that every time we open the Scriptures and begin to read we’re standing in a context that is permeated with the very idea of faithful stewardship.
Noah, hearing the promise of God to never again destroy the earth by flood, and offering the gift of the rainbow to remind ALL of us of this Covenant of love and faithfulness, is a story about being a Good Stewards and caring not only for creation, but for one another, and our relationships and how we live our lives in faith … Noah embodies a second chance to be lived out in God’s promise of love … how can we NOT be a good stewards of our life and all that fills it?
Then as he rises from the waters of Baptism, Jesus hears the voice saying “this is my son, the beloved …” words we echo in our own baptism. If we are to be celebrated as one of God’s beloved, how can we live as anything less than a good steward over our blessings and treasures?
Our faith is ALL about Good Stewardship … and yet, so often we don’t want to talk about Stewardship in Church circles because we may offend people … so we limit our Stewardship talk to seasonal letters and campaigns, or special appeals, and we HOPE that by some mystical process of osmosis, people will ‘get it’ when it comes to our finances and our needs on committees and councils … we won’t talk about it openly, but we hope people will give generously and freely … it’s a strange dichotomy that we’ve set up for ourselves really …
Yet, when we do dare to talk about stewardship it’s been my experience that amazing things begin to happen … and the way to best talk about Stewardship is through stories … stories of what ordinary people can do, and do easily that makes a world of difference.
When it comes down to it, the story I like to tell is that of the First Nations Church in Bella Coola wanting to buy copies of Voices United when they first came out. There was a real willingness to buy these new hymn books, and number were purchased almost immediately as memorial gifts from families and church members, but we didn’t have enough for the whole congregation … so we were left wondering what we could do.
Then one of the elders of the community came up with the idea of collecting pop and beer cans and turning them in for the nickel and using THAT money for buying the hymn books.
It worked … almost every morning I would find a plastic bag of pop cans at the garage door of the manse that I would add to the growing pile in the garage, and in turn I would sort in to bags of 100 cans which I could take to the store and turn in. Uma, the elder and others encouraged the kids and youth to gather pop cans after basketball games at the hall, and from the ditches around the community to help the Church – we had people who seldom entered the building helping out, and the trickle of cans quickly became a torrent.
One memorable afternoon we loaded two pick up trucks to over flowing – the bags were bungee corded into place over the box and cabs of the truck as we headed up the road to the store to cash in thousands of pop cans …
The campaign was SO SUCCESSFUL that not only did Emmanual Church buy enough copies of Voices United for their use, they had money left over to buy another set of hymn books that the United Church was no longer going to publish, and that we used extensively in the Congregation there … and it ALL happened one pop can at a time.
This past week I had the privilege of spending some time with some of the greatest minds behind the running of Food Banks across Canada. During the course of our informal chat David Northcott, the director of Winnipeg Harvest one of Canada’s biggest and oldest Food Banks mused that he finds the promotion of hunger and addressing it most challenging within the United Churches of Winnipeg and Manitoba. He said off handedly – “I don’t get it really … people are hungry, we’re called by faith to feed them, why is this so complicated for Churches?”
And in that moment, he hit the heart of Stewardship … why is it so complicated? Why is talking about stewardship so frightening and so fraught with danger? Why is it, when a minister stands in front of a congregation and offers a reflection stewardship, he or she runs the risk of being run out of town for offending people? Why do we have to make something so simple as good stewardship so complicated?
I’ve always like the story that Tim Huff offers in his book Bent Hope, about the young man who lived on the streets of Toronto and LOST everything in a sudden flood following a summer rain storm. This young man lost his backpack and a precious and irreplaceable picture of his sister that he carried with him in the hopes that one day of finding her again … and yet even with this enormous loss of everything he possessed, Tim marveled how later he found that same young man begging on the streets with a time horton’s cup full of change and a sign that said the money collected was for the survivors of Hurrican Katarina because they had lost everything.
The young man knew what it meant to lose everything, and was compelled to help. But more than that, even in his dire straits, he saw the folks in New Orleans as worse off than him, and wanted to do something … a young man with nothing, was doing what he could to help someone he say worse off than himself … and he did. With Tim’s help, he donated his collected change to one of the funds set up to aid the people who survived Katarina.
That’s GOOD STEWARDSHIP … and it’s what we’re capable of doing when we live our stories, and our faith and have the courage to really look at what’s before us and respond.
It’s been suggested that we engage a Twoonie Challenge where in ALL of US are challenged to donate an extra twoonie each week to help address the deficits we’re facing … it is startling to realize that if each of our 95 resident members in the Pastoral Charge donated JUST two dollars extra each week we would by the end of December have almost 9900 dollars more in our budget … if we each donated 5 dollars we would have almost 25 000 more dollars … and if we each donated an extra ten dollars a week we would have almost 50 000 extra dollars in our budget this year.
One small gesture can make a difference … a pop can … some spare change … a twoonie … a five dollar bill … if together we each respond as good stewards of our time, our talent and our treasures we can and WILL do astounding things in faith … all it takes is a willingness to try.
As Margaret Mead once said – “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world – indeed, it is the only thing that ever has …”
In faith, we gather here as thoughtful fools … let’s go and change the world !!
May it be so, thanks be to God, let us pray …
No comments:
Post a Comment