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A Sermon for Judson Church
October 22, 2006
Stewardship Sunday
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Beyond Money*
Today is not not Stewardship Sunday. Today is Stewardship Sunday. This congregation and its ministries need you to pledge and to pledge generously. A pledge is a promise to pay a certain amount of money to the church each year. There are cards available and you can speak to any member of the board - or me - about your gift. We thank you in advance.
Now, I have more important things to say, words from the land beyond money and heat bills, the land beyond the money running out before the month does. First, I must tell you about the widow and her mite - and the nearly humiliating generosity of the poor. I watched a woman hold a man in Union Square the other night. It was raining. He was vomiting. He was terribly ill, in the richest country in the world, in a very fine park. She held him. She cleaned him up. Her living room was in one shopping cart, his in another. She told me a bit later that she had never met the man. But in words simple enough for all to understand, she said, "I been there. Somebody helped me. What else could I do?" I never give a stewardship sermon without telling about Carrie, who cleaned dormitories at Amherst College. Every week there was $7.00 in her offering envelope, even on the many weeks where she was splitting her pills so they would last longer. She couldn't pay for her pills but she couldn't not pay the church. I could go on. The generosity of the poor is typically humiliating. You will have your own stories. Jesus tells about the widow's offering while the major givers of the temple look on. He makes it very clear that the gift he prefers is the small one, the one that comes from the heart. Please do not allow me to discourage large gifts today! We welcome large gifts. Especially if they can come from a heart the size of the widow's. What was large in her was her heart, not her purse. That was and is Jesus' message about money, and it will be mine as well.
I don't know if the widow was giving her mite to the treasury of the old temple or the new one, to Jesus or the world of the Pharisees. I just know that she was giving all that she had.
Stewardship is not so much about what the church needs to have as it is about what you need to give. Any professional fund raiser will tell you that the trick to getting people to give is to align their deepest needs with your project. If people can find their heart's desire in your mission, they will pour out the contents of their pocket to you. If they cannot find their heart's desire in your project, they may give but they will not give with their heart. Engage the heart and you have engaged the gift.
Judson needs your engaged heart. And more importantly, you need to engage your heart. I want to tell you about three things that Judson does just about every day - and see if you see your heart in it. The first is signing and signaling, the second is institutionalizing and incarnating the sign and the signal, and the third is to import our hope into real conditions in the real world for real people.
The first thing we do is to sign and signal. We institutionally sign and signal. We light flares of social, political, and artistic possibility in a culture that has lost its optimism. For some of us these flares are set out in the name of God. For others these flares are set out in the name of humanity or sheer orneriness at the paltriness of so many and so much. When I say we institutionally set out these signs of hope, I use the word 'institutionally' intentionally. To be sure, many institutions often need to be criticized; they can degenerate into bloated bureaucracies or self-cloning sites of selfishness. Institutions need constant renovation and creativity if they are to stay aligned to their missions. Ours is to signal hope and its partner, joy. We do signal hope and joy and I think we are moving into a period when our signal is going to get clearer and clearer. Because of a combination of not paying attention to the fragility of institutions and cynicism, which presents institutions, even good ones, as necessary evils, many of us fail to notice the importance of the signals and the missions organized religion is meant to make. I get mad every time someone says to me they don't like organized religion but are deeply spiritual. First of all, my version of organized religion is very disorganized! And secondly, if something is important, you organize it. You don't just let it float around in the ether. You sculpt it with organizational beauty and deftness, litheness and logos.
Many of us lost trust in institutional religion long ago. We also lost trust in medicine, law, universities, real estate, spinach, and priests. In the swamp of mistrust where we live, learning to trust an institution, like a Judson, is really hard. I recommend this difficult task to you. I recommend it to you as your heart's desire. To be able to trust.
If we are to be able to trust our fragile institution, we may - not must, but may - secure it. We may, not must, pay those we employ well and treat them well. Why should people who dare nourish the human spirit, like clergy or community organizers or artists, be paid ten times less than investment bankers? The innocence about money is part of the way we negate our heart's desire. We cheap out on expensive things, like creating institutions that are trustworthy and safe and holy. We keep the flares dim and sometimes the signals just go out for lack of battery, lack of maintenance, lack of an engaged heart. We yearn for trust but don't pay to build a house for it. Note fully all three versions of the association of evil and money in the texts listed today: it is not money but its abuse that is the root of evil.
Nobody is in charge of building a house of trust besides us. We are not Catholic where the Bishop pays, nor are we Presbyterians where the Presbytery owns the building. We are a Baptist and UCC institution, which is to say we pay for us. We must keep our spiritual home well lit and warmed. We own this meeting room and the fence that unfortunately surrounds it. We own it. No one can keep the signal on here but us. No one can establish the trust but us. Sometimes I shiver with this fact: the bread that is on my table comes from your pockets. You hire me to set out the flares and to manage the trust. I shiver with the grace of this covenant. Sometimes I think you do, too.
Have you ever stayed up at night wondering who would take care of you if everybody you loved passed before you? Judson will. Have you ever stayed up at night wondering who would visit you in the hospital on days when the bad news came about the return of your cancer? Judson will. We will do so institutionally, by keeping each other alive to the importance of trust and trusting frameworks in our lives. We will create a culture of care. Have you ever stayed up at night wondering how the Iraq war will ever stop? It will stop by a million widows giving a mite of protest, including the sign on the front of our building, stating the numbers who have died. You pay Peter Gaitens' salary so he can post those numbers every week. Never make fun of institutions. They institute trust. They institute care. They set out the flares. They sign and signal that another world is possible.
The second place I want to take you beyond the flat land of money is less institutional. It is the treasure in the earthen vessel. It is the content of the cup. I am a Christian because I adore the incarnation. It is my favorite bit of theology. By incarnation, I mean the way Jesus connects body and soul, divinity to humanity, heaven to earth, eternity to time. I mean the architecture of Our Ladies of the Angel church, newly built in Los Angeles. Let me take you to it. It is pure incarnation. The virgin at the door is a workingwoman, whose hands and feet show her labor. The trumpets descend from the ceiling, hiding the amplifiers within their bowl, and pour out the power of their music into the people. Every language spoken in LA is written in words surrounding the altar. The church is sited directly on the freeway, which the architect says is the modern version of a river, where the great cathedrals used to be set. The church declares with great vigor that the holy is in the ordinary. That is what we mean by incarnational theology. Jesus in the meat. God in the meat. Encarnacion in the Spanish is a way of saying not chile con carne, but Christ con carne.
What this institution, Judson, signals is that the ordinary carries the holy. We exist to enchant a world that some declare disenchanted. We exist to resacralize a descacralized world. I don't know about your heart, but my heart is desperate for a little fun, a little meat, a little sizzle, a mite of mighty joy. I get really bored. I get really tired. I get angry at people so anxious that they beep their horns in traffic or so alienated from beauty that they throw their coffee cups on the ground. I need a nearly constant signal that hope is real and that joy is possible. Jimmy Breslin was asked how modern journalism became so lame, and he began with the quip, "Because everybody comes to work in a suit." "You gotta find someone who makes you laugh, " he said. "It's a city of 8 million, for God's sake. Can't you find a single laugh?" Some days I can't find a single laugh, and other days I can't stop laughing. Judson exists to keep laughter holy. To find the stories. To stay out of the suits. The ordinary carries the holy. That is the treasure in our earthen vessel. We send out flares.
If this institutional holding of laughter is not enough to engage your heart, and therefore your gift, let me go just one more step. We live in a world with an illegitimately elected president. The media acts as a conveyor belt for his anti-American message. The true axis of evil is not made of some poor, scared countries on the other side of the world whose leaders' names we can't even pronounce. The true axis of evil, as Bill Coffin said so well, is pandemic poverty, environmental degradation and a world awash in weapons. I can't believe I am bequeathing my grandchild a world so deficited in money and air and water and hope. Some of you don't need treasure in earthen vessels. You just need to act. You just can't stand seeing one more person lose his stomach in the park and there be no hospital or relative to hold him. Some of you have a heart's desire for social and political change. Stewardship is indeed not so much about what Judson needs as it is about what you need to give. You need to give social and political change. As one therapist of mine said to me, you just have dynamite in your pants and that's all there is to it. I found it a somewhat inelegant way of saying what I felt, which is that I don't want any more families tormented by the American myth the way mine was, and that I won't stop till the institutionalized torment of ordinary people stops and a new kind of institutionalized grace emerges.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs down - and it won't, it will just sputter up the hill - it will be because our hearts got out of alignment with our hearts' desire. Some people will say that the locomotive's sputter is a result of institution's missions getting out of whack with their actual activity. I prefer the deeper analysis of the institution. It's not about organization; it is about heart. When hearts are aligned to carry treasure in earthen vessel and to set out their lights to show off that treasure, the organization and the money follow. To an incarnationalist, there is never "just" an organizational question. It is always a question of how to get the holy back into the ordinary.
Which leads me to the matter of how our Judson mite of institutional incarnation matters to the real conditions under which real people live. Again I shiver with the realization that there is a direct line between our daily work and the true axis of evil. When we condone spiritual violence or act as though God does not have a plan for history, we become complicit with lonely vomit in the parks. I see a straight line between how we treasure our theology and how progressive Christianity has joined the Democrats in never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity to make real change.
Our Institution and Our Theology is Embodied in Social Change
A friend of mine, Paul Kittlaus, gathered a group of pastors from the UCC and Disciples in 1992 and met for several sessions seeking to discern the signs of God's hand in the Gulf war then being fought. They came to an agreement about some assertions we could make about the state of our nation. They agreed:
1. That America has passed, in all likelihood irrevocably, from love of glory to love of domination;
2. That we look at our children and feel sad for their futures;
3. That America's war on Iraq was a racist slaughter;
4. That there is a new national will not to see reality;
5. That life in America has become incredibly addictive, forgetful, and unwilling to visualize the future;
6. That, noting that at the 1991 General Synod of the United Church of Christ there was theological reflection about "exile," we must ask ourselves, "What does it mean to be Christian in the midst of an imperial society in decline?"
7. That, in the period ahead, we as pastors must wean our people away from the very strong tendency to identify themselves as Americans rather than as part of the Jesus movement.
Kittlaus goes on from this prophecy, uncannily and eerily familiar, to say that he was enormously helped by an essay authored by Joe Hough. The essay was written while Joe was on the faculty at Claremont School of Theology in 1985. It was given at a symposium at the University of California at Santa Barbara on the prospects of the future for liberal Christianity. It was published with the other papers from that gathering under the title Liberal Protestantism: Realities and Possibilities. His essay is titled "The Loss of Optimism as a Problem for Liberal Christian Faith." I'll walk us through his argument.
Hough argues that the liberal Christian faith was, at its inception, characterized by the highly optimistic assessment of the possibilities of God's redemption in history. This optimism "cohered nicely with the optimism of American democratic faith. As the optimism of liberal Christianity faded and the theological heirs of liberalism became increasingly critical of America, they were alienated from secular democratic faith." Hough helpfully defines here the dilemma I face.
Hough continues, "To the average white American progress was not a philosophical idea but a common place of experience." He refers to Walter Rauschenbusch, arguing:
1. The God of biblical faith was the God who acted in history, in and out of the church, and the action of God in history was for the sake of human good;
2. God was absolutely sovereign over history, and that was the basis for profound optimism about human progress in history;
3. Christian piety was not only a matter of personal, moral, and religious behavior; it was also identified with participation in and support of progressive movements in history, particularly those movements that had the force of democratizing the major institutions of society. God was acting in history, in American history, progressively to bring in the kingdom on earth.
Our hearts pine for the simplicity and clarity of his faith, but this vision no longer fits our historical experience. As Hough reminds us, the two World Wars caused a major revision. Reinhold Niebuhr was severely critical of any attempt to equate historical movements or institutions with the Kingdom of God. Rather, it was an ideal with which to judge all of history. By the time the Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar movement had done their best to change America, and with the election of Ronald Reagan, American democratic faith had become, for liberal Christians, a serious problem. As summarized by Hough, "The God who acts in history increasingly was seen to be the judge of American perfidy at home and abroad. Liberal Christians had cast themselves in the role of internal critics of America, and some proponents of the democratic faith began to see them as disloyal."
Hough wrote in 1985:
A new alliance between evangelical religion and democratic faith has been born… We who have known ourselves as members of the establishment have been replaced like a wife who has been thrown out to make room for a new wife. Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell move into the White House guest bedrooms. Religion as we have practiced and preached it is no longer a legitimizing force. America itself is spawning its own faith. People in our pews experience themselves first as Americans and, somewhere down this list, as Christians.
It would be appropriate to put the flag behind the communion table and the cross back at the Narthex. And, if this were not enough to discourage us, Hough goes on:
…and new readings of history and discoveries in science bring this optimistic Christianity to its final stages of delegitimation. We know now that the natural world adds another dimension to the collapse of hope in progress. We live on a planet revolving around a sun that is burning itself out and is headed for the glory (or the ignominy) of becoming just another black hole in the cosmos. In light of this news it is impossible to hold any hope that progress will bring a wonderful future in anything like the terms we are used to.
Feeling overwhelmed by this list of disasters, I am reminded of a story in the Washington Post when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State for Richard Nixon. An aide informed him that war had broken out in a central African country. Dr. Kissinger replied, "There can't be another war. My calendar is already full."
Or we can remember the apocalyptic joke. We are travelers on the road of life. We come to a fork in the road; both choices ahead are carefully labeled. One road leads to "Annihilation." The other leads to "Total Destruction." Our challenge is to choose the right road!
The task then is to construct a theology that provides hope without requiring signs of progress to sustain it. To set out the lights of hope and joy. To institutionally carry a treasure in an earthen vessel. To get inside our recent history as progressive Protestants to see just how much trouble we are in.
Joseph Hough asks, "How does one understand the redemptive work of a God who acts in history when the politics of history threaten the end of world history and natural science foresees not only the end of world history, but also the end of galactic existence in the darkness of a 'black hole' in space?"
In his paper, Hough explores three theological projects he argues hold promise for faithful living and understanding in the midst of all this changed landscape. One is what he calls the Barth-Ellul school; the second was developed by James Gustafson. The third, which I find most helpful, is "Process Theology." He characterizes it this way:
[Process Theology] exhibits a chastened optimism about history and maintains a strong call for an activist religious presence. [The Sovereignty of God, for the process theologians,] is relative. By that it is meant that God is understood to be interdependently related to the world and deeply affected by what happens in the world. This, in turn, means that the divine intentionality, while being a major force in nature and history is, to some degree, limited and shaped by the dynamic interaction between God and all creation. Thus, while the divine power is certainly effective in history, it is not totally effective… Although we can be confident about the divine intention, we cannot be confident about any concrete cases of divine effectiveness. We can hope for the ultimate effectiveness of God, but that hope, like the 'future' or 'heaven,' functions as a promise rather than as the ground of any easy optimism… There is finally no assurance that the future holds anything more or less than destruction and death. Thus, even though life presents us with possibilities for good, the meaning and ultimate outcome of it all is dreadfully uncertain.
We set out the lights in a compromised context. Neither we nor our culture are any longer sure about God. Instead we have a small certainty. It is that holiness is carried in the ordinary, often known as the Eucharistic bread and wine. You may remember Ignazio Silone's 1936 novel Bread and Wine. The hero, Pietro Spina, has become a revolutionary with a price on his head. Though formally in exile, he returns to Italy in disguise. Though now an atheist, he disguises himself as a priest, and cannot resist visiting the old priest who first taught him so wisely and well. When the old priest speaks of the strange ways of the hidden God, Spina stiffens defensively.
"I lost my faith in God many years ago," the young man said, and his voice changed. "It was a religious impulse that led me into revolutionary movement, but once within the movement, I gradually rid my head of all religious prejudices…" The old priest smiled. "It does not matter," he said, "In time of conspiratorial and secret struggle, the Lord is obliged to hide and assume pseudonyms… Might not the ideal of social justice that animates the masses today be one of the pseudonyms the Lord is using to stay free Himself of the churches and the banks?" Spina looked at his old schoolmaster in astonishment…
The idea that God operates pseudonymously helps keep me going through the appalling times in which I am living out my life. The idea that God operates pseudonymously keeps me hard on the track of the ordinary signs of God. Stewardship is less about what Judson needs than about what I need to give. I need to give and receive signs of God in ordinary life. I need to find the funny stories in a city of millions. I need to light flares. I need to live from my heart's desire and not from those that advertising so generously supplies me.
I know a woman in this very room who knows how to give. She has two jobs but she volunteers a day a week at the Salvation Army helping people displaced by Katrina find each other. Why does she do that? Because she has to. I remember leaving a dear friend's house in Palo Alto after enjoying her hospitality for several days. She snuck a bottle of really good wine in my suitcase, saying that she knew I would really enjoy this one because of another one she had seen me enjoy. Underneath the gotcha, get it, car honking, pessimistic, untrusting world in which we live, there remains a deep and ancient culture of gift givers. There are widows with mites walking around everywhere. Be one. Let Judson become a culture of gift givers, flare lighters, dynamite in their process theology pants. Let us find the holy in the ordinary.
How, you will want to know? Consider this worship service worth at least the price of a good movie and dinner. Give us something like $20.00 a week. We will give you back hope and peace and joy. Amen.
Practical PostScript for the Web:
I will recommend here giving 5% to our own congregation and assuring ourselves that it is the kind of place involved in systemic change. The other 5% goes to organizations that change things or even to politics. The other is the Jewish law of Tzedekah, which has nine practical principles, the first being to assure your own security and the last being to give something to someone you don't know. This hierarchy of giving is extraordinary useful to the person who feels a compassionate generosity and wants to make a difference. Many Jews practice Tsedekah, which is a tiered understanding of giving. First, you secure yourself so as not to be a burden to others. Indeed, securing yourself is understood as a virtue. Secondly, you secure those of blood relation, again so as not to make your family a burden on the larger community. Third, you give to people and things you know, in an ascending order of anonymity, with the final and highest level of virtue being to give to those you do not know, cannot know, and who will never know you. This practice - which has a thousand versions and more adherents - results in the astonishing number of anonymous gifts given to symphonies, operas and the like by Jews. Unknown people benefit from the gifts of people they can never thank.
The Christian practice of tithing has a similar theology. Christians keep 90% of what they earn, while giving 10% to congregation, charity, or the poor. Many congregations advocate 5 % to themselves with the other half of the tithe going to the envelopes that flood the mail box: our colleges, fraternities and the like. In neither approach are we required to give all. Instead, we are to discipline the portion that is spare change.
Ancient Testimonies: "The Widow's Mite" Mark 12: 41 - 44
I Timothy 6:9-10
Three Versions of I Timothy 6:9-10:
King James
But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
The New Jerusalem Bible
People who long to be rich are a prey to trial; they get trapped into all sorts of foolish and harmful ambitions which plunge people into ruin and destruction.
The love of money is the root of all evils and there are some who, pursuing it, have wandered away from the faith and so given their souls any number of fatal wounds.
The New Revised Standard Version
But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
* Most of this sermon was given without notes, in the oral tradition. This web version is a back-up of most of what was said.
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