There's No Place Like Home

October 3, 2004 (Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost -- Proper 22)

By The Very Rev. Terry White, Dean

- Habakkuk 1:1-13;2:1-4
- Psalm 37:1-18 or 37:3-10
- 2 Timothy 1:1-14
- Luke 17:5-10

(From The Lectionary Page)

It was arguably the most impressive response ever to a stewardship sermon in an Episcopal Church. At the end of his sermon on financial stewardship, the priest asked everyone who was willing to increase his or pledge by half to stand up. Nobody did.

The priest smiled, “Hallelujah. Those who willing to double your pledge stand up.”

Nobody stood and the priest was beside himself with joy! “Glory to God in the highest! Those of you ready to triple your pledge please stand.” After a moment’s hesitation, everybody in the congregation stood.

Some say it was a miracle. Some say it was because the homily and the Holy Spirit had stirred hearts. But most said that it was because the organist began playing The Star Spangled Banner.

Welcome to Stewardship Sunday at Grace and Holy Trinity!

Today’s Gospel lesson begins with the disciples’ crying out, “Increase our faith.” According to Luke, Jesus has just offered two parables on faithfulness – the rich man with a dishonest albeit it shrewd manager, and the rich man who ignored a sickly, malnourished Lazarus at his front door. We’ve heard those lessons over the previous two weeks.

What we did not hear are other words, well known to most of us, where Jesus speaks with harsh judgment about those who lead others into sin and who cannot forgive those who repeatedly need to be forgiven. The teaching is if you can’t be faithful and forgive, you place a huge stone around your own neck before leaping into the ocean. The Sunday lectionary skipped over those words.

It is after all of this that the disciples cry out, “Increase our faith!” They sound sincere and desperate. And their plea is displaced. Can anyone else increase my faith? Do inspiring people like Desmond Tutu increase my faith? We sometimes say that a kind or generous act will “restore our faith in humanity,” but increase our faith? No, we choose to trust, and thus, increase our faith. We choose to believe, we choose to trust and act, confident in God.

This is a great lesson for this Sunday devoted to Financial Stewardship. Let me paraphrase a bit of today’s gospel: If I had faith the size of a mustard seed, I could say to my money: Be uprooted from wallet, purse, checkbook and portfolios and be planted in the mission and ministry of Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral!” And to that we might all join the apostles and say, “Lord, increase our faith!”

Seriously, it is important to talk about money and faith. When we examine Jesus’ teachings we discover that over one-sixth of everything he had to say is about the relationship between people and their possessions. That is a greater proportion that his remarks on prayer or love or forgiveness or any other topic. So we reflect on our financial stewardship because it was something Jesus took seriously. (from a sermon of Oct 3, 1999, by the Rev. George E. Councell, Rector, Church of the Holy Spirit, Lake Forest, Illinios.)

Let me share with you a bit of my own stewardship journey because it is totally about trusting in God and increasing my faith.

My first fulltime job was in radio broadcasting. I worked as a disc-jockey from 6 p.m. to midnight six nights a week at Radio Station KILJ-FM in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, 3000 watts of power that covered a 50 mile area if the wind was blowing just right. I loved the work, and the hours allowed me to be a full time college student during the day and work a fulltime job at night. (Let me add, that small town radio broadcasting is one of the jobs where, when you become a priest, you actually get a pay raise!) Though I had a steady salary, and lived with my parents during this time which saved me housing expenses, it seemed like I never had enough money for tuition, books, maintaining a car, and all the other necessities like food and golf balls. Writing a weekly check to the church was not a joyful experience. I could not rationally accept the call to be generous, because I had so many needs.

I can still remember fairly clearly a fall morning in 1979, sitting in my car outside of St. Michael’s Church before the service. General Convention had just reaffirmed the tithe as the minimum standard of giving for Episcopalians, and I had just begun the discernment process to test if I was called to ordained ministry, and coincidentally, my parents had just had a discussion about how they were going to substantially raise their financial giving to their church. And one sentence from Scripture kept running through my mind: the Lord loves a cheerful giver. Well, my weekly giving was not giving me joy. In fact, to be honest, some Sundays I resented putting even a few dollars in the plate.

So call it the stewardship equivalent of the perfect storm, or as I now see it, the work of the Holy Spirit, I decided that I was tired of feeling not good about what I gave to the Church. So that morning, I wrote a check equal to 10% of my take home pay. To this day, it remains one of the most important religious experiences of my life. For a moment, my brain screamed what are you doing? But leaving St. Michael’s that morning, having summoned up the strength and courage to actually place the check in the alms basin, I can honestly tell you I experienced a lightness of spirit I had never known before. I was astounded and amazed. And that is why every year since then I have given 10% of my take home pay to the church, and after Linda Sue and I were married, we agreed to give a minimum of 10% of our income to the work of the Gospel. We also know that we can do better and we are still growing our commitment. We feel good about doing so. To repeat words David Barker used last week: I know first hand what it is like to give until it feels good. I am an advocate of proportional giving: decide upon a percentage of your income to be given to the Gospel, then commit to increase it every year, and then marvel as your faith and trust in God grow, too.

On Rally Sunday, I had a delightful conversation with a person who said, “You know, it has just recently occurred to me that the dean is now my age!” I responded by saying, “Yeah. The grownups went away and left us in charge!” That exchange reminded me of a homily Bishop George Councell preached as a parish rector five years. He said,

“We never retire from the practice of stewardship, so the following is not intended to excuse our seniors, but I have a special word of invitation to my fellow baby boomers as we enter our 40’s and 50’s. It’s our turn. Now is the time for more of us to give more active leadership and more generous support to the Church, so that one day, we can pass it on to our children in good condition. That means sacrifice and discipline. It means listening to God more than we listen to the siren voices of materialism and self-fulfillment that dominate our culture.” (Ibid.)

It means trusting in God more than we ever have, and then marrying that trust to an action.

Let me end by borrowing words of Lucy Lind Logan who recalls a scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy was willing to endure many trials in order to get back to her beloved Kansas. Against overwhelming odds, with the help of her friends she triumphs over the Wicked Witch of the West and returns to the Wizard with the witch’s broomstick. But she discovers that wizard is nothing more than a man, a huckster who has no more power than she does. Yet Dorothy’s disappointment is short-lived; Glinda arrives, the good witch who tells her that the power to return home already lies within Dorothy herself. Dorothy throws a bit of a tantrum: “Why didn’t you tell me that in the beginning? Why did you make me go through all of this?” Glinda replies, “Why? Because you would not have believed me.” (Lucy Lind Hogan, New Proclamation, Year C, 2004, p 222.)

My sisters and brothers: Let us grow in our faith, in our belief that God has given us everything we need to accomplish extraordinary things. We can meet the needs of our community, we can forgive those who hurt us over and over again, and we can manage our money in such a way that we are happy even as the mission of the Cathedral grows by leaps and bounds. Let us not focus on impossibilities, but look for the vast possibilities in us that we have not yet tapped. Let us go through whatever trials and journeys through the land of Oz we need in order to believe. And then let us act on that belief. That is how our faith increases. It is also how our budget increases.

We expect great things from God and receive no less. Likewise, God asks great things of us and should receive no less than our very best. With God all things are possible. Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him, and he will bring it to pass. Then click your heels together three times and truly pledge yourself to ministry of this place. If together we come to trust God more, then it won’t take John playing the Star-Spangled Banner to get us up and moving forward!

There is no place like home, this spiritual home, this unique place.

God bless us all.