All Saints and Stewardship

Ephesians 1:11-23

Luke 6:20-31

Today I have the daunting task of talking to you about both Stewardship and All Saints Day. But while these may not seem connected, stewardship is not just a giving forward, it is also a celebration of what has been, an honoring of the past.

The Ephesians passage tells us that we were chosen in Christ.  We can rest assured that the Saints were chosen in Christ.  We can feel safe in the assurance that our loved ones still exist in some form, that they are with God, that our love for them still matters, and their love for us still continues.  When we are in grief, as many in this congregation are this year, these words can seem a little hollow, perhaps. We miss them.  And while the promise that they still exist in some form helps, while being assured that they are now at rest with God can help, it doesn’t always ease our grief. 

As I thought about the fact that on All Saint’s Day we are called to honor those who went before, I realized that we honor them as much for our sake as for theirs.  Taking the time to celebrate and remember those who have shared with us their time, their wisdom, their presence - helps us to grieve with grace, to celebrate their lives, even as we mourn our own losses, to reflect on the legacies that they’ve left us and that have made us who we are today.    

We honor their memories by sharing with others stories of their lives.  We honor their memories by praying about them, or talking to God about them.  We honor their memories by spending time looking at their pictures, at things they’ve made or things they’ve created, by remembering them.  But there is more.

One of the ways we honor the memories of the Saints is by maintaining practices and rituals that were important to them…such as going to church and giving to church. The saints, the ones who have passed, understood that faith is not just a statement about what we believe.  It is an action, it is about doing, much more than believing.  You show what matters to you by what you do with your time, your energy, your money, your talents, your gifts.  That means that we honor the Saints not only by following in a tradition of generosity, but by giving of our time, our energy, and our talents as well.  There is something that every person here can do.  Every person here can contribute in some way: writing cards, knitting scarves, coming to bible study, inviting your friends to come to an event at church: the concerts, the studies, Sunday worship.  Stewardship then is following through on all of this: it is about committing our lives with our time, energy, talents, and resources - all of which is an expression of faith but also an honoring of our tradition, our history, and the Saints that have gone before us as well.

That doesn’t mean that giving is easy for any of us.  We live in a culture where we are expected to get more and gain more.  We often rank ourselves by the wealth we can demonstrate and we socialize with those in the same socio-economic sphere.  What we perceive to be our need often grows to fit our incomes or to even exceed them.  We can see it happening in our lives and in the lives of those around us, but it is hard to change this, especially in a culture that celebrates wealth. 

A boat docked in a tiny Mexican village. An American tourist complimented the Mexican fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took him to catch them.

            "Not very long," answered the Mexican. 

            "But then, why didn't you stay out longer and catch more?" asked the American. 

            The Mexican explained that his small catch was sufficient to meet his needs and those of his family.

The American asked, "But what do you do with the rest of your time?" 

"I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a siesta with my wife. In the evenings, I go into the village to see my friends, have a few drinks, play the guitar, and sing a few songs. I have a full life." 

The American interrupted, "I have an MBA from Harvard and I can help you! You should start by fishing longer every day. You can then sell the extra fish you catch. With the extra revenue, you can buy a bigger boat."

"And after that?" asked the Mexican. 

"With the extra money the larger boat will bring, you can buy a second one and a third one and so on until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middle man, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant. You can then leave this little village and move to Mexico City, Los Angeles, or even New York City! From there you can direct your huge new enterprise." 

"How long would that take?" asked the Mexican. 

"Twenty, perhaps twenty-five years," replied the American. 

"And after that?" 

"Afterwards? Well my friend, that's when it gets really interesting," answered the American, laughing. "When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!" 

"Millions? Really? And after that?" asked the Mexican. 

"After that you'll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends." 

How much life do we miss in our quest to become richer?  In our quest to gain more for ourselves and our families?  We know that the most generous people, again with time as well as with money, are often those who start with the least amount of money; and that those who share the least are those with the most money and time to do the sharing.  We also know that studies show there is NO increase in happiness associated with an increase in wealth.  What we think will make our lives fuller and more meaningful doesn’t.  Instead, the one thing that tends to be the best indicator of human happiness is a person’s generosity, with giving, and with caring for and serving others.  That is something that people of previous generations often understood much better than we ourselves can.  And, on death beds, the biggest regret that is always expressed is not spending more time giving meaningful service and time to those people and needs that we care the most about.

            One of my house-mates from college lives as a Catholic worker volunteer.  This means that she lives in a community of other volunteers who open their house to the poor in their community.  They feed them, house them, living in community together.  She is married with children and still lives in this community.  While I struggle to find the money to send my children to lessons so that they might have a full education, her children have the fullest education possible, living with and serving God’s people in community.  She has found God’s wealth to be far greater than that of material wealth and security.   She lives in God’s kingdom and she does it every day.

            I think about Rick Warren, the pastor of the megachurch, Saddleback in Southern CA.  When his books hit the best seller list and he started raking in the money, he had to make some serious decisions about what he would be doing with it.  He wrote, “sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder (than dealing with the challenges in life). For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy.   It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before. I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease. So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72.   First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit.. We made no major purchases.  Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church.   Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation.   Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.   We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity?   Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes?   When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better.. God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. (God) is more interested in what I am than what I do.”

Many people come to church for what Church can give them.  Instead, maybe we should pick a church by what church needs us.  It should be a two way street.  No church will be perfect, and that is part of the challenge.  Same is true of the Saints that went before.  None of them are perfect, but we sometimes feel the church should be perfect and until we find one that is, we won’t commit.  We don’t honor our loved ones by making them into people they really weren’t.  We don’t honor who they really were by remembering only the good stuff.  And we don’t honor the tradition of the church by insisting it be perfect, or that it serve us if we are not giving back every bit as much as we hope to get from the church.  It is in giving that we receive. 

I think about the description of heaven and hell that I have shared with you before: in hell, you walk in and see a banquet table filled with foods, but everyone’s elbows are locked.  Each person struggled to feed himself, fighting against the fact that each one cannot bend his or her arms to bring the food into his or her mouth.  In heaven the situation looks very similar: a table filled with food, people surrounding the table with elbows locked.  However in heaven everyone is feeding each other.

            Stewardship, choosing to give of our resources and to give with generosity, is a statement of trust in God, a statement that we know that our real wealth comes from our connections with God and to God’s people.  It is an offering to the church and to one another the foods on the banquet table, trusting that we will be fed in turn.  It is an honoring of all we have loved and all we continue to love as we celebrate the generosity of the Saints by being generous in turn, by sharing with one another our time, our experiences, our wisdom, our energy, and our monetary gifts.

            The words of the hymn we will be singing later, “we give thee but thine own” is one of the truest statements of our faith.  The money, the talents, the gifts and resources we have are not ours.  They are on loan to us from God…but as scripture tells us, “from those who have much, much will be expected.”

            We are blessed.  And today as we remember the Saints who have passed on, we remember that their presence in our lives was a great blessing and their memories continue to be a blessing.  We honor those memories by striving to give as much as they gave us, of all that we have and all that we are.  Amen.