Sermon for Sunday, October 20th 2024

St John’s Anglican Church
20 October, 2024
Stewardship

Please be seated. 

It’s a privilege to be invited to be part of the preaching ministry here at St John’s while Preston is on sabbatical.

This past Sunday and today have been Sundays set aside for our annual focus on Stewardship. And I imagine that you might be thinking ‘hmmm stewardship—she’s probably going to be preaching about money’. So just to put your mind at ease, the answer to that question is, ‘Yes I am’.

However, at the same time, it’s important not to lose sight of the reality that stewardship is much more all-encompassing than the use of our financial resources.  It has to do with how we use all the gifts and resources with which God has blessed each of us, to care for and tend to all of God’s created order. In reality, we have had a stewardship emphasis since early September, with our focus on the Season of Creation. And that focus continues even into today’s Psalm that includes wonderfully, glorious metaphors of God as creator.

But now, last week and today, we want to reflect more specifically on the stewardship of our financial resources.

My introduction to the concept of ‘stewardship’ as the giving of our financial resources began at the age of 5.  In my family when we turned 5 we were given a nickel to put in the offering plate on Sunday morning.  I liked doing that.  It made me feel grown-up, and rather important to be able to add my contribution like the other grown-ups around me. 

In my family, at age nine, we were given an allowance of 25 cents.  10 cents now went into the offering plate, 10 cents went into our piggy bank to save, and 5 cents was for spending money.  I liked that too—feeling even more grown up to have more to put in the offering plate.

Then I turned 10.  Now, I don’t know about the Canadian math curriculum, but in Pennsylvania where I grew up, our grade 5 math curriculum included learning about percentages.  And I had two aha moments: 

One, now I understood what ‘percent’ meant, when the pastor talked about giving 10% of your income; and two, I rather quickly did the math, and figured out that I was giving, not 10% of my allowance, but rather 40%.

Suffice it to say, I did not win the argument I had with my parents, where I suggested that I should really be giving 2 ½ cents, not 10 cents, and even though I generously volunteered to up it to 3 cents, they were not impressed.  Full confession, I have not given 40% of my resources to the church since those early years of my 25 cent allowance.

I’m quite aware that my early experience of ‘giving’ has shaped what for me has become a central spiritual practice of contributing a percentage of my resources to the church.  Giving is for me a Spiritual Practice. Like praying, or reading Scripture, giving is embedded in how I attempt to live out my Christian faith.  As I reflected on this, what interested me, was less about the actual act of ‘giving’ and more about what Christian educators call formation into the habits and practices of living Christianly. How are we formed as Christians?   From an Anglican perspective, our formation, as Christians is embedded in our baptismal vows.   “Will you persevere in resisting evil…will you seek and serve Christ in all persons… will you proclaim by work and example the good news of God in Christ…

We typically repeat those vows along with the newly baptized, and often at the Easter Vigil.  Granted, there is not a baptismal vow that says, ‘Will you contribute a portion of your financial resources to the church’; but I think the practice of giving is a joyful response to the life to which our baptismal vows call us.

What I’d like to invite us to consider this morning are the ways in which we move from repeating baptismal vows to embodying them, so that they form our daily lives.

Both our Old Testament and our Gospel lesson for today give us some hints about this.

If I were to ask you what you remember from today’s Old Testament lesson from II Kings, you would probably recall it as the familiar story of Naaman, the great army commander, who is cured of his leprosy through obeying Elisha the prophet, by washing himself in the Jordan River and through that experience comes to confess Israel’s God as the one true God.

But listen to vs. 2 and 3. “Now the Arameans on one of their raids, had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife.  She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria!  He would cure him of his leprosy.’”

Perhaps the reason we often overlook these two verses is that they are too disturbing to take in.  A young girl, perhaps 10 or 12 has been kidnapped, is taken from her parents, from her home, from her community and is forced into slavery.  We do not know what sustained her through what must have been a terrifying time. What we do know is that someone at some time formed her in the faith story of Israel, so that she, a slave child in exile could remember and act to facilitate not only Naaman’s physical healing, but also his belief in Israel’s God.

We can imagine that this young girl would have learned the Sabbath rituals and prayers from her mother as she helped to prepare the weekly Sabbath meal.  We can imagine that she would have heard the story of Exodus at Passover and that she would have participated in the Jewish festivals and feast days. We can imagine that from the moment of her birth she would have been formed in a community bound by the admonition from Deuteronomy 6:  “Keep these words to day in your heart…recite them to your children, talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.  Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them on your forehead, write them on the doorposts of your house and your gates.” 

I can imagine it was perhaps this early experience of Formation into the Jewish community and its faith story that enabled her, a young slave girl in exile to be an agent of healing and hope and transformation.  It is a reminder to us of the important work that we have here in this community of welcoming, teaching and nurturing the children among us.  Restarting Sunday school today for our children is a welcome addition to our ministry to families.

Our Gospel lesson provides us with another glimpse into formational practices. Brothers James and John, despite the hours spent with Jesus, get sidetracked into the very human longing to be special.  They wish for the satisfaction of being chosen to be close to Jesus, to sit next to him in his glory. 

Jesus, perhaps with patience, or perhaps with a bit of an eyeroll, reminds them of another formational practice, that greatness is not about where we sit, or about being first, but about service to others. 

The Gospel lesson reminds us that a Gospel-based community, as we here at St John’s strive to be, is utterly different from the ‘business as usual-me first world’ that we encounter all the time and all around us.

Our formation as Christians begins with the daily practice of Christian habits and disciplines.  It begins with being formed in a community of people who practice actions in response to God’s abundant love for the world.  All of us here understand the discipline of practice.  We can all brush our teeth in the morning, probably with our eyes closed.  If you’re under 30 or maybe 40 you’ve probably practiced enough to be good at video games.  Some of us practiced enough to be fluent in a foreign language, play a sport, or a musical instrument.

A central place immersion in Christian practices happens is in worship, where we gather to remember who God is and who we are.  It happens as we sing together, pray together, read Scripture, offer hospitality, resolve conflict, break bread together, serve our community and neighbourhood, strive to love each other despite our differences, and as we give of our financial resources. And it is as we practice these actions together week after week, year after year, that our habits become embodied and shape our character and our community.

One of my favourite theologians, Sam Wells, delves even deeper into our formation as Christians.  He uses the language of ‘improvisation’, borrowed from the arts, and suggests that when Christians become so thoroughly inhabited by Christian practices they are then able to ‘improvise’ and respond in fresh and imaginative ways to the challenges of their time. This kind of imaginative improvisational discipleship requires not only ‘the ability to see what is, but the capacity to see what might be, and the imagination to begin to create it’.

You might think that sounds a bit lofty or perhaps idealistic,  and perhaps it does, but we here at St John’s experience that kind of imaginative improvisation frequently. 

Angus, our excellent organist not infrequently improvises.  You might remember, that several weeks ago our Gospel lesson was Jesus stilling the stormy sea.  If you were listening carefully, you heard the Gospel read, then you heard Angus play the Gospel story—you heard the storm, the crashing waves, and then the peaceful stilling of the water—all this as the rector and others were making their way back to the altar.

While to us Angus’ playing may seem spontaneous and fresh, or made up in the moment, we know that Angus’ ability to do that it is honed by hours and hours of practice.  I think this is a wonderful example for us, of the ‘improvisation’ that Wells is referring to—the ability to see/hear what it, the capacity to see what might be, and the imagination to begin to create it’—honed by hours of practice.

I started this sermon with a personal example of how my early experience of ‘giving’ helped to form in me a core spiritual practice.  I want to circle back to that because I think that seeing our financial stewardship as part of our formation as Christians is something we are often hesitant to talk about or emphasize, or it’s something that we address rather apologetically.    

However, recently I had a very different experience:

Earlier this month Ken and I had the privilege of attending two Evensongs and a Sunday morning Eucharist at Canterbury Cathedral.  Following the ‘Welcome to Canterbury Cathedral, we’re glad that you are worshipping with us today’, all three services began—emphasis began– unapologetically this way, “We will be taking an offering.  It costs 30,000 pounds each day to keep the cathedral open and ministering to our community and to the pilgrims who come among us.  If you don’t have cash with you there are various places around the cathedral for you to tap your card to donate to our work”.  

Here at St John’s it doesn’t cost us 30,000 pounds daily, but our ministry and building do cost us about $14-1500 each day, and that’s without considering any additional opportunities to expand our ministry or improve our building.  We who are here today are not only the recipients of the daily ministry of Word and Sacrament, we are not only the recipients of the gifts of community which we cherish, and we are not only committed to offer God’s love and grace to our neighbourhood, but we are also the stewards of this ministry for our children and for the generations to come.  

These weeks we have been asking that you prayerfully consider what God is inviting you to contribute to the ministry of St John’s.  As you do that, I hope that you may be inspired to envision St John’s as a community of imaginative improvisational disciples, with “the ability to see what is, the capacity to see what might be, and the imagination to begin to create it.”