Sermon for Consecration Sunday at Nativity Cathedral, Bethlehem, PA 11-2-08 The Reverend Patrick J. Wingo
I am very glad to be here with you to speak about Stewardship on your Consecration Sunday.
I suppose some of you might think it odd for a good ol’ boy from Alabama to come so far North for this event.
The short answer to this is that Tony is my friend and the last time I was here was for his wedding in 1993, so it’s high time I came back.
But since I brought up this North/South subject let me start today with a story about a businessman from the North who went South for the first time.
He flew into Birmingham, rented a car, then drove out to Bug Tussle, Alabama, which has since changed its name to the more respectable Wilburn.
He found a little motel and went to bed for the night.
The next morning the man went to Bubba’s Diner for breakfast, and because he was very hungry he ordered something called the Trucker’s Breakfast.
When the waitress brought his plate it looked wonderful—beautiful sunny-side up eggs, big hunks of sizzling bacon, a huge stack of pancakes.
But with the delicious breakfast there was also a large blob of white goo.
He said to the waitress, “what’s this,” and she replied “grits”.
The man said, “But I didn’t order grits.”
The waitress looked at him and said, “Honey, you don’t order grits—grits just comes!”
I will get back to that story in a minute, because believe it or not it goes to the heart of what I want to say, but for now I need to acknowledge that I speak today in the context of many other events.
I think it was Paul Tillich who said that preachers should preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other.
Just a cursory glace at the New York Times tells me that we currently go about our daily business with an economy in shambles, with a war that has been going on far too long with far too many casualties, and with a very important election just a few days away.
It also occurs to me that in coming to be with you from Alabama, while there is a significant distance between us in miles, and perhaps a small bit of cultural and culinary difference, there is no difference in us as human beings:
I have a family to take care of as many of you do.
I have elderly parents, financial concerns, and many of the same joys and sorrows as you.
Those are some things on my mind, as I suspect they are on your mind.
Yet there is something else on my mind as well, because today in the church calendar we celebrate the Sunday after All Saints’ Day.
It is the day we remember all the saints who have gone before us, and all the saints with whom we live, who give us a glimpse of God by the way they have lived.
It is a day when we are reminded that in spite of our failures, we are beloved of God, and God is making us all into saints.
It is a day in which we are reminded that life is pure gift.
I was reminded of that gift in another way not long ago.
My family and I took a trip out to the Grand Canyon last summer.
My wife and I have three daughters, ages 17, 12 and 10, and this was a trip we had been planning and looking forward to for a while.
We stayed inside the Grand Canyon National Park, just a short hike from the Canyon rim, and we had a wonderful time.
On our last night there, around dusk, we had been following an elk around trying to get a decent picture of it (we never did), and when we got back to our room my wife and I waited until it got completely dark outside, and then told our kids to put on their sweatshirts, because we had one more thing to show them.
Since they had started to settle in for the night and were tired from a long day of fun, there was quite a bit of complaining, but we didn’t back down.
There’s a very long road that runs along the rim of the Grand Canyon, and every so often there are places to turn into a parking lot and get out and walk along the rim.
That last night of our visit we drove down that road until we were far away from the hotels and restaurants and other fun places, and we came to one of the turn-ins and drove into a parking lot, which was dark and deserted.
This was in early June, and as we got out of the car the wind was whipping around us and it was really cold.
The kids complained some more, but I brought out a small flashlight, and we walked up a path to the rim of the canyon.
We walked through a stand of trees to a sidewalk next to the canyon, and told the kids to close their eyes and lie down on their backs on the pavement.
I turned off my flashlight, told them to open their eyes, and there before them, on that cold, clear night lying on the ground next to one of the grandest places on earth they saw the grandeur of the heavens, more stars than they could have ever imagined existed.
“Wow,” they kept saying over and over. “Wow!”
It is one of my fondest memories, and what I remember about it was not only that it was fun and beautiful, but it was also more stars than I ever imagined could exist.
I also remember that as we lay there in the dark while my children exclaimed their sheer awe, the words of Psalm 19 kept running through my head:
“The heavens are telling the glory of God, and the firmament displays his handiwork.” Wow!
I would submit to you that we can’t truly begin to understand what God asks of us as Christian stewards until we get a glimpse of the glory of God.
Stewardship begins with having the eyes to see the awe and wonder of God in our lives.
It’s not about giving our fair share.
That’s great for the United Way, but it’s not Christian Stewardship.
It’s not about paying our dues.
That’s fine for the country club or the PTA, but it’s not Christian Stewardship.
Christian Stewardship is risky because it begins with the understanding that the God who made the Universe, the God who made those millions of stars that my children saw only when we took them to a place where it was possible to see them, is the same God who made me, and you, and has given us the blessing of life itself.
It’s risky because we have to go to a place where we can experience the awe and wonder of God, and sometimes that place can be uncomfortable.
Yet that is where Christian Stewardship begins.
Since we can’t go to the Grand Canyon every day, and since the awe and wonder of God can be found anywhere if we have the eyes to see it, I believe we can best go to that beginning place as Stewards right here as we worship God.
The word ‘worship’ literally means, “to give worth.”
In other words, we worship what we most value.
We are making a profound statement when we come here every week to worship the God we have come to know in Jesus Christ.
We are saying that worshipping God in Christ is worth it, that we value our relationship with God and we take it seriously.
Now, I know that we value other things as well.
We value our families and our friends, certainly, and we value material things—our homes, our cars and, in my case, college football season.
Becoming a Christian Steward, however, means that we take the risk to prioritize everything in our lives, and it means that we are willing to admit that we give more value to some things than they deserve.
It means that we have the audacity to approach the God who made the heavens and the earth, and realize that this Holy One cares about us, so much so that he gave us the gift of life, and even knows the number of hairs on our heads, according to the Bible.
What is our response to that gift?
Here’s what I think that response should be:
we look honestly at how we give our time, our talents and our treasure to God through the work of God’s church, and we make a commitment that our response to God’s gift will move up our list of priorities, starting now.
Some folks will examine their lives and decide that their response to God is pretty significant in the grand scheme of things—that’s great.
Make a commitment to keep it there.
Others may decide that they are so far from responding to God as a priority in their life that they’ll never get there.
That’s why stewardship has to be a journey.
Look specifically at your financial gift to God’s work through the church as a proportional gift.
Figure out what percentage you give and then make a commitment to make that percentage a half percent higher this year, and then maybe one percent higher next year.
I guarantee that as you begin to honestly take an account of your life in this way, your priorities somehow find themselves falling into their proper place, and the result is joy.
When people hear the word “Stewardship” they think “OK, they’re going to try to shake some money out of me now.”
But that’s not stewardship at all.
That’s fund-raising.
Fund-raising in the church deadens the soul;
giving as a response to God’s generosity is joyful.
How do we learn that lesson?
How does it come to be a part of our being?
I mentioned earlier that today is the Sunday after All Saints’ Day.
This day is always important to me because of my grandmother’s influence in my life.
She was a saint, who died in 1975 at the age of 79, and in her own quiet way, I think she had more influence on my understanding of God than anyone else.
Every summer when I was a kid I spent every Saturday at the baseball field, and then would walk over to my grandmother’s house to eat dinner and spend the night.
My dad would have taken my clothes and other things over to her house earlier, so while Granny fixed my dinner I would shower and get ready for a night of playing canasta, watching Perry Mason re-runs and being doted on by someone who loved me extravagantly.
We would stay up late having fun, and then the next day my dad would pick us up for church.
Every Sunday my grandmother, my dad and I would slip into the fourth pew from the back on the right side of All Saints’ Church in Birmingham, and my grandmother would kneel to pray.
And when my grandmother prayed, you could just tell God was listening.
She had very little money, but every week she put a check in the offering plate, and, as children often do, I saw how important that act was for her.
As I grew to be a teenager, she told me over and over again that when I was confirmed, she wanted to be the person who gave me my first prayer book.
Even though it’s a 1928 version, I still cherish that book.
I tell you about my grandmother because even as a little boy I knew how important her relationship with God was to her.
Of course I could not have articulated that, but what I felt was the abundance of her of love for me, and in small ways I learned from her about the extravagant love of God.
I still miss her and think of her often.
I know that she is one of those saints gathered around the throne of God, of which we heard about today in our reading from the Revelation to John.
I also know that her love for me, as overflowing as it was, is just a glimpse of the love that God has for me, and for each of us.
She gave me a glimpse of God’s love, and something in that glimpse made me want to respond.
We get glimpses of God’s love every day.
If we truly had the eyes to see it clearly, we might only say “wow” over and over and over again.
As it is, the very best way we can respond to God is to be self-giving, making love of God and neighbor our first priority, committing ourselves to God because we have discovered that God’s love is the most valuable thing we have.
It is in that love that we also discover that there is nothing we can do to earn God’s favor, or make more it abundant.
God’s grace and love is like grits in the South.
You don’t order it. It just comes.
