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Awesome
Thanks, Marvelous Giving
by the Rev. Rich Smith
November 18, 2007
Isaiah 12
There was once a minister who stepped into the
pulpit and announced to the congregation, “I have three sermons with me
this morning. The first I call the $100 sermon. It’s fifty
pages long. The second is the $1,000 sermon. It’s
twenty-five pages long. And the third is the $10,000 sermon,
which is only four pages. Now, we’ll take the offering and see
which one I preach!”
This morning I have only one sermon, the $600,000
sermon – $600,000 being about the amount we need to raise in pledges to
meet the Trustees’ Challenge Budget for 2008 – and it’s not all
that long. Partly it’s not long because I’ve been sick most of
the week, and about the time I got better our daughter called from
Florida complaining of what turned out to be a ruptured appendix, which
required surgery yesterday – Pam is down there now, and Alison is doing
fine, but I’ve been somewhat preoccupied.
But mostly, I think I can keep this sermon
relatively short, because of my confidence in you – in your love of God
and this church, in your proven generosity of spirit and treasure, in
your ability to rise to a challenge in offering awesome thanks and
marvelous giving.
This is Thanksgiving Sunday, which is always a
special day for those of us who come from the “Congregational” side of
our UCC heritage. We like to think of it as “our” high holy day, owing
to the Thanksgiving meal our Pilgrim forebearers shared in 1621 with
the Wampanoag Indians, who probably brought most of the food. Of
course if you talk to folks from Jamestown, they’ll tell you of the
Berkeley Plantation on the James River where they claim the first
Thanksgiving in America was held on December 4th, 1619....two years
before the Pilgrims' festival....and it’s been re-enacted annually for
the last fifty years. Or, you might want to talk to the Texans
who claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in
little San Elizario, near present-day El Paso, in 1598 -- twenty-three
years before the Pilgrims, when Spanish explorer Juan de Onate arrived
on the banks of the Rio Grande. De Onate is said to have held a big
Thanksgiving festival after leading hundreds of settlers on a grueling
350-mile long trek across the Mexican desert. Whatever,
Thanksgiving is certainly part of our American history and essential to
the American character. And we Congregationalists still claim it!
Of course it’s not uniquely American nor
Congregationalist -- for nearly every culture throughout history has
held harvest festivals where they have given thanks to their gods for
sustaining them, and where they acknowledge, as Barbara Brown Zikmund
reminds us, that “life is not so much an accomplishment as it is a
gift.” We’re all here by the grace of God! And so giving
thanks has been fundamental to our faith since the days of our Hebrew
forbearers. Our lectionary reading from the book of the prophet
Isaiah (“Give thanks to the Lord, Call on God’s name, Make known God’s
deeds among the people”) is actually a psalm. You may have
thought that all of the psalms were in the book of Psalms, but that’s
not the case. You can find them all over the Bible. Psalms
are really hymns - words spoken or sung to God, expressing petition, or
lament, or frequently praise and thanksgiving. This psalm,
placed in the 12th chapter of Isaiah, is significant, not so much for
what it says (after all, it’s much like many other Psalms) but for
where it is found – in the midst of a prophetic book. It was
probably placed there by editors, so that it would come up as the book
was read through in worship, and the connection between Isaiah’s
prophetic words – words which condemned social injustice, which warned
of wars – would be evident. It was a reminder to the ancient
Hebrews of that they were to be about both the work of justice in
society and praise and thanksgiving to God in worship; that their
thanks to God for God’s awesome and marvelous works was to be expressed
in awesome and marvelous giving – giving of praise, giving of time,
talent and treasure to create and sustain a better world, for Thanks is
giving.
So this day is about thanks and it is about giving.
Bill Clinton writes in his new book, Giving: How
Each of us can Change the World, “Like most Americans of my generation,
I first learned about giving in my church where we were taught to
tithe.”
I did too. Actually, my first experience was
with a double tithe! My first allowance was 25 cents a
week. Actually quite a generous one for 1958! But, I only
saw 15 cents of that. 5 cents was withheld by my parents for my
savings account. Another five cents was back out for me to put in
the offering plate at Sunday School, in my own personal child-size
offering envelope. Five cents a week may not seem like much now,
but it would buy a whole candy bar or pack of gum, so it meant
something to me, and as I said, it was a 20% tithe! And that’s
how I first learned about giving.
I also learned about giving in that church I grew up
in, as service to others was a hallmark of our youth activities.
As I have often said I was never asked if I was saved, but I was often
asked if I would serve. And there were many opportunities to serve –
from ministry with migrant farm workers, to the auxiliary at the
retirement home our church built to the annual summer work camp in
Mexico. We worshiped on folding chairs in a building designed to
be the fellowship hall. Facilities for Christian Education built next,
and then the retirement home– and only when youth needs and mission was
addressed was the sanctuary built, nearly 20 years after the church was
founded! The attitude was: serve others first, because Jesus was
“the man for others!”
I learned about giving from the minister at the
church where I was a youth minister in seminary. In the fall
personalized stewardship letters went out, with a line that said,
“Would you consider a gift of____?” And in the blank he had written $2
a week” and off to the side the phrase, “the nerve!” I was being paid
$25 a week, so this was 8%, but I did it.
I learned about giving at my first church in
Tombstone. It had a quaint little sanctuary, with nine stained
glass windows, reflective of the frontier era when the church was
built. The most remarkable thing was that at the bottom of each
of the windows, part of the stained glass itself, was the name
of of the church that had donated that windows - nine in all,
church from New England and the Midwest. It was a weekly reminder
to me that the church existed because of the generosity of others, who
had given to a mission most would never see, to bring the blessings and
benefits of Christ’s church to the “town too tough to die.” One
of the church members, a retired canned food salesman from Indiana
named Charlie – he swore he was the model for “Charlie the Tuna” – told
me how he handled his own benevolent giving to the church and other
good causes. He kept one bank account, but two checkbooks.
Whenever he received any money – pension, social security, dividend –
he would enter 90% of the amount in one of the check registers, and 10%
in the other. He lived off the 90% one, and always had plenty of
money in the other one for his marvelous giving.
I learned about giving in my next church, in
California, when in a single week I had two conversations with
different members about their giving habits. One derived most of
her income from her Social Security check and a small savings
account. I think it came to $10,000 a year. She really
wanted to tithe, to give away 10%. She told me about her father, who in
the midst of the Great Depression would come home on Saturday evening
after six hard days working at a job he knew he was lucky to have, and
he would count out $1.50 to put in the offering plate the next morning
– this out of the $15 he had earned for the week! This
memory stayed with her, but it was getting harder and harder with
expenses going up faster than her income, so she settled for $800 a
year, but didn’t feel good about it. She wanted to make up for it
so she left her house to the church when she died. The other
conversation was with a man who owned his own business, and he told me
he cleared $100,000 a year, pretty good for the mid-1980's. To
him tithing was unthinkable, since that would mean giving away
$10,000. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t live on
$90,000. But it at least was anecdotal evidence for what I’d
always heard, that proportionally, the poor give more than the
rich. Not everyone is like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, who plan
to give away the bulk of their vast fortunes before they die; or Rick
Warren of California’s Saddleback Church, whose Purpose Driven Life has
brought in so much money that he’s become a “reverse tither”, giving
away 90% and living on 10. The more you have, the more you seem
to need. But I learned something positive about giving and about
faith from the lady who only received $10,000 a year and gave away so
very much! And about the important of “percentage giving”which is
so very biblical!
I learned about giving from the church I served in
Tucson. When I arrived in 1994, they wanted to use a new stewardship
program developed by the UCC (aren’t we always looking for a new
stewardship program?) called “Consecrating Stewards” where the
emphasis, the motivation for giving, was not on the church and its
needs but the giver’s need to be a giving person. The first time
we tried it, giving went up 30%! A feature of that program is one
that we have kept here – the Consecration Sunday pilgrimage to the
chancel to publicly before God and everyone place the pledges in the
basket and receive a personal blessing. It taught me that giving
is what makes us who we are as Christians, and we would need to do that
whether or not the church needed it. We’re hard-wired for
it. Of course, some mess with the wiring, and soon discover that
the relationship between “miser” and “misery” is more than etymological
I also learned about giving from that church when
they voted to sell their beautiful downtown facilities and relocate, in
order to reach and include people in the growing east side of
town. People who had paid for and built the buildings knew that
the church was more than buildings, and some who knew that they would
not be able to attend a church 13 miles farther away made the sacrifice
on behalf of the future, for those who were not there yet.
And I have learned bout giving, awesome thanks and
marvelous giving, from this church – the first church I’ve ever been
part of that takes its Christmas and Easter offerings, and all the
profits from its annual bazaar, and gives it all away! Most
churches I know depend on Christmas Eve to balance the budget at the
end of the year. While it might help here, it would be contrary
to the spirit by which we have ordered our common life together, which
makes outreach, justice, giving ourselves away a cornerstone of who we
are. In the same way we have regularly given away all the
proceeds from our concert series to important causes, and one of the
things that attracted me here was the use of the arts in support of
social justice. It was awesome and marvelous! Since then I
have seen this play itself out all over the life of this church.
The stories I hear from the “pillars in the pulpit” are humbling. The
amount of time you volunteer both here and beyond is staggering.
The talents you share are amazing.
Finally, I have learned about giving from my
children! During their high school years each worked in the food
service industry, making and delivering pizzas, hostessing at
restaurants, and so on. It had several effects. It lowered
our food bills, since they were always eating at work, no small benefit
when you have teenagers. It broadened their palates, as they
tried all sorts of new foods. And it turned them into extravagant
tippers! For them, the standard 15% was quite meager, and they
convinced me that 20 or even 25% was not out of line; that the dollar
or two it would take would mean a lot more to the recipient than to
me. So they’ve taught me, and you know, it feels good to leave a
substantial tip, it really does. It feels good to say thanks, and
to be a giver.
But you already know that. And so whether this
is a $600,000 sermon or not, I know you will respond, not to me, but to
God – God who is a giver, God who in the words of Isaiah’s psalm,
continues to uphold us and do gloriously. I know we will all
respond to God with awesome thanks and marvelous
giving!
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Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
Westmoreland Circle
Bethesda, MD 20816
301-229-7766
Email the church office: churchinfo@westmorelanducc.org
www.westmorelanducc.org
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Open and Affirming Congregation
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