catecheumenate

Christianity 101—inaugural year
Curriculum

This Fall, we're adding a catecheumenate to the Edge House's repetoire. Or, for the uninitiated or recovering-Catholic among you, Christianity 101. The idea is that we have students who would like to be baptized or who'd like to reaffirm their faith and we ought to offer information and conversation to help those decisions. After meeting for a couple hours once a month, at the Easter Vigil 2012--at, like 4:30 in the morning--we'll give them the opportunity to affirm or reaffirm. Should be amazing!

What remains is for me to figure out what I'm going to teach them... Here's a very vague sketch. Your thoughts?

October: how did you get here?--share stories, watch Cameron Duncan's "DFK6498", talk about where we're bound and where we need freedom, begin talking about scripture and how that big story got here (maybe a short study on something relating to the exile)
homework: memorize books of the bible (very handy, that...)

November: continue conversations about scripture, in particular overview of The Story/Plot, intensive studies of several pivotal passages, clip from Firefly: disc 2, "Jaynestown", chapter 3, 9:44, from Book: "What are we up to?" through Book: "You hang onto those now."
homework: assign stories for projects--must read from several translations, short essay maybe on what's happening literally and spiritually (what's God doing? how do we react?), where you see yourself, and some creative response

December: church history--how'd we get here?, Paul, councils, denominations, etc.
homework:

January: theology—sola scriptura vs. Three-Legged Stool, major bits of theology (Christology, Trinity, soteriology, what else?), I know I have some media for “what’s God like?”—film clip? Excerpt from book?..., maybe use some of the 500 Theses from seminary, Images of Jesus handout
homework: begin working on spiritual autobiography

February: ethics—read and discuss some ethical case studies from my seminary ethics class, play the “Who Gets the Liver?” game, heroes of the faith (Good Samaritan, Constance and her Companions, the Widow and Elijah, who else?)
homework: continue working on spiritual autobiography

March: practice—make communion bread together while talking?, orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy, liturgy and worship, prayer, mission, present autobiographies
homework: share your autobiography with someone who’s not in this group

April: participate in Holy Week and Easter Vigil

sunday's sermon--Psalm 85.8

Baruch attah adonai elohenu melech ha-olam. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of all possibilities.
* * *
[Teach “Let Me Hear” by Philip Newell]
Let me hear, let me listen, help me listen,
because I think God has something to say.
But I keep getting distracted. Do you have this problem?
There’s always something: the laundry, or work,
or it’s not practical to spend time in prayer or to advocate for…
ooh, look! a shiny thing…
It’s been a heck of a week for me at the Edge campus ministry house:
I’ve had to say “no” to a couple wanting to have their marriage blessed
even though I didn’t want to,
I’ve had to say “no” to a student
who wanted to continue to be a part of the ministry,
I’ve gotten to say “yes” to some exciting outreach plans
for the school year and spring break,
…aaand then had to say “no” again to our friendly neighborhood bum.
Bennie sleeps on the porch. And leaves trash on the porch.
And pees on the porch. And he’s a violent drunk.
And he’s the county’s arrest record-holder.
So I don’t kick him off on a whim—
it’s not a good situation for us and it’s not good for him either. The thing is, he doesn’t listen. Or he can’t listen.
Every time I see him, I tell him,
“Bennie, you can’t sleep here” at least five times.
And he says he’s not.
And then we find evidence he’s been there, or Bennie himself,
still sleeping off his cheap liquor.
His mental illness keeps him from understanding
what people say to him.
And I wonder if we, too, have something
that keeps us from understanding what people say to us,
what God says to us.
Do we have some sort of—let’s call it a mental illness—
that distracts from the abundant life God offers?
Yeah, we do. It’s called sin.
Not a pleasant word in our world,
not a word we want to apply to our not spending much time
in prayer
or our justifications for the comfort we have.
But it’s our word, it’s the church’s word
for all that distracts us from the amazing, delightful,
peace-filled life God invites us to.
Sin is thinking you have the right answer on your own,
it’s looking down on your parents or professors,
it’s hurting other people whether we know it or not,
it’s not practicing the generous faith we claim.
Sin is not listening to God.
My spiritual director gave me an article years ago which has stuck with me.
In it, the writer says that he always thought prayer
needed to be very calm, very spiritual,
approached from a calm, spiritual day.
You know, some yoga, a cup of tea, soothing classical music,
no…you know…actual life happening around him as it does.
He says his prayers never looked like that,
that he would stew over the events of his day
for the majority of the time,
then ask a kind of perfunctory “I’m here, where are you God?”
and then be done with it.
But he came to realize that his prayer was
more expansive than that—
that the stewing was indeed part of the prayer,
that God wants us to tell him everything,
even though he already knows it.
Turning over the events of the days in the presence of God is prayer.
And most of us never get past this part—
we talk at God and then call it a day.
But that’s not all of it.
After we can’t stew any more, we reflect:
“I think this is what’s happening here,
maybe this is how I ought to reply,
ah, that one story from scripture is kind of similar…”
If we’re lucky, we make it to this reflection part of prayer
and we think we’re deeply spiritual.
And it is an advance of sorts.
The vast majority of us rarely, if ever,
let ourselves get to the third stage: listening.
Emptying ourselves of all the stewing
and all the pride that we can figure it out
and just listening to what God might have to speak.
And all of this is what we mean by turning to God in our hearts.
But what does God sound like? What are we listening for?
Some really do hear words,
others feel a strong, repeated push towards something
over months or years,
others feel God in a sudden inspiration that seems outside
of what they could have come up with.
Scripture suggests that the voice of God is peace.
When we listen, says the Psalm for today, God speaks peace
to the faithful who turn to God in their hearts.
And not peace in the cute, marketed peace-sign kind of way
but what our Jewish brothers and sisters call shalom.
It’s a complex thing, shalom.
It means first wholeness and interdependence.
And it means truth, a deep, abiding truth
that speaks to our guts as much as it does our brains.
And it means love, but a challenging love of sacrifice,
loving something that we’re not entirely gung-ho about.
Because, again, we don’t want to hear it.
The word of God is about righteousness and faithfulness
and connection being the norm.
This is what Shalom is.
It’s like the moment right after you put your kids to bed.
It’s the place after all the “yes’s” and “no’s”
that we have to say during the day,
it’s the place where it all makes sense,
fits together, and is beautiful.
When God speaks peace and we hear it,
it’s not just hearing the vibrations in the air,
“yeah, ok, that’s nice” but a full-body kind of hearing.
Often, we can only hear the voice of God
because we’ve been practicing hearing it.
What we do regularly
—church, outreach, getting to know the neighbors, shopping—
what we do regularly shapes us,
it forms us into beings who can or cannot hear God speaking.
What we do regularly allows us to drop the distractions.
Or it allows us to keep those distractions, those sins, in place.
This is the practice of the faith—listening means practicing.
And God speaks peace all the time.
Shalom, wholeness, it’s few and far between in this broken world
—but it’s here nonetheless.
God is speaking peace to us constantly
—in our marriages and family life,
at work where things can get contentious,
in the middle of exam week or co-op decision time on campus,
in the middle of a movie,
in our conversations about theology or sexuality or politics—
God is speaking peace, is offering us a different way,
the true way that we’re struggling so hard to achieve on our own.
God is speaking peace, wholeness, vulnerability, faithfulness, peace
to every one of us in every moment.
To hear God, maybe we need to make time to listen
and not just assume that we’ll get it one day.
Let’s turn to God in our hearts
and reach out for the peace God’s offering.
Let’s practice listening for peace.
[Sing again.]

sunday's sermon--Matthew 14:13-21

Most images below come from Things Organized Neatly. You should check it out. Also, Things Organized Neatly, please don't sue me for posting these images. They made my sermon more effective.

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(asterixes indicate a slide change)
“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.”
“Everyone who thirsts…” Are you thirsty?*














Are you hungry?
What for?*(black screen)
I hunger for cool new shoes. And the approval of others.
I thirst for free time and then spend it doing housework
—it does not satisfy.
What do you hunger and thirst for?
I hunger for radically inclusive church community
where everyone is not just allowed in but desired
I thirst for a church where the poor, the outcast, the broken,
yes, even the rich are welcomed with open arms.
I hunger for more time with my delightful daughter.
I thirst for deep prayer in a world which doesn’t have the time.
These would satisfy. These would be the bread Isaiah and Jesus speak of.
It seems like we here on the ground, we ordinary people
are always striving for something else, something more.
Yet the something more we receive rarely satisfies.
You know what I’m talking about: houses, cars, clothing, success at work,
people liking us for the image we present
—that stuff doesn’t satisfy, not for long.
I don’t know about you, but I kind of expect God to be, you know, obvious.
Sign-like. A big burning bush in the middle UC’s campus
or a pillar of smoke in the middle of the House of Representatives
leading us to the Promised Land.
But, no, we have ordinary old sidewalks and ballpark hot dogs.
We hunger and thirst for something huge and flashy
and we get something small and ordinary.
We’ve been talking about finding God in the ordinary the last few weeks
—have you caught on to that?—
because we rarely get the huge, flashy sign of God’s presence.
But, more than that, we’re talking about finding God in the ordinary
because that is precisely where God shows up.
Check it out. One of my favorite blogs is called Things Organized Neatly
—she posts images of, well, things. Organized neatly.
Here’s a couple examples: clay pots stacked neatly*,











matches in varying degrees of being burnt*,










books organized by color*,











all the pieces of a pocket watch*













—you get the point.
Each is made up of very ordinary things, yet seen in a different way,
are things of extraordinary beauty.*(black screen)
Or try this one:
my husband has been spending his summer away from teaching
revising his young adult novel so he can pitch it to an agent.
Parts of the revision go smoothly,
he really gets into it and hours pass without his realizing.
Other parts are much more difficult, and he struggles with them.
And every so often, having had all of those parts of the plot
swimming around in his head for months,
an elegant solution rises to the surface
which makes everything fit together.
I’m not speaking of a blinding flash of insight here, folks,
but the everyday, ordinary workings of our brains
which, to me, suggest the action of the Holy Spirit.
She moves in mysterious ways, in subtle ways,
in ways we’d call ordinary and thus not divine.
But the ordinary points to the divine.
Look: The stuff Jesus fed the 5000 with is ordinary stuff.
Bread and fish—you could buy it at any store, or make it yourself.
It’s not special.
And even the bread and wine of our weekly meal here is ordinary.
Ordinary things—fish and bread, bread and juice…us.
We’re ordinary things—we’re no saints,
we’re made of dirt if you remember the Genesis stories!
Ordinary dirt sculpted into something beautiful.
But that’s what the saints were
—ordinary people doing extraordinary things—or, rather,
ordinary people doing the ordinary things of the Kingdom of God.
Check this out.
Today (Saturday) we celebrate the feast day of William Wilberforce,
an abolitionist and politician from the 1800s.
He made long speeches and worked tirelessly for 18 years
to abolish the slave trade in England because of his faith
in the freedom we have in Jesus Christ.
You might think
“it’s all well and good for him, he was famous and powerful.”
But he was just a guy
who didn’t think a person should own another person.
All the heroes of the faith are ordinary folks
trying to live like God is really here like he says he is,
ordinary folks thirsting and hungering
for justice and truth and mercy.
When Jesus told the disciples to feed the crowd of well more than 5000 people,
they didn’t know what to do—they only had a little bread and fish,
nothing compared to the crowds gathered.
And Jesus said, “bring your nothing to me.”
This morning, I bring to God my nothing
and hope that he can make something out of it.
I bring our beloved country’s literal hunger and thirst.
From what I read, there is plenty to go around,
so why, in a country which prides itself
on its Christian history and Christian present,
do so many suffer from malnutrition?
Every time I go to the Freestore/Foodbank to volunteer,
they show us around the warehouse,
and when we get to the PowerPak station, I tear up.
Every time.
PowerPaks have food for the 36-hours of a week-end,
food that doesn’t have to be refrigerated
and doesn’t need special tools like can openers to open.
Because it’s for kids whose parents can’t or won’t feed them over the weekend.
Kids who won’t eat otherwise.
This is not right.
This is not what a Christian nation looks like.
Trappist monk Thomas Merton says
we can’t hope to bring about the Kingdom
with non-Kingdom practices—
we can’t bring about peace with weapons,
we can’t bring about abundance for all
with wealth concentrated in the few.
This is a hard thing, brothers and sisters,
because these things have become ordinary to us.
Our comfort and wealth have become entitlements
Which only means things we’ve got used to.
Our hunger and thirst have become ordinary
to the point that we don’t notice them,
we don’t see the Kingdom of God showing up in our lives
because it doesn’t seem important enough.
We can’t see past the ordinariness of our situation
—but that is exactly where God meets us
and makes of our nothing an abundant feast.
Jesus made the little bit of bread and fish
into food for thousands but that wasn’t the only point
—that was the big sign that something was happening,
but then the something happened.
The disciples fed the people.
They took the bread and fish
and handed it out to the people waiting.
They fed the hungry.
And they fed ALL the hungry.
This is the kingdom of God, brothers and sisters…
In the ordinary stuff of our lives
—scissors*,














salad*,









baby clothes*,










ingredients for cookies*,










leaves*,













tea*,








sandwiches*,














candy bars*














—God makes something out of nothing.
And do you see how many of these images were of food?
It’s one of the most ordinary parts of our lives
and yet gives us a foretaste of the kingdom of God.*(black screen)
Do you see?
Do you see how God can slip in through the cracks
where we don’t expect him?
Do you see that in ordinary things like a bit of bread and fish,
God calls us to the life of the Kingdom
where all have a place at the table,
where all receive what they need and offer what they have,
where there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek,
slave nor free, gay nor straight,
rich nor poor, Democrat nor Republican
and where we receive abundant life,
and where we give it away as well.
What if we lived like that Kingdom were here right now?*










What do you hunger for?
What do you thirst for?
Does it satisfy?
Come to the table, for the meal is prepared.
*(black screen)

eucharistic prayer for NOSH--Creation

Church nerds among you might recognize the second half of the prayer as the ancient didache eucharistic prayer. We added an introduction to connect with our first liturgical season, God's creation of the universe.

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Out of the dirt of the garden, God made every tree to grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food and The Tree-of-Life was in the middle of the garden. And God made us out of the dirt and gave us the garden to delight in and to take care of. And God so loved it all that God joined us in creation, was made out of the same dirt. And asked that through simple things of the earth—bread, wine, a shared meal—we lift our hearts and our hands to God as we remember the life Jesus led, the people he touched, the meals he ate, and the sacrifice he made. A reminder about communion: all may, some should, none must. Much of this ritual is about the gathered community, so when you pass the bread and wine, please continue to say the words to the next person whether you take the bread and wine or not.

[concerning the wine] We thank you, our Father, for the holy vine of David your servant, which you made known to us through Jesus your servant; to you be the glory for ever.
[concerning the bread] We thank you, our Father, for the life and knowledge which you made known to us through Jesus your servant; to you be the glory for ever. Even as the grains of wheat were scattered over the hills, and were gathered together to become one bread, so let your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom; for yours is the glory and the power through Jesus Christ for ever.

7 cups of tea

Sabbath, refreshment, and beauty.

tomorrow's sermon--Acts 20:32-35

Baruch attah adonai elohenu melech ha-olam. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of eternity. Amen.
* * *
Welcome to week two of stewardship at Good Shepherd.
There are a ton of illustrations for sermons available online
for stewardship season
—object lessons that show you simply and clearly
why tithing is important and doable,
illustrations which would bring every one of you to your knees
with the blinding truth of God’s love,
illustrations which would have you opening your wallets and
handing over everything for the work of the Kingdom! A-men?
Or, at least, that’s what they’d have you think.
There are jokes about ministers and horses and desert islands,
there are prop-related illustrations
that involve things like a mason jar with a few Ping-Pong balls
and some sand which, when I saw it done,
was cheesy but effective.
There are thousands of these things available,
because we in the church have realized
how difficult it is to talk about money in an engaging way.
We’re all a bit jealous of our time and our money.
I know I have a hard time thinking Leighton and I will be able
to cover our bills and things
if we give more money to the church.
And, if you don’t have the experience of Good Shepherd
as a joy-filled place that feeds your soul
for ministry in the world,
no sermon illustration ever will make you open your wallet.
Before Leighton and I had our delightful daughter Abby,
before we were even considering having kids, we had a pretty good life.
We worked and we made art and we gardened
and we went out with friends.
We watched movies and TV, we talked politics,
and there never seemed to be enough time
for everything we wanted to do.
As we considered having a child,
we became fearful of how much time we would lose.
Children, wonderful creatures that they are,
take a lot of time to care for and play with.
Where would that time come from?
How would we continue doing all the things we had come to love
and still take care of this child?
Those of you who are parents know well how much your focus shifts
when you hold that baby in your arms
—often, we can’t even remember what we did
to fill the hours we now spend with Abby.
Some of the stuff you did before stays around,
but much of it gets put in your spiritual attic
and, while you miss it, you don’t miss it much,
because you have this amazing, overwhelmingly beautiful,
intriguing, endlessly changing
new relationship in your life.
The sacrifice of something you love
brings to town an even deeper love.
Do you get it?
This is so much bigger than the annual stewardship campaign.
This is the heart of the Gospel that Peter speaks of in today’s Acts reading,
that Jesus spent his life getting folks to see
—that this faith we profess is about a joyful relationship
which is so much better than we can imagine
when standing outside of it.
Clinging to our stuff or our time leads only
to a narrower, more pinched life,
but holding it all loosely,
offering our stuff, our time, our selves to one another in the church
expands our lives, allows us room to breathe in,
allows space for the Spirit to transform us.
Last week we talked about how we see the world
through a lens of scarcity
while God sees the world through a lens of abundance.
We talked about how this faith we profess is about celebration,
about how church should be and is a party.
Let me give you some examples:
Way back in the day,
when the Ark of the Covenant was returned to Jerusalem,
the Ark of the Covenant which contained the Law of God
given to Moses
and which was so wonderfully holy that it might indeed
have melted Nazi faces (Raiders of the Lost Ark, right?),
the Ark of the Covenant which was to be placed
in the brand-new Temple as a footstool for God,
when the Ark of the Covenant was returned to Jerusalem,
all the Jews partied and David, greatest King of Israel,
stripped down to just his shorts, and danced.
He danced so passionately, with such devotion and love,
that his wife was embarrassed. He was that happy.
And even farther back in the day,
when the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea
after fleeing slavery in Egypt,
when the Israelites had made it safely
between two enormous, terrifying walls of water,
when the Israelites truly saw the mighty, freeing power
of their God,
one of their leaders, Moses’ sister Miriam,
sang her relief and joy to have survived the crossing,
she and the women took tambourines and lyres
and danced around the camp in exultation.
Brother Paul wrote his gratitude and pleasure in God
even while still in prison.
In Hebrews 12, he all but shouts,
“Do you see what we've got? An unshakable kingdom!
And do you see how thankful we must be?
Not only thankful, but brimming with worship,
deeply reverent before God.”
And Jesus exclaimed over God’s generosity,
shouting his joy that the meek and persecuted
and peacemakers would receive abundant life!
All because they saw the depth and power and good news
of God our Maker.
And so we at Good Shepherd are asking something small of you
we are asking for a 1% increase in your current pledge out of joy
My husband Leighton and I have increased our pledge
We’re now giving a huge 6%!
That’s not very big, is it?
On the other hand, it’s only been recently
that we’ve made a regular pledge at all
a few years ago
I did a little math and was embarrassed to discover
Our pledge was less than 1% of our income
And I thought we were so close to a tithe, 10%
So I figured out 2% and sent in the card
this year, 5%, next year, 6%, and after, maybe as high as 7%
I mean this in all seriousness
Increasing a pledge to the church can seem huge,
Even by a single, small percentage point
like that time before you have a kid
and you can’t imagine how you’ll manage
But ask yourself
Why does Good Shepherd matter?
Why does this community, here and now, matter to you and to the world?
What life of celebration have you discovered here?
What makes you want to dance with joy?
Have you made friends and connections here
you couldn’t somewhere else?
Have you reached out to someone who needed it?
Have you had someone from the Stephen Ministry
or the food-making ministry show up at your door?
Or received a card in the mail?
Have you talked with someone very different than yourself?
Has this community made an impact on your life?
Why does Good Shepherd matter to you?
Last week, we heard the prophet Ecclesiastes say that
we “will scarcely brood over the days of [our] lives
because God keeps [us] occupied with the joy of [our] hearts.”
And this week, Luke writes in the book of Acts that
the Gospel is “a message that is able to build you up.”
The heart of our community is celebration.
The center of our practice is thanksgiving.
The focus of our lives is love.
later, we’re going to sing a song called “When Love Comes to Town”
—it’s about deep joy in the midst of a broken life,
it’s about God being present in the craziest places
and about love winning out every time.
When love comes to town—when God comes to town—
he won’t be looking for your excuses,
he won’t be wondering how often you’ve been praised
for helping out your fellows
or how well you’ve avoided them,
he won’t be wondering if your theology’s kosher
—mm-umm, no, sir, when love comes to town,
when God comes to town,
he’ll be looking for how we’ve used the gifts we’ve been given,
he’ll be looking for how generously we’ve treated the abused
and the abusers,
he’ll be looking for how we’ve lived out this image of God
we were created in
—mm-hum, yes, sir
love comes to town every day,
God comes to town in every moment
—so you better dance like David and sing like Miriam,
you better write like Paul and shout like Jesus.
And give yourself away like it’s going out of style!

last Sunday's sermon--Colossians 3:1-10

Baruch attah adonai elohenu melech ha-olam. Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of eternity. Amen.
* * *
My husband likes to say he succumbs to the sin of uxoriousness.
That’s the sin of loving your wife more than God.
To which I reply, “thanks?”
Uxoriousness—use it in a sentence today…
This is of course a form of idolatry,
a way to put something else in the place of God,
to make something or someone, in effect, your God.
Lots of things can be idols—golden calves, trophies, a career, money,
…and insert a deeply-felt groan here
because you’ve just realized it’s that time of year again…
It’s time for speeches about how we need your money,
heart-felt speeches saying essentially,
“give it up you tightwads, this stuff ain’t free,
oh and here’s some scripture to make you feel guilty”
that’s right, it’s stewardship season!
So, while we’re being honest about how we feel
about stewardship sermons
let’s be honest about why we don’t give more
—it’s because we come from an attitude of scarcity.
We think we ought to trust God for everything, right?
God’s the Creator and everything,
but what kind of return does God give on a $1000 investment?
What’s the deductible on God’s insurance plan?
No, God’s all right and all, but we need to trust something else,
something tangible or measurable. Something real…
We trust other things, put other things in the place of God
because we don’t think God will be enough
we don’t think there will be enough…whatever…to go around.
Now, I’m not saying we should all stop planning for the future,
but those plans are not God.
That future is usually anything but
what we expect it to be.
It is uncertain and it fills us with fear.
So we plan and worry and save and hoard
and become greedy for what we already have
—God’s promise that it will all be okay
in the end, right? And if it’s not okay…
[it’s not the end]
Here’s an example—
there are two documents in your house,
or on whatever tech device you use,
that will tell me exactly what you care about and what you fear.
They are your credit card statement and your calendar.
One will tell me what you spend your money on
—and what you don’t spend your money on—
and the other what you spend your time on.
These two paint a picture of who you are in the real world,
where your treasure and your heart are.
You might say they’re moral documents
You might say that they show us the idols we worship.
But what does that mean, “the idols we worship”?
What does it mean to worship anything?
Worship is intense devotion of time and energy.
Worship is giving worth—ultimate worth—to something.
Worship shows what comes before anything else in our lives.
Worship involves joy, maybe a tinge of fear, and a sense of awe.
It’s not unlike the devotion we show to sports teams in this town.
Now, I’m not going to lie, my team of choice is amazing
—they go out there and hustle,
they work hard, and they bring home the victory,
so there’s a reason the Cincinnati Rollergirls
are my favorite and that I’ve got tickets
to the next three bouts
—but I don’t worship them.
I used to have very disconcerting conversations
with parents of teenagers
about how their kids couldn’t come to confirmation class
—confirmation class!
Their conscious, adult choice to follow Jesus
Where they’re confirming they’ll try to love God
with all their hearts and souls
and minds and strengths
a class which lasted only 8 weeks—
they couldn’t come because the Bengals were playing
If that isn’t an obvious choice between God and an idol,
I don’t know what is.
No one wants to be called out on idolatry—
it’s uncomfortable, we fight such negative words,
and, really, it’s not us who are the problem
In the Colossians reading today, Paul equates idolatry with being greedy,
and no one wants to be called greedy either…
so we define it away from ourselves.
Greed is something people much richer than we are
have to struggle with.
Greed is extreme, greed is ugly, greed is unnecessary.
We could never be like that.
And this is precisely why folks don’t care for stewardship season—
readings like Colossians
which basically call us out on our inherent self-interest
when the church is also trying to butter us up
to give more money.
Essentially, “You’re a big sinner and you should be ashamed
—but pay up and it’ll be okay.”
Don’t get me wrong, we do some amazing things with the money
—but don’t give because we need it,
give because you need to give your stuff and yourself away,
give because giving removes the temptation
to trust in something not God
give away because you need to know just how filled
your life really is.
Here’s the deal:
whether it’s a little or a lot, acquiring and holding on to wealth
is the lens we see the world through.
Giving away wealth in any amount
is the lens God sees the world through.
We come at things from an attitude of scarcity,
God comes from a posture of abundance.
Let me tell you a story:
several years ago, the Episcopal Diocesan Convention
—Synod Assembly to y’all—was in Columbus.
We’d spent a good portion of the convention talking about money
and what we should do with what we had
—some thought we had too much,
some thought not enough—
typical conversations at convention.
Our closing Eucharist took place in the chapel at my seminary
and the place was packed.
When it came time for the ushers to bring
the offerings of bread, wine, and money forward to the altar,
it was like a comedy of errors.
Two ushers had the three plates of bread
which looked like cartoonish stacks of pancakes
—easily a foot tall each.
There were two enormous cruets of wine.
And the money was the most ridiculous.
I don’t know if someone forgot to get the larger baskets
or if people were particularly generous,
but as the ushers came forwards, the baskets were so full,
dollar bills fell out onto the floor.
They’d stop to pick them up and more would fall out.
They got to the altar and somehow crammed everything
onto the surface
and I could see our bishop just grinning
and saying “marvelous, marvelous.”
And it was.
There was such abundance there that day,
we all could see God’s kingdom right there in front of us—
there’s enough—no, more than enough—to go around.
How wonderful, how marvelous,
how ridiculously generous of God to give us such gifts.
We are far richer than we allow ourselves to believe,
in money, yes, and in talent and in time and in love
—wouldn’t we want to share that?
Wouldn’t we want to offer it to everyone we meet?
Wouldn’t it be a relief to let go of the fear and the scarcity
and the worry and the idolatry and the greed?
Wouldn’t we want to allow the resurrection
—Jesus’ ridiculously generous offer of life—to mean something? Wouldn’t we want to participate in the building of the Kingdom
of justice and mercy and abundance here and now?
Brothers and sisters, this life we’re offered in Jesus
is a celebration of abundance
This worship service every single week is a celebration of abundance
—so let’s party!