Today's Sermon on Baptism/Stewardship

Any Sunday which a congregation has the opportunity to celebrate baptism is certainly a day to rejoice. The fact that baptism is something to be celebrated is by far one of the strangest things we do as followers of Jesus Christ. The words which are spoken in the baptismal liturgy are not ones to be taken lightly. We say that in the sacrament of baptism, “through grace and the power of the Holy Spirit, we are united with Christ, cleansed by his saving work, enter into the fellowship of the church, and are called to a life of faith and willing obedience.” This is a statement which if lived out, means that we are not called to live the life or an ordinary person. We are called to be different from those who seek lives of wealth, lives of place and power. Instead, we are called to lives of sacrifice, lives of service, lives of stewardship.

If this is the case, then you might be wondering why we’re using a gospel text which is traditionally used to talk about taxes. Countless sermons have been preached on “Render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.” Now of course we don’t have a Caesar today, but we can easily substitute the word government or president. When these sermons are preached, we tend to applaud Jesus’ wisdom in a moment of confrontation. Unfortunately, this is where the bulk of sermons seem to end, on feeling ok about giving what we need to the powers that be.

I wish we had a recording of Jesus answering those who were trying to trap him. Because I think Jesus paused for dramatic effect when he said “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” I think he paused so that the full force of the conclusion of his words would be felt by everyone listening. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s… and to God what is God’s.” “While there is a strict parallelism between the two halves of this statement, they are by no means of equal significance, because Caesar’s role is so vastly inferior to God’s. That is, Jesus is not saying, ‘There is a secular realm and there is a religious realm, and equal respect must be paid to each.’ The second half of Jesus’ statement practically annuls the first by preempting it.”[1] Yet rarely do we focus on giving to God what is God’s.

Why is this so? Why is it difficult to focus on giving God what is God’s? I mean, I’m pretty sure everyone in this room can give the answer of what belongs to God. It’s taught to us in Sunday school. EVERYTHING belongs to God. Because our answer as Christians is engrained into the way we already think, we sometimes lose the fact that the concept of giving to God what belongs to God is a call for total commitment unlike anything the rest of the world has ever known.[2]

The fact that we have the word God on our money has done us a great disservice in our stewardship of the things that are God’s. Somehow we assume that because God’s name is printed on it, that money is really all we need to give. But, my brothers and sisters, money is not what it is that is stamped with God’s image. It’s us! It’s You and it’s me! When we say everything is God’s, it is not something we can do in part. We cannot give our minds but not our hearts. We cannot give God our muscle but not come to worship or education classes. We can’t simply give God an hour or two a week. God longs for us to give everything. All 168 hours per week. While many of us give only 2% of our income, others 10% of it, God desires 100%.[3]

For me, the most interesting part of this Gospel text today is not the fact that Jesus is so clever as to avoid the trappings of those who would cause him harm, but that Jesus isn’t taking part in the whole financial system that Rome would have everyone be in. Neither Jesus nor his followers pulled out a Roman coin to help make the point Jesus was trying to make. When Jesus and the disciples practiced stewardship (giving everything to God and not partaking in the prevalent economy), they had to sacrifice (disciples leaving their families and friends); they had to serve others, even when they didn’t want to (Jesus had them serve the 5000 when the disciples wanted to send them away).

This type of stewardship, this type of sacrifice, this type of service begins during our Baptism. A few minutes ago, all of you proclaimed that you were baptized into the death of Jesus. Your old selves were buried with him in your baptism, when you repented of your sins, so that we might be raised to live a new life. Not only that, but you were reminded that through your baptism, you were placed in a covenant relationship, not only with God, but with the rest of the people who have made the same commitment. Every Sunday I have the privilege of leading worship and I get to look out into the pews and see the worshipping faces of a hundred people who are connected by the baptismal covenant. That connection is stronger than death because that baptismal covenant is life! It is Love! And every day we get to show love to the world around us through our stewardship of everything God has entrusted to us. In the multitude of ways in which we serve one another, in how we sacrifice ourselves for our neighbor because Christ did everything for us already.

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[1] Douglas R.A. Hare. “Matthew: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching.” John Knox Press, Louisville. 1993. Pg 254.

[2] Ibid pg 255.

[3] Brian Stoffregen. Exegetical Notes. (Available online) http://www.crossmarks.com/brian/matt22x15.htm

UniMix!

I lead our Wednesday night service today. This season of Lent we have been going over the Lord's Prayer and today's topic was "Give us this day our Daily Bread". Having just completed this years 30 hour famine sponsored by World Vision (http://www.wvi.org/wvi/wviweb.nsf/) I thought it would be neat to speak a bit about what millions of starving people eat every day. In the 30 hour famine leadership guide, it has a recipe for something called UniMix, which is as follows.

40% Beans -- mashed. (I used 4 cans of Navy Beans)
30% Corn meal. (I used 3 cans)
10% Vegatable Oil (1 can)
10% Sugar (1 can)
10% Powered Milk (1 can)
Add water as necessary till it has an oatmeal/porridge like consistancy.

I then divided it up into 2 oz containers and gave them out to taste during a part of the liturgy. One person got up out of the pews to drink some water. I must admit that it doesn't taste very good. Heck, even the recipe says it isn't going to taste like what we are used to. A bunch of people made excuses for not eating it. Others just said they weren't up for that type of adventure.

All in all, I think we do a poor job of asking God to provide us with what we need on a daily basis. We really don't want to be in unity with our brothers and sisters in Africa because it would mean giving up a lifestyle we have grown comfortable with.

One of the questions that was asked today is "How do we go about giving up the things we don't really need?" I don't have an answer really, but I do remember a quote I read recently, although I don't remember who said it. It was, "it is far easier to give things up in big steps than small ones." I don't know how much truth there is in that statement, but I think you have to try it to find out.

Christ the King Sermon

Anyone care to guess at the most well known Shakespeare quote of all time? “To be or not to be” is one of the questions which seem to speak to the very nature of who we are. It speaks about life itself.

This week is Christ the King Sunday. During worship, we are to celebrate the reign of Christ. It can be celebrated in a number of fashions. One might understand this celebration in the future tense, that Christ WILL BE king after Armageddon or whichever end times scenario one might chose to believe and then a new world is created. Or you can celebrate this day as Christ was the King of the Jews… giving place and power to what he accomplished during his lifetime on earth. Or perhaps you can celebrate the day as it is written, without a tense…Christ THE King. Just leave it at that and not give it much thought.

But to simply do any one of these is an offense to the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of life.
My roommate during my second year of Seminary is one of my best friends. One afternoon while we were writing papers, he frantically called me into his room. As I rushed down the hall, I saw him jumping up and down at his window, looking at the sorority house across the street. Two Jehovah’s witnesses, dressed in their traditional white shirt and black pants, were on our neighbor’s porch talking to four or five girls. You could tell by their body language that they were not looking to convert that day, and we presumed that these two men would be stopping at our house next.

We rushed downstairs to the living room to our big bay window and peered excitedly out the window. If you haven’t caught on already, this is a seminary student’s dream… Two unsuspecting people trying to convert you walking into the home of two theologically trained students. It’s the thing dreams are made of. Never in my life have I been so excited about a theological conversation. When we saw the two men leave the sorority house without getting past the porch, my roommate and I fixed the curtains and pretended to watch a TV that wasn’t on, waiting patiently for the knock on our door. Tony was frantically tapping his foot and I had already chewed off three fingernails in the excitement. A minute passed and still there was no knock at our door. We both looked out the window only to find that they had crossed the street and were getting into their car and driving away. Tony and I were heart broken. We had, in two short minutes, prepared for the biggest event of our seminary careers. Neither of us got any work done the rest of that day and we never brought up the moment again.

Then, in early September of this year, I called my former roommate, who had moved back to North Carolina, to see how he was doing. He told me that a few days ago; two other Jehovah’s witnesses had come to his door. It didn’t turn out to be as exciting as what we had originally hoped for that afternoon, but it did make him stop and do a bit more research about the trinity. (In case you didn’t know, Jehovah’s witness’ believe that Jesus was not God, but just a holy man.) Well, Tony looked up in his Greek bible one particular verse from Matthew 28. Verse 19 says “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” And Tony told me that when we look at the Greek text, we see that the Holy Spirit and Jesus are things belonging to God. It is similar to saying my arm is its own separate thing, but it is still a part of my overall body. A different part of the same essence. God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are different parts of the same thing.

Now, the question you must all ask yourself is why did I just spend the last five minutes explaining the concept of the trinity on a day which should focus mainly on Christ the King? Every English teacher knows the answer to this question. It is because Christ the King is not a complete sentence. It needs a verb…it needs action.

I told you that story because calling Christ, and by proxy, God, a king severely limits the true essence of the divine. Calling Christ merely a king usurps the power of the Holy. One whose power is displayed in weakness; glory in humility and exaltation in transforming suffering[1]. Instead, there is only one time in the whole Bible where we learn the true essence of the trinity and the answer, surprisingly, does NOT come from Jesus, but instead it is God speaking to Moses. When Moses speaks to the burning bush and asks the name of God, the reply is simply “I AM.” The answer that humanity first receives from God is not Father, King, servant, lamb, or shepherd. Those are all useful names, but they are not the true being of God. Instead of using names, nouns, if you will… we must realize that we belong to a God of action. We belong to a verb. God says “I AM” because it opens up an infinite amount of possibilities to which we have very few words for. When we speak of God or Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit, we are speaking to all that is within the realm of possibility. When we say God is love, God responds with “I AM love.” When we say God is hope, God replies with “I AM Hope.” When we say God is justice, God replies with “I AM Justice.” When we say God is peace, God exclaims “I AM Shalom”.
What action do you associate with when you are in the presence of the Holy? When you take off your shows and stand in front of the burning bush, what words does your heart place in your mouth?

Right now, I would like you to stand if you are able and as I speak the words which God spoke to Moses, I invite you to then fill in the rest with the responses that your heart gives. Feel free to repeat a response if that is what you feel called to respond with as the same word for a different person has many different meanings. If your heart doesn’t lead you to any words, it is always acceptable to stand quietly in humble adoration.
I AM...
I AM...
I AM...
I AM...
I AM WHO I AM says God.
So be it.
[1] Otto Dreydopple Jr. Back of Moravian Bulletins for Sunday, November 25, 2007.

The Difficulty of Faith ~ July 22, 2007

The first word that Abraham hears from God is the word leave. Leave your home, leave your country, leave your family, leave everything you have ever known to be true in your whole life. Leave, for an unknown land, and I will then make your family great. Abraham gets this message when he is 75 years old. He doesn’t get a visit from God either, he just hears a voice. If this happened today, most of us would probably just dismiss Abraham as a crazy old man. We would say that he should be put in an old folks home. We’d say all sorts of strange things about him, the people that knew him probably laughed at such a notion, that Abraham was going to follow the voice that was in his head is absurd. There is only one thing more absurd than telling people that you believe God is talking to you, and that is acting on it. How many of us actually act on the strange thoughts that run through our heads? Even if we think about acting on some of the things we think about, we run them by other people, making sure that our ideas aren’t as crazy as they might seem. Abraham doesn’t do this. He just accepts the fact that God is going to make him the father of all generations.

This is when we pick up in the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah. Sarah is almost 100 years old and has still not born any children for her husband. Obviously, she believes that she cannot have a child, and quite frankly, who can blame her? Is there anyone in this room today over the age of 60 that would still want to do all the work that comes with having a child? My guess is that very few of you, if any, would want such a thing. The faith that had originally sustained Abraham and Sarah was long gone. So much so that when this stranger stops by to visit, they laugh at him, they laugh at the idea that the God they once believed in would actually fulfill the promise made so many years ago. It is my guess that Abraham and Sarah didn’t actually believe the stranger until she started to show the signs of pregnancy. And understandably so, because as we grow older, we think that we are wise enough to know when someone is telling the truth or not.

This is the difficulty of faith. That faith used to fill us, and yet, as we age, it seems to disappear from view. It is quite similar to when we are children, believing in something like Santa Klaus or the Easter Bunny. At a young age, we are naïve enough to believe anything we are told. Then as we grow older, when we have had more experience at all that life has to offer, we become jaded, so much so that we start to not believe anything that we once thought might have been true. Have you ever gotten to the point where not only do you not have faith in something, but you begin to believe that anyone who believes in it is disillusioned? I’m pretty sure that this is what Abraham and Sarah were feeling. They know that God keeps most promises, but maybe one or two are forgotten, or perhaps fulfilled in different ways, like Hagar bearing Abraham’s first child. Maybe the promise changed, maybe it wasn’t meant to be, so many different maybes, that they were not sure what to believe.

When I look at the situation with Abraham and Sarah, I am reminded of our Moravian church and the long history that we have had. As the oldest protestant church in the world, we have been around quite a long time. In most non Moravian circles, we are described as a church that was important a pretty long time ago, but in modern times, seems to be pretty irrelevant. Sure, we have moments of goodness, we do some good out in the community, we have some mission work, but we aren’t anywhere close to where the church was when Zinzendorf was around. We are missing something that the church once had, and I think that thing is faith.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with your pastor about this congregation. He was telling me about all of you, and about how loving a congregation this is. We spoke of his hopes for the congregation as Gordy will be ending his interim position. When I was reflecting back on our conversation for this sermon, I realized that as a whole, most of our churches are filled with loving people, we have a lot of hope for the future of the church, but something tells me that we are generally lacking in the faith department.

That begs the question, what is faith? Earlier in the liturgy we made a profession of faith, saying that we believe in God, the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. We professed belief in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, all things that we as Christians must have faith in. To me, it seems that we have gotten too comfortable with the thought that saying those words together means that we have faith. What good is a public profession of faith if we are only doing it in the presence of fellow Christians? While it does have some good, I must say, believing that such a statement is sufficient to call us people of faith is misleading.

True faith though, is more than a statement, but it something I have found extremely difficult to define in words. One of my favourite quotes on faith is from William Sloane Coffin. He writes in his book Credo: "I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings." That is the essence of what Abraham and Sarah do in the story today, they took a leap at the age of 75, and it took them nearly 25 years before they grew those wings. Abraham showed that faith is more than words, it is an action. That leads us to take a look at everything we do in our lives and see if it is something we are doing out of faith or something we are doing merely because we ought to do it. Are we walking off cliffs and letting our wings bring us down, or are we merely taking the stairs down, descending at our own pace? One of my favourite stories about the early Moravian mission movement is how the missionaries who came to the Caribbean islands brought very little with them, but when they did bring something, one of the few things they took with them was their headstone. That, my brothers and sisters, is a faith that very few of us are living today.

I wish that I could tell you that such a faith is possible if we just pray for it to happen. Of course we need to pray for such a dynamic faith everyday. But just because we pray for it doesn’t mean we simply receive it.

About few weeks ago, I was listening to the radio and heard the following quote. This person said that when we pray for something like patience, we do not simply get our patience meter refilled so that the next time we are in a tough situation, we will not be anxious, instead, God when we pray for patience, God grants us more situations for us to be patient in, thus learning as we go. I believe that the same is true of faith, we do not simply receive faith every time we pray for it, but instead, God grants us more times for us to radically live out the faith that we profess.

This last January, we had a class on Evangelism where we did a little bit of role playing. If any of the church members are here who went to the last synod meeting, you’ll remember what I’m talking about. Two people were given a situation in which one person could attempt to show their faith by talking to the person across from them. My friend got the role of playing a poor person on the bus who was asking for money, and I was the person who he was going to ask. Apparently, the scene was supposed to take place with me giving the person only a few dollars, maybe the spare change from my pocket, and then hoping he would go away. Instead, I pulled out my wallet and without looking at what was in there, pulled out a hundred dollar bill. Now, I knew it was a hundred dollars because of where I keep my money in my wallet, but completely threw my friend off guard. Now, perhaps I only gave him the money because I knew I would be getting it back, or because I wanted to impress my friends by whipping out a hundred dollar bill. I wish that I could tell you that I was carrying that much money when someone came up to me and really needed it, but I can’t do that. But I do know that someday, when someone does ask me for something, when God shows me an opportunity to live out my faith, that I am able to give more than just the spare change in my pocket, that I am willing to do something big, to do something reckless, that my faith in Christ comes through.

In the coming days, weeks and months, allow for God to speak to you. Allow God to guide you in a way in which you are uncertain of the outcome. Allow yourself to leap without looking. Next time a stranger asks you for money, think less about how they might spend it on booze and think more about how your generosity will shock what they think about Christians. Living our lives as people of faith is difficult. Abraham and Sarah did it, even in their old age. I’m pretty sure that we can do the same thing if we simply see the opportunity in front of us. Amen.