Pentecost Viiiyear A
Sermon
Pentecost VIIIYear A
30/7/17
Vision/Planned Giving VI
Eltham
Readings
Genesis 29:15-28; Psalm 105:1-11, 45b; Romans 8:26-39; Matthew 13:44-58
+FSHS
Over the past six weeks, we’ve been discerning together where God is calling us to go as a parish, and contemplating what following that call means for us as disciples of Jesus. Two weeks ago we were invited to offer our gifts to God; last week we were invited to commit to initiate, strengthen, or change some aspect of our discipleship. Reading through the response both to the gifts and to what we as the folk of St Margaret’s are committing to personally has encouraged me greatly. I was so thankful for the gifts for which we gave thanks, and excited by the willingness to grow deeper in relationship with God through prayer, knowledge of God in reading scripture, and service with God in the wider community.
This week’s readings reinforce for us the fact that our following of Jesus is a wholehearted response to God’s gift to us of Godself. In the gospel reading, Jesus strings together parables of the kingdom of God. “The Kingdom of God is like…” treasure in a field, the pearl of great price, the net which catches an abundance of different kinds of fish. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is the New Moses, the inaugurator of the realm of God. The realm of God doesn’t function the way earthly realms do. In the realm of God, the normal order of things is often stood on its head, human habits and fears are revealed for what they are, and power is not power over, but power given away. That’s very much the tenor of these parables: the kingdom of heaven/realm of God is a person so overjoyed at the discovery of the kingdom—which is like priceless treasure to them—that they’ll give everything they have to be able to have it. The realm of God is the merchant searching long until he finds the perfect pearl. The realm of God is a net cast wide and catching not just good and bad fish, but a whole plethora of different fish of different sizes—it’s inclusive, hopeful, the ultimate joy, and something to be excited about. In the realm of God, even the despised scribes, if trained to understand, to read and write in the manner of God’s realm, will be renewed, and treasure old and new will come together in abundance.
When Jesus is talking about the kingdom of heaven, he’s not talking about some far-off future beyond death, some Elysium. He’s talking about God’s realm in the here and now, and inviting his hearers/disciples to see what is already around them. Elsewhere he says, “the kingdom of heaven is within you”—in the sense that it’s about intimate communion with God, as well as lived out from within us, ie, the enactment of God’s values starts in the heart of human beings, transforming attitudes of mind and reorienting intention and purpose. The parables we’ve heard reinforce that, by making the realm of God/kingdom of heaven something we as Jesus’ disciples are invited to place at the centre of our lives, just as he did, our most priceless treasure.
I love the reading we heard from Romans 8, too, where Paul vigorously assures the Romans that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. God held nothing back in giving him. God risked God’s greatest treasure in becoming human, one with creation, in order to redeem it and restore it to something beyond its former glory, yet to be imagined. If God is for us, he says, who can be against us? This is not triumphalistic, in the sense that “God’s on our side, but not on yours”. Paul is talking here about the unfathomable love God has for us, love so deep as to search the meanings of our hearts, to give the gift of the Spirit to pray in us, and to communicate that which is beyond words: the deepest longings of our hearts, as well as our (often) paltry love for God, for our neighbours, for ourselves. God is limitless life and love expressed through Jesus for the world. And nothing can separate us from that love. Once we’ve tasted the realm of God, we won’t want to go back. We see the realm of God realized in Jesus: and the key to that realm is love.
All of this evokes a response in us. In some ways, we reduce Christian faith to easy platitudes: love God, love others as you love yourself; do unto others as you’d like them to do unto you. But that sells things short. Wesley was right when he wrote: love so amazing, so divine, demands my heart, my life, my all. This is a demanding faith; being Jesus’ disciple means putting it all on the line, not with gritted teeth with the expectation of martyrdom, not in a half-hearted fashion, but risking everything—like the guy who buys the field the treasure’s in, or the merchant who’s been searching his whole life and has finally, finally found the pearl for which he’d pay in his heart’s blood if necessary, and like the net which casts in the lake or sea as far and as wide as the sower sowed the seed.
This means our whole lives are at God’s disposal; it means living out of a sense of radical dependence on God; it means ceding to God the mirage we continue to hold onto that we can control our lives or the world around us. It means that, because our lives belong to God in the first place, we return to God the best or first fruits of our lives, not as subservient automatons, but as those who have been called to share nothing less than the mutually self-giving life of God who is Father, Son, and Spirit. How we live and what priorities we have in life are shaped by love for this God who first loved us.
It’s in the light of this that, as part of our Visioning, we are invited to prayerfully consider our giving: what we give back to God of our resources. I’m not going to pull any punches; I’m going to be direct in talking to you about money, even though that’s something I want to shrink from because it’s a sensitive topic, not least because the church is often accused of being interested only in people’s money. Giving money to support your church will not make you rich, it will not necessarily make you happier, and we must never expect that our contributions to the ministry of our local church are a fee we pay in order to receive some level of service from the clergy, some influence over policy or some extra advantage from God. That’s not the way God works.Nor does God demand it of us slavishly. Giving must always be a natural response to the love God has shown us.
Also, let me be clear that talking about giving is not just about giving to this worshipping community. All of us give money away to all kinds of things, and if you have a call to give to someone or some organization other than this Worshipping Community, then you must do that. Giving of our financial resources is a part of our discipleship, part of following Jesus, and part of the way in which we participate in seeing the realm of God come (and answer that part of the Lord’s Prayer: your kingdom come on earth as in heaven). I have no trouble in declaring I give 11% of my income away, and I do this because God has blessed me with more than enough. I want to bless this church community, and people in other organizations which are striving for justice, and alleviating homelessness and poverty with the blessings I’ve been given. Each of us needs to make our own decision about how we structure our giving. Once you’ve determined the proportion of income that God is calling you to give - whether the traditional tithe, or more, or less, then the way you give is also a question of vocation. And if you’re called to give 15% to World Vision and 5% to a neighbour having a rough time, then do that, because it’s what you’ve been called to do as part of your discipleship.
The leadership team here—parish council and the finance committee, have determined that from our next budget we’re going to be aiming towards giving away 10% of our income as a parish to assist mission in other places—internationally, nationally, and locally. Next year that figure will be 6%, with rises every year until we hit 10%. The leadership team are hoping to do this, as encouragement to all of us to consider what proportion of our income we are giving to God’s work, and as a statement about our discipleship as a parish.
We have been blessed with a number of income sources other than what people commit to give. We need to celebrate God’s goodness to us in that, and the wise stewardship of property, and the generous bequests of people who have gone before us in faith. However, at the moment, our offerings do not cover the cost of having a full time priest. There’s no way around it: clergy are the most expensive item on the budget. Priests in charge are paid a stipend. It’s indexed so that its about 2/3 of the average wage, plus a place to live and utilities, and a vehicle allowance which isn’t payment so much as reimbursement for a necessary ministry resource. A priest who is in charge of a parish receives the equivalent of an average wage (give or take). That represents a significantpart of our expenditure each year. This is a strange tension in which to live. Leading this faith community in financial sustainability is intrinsically linked to securing my own income—and it doesn’t take much imagination to realize that that has some uncomfortable ethical implications. We are in the blessed position that we have income from property to assist not only in covering the cost of a priest, but also a parish administrator, as well as meeting the usual day-to-day running expenses. Although in an ideal world the costs of ministry should be met from what is received through the plate/planned giving, leaving the balance of income for other forms of living God’s mission.
We’ve been engaged in a Vision Discernment season, and we’ve identified some directions to grow in. That means supporting new ventures the Spirit prompts in us. The invitation I’d like to put before all of us to ponder in the coming week or weeks is this: how do we, as God’s beloved, Jesus’ disciples, respond to the good news of the realm of God, to its limitless joy and abundance? And to do that, I’d like to suggest an answer to the question many people ask: How much am I supposed to give? This question arises from people who were taught to put pocket change in the collection (and still do), from people who were taken on guilt-trips about giving ten percent of everything they earned (and feel really stretched and stressed at the thought), from people who for years assumed that churches got government funding (which we don’t), or from people who have just never got around to being a diligent financial giver. How much am I supposed to give?
The answer is ‘everything’. Every dollar in our bank accounts, every room in our houses, every kilometre on our cars - everything is how much we’re supposed to give until the realm of God is a reality in the here and now. Our whole lives, our everything. Jesus never set a limit on how much we give, and he never, not once, suggested that to follow him is easy. For many people, following Jesus is costly to the point of losing their lives. When it comes to giving of my finances, I’ve found it a good spiritual discipline to use the tithe - 10% - as a starting point to discern how much money I should give away freely, no strings attached. You might find it helpful as well, though some of us need to give away much more than that, and for some of us, 10% is simply not possible. Over the next week(s), as we pray and seek God’s guidance for our giving, let’s start with the truth that the only possible response to the God who created, redeems, and sustains us, and from whose love we can never be separated, is the gift of our all, our everything. The question of planned giving, is what proportion of your everything will you put into the central pool so that it can be used for the building-up of the People of God. And that, my friends, comes from the deeper question: what response are we going to give to the abundant God who loves use more than we can imagine, desire, or deserve?
The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Question: planned giving commitment cards – to take away and return next week.
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