Sermon in a Box
The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary
Exodus 20 Psalm 133
October 2, 2005
It exactly ten years ago, this weekend, that I first met the youth group at SPC. Friday, September 30, Saturday, October.1, Sunday, October. 2. World Communion Sunday. Peacemaking Sunday. 1995.
I drove my 1979 Chevy Monza across the Verrazano Bridge and along the LIE, pulled into the church parking lot and parked next to the first set of bushes out there near the light pole. My Monza was a gift from my grandfather, the best car manufactured n 1979, and it had seen me through college, my cross country move to seminary, and got me here for the first time (though by then the car didn’t have even one more week left in it, and never saw Setauket again). I jumped out of my car and jumped right into a waiting van, climbed in the back seat and sat beside Nick Mocas, a seventh grader I believe, and took my first trip up to the Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center in Holmes, New York to climb the high ropes with the junior high.
It was my first weekend working for this church. It was a youth retreat. And it was my birthday.
The youth group threw me a party that weekend, celebrating my 26th birthday. Beverly Campbell and Kathy Coen made me a cake, with candles, and I still have the birthday card that the kids made me. It was the first thing I put in my desk when I finally moved to Setauket, and it was among the last things I took out of that old desk when I replaced it this summer with a gently used desk donated to the church by Paul and Mildred Leedom as they downsized their home. (Hold up the card) All of the kids who signed this first birthday card have graduated from college by now, and I’m still in touch with many of them. But perhaps my favorite were the two young girls, best of friends, who wrote “Happy Birthday New Guy.”
I was not yet ordained, and so the youth group did not celebrate the sacrament of holy communion that Sunday. I believe it was the only World Communion Sunday I had missed since I was very young. When the weekend was over, I hopped back in my Monza and returned to New Jersey. Noelle and I moved to Setauket the following week, and settled in the manse.
Last weekend, while I was on my now eleventh junior high retreat up at the Presbyterian Camp at Holmes, the youth group threw me another birthday party. But they also surprised me with a celebration of my first ten years of ministry. I don’t know if I showed it at the time, but I was incredibly touched. The youth advisors gave me a gift, an Associate Pastor’s Emergency Kit. Inside were gifts that exemplify the kind of ministry the youth, and their families, and I have shared together.
(Begin holding up items from the box) Several items are inside jokes within the youth group. But other reflect how well they know me.
✚ Knowing my love of Halloween, ghost stories and all things scary, they gave me a cd of ‘very scary music” labeled “for meditation.”
✚ A Starbucks card labeled “for late night sermon writing.”
✚ Tickets to Loews movie theater labeled “for sermon research” which those of you who remember my sermons on Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, on Harry Potter and on the film Kingdom Of Heaven will understand. Coming later this fall: a sermon on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
✚What perhaps touched me the most, was an envelope labeled “for Counseling”. Inside was a gift certificate to Magic Sundaes Ice Cream. Many of the kids know that I think peanut butter goes with any flavor of ice cream, but it’s clear to me that they also know that over ice cream I have discussed first kisses, the death of grandparents, good books, loneliness, and college applications and the war in Iraq.
✚ And, appropriately, emergency communion supplies,
There were many more items than these. Only when the weekend was over did I open the box again, and I wept, because the contents were not only a vision of my way of life, my way of living my faith, of giving shape to the intersecting practices that together give my ministry meaning. In this box are symbols of our life together as a congregation. In this sense, they gave me a sermon in a box.
Take the Starbucks card again. On Friday morning, my day off, I took some of my school work down to Starbucks to read. And I ran into a few women from our church, one of whom is going through a divorce. She shared with us how difficult is can be to come to worship and look at the place where she and her husband exchanged vows together. But as we talked, we saw this same space as the place where she had received her bible in third grade, where her children were baptized, where she had read scripture on Sunday mornings, and her children had acted in the Christmas pageants on Christmas eves. This also the place where we blessed her decision to divorce. This is a place where time and again she had come for memorial services to meet familiar faces and say goodbye to friends. Familiar faces that had seen her laugh, and cry, and hope, and pray, here. Had witnesses her ups and downs, her good times and not so good times, here. Her entire life is invested here.
What we find in our church life is not anything that we can’t find elsewhere. If you sit in Starbucks long enough and listen in on enough conversations you hear that we all want the same thing: we search for meaning, struggle to forgive ourselves and others, need good friends, share the desire to be known for who we are, who we truly are, to have honest conversation, and we hope for a better world. But these hopes and desires take on a particular pattern when we bring them here. Here, our hope is a prayer, our prayer helps us hear God, and our understanding of God lets us know our place in the world and how our gifts and passions meet the worlds need. The struggle to forgive is spoken in the same place we grieve our losses, our passions for justice and our actions for a better world are offered in the same space we welcome children into the community and offer hospitality to the stranger, our desire to be known is shared by others with whom we break bread. It is the patterning, the weaving together of these practices, and our relating them all to God’s love for us, that makes our lives distinctly Christian.
When we live these practices of Christian faith, we join together with Jesus, one another, and a great cloud of witnesses in a way to live that brings abundant life – Life with a capital L – life for creation, for other people, and for ourselves.
When we live this way, we don’t just get what we need to survive, but there is abundance - right relation, cup running over, oil running down Aaron’s beard abundance - it is in risking our entire lives in order to be part of such a justice shaped community that we receive God’s abundant life.
Last weekend I shared with the youth group this advice from the Apostle Paul:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life — your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life — and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God. Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Romans 12. Paraphrased by Eugene Peterson.
Let me make explicit what has been implicit so far.
This is a sermon on stewardship. The first actually of
three sermons on Stewardship. Christian stewardship is about the choices we make, choices that
reveal the role of faith in one’s life. The choices we make - the vacation we plan or the music we listen
to and the things we choose to buy- are about how we understand God’s world and our place in it. These
choices affect how we interact with others. Stewardship is how lives are lived in God’s world and how we
use our gifts from God.
Stewardship begins in worship, where our everyday life, our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, walking-around life - receives its unique pattern. This church is only a church because God has brought us together with a vision: a vision of love in service to the world and to each other in the name of Jesus Christ who sustains us and guides us. Our church lives not on money but on hope. We worship each Sunday because it is this community which has become God’s hand upon ours during the week. If we pray for growth it is not so that we will be a mega-church glistening on the green but so that we have facilities through which this ministry to the world can live.
So, since this is the first of our stewardship sermons, let me ask you to hold on to your money. And your offerings. Don’t fill out your pledge card yet. Let’s first agree that this money will not go to support an institution. Yes it will help pay for the upkeep of this building. Yes, some will help larger denominational projects. Yes, some will go toward paying my salary. But know one thing. This church is not about ritual for the sake of ritual, or an institution for the sake of an institution. We do not want you offering if you decide to give money in place of your heart to God. We are not in the business of soothing guilty souls through exchanges of cash. This is not a place of business, but a temple of God. We do not make large donations a requirement for membership. Nor will we cajole our greatest donors through prestige and attention. We will not refuse communion or Church School or pastoral care to anyone, ever.
And then let us commit to share the love of Christ with integrity and abundance. Let use our spiritual and material resources to spread the love of Christ. Let us also, without shame offer our money to God. Let us give without hesitancy to the activity of God’s Church because we trust the church.
Or do we? That is the crux of financial stewardship, isn’t it, whether we trust the church? Do we trust the church not only with our spiritual life, but with the tangible stuff? With the check which assures me and my family groceries and a roof over our heads, and a college fund for my child? It would be one thing if God got the money direct, but to work through an intermediary is another thing.
If you were going to invest your money, how would you go about choosing who would manage it? Well, you’d probably read the company’s literature, you’d ask some friends and experts what they think, you’d stop by and meet the people who will be managing your money, you should examine their social responsibility index, and look at the track record to see how effectively this group has invested.
Well, I’m inviting you to do the same thing with Setauket Presbyterian Church in the next few weeks. Read our newsletter, talk to people in our community about the church, join us in making dinner for the soup kitchen or writing a letter to save our homeless shelter. Pray with me. Take the hand of the person next to you and listen to their story of how God has moved in this church to transform their life. Then remember with them how God has worked through this community to comfort you, to heal you, to encourage you.
I know this is a crass analogy. The church is not just another non-profit organization that will “do good things with your money”. Our investments in the church are investments in a way of life, a way of life that is produced, not consumed. But I’m not asking you to invest in the church, I’m asking you to think about how you are already deeply invested in this community. For I am confident that in the remembering, in the telling, in the praying and in the caring, you will become aware of the trust you have already placed in this community and the trust we place in you. And in the weeks ahead, come. Come trust God is working through this community once more. Come with a portion of your harvest. Come with a tenth of your income. Come with confidence and hope and lay your gifts and pledges on this same table from which we receive the sacrament of communion, the sacrament of connection, of world community, the sacrament of peace. The sacrament of our everyday life - our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - transformed by God’s grace.