October 19, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
So the first task of being a good steward is to get clear and to get honest about what we have been given and what we treasure.
Download
Full Text
“The Second Principle of Stewardship, A Series”
The Rev. R. Cameron Miller
October 19, 2008
---
Good morning.
I want to note one thing about
Isaiah this morning,
and then move onto something else
that is related but different.
About Isaiah
I want us to recognize a startling
and brazen interpretation of current events
on the part of the ancient prophet.
Isaiah says that God has anointed Cyrus.
Now understand please,
another word for anointed is Messiah.
Isaiah says that God has Messiah-ized Cyrus.
That is especially startling to us
because as Christians ignorant of the our Jewishness,
we think there is only one Messiah – Jesus.
But in fact,
in ancient Israel,
there were many, many people
over the centuries anointed as God’s servants.
Messiah means, literally, anointed one,
as in anointed with oil.
Or my favorite,
more earthy, interpretation:
Messiah means oily head.
So God has anointed Cyrus.
Who is Cyrus?
Well…he is the king of Persia.
He is not an Israelite.
He is a total, utter Gentile.
That is a brazen claim.
To assert that God has not only chosen a Gentile
but a Gentile King
of a Gentile Nation,
that is about to be the Superpower Empire of its day,
is a shocking image to his contemporaries.
But there it is:
God has made Cyrus a Messiah –
anointed him as a servant
of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Crazy.
But there is more.
Look at what it says:
God is holding his hand!
God is holding the hand of the Emperor
and taking a stroll with him
to make sure that he uses his power
the right way.
So for the ancients listening to Isaiah’s poetry
or reading later as time and history passed,
it would have been an
astounding
scandalous claim:
Like anointing the Russian President or the
Chinese Premier as President of the United States.
For us,
we moderns of the 21st century,
the scandal is the implication
that anybody’s empire would belong to God.
The idea that God has the power
or will
to guide anybody’s hand…
let alone George Bush’s
or Vladimir Putin’s
or Hu Jintao’s…
is simply beyond the pale for us 21st century-ites.
But I just want us to note, as we move on,
the two implications of Isaiah’s prophecy:
1. the Biblical assumption that God reaches beyond any religion and any boundary
to touch and call any servant;
2. And secondly,
the presumption that it all belongs to God anyway.
Jesus’ bit on taxes really says the same thing
but we don’t have time to dig into that today.
Trust me, both Isaiah and Jesus
held that the whole world,
Gentile or Jew, blankets, gold, machinery or bread,
belong to God and we are renters not owners.
That is where I am going to leave the Bible behind.
Isaiah and Jesus are thick
in the midst of everything else
I want us to think about today,
but not explicitly.
I am inviting us into a prolonged reflection.
It won’t end with this sermon.
It will continue for several weeks.
And it is my hope
that what I am asking us to reflect on
will seep inside your thoughts,
and wedge into the one of the folds in your brain
and sit there
like a seed stuck in your teeth.
We are in the midst of a tremendous sea-change
only we don’ t know what it is.
We can still look back
and see the familiar dock from which we are
drifting away without a paddle,
and we can look out into the vast expanse of turbulence
but we cannot see what is on the other side –
and it is in moments like these
that we do not even know if we’ll get there.
We are in an in-between time,
a still time or still-point
as T S Eliot penned in one of his poems.
It is the kind of time,
the very type of moment,
that religion ought to have something to say
that is deeper
and truer
and more compelling
than what we hear from
the pundits,
the prognosticators,
the candidates seeking approval,
and the wizards of economics who promised us the world and have led us into a dry gulch.
But I am not of the order of religion
that says we have the answers
in times like these,
rather,
that we have the questions to guide us
and we have the wisdom to guide us
and we have the hope to guide us
and we have the source of life to sustain us.
Nor am I the kind of preacher,
I hope,
who thinks it is his job to tell you what to think
and what is right
and what is wrong.
Instead,
I hope I am the kind of preacher
who challenges us to listen,
and challenges us to discern,
and challenges us to act…
and who invites us to honor our autonomy
and honor the individuality
of our different consciences
and our different experiences
and our different capacities.
For the next four Sundays
I am going to ask you to dig deep into your own soul
as we reflect on stewardship,
your stewardship and mine.
Now I think I just heard the air let out of the sanctuary.
“Stewardship” is such a sad word any more,
at least in churches,
because it has come to mean a solicitation for money.
But I want us to think about this word
the way environmentalists do:
as in stewardship of the Earth.
In that context,
Stewardship is an
exciting
challenging
frightening
sobering
and chocked-full-of-meaning word.
Indeed, today is the beginning of our
Fall Stewardship Campaign
that we are calling “Many Voices – One Mission”
but something different is going on here.
Normally, on the first Sunday of such a campaign,
we would have sent you pledge cards
and over the weeks of the campaign
we would have agitated for more and more cards
to be turned in until finally,
on November 23rd we would count them all up
and declare success.
We are not going to do that, not this year,
maybe never again…I don’t know.
Instead, we will not send out a pledge card
or 2009 contributions card,
or any direct solicitation for your commitment of
specific funds,
until we have had this time of reflection.
Stewardship,
as a Big Word rather than a money-grubbing word,
is the incarnation of our spirituality…
(repeat)
Stop right there and hold that please.
The way that you and I act,
as the stewards of our lives
and as the stewards of our resources,
is in fact the measure of our spirituality.
It is not about what we believe.
It is not about how much we pray.
It is not about how often we attend worship.
No.
Our spirituality,
its depth and its breadth,
is incarnate in how we act as stewards.
This is a totally even playing field.
It has nothing to do with how much
or how little
money you happen to have –
or how much of the money we have as individuals
is discretionary or limited.
So we are not even going to talk about
yours and my monetary gifts to Trinity
until we have had a long,
extended,
and I hope meaningful and challenging
reflection on what kind of stewards we are
as individuals and as a community.
We are not going to talk about money unless,
or until we have thought long and hard about
what kind of spiritual practice you and I live.
Not only on what kind of stewards we are
but what the hell it means to be a steward
at our moment in history
in the place you and I live
and in the days ahead
So I am thinking about
the meltdown of the Financial Markets
and all the dread about what else is to follow,
in the same way I experience any other kind of death.
When you and I are suddenly confronted by death,
especially when it is the death of a loved one
or a friend
who is close to us in age,
it has the effect of really focusing Life.
In the presence of death,
when the grief is acute,
rather than that long tunnel of disorientation and numbness that follows in death’s aftermath,
we suddenly get up close and personal
with our own lives.
Death brings on the questions
and the challenges
and the evaluations
of just what we are doing
with our one wild and precious life
(as the poet Mary Oliver has called it).
Likewise,
this national and global crash of financial systems,
and the attendant crises that it has and will stimulate,
focus us in a surreal and stunning way,
on who we are
and whose we are
and just what we are going to do about it.
In fact, this whole financial collapse
is a stewardship crisis!
You won’t hear that on CNN,
and certainly not Fox.
But the collapse we have witnessed
has its root cause in a stewardship crisis
in which the people who lead
and steward the resources
had no spiritual practice…
Literally, the system upon which
people engrandized themselves
and engorged themselves
and sucked up the resources of a world
bereft of resources,
was the incarnation of a spiritual vacuum…a void.
Who we are and whose we are
are incarnate in what we do
so watch the news with that in mind.
But this crisis is real for us,
on very personal terms,
and so is the call to stewardship.
What we do
is the incarnation of who we are –
that is the spiritual nature of stewardship.
For example, here is how it focuses us
as the community of Trinity.
For over sixty years
we have been a congregation with investments
to support and supplement our annual budget.
That is not a bad thing,
given that previous generations bequeathed to us
a massive, magnificent and artistically significant
campus of buildings for which to be stewards.
There have been years and periods of years
in Trinity’s history in which those investments
were leaned upon with great weight,
squeezing them harder than they should have been.
But there have also been years of appropriate use
when they were leaned upon lightly to support the buildings.
But regardless of how they were used in the past,
the crash of the stock market has meant that,
suddenly, over-night really,
we cannot touch those investment
in any amount
for as long as it takes for the markets to return to health.
The next two or three years will require us to change
and how much we change will depend upon
how much income we can gather from other sources –
such as leasing property,
developing programs with income potential,
finding grants
and of course,
you and me.
But even if we are radically successful
in growing our income in all those directions
we will have significantly less money in the next
few years than any time in the past half century.
That is a death
and it will cause us as a congregation
to ask who and what we are about
and how we will go about being it
during this in-between time…
at this still-point of history.
There are many of us in the congregation
who have experienced that kind of death
on an individual or family level.
Others will be experiencing such losses
in the weeks and months ahead.
And we are surrounded by people
in this nation we share,
who have lost their homes, jobs and security.
We can focus on the loss and despair
or we can focus on
the challenge to our stewardship of the life
we have been given to live
and the resources we have to use and share
and the community we have helped create.
To focus on loss and despair
sucks the energy and hope right out of us,
while to focus upon the challenge and opportunity
to deepen and grow as stewards will energize us.
So all of that is why we will be reflecting upon ourselves as stewards, and the stewardship of our community
for the next four weeks; and why,
even as we are, we will not be asking anyone for a pledge card…yet.
Okay, I have spent almost all of my time
on an introduction so let me end with this thought
for us to take home and cogitate on this week.
I have three older sisters
and when we were very young
I somehow discerned which one of them to ask for what.
You see,
• One of them wouldn’t even share her pencil with me without the promise of something in return.
• One of them was very generous
with giving away the things
she didn’t really want any more anyway.
• And the other was a cautious giver,
but would always give me what I truly needed.
As the youngest
no one every wanted my stuff
so I don’t know what they would say about me as a kid.
But thinking about my sisters,
and looking at the amazing differences
in my own children,
it seems to me that some of that is hard-wired into us.
We just come out of the shoot
with some personality traits that greatly
influence what kind of a giver we are
or what kind of attitudes we have –
we think they are all environmental
or values that we choose to hold or not.
But it seems to me
we begin with some hard-wired personality traits
and whatever those are,
they are part of the fruit within the garden
we have been called to steward.
Religion can’t just say to people: be generous.
Give happily.
Give away 10% of all your money.
How we give,
what we give,
how much we give,
to whom we give,
and when we give
do not line up into a one-size-fits-all formula.
That’s too easy and worse, too inauthentic.
Being called by God
to be a good steward of the gifts and resources
we have been given,
is not an accounting formula
it is a spiritual exercise
and we need to treat it as such.
But one thing I have observed about everyone I know
is that if something belongs to us,
and we value it,
we will usually care for it.
We all have different capabilities and capacities
for taking care of our belongings –
some people keep their things in pristine shape
for years and years,
while others
exert hard ownership along the way.
Yet most of us seem to find ways to hold onto
and protect
that which we treasure.
So the punch line is:
we all have different attitudes
and strategies about whether and how
we share our resources with others,
but we are generally pretty clear about
what belongs to us and how we will care for it.
So the first task of being a good steward
is to get clear
and to get honest
about what we have been given
and what we treasure.
Last week I said the first principle of stewardship
is perspective:
Do we act as if there is abundance
or do we act as if there is scarcity?
The second principle of stewardship is a fearless and honest inventory of the actual gifts and resources
we have been given,
and naming which of those we truly treasure.
We say we treasure and value many things
but which of them do we actually,
personally and with sacrifice,
care for and sustain
So, as we come forward to light candles this week,
I invite us to ask God for clear insight
and true wisdom
as we discern the gifts and resources
that God has entrusted to our stewardship.
Then, in the week ahead,
I invite us each to spend some time with this question
and to actually name
and write down,
our gifts and resources
and get honest about which we treasure most.
Next week, the third principle of stewardship.
Amen.
