Stewardship Sunday Contemporary Worship at Calvary Lutheran Church November 8, 2015 Mark 12:38-44 38 As Jesus taught, he said, Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, 39 and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! 40 They devour widows houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation. 41 He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42 A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. 43 Then he called his disciples and said to them, Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. 44 For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on. Dear friends, grace and peace to you from your God. Today is the day that we, your Calvary staff, designated as Stewardship Sunday months ago. Now it just so happens that when we turned to our lectionary schedule to see what text was assigned for this day, this was the text that came up. It seemed too good to be true this text that talks about this woman giving generously to the church. Great, we said. Let s keep it as our text for the day. Having spent more time with the text this past week, I ve been thinking maybe it s not such a great text for Stewardship Sunday, because it shows church leaders abusing their power, and it shows a woman giving so much to the church that she is left with nothing to live on. Well, since it IS Stewardship Sunday, and since I did read the text, let me share my reaction two these two scenes in Mark s gospel.
First, We are not that church-- the kind of church described here, full of power-seeking judgy leaders motivated not by devotion to God and love for God s people but rather by a desire for more stature and attention, more money and power. We are not a church that wants to pressure those who have very little to give it all to the church. We are not perfect by any means. But I can say with confidence that we are not that church. No, if you are looking for Calvary Lutheran in this scene, I don t think we are the scribes, and honestly, I don t really think we are the poor woman putting in everything she has, and I know we re not Jesus. I think, rather, we all of us-- are the disciples who are sitting there with Jesus on the temple steps, trying to learn from him and follow him, listening to what he has to say, trying to notice what he notices, trying to love what he loves, and hate what he hates. So what are you noticing, and learning from this scene, disciples? What I learn from Jesus is that motives matter. Why we do what we do matters to Jesus as much as what it is we actually do. Jesus hates hypocrisy and loves humble devotion. The scribes contribute to the temple treasury to impress others, to show how good they are. It is a strategic investment. They remind me of businesses that contribute to political candidates in both parties running for the same seat. Their contribution is not really about having faith in the candidate or their platform. It is about hedging your bets and buying favor, so no matter
who wins, they owe you. These guys with their big contributions are buying favor from the temple priests, from the other members of the congregation, heck, looks like they want even God to feel beholden to them. I ll scratch your back, God, you scratch mine. This is not worship, it is a negotiation. I don t know exactly why the woman puts in her two little bits, if Jesus knows her motives, he doesn t say. Perhaps she feels like, What do I have to lose? Or perhaps in her time of need, she needs to show her trust in God, and invest in her relationship with her faith community. In any case, her offering is so minimal, it is not going to impress anyone or make much of a difference to the temple budget, but it makes a huge difference to her. She is putting all her eggs in God s basket. It is a total offering, all she had to live on. She is giving God all she has, trusting, I assume, that God will somehow take care of her. We cannot know for sure. What we do know is that her offering impressed Jesus more than any other offering put in, because with her two bits she gave her whole self. So Jesus lifts this woman up as an extraordinary steward. We don t use the word steward very much these days, so let s unpack it a bit. A steward is a caretaker for someone else s stuff. Like a property overseer, or a store manager, or a chairman of a board, or a mechanic or accountant or house-sitter, or even a baby-sitter or teacher. In all of these situations, the person has been entrusted with the responsibility to take good care of what is not theirs. You all, in some shape or form, are stewards, I believe. If nothing else, you are a steward of your life.
A Christian view of Stewardship starts with the assumption that what we have in this life, all of it, is not really ours at all. It belongs to God. God created us, breathed life into us, gave each of us a body, a mind and spirit, strength, will and passion, the ability to feel and care and relate, the ability to study and learn, the strength to work and make money God gave us all of it, along with his Holy Spirit in baptism and set us free to use it to love God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves. How we use this gift of life-- how we use our time our energy our passion, skill and yes, our money--this is our stewardship. How well we steward our lives is precisely how well we worship. Stewardship and worship--they are one in the same if you ask me. Worship is not just what you do on Sunday, it is what you do with your whole life to honor God. Likewise it has often been said that stewardship is everything we think and say and do after we say we believe. Honestly, this is not something your pastors can just talk about one Sunday. If we are stewarding our job as your pastors, this is what we are talking about every Sunday, because it is at the heart of who we are as Christians. We are God s people, God s stewards 24-7. If you are a good steward of what God has given you, you are constantly going to be on the lookout for ways to steward your life for good. You will do this by taking good care of your family and by taking good care of yourself. You will be the most diligent employee or the most generous and fair employer you can be or if you are a student, you will learn all you can to apply it for a good purpose. No matter who you are, you will do this by being an active citizen in your community and contributing towards organizations that you see embodying God s love and justice in the world. And hopefully you will also do this by actively supporting the work of your church, if you do in fact believe that we are together an embodiment of God s purposes in this world.
I m just going to say it. I believe that Calvary Lutheran, your church, is absolutely a worthy of your investment of time, talent and treasure. This is an extraordinary church, and I am not just saying that because I am a pastor here. I have been to a lot of churches, and rarely do you find one so full of life and enthusiasm, open-mindedness, grace and hope for the future. There is a reason why you are here, and why our church continues to grow when so many are shrinking. Last year we baptized 67 children and 3 adults, each one received a Bible. This fall Jackie registered 53 three-year-olds for Sunday school, and each one got a Bible. There are so many kids in Sunday school Jackie is once again trying to figure out where to put them all! It s a great problem to have! You see it yourselves on Sunday mornings, the kids come flying out of the woodwork! It s crazy, but isn t it glorious? And that s not saying anything about all the kids who are in confirmation, who went to camp and to Castaway and the National Youth Gathering. Our young people are being raised up in the faith, and are growing into young adults who are leading the way to a new era of service for Calvary. We have 19 people representing Calvary on a service trip to Ethiopia right now and the Honduras team is gearing up for their trip in March. But it s not just the big things that speak of God at work. This church is buzzing every day of the week with Bible Studies, conversation groups, the Memory Café, the knitting group, the La Leche league, parenting groups, Financial Peace University will be later today. There is a
med-student who has taken up residence in room 10 so she can study in a place of grace. and another woman who has started to come every Wednesday and use the sanctuary to practice opera! Now that ll wake you up! People feel welcomed here, and they are. And the work of Calvary extends outside this building, through the financial support we provide to Northlands Mission and CVIC and Christus Rex, to name a few. Through the leadership of our Parish Nurse Mary Ann Devig we train Stephens Ministers and a care team to visit those who are homebound and in need of support and one of your Calvary staff visits the hospital every week. More than that, each week we send out several hundred missionaries into our community, fed by Jesus and his word and equipped to live lives of love and service to God. That s you! I treasure all these signs that God s mission for Calvary is alive and well and moving us forward into the world God loves. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you for all that you have done and have given to ignite people for Christ and to make this a spirit-filled vibrant congregation! I am so grateful to serve as your pastor. Every day is a new adventure with you wonderful people. This is my dream job. But I would be negligent if I did not take this opportunity to remind all of you, people of God at Calvary, that the work we do together depends upon your deep investment of time and passion and yes, money, if it is going to remain strong and vibrant into the future. We just really need you to be completely on board this Ship of Christ to keep it sailing strong! I say this in part because your Calvary staff and council were recently made aware by our finance team that about half of Calvary families don t give anything at all. Now of course, there are many others who give very generously, and for that we are so very grateful. But they told us that the cushion in our general budget is getting slimmer and slimmer. What we have seen is that a lot of people seem to like to give to specific projects of the church that they are
passionate about but then don t support the general budget. The general budget may not seem as exciting, but the reality is that it is the base of all we do. If the general budget suffers, all these projects will fall apart too. As we prepare the 2016 budget, the finance team is starting to gently ask if there are ministries we staff could possibly cut back on. Your Calvary staff does not see this as a time to cut back. In a time when there is so much going on in our world and community that feel negative and divisive, we feel like God is doing amazing things here uniting people in worship and in service, and there are so many ideas bubbling up about what we could do and become for this growing community. There has been a lot of transition, but we feel like God is launching us into a new exciting chapter! So yes, I am concerned for our shared mission, people of Calvary. But more that that, this news also causes me deep concern for the spiritual health of our members, because I am convinced it is almost impossible to learn to trust God and depend on God if you are not consistently and financially invested in God s work. As it says in Matthew 6:21, Where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also. We vote for what we care about with our wallet. What do you really love and how do you show it and where is God on that list? This lesson was brought forcefully home to me about 16 years ago. I remember very clearly the Stewardship Sunday Brian and I were sitting in the church we attended in Minneapolis and the Stewardship chair asked us without apology to please be intentional about filling out our pledge cards, to talk and pray over it, to make our giving match the kind of worship we wanted to offer God, first fruits instead of the leftovers. He said we needed to do this not only for the sake of the church, but also for our faith walk. Now this was the first time I had ever been asked to do this, and I was a bit taken aback. Brian and I were both in graduate school, taking out loans and working hard, and living pretty close to the poverty line. What could we really afford to give? But we took his words to heart because we realized that we had never actually sat down in our two years of marriage to talk about what was an appropriate amount to give the church. Our giving was erratic, largely based on how we were feeling that week about our finances or how much money we happened to have in our wallets. Actually thinking about it, it was a little embarrassing. I mean I was in seminary for Pete s sake. We had been doing just what he had said, we had been offering God the leftovers.
When we sat down together and looked at our finances, I wasn t sure what difference it would make to our faith, but we decided it was the right thing to do to tithe, to give 10% of what was coming into our checking account, including loans. It was a big leap of faith for us. But we stuck to it. Every week we wrote out that check, and you know what, it really did feel like an act of worship putting that check in the plate, because it required trust and prayer. It made us more serious about our commitment to God because it required us to set priorities in our spending in the other areas of our lives. It actually helped us give our whole selves to God. And it also helped us to be a lot more invested in the life of the Church. So I started teaching Confirmation and Brian started helping with a summer work program. Now this became not just a church we were going to, this was OUR church. Even though we knew we would only be there a couple years, we decided to join, because we felt that strongly about it. We had invested our treasure our money, our time and energy and passion, and our hearts followed. It was the first church I joined as an adult, and I still feel a soft spot in my heart for this church that taught me to commit. We still tithe, and it s still an act of faith. Most of that goes to Calvary, but a portion of it is set aside to go to other causes that we care about. It s part of our marriage, it s part of the worship of our daily lives. Some of you are maybe in the position we were in you consider Calvary your home congregation, but you just haven t given your offerings to the church too much thought or you don t think you have much to give in the areas of time, skill or money. If that s you, I want to ask you to take this opportunity to think seriously and prayerfully about your stewardship. What are you offering to God? Are you giving God your whole self? Your Monday to Saturday self as well as your Sunday morning self? Are you giving God your passion and your joy and your thirst for justice and your desire for meaning? Are you giving God your dreams and hopes and worries? Are you giving God your time, your relationships, your skills? Are you giving God your best, your first, your designated to him investment of all that you have and are, or are you giving him your leftovers? How we steward what is ours is our true worship.
So while we must talk about money, stewardship is not just about money. It s about giving everything. This is what Jesus saw in that widow, and this is what he wants to see in us, the disciples sitting with him on those steps. So let s learn from him today. Let s heed the invitation to be stewards of the very precious lives placed in our hands. Let s give it all to him. Amen.