The Greatest Commandment

By The Rev. Christian Carroll, Priest Associate

If you have been here the last two Sundays or opened your mail in the last two weeks then you know we are in the middle of our stewardship season. I don’t like the word “stewardship”.

What does it mean when we add “ship” to a word? Think about it. “Friendship”, “Companionship”, “Leadership”. To me they’re concepts that point to activities. It’s the activities we’re interested in. The meat is in the “friending”, the “companioning”, the “leading”, the “stewarding”. So what’s “stewarding”?

If a steward is someone given the job of maintaining and spending assets (think of a wine steward with the key to the wine cellar where the good wines are kept and maintained) then stewardship would be reflecting on stewarding or how the job of maintaining and spending assets is going.

So when I say we’re in stewardship season I mean we’re at the time of year when we start reflecting on our individual and joint “stewarding” or how we’re doing at the job of maintaining, protecting and spending assets.

We’re asking “how am I, how are we doing at maintaining, protecting and spending the assets that we’re charged with.”

In a church the assets are not bottles of wine and the job is not just maintaining the correct temperature so they’re ready to be enjoyed. In a church our asset is God’s grace in our lives. Jesus gives us our most important charge in this morning’s gospel. That is, loving the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind and loving our neighbor as our self.

Stewardship is reflecting on the “our stewarding” that is the actions that flow from our conscious desire to know love and serve God with everything we’ve got.

So every year at this time, a stewardship committee, made up of congregation members is gathered and charged with leading the congregation in reflecting on how we as individuals and as a congregation are responding to our charge to be stewards of God’s grace in our lives.

During this time we think about God’s grace. We think about God’s presence and impact on our daily lives. We think about, how or if we are motivated to respond. We ask “How are we doing with what Jesus calls the greatest commandments?” We listen to members of the congregation when they step forward to bear witness – to share their reflections and their experiences in stewarding. As we will again in a few minutes.

We take a step back and take an inventory of ourselves, our talents, our finances, our gifts, our time – all the stuff of our individual households – all the stuff that makes us who we are – and we acknowledge that – all things come of thee oh Lord – and question how – we are giving from what has been given us.

This inventory is not so we can passively offer thanks to God with a grateful heart but to see how we have lived the greatest commandment to “love the Lord our God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind”.

This inventory is not so we can passively offer thanks to God with a grateful heart but to see how we have “loved our neighbors as ourselves” using what is given us by God. Have we loved our neighbors as God has loved us?

And we form a committee to get us started. I have served on the stewardship committee for two seasons. And it’s not easy. Each year the members of that committee struggled.

We were uncomfortable. We struggled with the fact that the word “stewardship” seems to take center stage in our corporate life only when it’s time to plan next year’s budget.

Stewardship seems to always come down to the action of asking for money so we can keep the doors open, the lights on, the silver polished and the place warm, and ourselves doing all the things we have been doing here.

And each year the committee laments that we know that stewardship is not all about money. We know it’s about individual and corporate ministry. We know it’s about how we individually and corporately seek to witness to new life in Jesus Christ.

I think part of the struggle with stewardship as we practice it in this season occurs from a sense of embarrassment. That is embarrassment that, although we know better – stewardship always seems to get brought back down to money, despite the many ways we do indeed share our blessings in ministry both inside and outside these walls. Why is that?

We seem unable or unwilling to embrace stewardship as an ongoing reflection that can be a celebration of how we spend ourselves to the glory of God. We seem inattentive to integrating the joyful celebration of “our responses to God’s grace in our lives” throughout the church year.

I think I have an idea why. It has to do with fear and forgetting.

Because stewardship gets linked to money the whole reflection on blessings gets tainted. We taint the whole practice of seeing how we’re doing at using what we’ve been given. Linking stewardship only to money links stewardship to a resource we have that can become scarce at the drop of a hat. Poof, “money”, now it’s here, now it’s gone, will it ever come back? That particular asset is so tied to our self-esteem, our value and sense of security that money becomes hard for us to talk about. “Money”, now it’s here, now it’s gone, will it ever come back?

When stewardship gets linked principally to money it gets linked to fear and fear gets linked to giving. “If I give it – anything – I will not have it, – I will not have it and I will not be safe. If I am not safe, I might die.

The scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Stewardship is not about raising money for church, but about asking if there is any alternative to the culture of death in which we live.” Translate “the culture of death” in your mind to the “culture of not enough”. To restate Brueggemann then “Stewardship is not about raising money for church, but about asking if there is any alternative to the culture of not enough in which we live.” In the culture of not enough fear replaces stewardship – that is – our responding in action to God’s graces in our lives, becomes something fearful. “Fear that there won’t be enough.”

And the fear that there won’t be enough, says Brueggemann, is really about seeing our past, individual and corporate” as “barren of miracles”. “A past without gifts and a future without hope gives a present that is an arena for anxiety.” If there is no acknowledgement or a denial of miracles, of God’s beneficence, then “the only way to get anywhere is to invent yourself and scramble for whatever you can get.”

If we leave unchallenged “a culture of not enough” or if we turn away from challenging our own fears of what will happen to us if we do not have enough than Brueggemann suggests we end up living as if our neighbors are a threat and the greatest and second greatest commandments are too much for our fears to bear.

The alternative is to step away – even if only in small steps – from whatever it is that stymies us from embracing in celebration all the ways we do spend ourselves to the glory of God. The alternative is to step away from whatever it is that stymies us from integrating the joyful celebration of “our responses to God’s grace” throughout the church year. The alternative is to reclaim stewarding and “stewardship” from money and fear.

I’m convinced we have a new opportunity here. We can throw open clouded up windows and take a new look at stewardship. Reclaim the word. Take it away from money; dissociate it from a financial burden. Don’t think about the money.

Think about this. Let’s look at reality – the reality of how this congregation has been maintaining, protecting and using its gifts.

There is palpable new energy in St. George’s that doesn’t have much to do with money.

We have neighborhood kids joining the choir camp. Our kids are inviting friends to join them in church. Our music program keeps getting bigger and better. We have a new liturgy for people in recovery. We have the willingness to experiment with the shape of our worship space. We have the ability to change.

We have women in the congregation stepping up who want to offer the congregation and the community more. Women who want to pray and learn together. We have new adult leadership jumping in and getting involved in guiding our young people. People from the outside, our neighbors, come in here to take a look at us to see if we have what they want or are trying to find.

We have people in our midst who greet those newcomers with joy and enthusiasm. New people are interested and excited about learning about the church and they come to seekers class. People come here to have their relationships blessed in weddings and civil unions. People come to hear our musicians in concerts. People come here to do yoga. People come here to celebrate the changing of seasons in ritual celebrations. People come here to learn how to stay sober and help other people attain sobriety. We have new people stepping up and teaching Sunday school and new people on the behind the scenes committees like property and finance. We have a talented and generous web master. Our wardens are active and vestry members supporting individual ministries.

And there are other ministries going on behind the scenes. Volunteerism, the pastoral visits, the gardeners, the people who pray with people for healing, the people who loving and prayerfully maintain the sanctuary, the people who make our worship function smoothly and all the helping hands giving unbeknownst to all of us. We have people serving on not-for-profit boards. We have people hammering nails for the Abraham House project. We gave over $20,000 to community organizations whose work reflects our commitment to be of service. If I’ve forgotten you or your ministry activity forgive me.

Let’s get used to speaking about the plenty we have here and let ourselves be inspired to keep using it. Let’s keep holding up our graces. Let’s keep holding up God’s beneficence in our lives. Use it, Use it, and Use it.

We each are an opportunity to witness to God’s grace. Your life itself is the opportunity. I challenge us to free stewardship from fear and concentrate year-round with stewarding – active intentional spending our treasures.

If I could I would give you all little keys to put on your key chains. They would be reminders like the wine steward’s key. They would be like the key to the wine cellar but our wine cellar has the bounty of the kingdom of God and we’re going to keep opening it up everyday to every neighbor we touch. And we’ll commit to doing this when we remember the miracles and when we fear they’ll stop. We keep doing it with or without fear. That is our charge. We’re going to keep opening the Kingdom up everyday to every neighbor we touch.

© 2008 The Rev. Christian Carroll

The Great Experiment

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

There was a small item in the news this week that was lost amid the financial turbulence. It involved a man by the name of Paul Emory Washington. Perhaps because it's an election year, or perhaps because of the turbulent times we're now in, or most likely in a bid for advertising by a genealogy company, research was done on the ancestry of our first President George Washington to discover his oldest living heir.

The process was complicated by the fact that George Washington had no children. But the intrepid genealogists followed the rules of their science of kinship to trace the line which led them from the late 1700's to 2008 to 82 year old Paul Emory Washington of San Antonio, Texas.

Being of presidential lineage is not that uncommon, as a matter of fact, we're pleased to know that one of our own church members is a direct descendant of President Ulysses S. Grant.

However, what makes Paul Washington of interest is that in the days following the Revolutionary War, George Washington was offered the monarchy. The role of President had not been invented yet, and the new American country only knew one form of leadership, that of Sovereign Monarchs. So grateful was the nation to George Washington that they offered him the crown. Perhaps Jesus was the only other person in history to decline such an honor. But, Washington so believed in the leadership capability of the people that he championed the idea of President and elected terms as part of the great experiment of Democracy. Had Washington accepted the crown and become King, Paul Emerson Washington of San Antonio, Texas might just have been our reigning King.

Mr. Washington humbly brushes aside any notion of regal standing, though his children are quoted as being quite sure he'd make a dandy king.

In the early days of American independence, there was a great deal of fear and worry that the "great experiment" as it became known would fail. Drawing up a whole new governmental system as it was adopted in 1787 didn't seem quite as easy as it had in 1776 when they signed the declaration for independence. It was indeed risky and the lives of everyone in the country weighed in the balance.

Many people looked back to the traditional method of monarchy as the solution to their fear. It's what they knew, and in the anxiety of facing an unknown, untried "experiment," to many people, returning to the monarchy seemed a conservative and prudent course of action.

To some degree this is the mind set of the Israelites wandering in the desert as we continue this account from the Book of Exodus. They really didn't know what they had gotten themselves into. Yes, they had been miserable; and yes they cried out for help. But who was Moses anyway? Modern readers have the end of the story and several millennia of myth and lore surrounding it to know who Moses was, but to the people in the desert he was a young, relatively unknown, untested man whose only claim to authority was speaking to a burning bush. He told them of a God whose name was so holy that they couldn't even say it. A God who was everywhere, yet invisible, and a God who had singled them out for a particular relationship. It didn't bode well.

There were signs and wonders along the way, but quite possibly they were coincidences. And there was that disturbing habit Moses had of going off by himself climbing mountains and disappearing for months at a time. In our first lesson we read about the last straw the Israelites were prepared to endure. He was gone too long, they were scared and lost and fearful that Moses and this God were gone forever. They decided it was time to return to what they knew. And what they knew were carved images they called gods. The needed the security of seeing their gods and carrying them and knowing where they were. They wanted to know their names and speak directly to them. They had reached a point of thinking their own great experiment had indeed failed and it was time to return to the old ways.

Well, Moses did return and he set them straight. We know the ending of that story and how the people of Israel did continue to make their way through the desert to their promised land, and similarly we know the ending of the story after the American Revolution, how the Constitution was written and how each community put their trust in God, engraving it, in the former case on tablets of stone, and in the later case on dollar bills.

The Gospel lesson gives us another very strange image of God's invitation to community. What a wedding that must have been! I don't think I've ever received and invitation to a wedding that has elicited from me a hostile response toward the mail carrier - much less kill her. Nor would it have occurred to me to re-examine the cause of a town's destruction to be the work of an angry father of the groom. I can only imagine the second round of guests looking at the carnage around them and tell the next set of messengers they'd be delighted to attend the wedding. It sounds like a real blast. This is like the Kingdom of Heaven, huh? Some parables work better than others.

Sifting through the debris of the Gospel lesson we can actually see how the invitation from God to enter into joy is often met with resistance. The messengers who were the prophets did try to prepare the people for righteous living worthy of God and they were ridiculed and killed. This is where I differ with the teller of the story. I don't believe that a loving God retaliates against the wrongs done to the messengers. I think the towns tend to destroy themselves through their own pettiness or carelessness, or greed, or hostility.

There is a theology in the world that credits God with earthly destruction. I think such theologies are the worst cuts of all. We can look around the world at the wars, violence and financial crisis and figure out that this is not God's doing. This is ours. God invites us to a kingdom of joy and we refuse the offer with, and through, violence.

But in God's love it doesn't stop there. God asks again and again until someone shows up. During my lifetime the biggest crisis and catastrophes I've seen have been the rise and falls of stock markets in 1987, 2001 and this current one. I've seen the devastation of the early AIDS epidemic and lost more friends than I care to count. I watched in horror as the towers fell in 2001 and spent countless hours in pastoral care for those who lost loved ones or colleagues or hope. We all watched the devastation of the tsunamis and hurricanes, especially Katrina.

Yet in each of these crisis I witnessed miracles. The overwhelming power of love to face the challenges. The number of people who rose to the occasion to be God's hands and voice in times of need. Volunteers to work or donate money or time and expertise are, in keeping with the parable, those who accepted the invitation to the wedding feast. People who come to the help of others in time of crisis and need are the people who experience the kingdom of God and its love. In each of these crisis we did not know what was going to happen next, but pulling together we walked through the difficult terrain of unknowing through the sheer will of doing the next right thing.

In times of uncertainty it's a very real temptation to look back and try to replicate older solutions to older problems. But new problems require new solutions and they aren't always clear or obvious. They take faith and will power. They take integrity and patience. When I read about the executives who used part of their bail out money for a $400K junket, I thought of the guest who came to the wedding not dressed properly.

We've lived through crisis before and we'll certainly live through this one. It's an opportunity for all of us to do our daily work and live our daily lives committed to honesty and service to our fellow travelers. If anyone is tempted to feel sorry for themselves, then it's time for that person to help another.

In one sense we picked a horrible time for a Stewardship Campaign. But in another sense, this is a perfect time. People are afraid and giving threatens to be low. But on the other hand the need is greater now than ever to do what we do best, and that is to live, preach and witness the Good News of God in Christ. Hope is one of the foundations of our common lives here. It's a demonstrated fact that whenever public crisis hit, people turn to houses of faith in ways they never had before. We need to continue our work and ministry and be prepared to offer a spiritual haven and living example of the triumph of love in the face of adversity. We are not a people defeated and we are not a people looking backward. We do not look for scapegoats nor do we shrink from difficult questions. Our faith means everything to us and for that reason we must continue to pledge toward the work and witness of St. George's.

Over the next few weeks we'll conduct this program a little differently than before, but ultimately the need remains to make a financial pledge that makes sense for each household. No one of us will presume to tell you what that should be. We will make clear that we made good decisions last year regarding our budget and though we have a deficit it's much smaller than in years past. I think we've found the right balance. We need to maintain it to stay where we are, but we also need to grow our income side if we are to grow in our ministry. Our family and youth programs have been doing so well, I would personally love to see our income grow enough to hire a youth minister. There are a lot of ways we can grow, but first we must recommit ourselves to the value of the ministry we already do and the value of the faith, hope and love that is nurtured in this church. It's up to all of us to keep it strong and it's up to God to help us. God has never let his people down and certainly will not this day.

When the apostle Paul wrote to his church facing hard times he wrote these words for their comfort and inspiration: "...Beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things. Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you." Amen.

© 2008 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ

The World Is Changed

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom far away there lived a princess. She was very beautiful and wherever she walked the birds would sing and bright flowers would open up. She liked to go for walks in the forest around the castle and call to the deer and rabbits to walk along with her. Then one day she strayed farther than usual into the woods and realized that no one was around. She replaced her princess dress with her party clothes and tore out of the woods in her royal Ferrari leaving the deer and rabbits in a cloud of dust on her way to the disco.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

I’d get this far before my very young nieces and nephews would scream in a chorus of "No!!!’s" That’s not how to tell a fairy tale, they’d complain through their giggles. I’d try again, but they didn’t want to hear about Cinderella in the Industrial Waste Dump either. (I didn’t get many invitations to baby sit. My sister had no sense of humor.)

Well, I’d ask, how do you tell a fairy tale? And I’d get the same old conventional Grimm Brother’s garden variety story. The real message was, "Don’t mess with our fairy tales. Either tell them right or don’t tell them at all."

That’s not unlike the message Jesus got when he told the parable or the Vineyard. He took a perfectly good old favorite story and put it on it’s head. The story of the Vineyard was an old favorite first told by the Prophet Isaiah centuries before. Everyone knew it and when Jesus began his version of it, like my nieces and nephews they no doubt began to relax with the familiar cadences until he changed it. In the fifth chapter of Isaiah the story starts, "Let me sing for my beloved a love song concerning his Vineyard." Now that’s how you start a story! It’s the Old Testament version of "Once upon a time." It continues, "My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill, He digged it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the mist of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it... and he looked to it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes." It too was a parable of Israel’s disobedience and unfaithfulness to God, but Jesus turned it on it’s head and gave it a Martin Scorsese ending with a lot of violence. In Jesus’ version the tenants in the Vineyard got greedy and wanted all the income for themselves and thought to kill the landlord’s son in order to get it.

The scribes and Pharisees listening to the story may not yet have understood the flow of it, but the generation later that read the Gospel certainly made the connections with the Christ figure of the son being killed and the greedy tenants being the religious leaders. The rejection of evil people and replacement of a new people in the vineyard must have given the average listener hope.

The addition of the verse about the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone added another dimension to the lesson. Though Jesus was rejected and crucified, he became the cornerstone after all for their beliefs and lives. Jesus really knew how to take a story and run with it.

But people still don’t like their stories being tampered with. The financial crisis that hit the world has tampered with an American story begun in the post world war II era. A story about an America strong and independent who could lead and not need any other country. This latest crisis has in fact shown that America is not isolated and invulnerable, but linked to a world economy that must be considered partners not servants or unequals.

There are important lessons to be learned about how to conduct business that include responsibility and accountability. Greed and fear have threatened the strength of our systems. The bedrock of integrity seems to have been rejected by too many in leadership roles leading up to the crisis. That same integrity and moral sense of responsibility for people in this country and around the world has got to become the chief cornerstone. The first lesson from Exodus recounts the giving of the ten commandments and connected with this Gospel lesson serve as a wonderful reminder of exactly what that cornerstone is made up of. The very decency of humanity as encapsulated in the ten commandments and lived in the life of Jesus and given through the commandments of his teaching provide us with the compass to lead us.

One of the comments I heard about this crisis was that it might have changed the world as we know it. There is no "might" about it. The world is changed. It is not how we’ve known it. Some look back in nostalgia to the 1950's as the glory days of America and wouldn’t it be wonderful to go back to that time. For some yes, but for others, no. That decade was a tale of two cities (or two countries) in which we hear one story at the exclusion of the other.

Regardless, we cannot look back at stories trying to recapture an illusion. We have to look toward the uncertainty of the future, not in fear, but in faith. We’re programmed to fear the unknown rather than embrace the opportunities that the future has to offer. If integrity replaces greed and faith replaces fear we’ll be on our way.

We have a lot of four legged guests today to remind us of a man we commemorate today. St. Francis certainly gave a model to the world of faithful compassion. His love of God and the created world is the subject of much spiritual writing and song. His personal story inspired countless others to live simpler lives and find their joy in God’s creation. It touches us six hundred years later because deep down, and maybe not so deep down we still hope and believe that a simpler love can restore the chaotic consequences of materialistic greed and even beyond that, ambitious power to dominate people, lands and markets.

The unconditional love experienced by pet owners from their beloved pets is further witness of the possibility of a perfect world. We need to slow down and take seriously the spiritual laws handed down to us by people we honor. Moses, Jesus, Francis, and many others are honored for what they have to share and teach us. These teachings can and have to be the cornerstone of our lives if we are to make it to another generation. The world has become too small to think only of ourselves and lives too precious to be thrown away or ground down by inhuman labor practices and abusive expectation.

Our story as a people has yet to be written. Old stories can keep us grounded and it’s important to know where we’ve come from but it’s a mistake to think we can ever go back again. Like the stories of the Israelites in the desert we’ve been reading these past weeks, there is no going back and even the uncertainties of the future cannot scare us into trying. We have to go forward and rather than fear it, we have to go bravely and lovingly into it.

It’s a beautiful vineyard that God has given us, full of life and possibility. We are tenants on this fragile earth and we can be good ones. We’ve seen what the bad tenants can do, let’s show them what the good tenants can do. Amen.

© 2008 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ