Aw, hell. This has nothing to do with any kind of progressive agenda, unless you want to think about political donations as "stewardship."
But I thought it was a decent sermon, and that you all might get a kick out of it.
If you haven't already, check out this morning's thread on when to hold a dKos convention.
Isaiah 65:17-25
I was visiting one of our members at the nursing home she lives in, and she told me a story. It seems the staff likes to pick at one another, mostly in good humor. And, as it happens, one of the staff members comes in each morning, opens the curtains and kisses our homebound member to wake her up. One particular morning, she could tell that the staff were getting a little jealous of one another, because there was another staff person in the room, very vigorously fluffing some pillows or whatever it was that she needed to do that morning.
And so, this woman tells me, she turned to the second staff member and said: "You don't have to be jealous. I have enough love for everyone."
I have enough love for everyone. Do you see where this is going? Yep: God also has enough love for everyone. And out of the abundance of that love wells up God's work in our world.
I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind
God tells Isaiah. This is a radical vision: in Isaiah's time, it was widely agreed that nothing good came of change, even if change were possible. And yet, here's God promising not just to change things, but to wipe the slate clean and start over again, better than before.
And not just that: God's love promises plenty for all people. Plenty of life:
No more shall there be in [the world]
an infant that lives for a few days,
or an old person who does not
live out a lifetime;
Plenty of peace:
They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity...
The literal translation here is "bear children for sudden terror," which has a entirely new meaning in this post-9/11 world.
God also promises material plenty:
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat,
for like the days of a tree shall
the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy
the work of their hands.
As you might imagine, this vision of the "enough" of God's love is a word of profound comfort for Isaiah's original audience: the small band of Israelites who have returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon to discover a ruined city and seemingly endless work rebuilding their lives.
But as comforting as that word is, God has still more than enough love for everyone. Isaiah's vision ends with these words:
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox:
but the serpent--its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.
Okay, so maybe God doesn't have quite enough love for the serpent. There's bad blood between those two, you know.
But the point remains: God's love is so bountiful, so plenty, so enough, that it will remake even the natural relationships between the animals to bring final peace and prosperity to the entire world.
And that, my friends, is where the discussion of stewardship properly begins. The greatest mistake you could make in speaking of stewardship--in fact, one of the greatest mistakes you could make in faith--is to believe that there is not enough for all. For to do so is to doubt that God has enough love for everyone, enough and more than enough.
I know this is difficult to believe in a congregation stretched tight for money, and whose members are chronically short of time. But the vision of God brought to us by Isaiah calls us into the counterintuitive truth: that God provides us with enough. If we are willing to set our priorities according to God's schedule, we will discover the hidden plenty that runs through our lives.
That's not easy: look at the traditional stewardship categories of time, talent, and treasure. To find the plenty of time, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about how much we work, how many activities we take on as a family, how much television or internet we use in our free time? This gets into notions of keeping Sabbath, but I don't want to get off track here. Let me just ask this: how many of you feel that you have time on a Sunday afternoon to read a book, go for a walk, take a nap, enjoy the company of family and friends? If you don't feel like you can afford that, let me assure you that you can. God promised manna to the Israelites, and he promises to care for your needs as you rest.
Talent? We have plenty of talent in this congregation, and in the world around us. But we need to nurture that talent, to develop it in one another and to make one another aware that it's there for the using. To give you just one example, I noticed while looking through the Spiritual Gifts Inventory that we filled out in the cottage meetings at the end of last year that we have many people who could do a wonderful job in giving personal testimony. Yet many of those same folks are the same ones who'd rather have their teeth extracted without anesthesia than speak in front of the congregation. They don't think they can do it, but they can, and our responsibility to one another calls us to help them discover that talent, to claim it and to rejoice in it as they serve God with it. That means getting a little more involved with someone that we're typically comfortable with. In many ways, it's easier to put a general announcement in the bulletin and wipe our foreheads in relief when no one answers it.
And treasure? Great googly-moogly! There's enough money in this congregation to pay our bills and more, if we're willing to set our priorities correctly. I mean think about this with me: we're going to go over to the Altland House after worship and drop, what? $16.00 a person? Now, I'm not criticizing: everybody's got to have fun sometime, and you all know how interested I am in food. But let me put it to you this way: $16.00 is a bit more than a weeks' wages for half the world population. We're rich, folks. To the average African, you and I are fabulously wealthy. But we're afraid to challenge one another on where the money goes. We--and by "we" I mean a great many North American Christians--have built up this fine tradition that it is inappropriate, rude, even downright threatening, to talk about how we use our money in church.
But folks, that's our responsibility to one another as Christians. We are meant to build one another up in faith and in love, for neither of these things is lacking, either. We are meant to hear the vision of Isaiah, and from it to form our own vision. Not a vision of a beautiful daydream, of a perfect world that may never come to pass, but of a world that is attainable by belief--and participation--in the love of God. For once we let go of our jealousy, once we let go of our belief that there is not enough for all, we can begin to discover that God has enough love for everyone, and so can we.
Stewardship is not a matter of giving more money to the church. It is a matter of trusting in God's plenty, and of adjusting our priorities to enable ourselves to share more of our love with the world and the people in it. It is to welcome new heavens and a new earth, and to join God in joy and delight in what can be created out the simple statement, I have enough love for everyone. Amen.