Mary's song is a stewardship song
(The following sermon has been posted due to repeated requests to make it available.)
Mary's Song, Our Song
A stewardship sermon from Luke 1:46-55
An American Baptist seminary professor once helped me understand how easy it is to identify a thriving congregation. He showed me how to listen for the kind of dominant story a congregation tells when it is asked to describe itself. The three types of stories are:
1. Stories about God.
2. Stories about programs.
3. Stories about people.
Congregations that readily and easily talk about God tend to demonstrating their vitality. Congregations that talk about programs tend to be stagnant and have lost touch with the "why" of what they are doing. Congregations that talk about people are usually talking about people who once were part of the congregation and tend to be congregations that are in decline.
We need to appreciate what it means to be part of a congregation that is getting in touch with the God stories in their midst--pointing to them and let them be told.
I was privileged to be part of a community like this. My parents and the other adults in our congregation invested heavily in their children to make sure we developed a faith we could rely on. They weren't so much interested that we would preserve their ways of doing things in the congregation, as much as would take hold of and advance the work of the gospel. Now I have raised my own children in communities of faith and helped them develop and advance their own faith--in ways I hope will get invest in yet another generation of Christians. When I was younger I did not understand how rare are communities like these, and how digiligently we must work to maintain them. But it is among them that God gets a lot of work done.
Mary was part of a community like this. She was very young, perhaps just past menarche. She definitely had little life experience beyond her childhood instruction. And yet, this immersion in a community of faith provided significant preparation for her to absorb the angel's announcement that she would give birth to Emmanuel. Even more, this background fuels the song she sings, because Hannah's song, sung so many hundreds of years before, influences Mary's own perspective and the song she sings. Hannah's God is Mary's God.
Just as Hannah believed, Mary sings of a God who:
1. performs mighty deeds.
2. scatters those who are proud in the heart of their thoughts.
3. brings down rulers from their thrones.
4. lifts up those who are humble.
5. fills the hungry with good things.
6. sends the rich away empty.
This is no narcissistic teen, focused solely on how the news affects her. She views her pregnancy in light of human history and the history of God's interaction with his people. I have a couple of nieces who are in this age group. I ask myself, how has their family and their communities of faith prepared them to be awed by the work of God, to want to participate in it, and to recognize it when it comes to them?
******
Anyone who works with me for a time knows I spend a great deal of time thinking about giving and how we teach people to be generous. This is because I've learned that when we are baptized our wallets get baptized too. Our life with money touches everything about us and demonstrates who we really are. This is why a key teaching of Jesus is that we cannot serve God and money.
When we understand this, we give all of ourselves to God as God gives all to us. This is Mary's response to God. Seeing it helps me commit anew to respond in the same way and to invite others to live in Mary's company. It also strengthens my conviction that our life with money is often what gets in the way.
I'm privileged to be part of a book project where several of us who have written and taught on these matters for an extended period of time have been invited to condense our work into a single chapter--as if this was the only thing anyone would ever read. Here are some excerpts from my contribution that speak to this subject (The book is titled A Stewardship Primer and is due out next April):
The word stewardship gets a lot more play in our conversation than does the word steward.
Stewardship is now used more widely in secular speech and for secular meanings than it is to convey a spiritual mission or motivation. In regular conversation stewardship tends to mean something that the speaker thinks is an appropriate use of a resource under their care, and is often used as a means to justify their choice.
It is not the word stewardship that is central to this conversation but the word steward. In the scriptures, the word steward is the title and names the role the Christian is to play.
A Christian is a steward of the gospel
The gospel for which the Christian is a steward is the good news that God forgives sin and made a restored relationship with humans possible by the gift of God in Jesus Christ.
This gospel is cared for through two key actions: 1) obedience to the Great Commission by inviting others to accept the forgiveness God offers, and 2) living the Great Commandment to love God with all one's heart, soul, mind and strength and to love neighbor as self (In the Good Samaritan parable, Jesus defines a neighbor as one's enemy, even the person against whom one is deeply prejudiced, certainly the one who has been harmed and ignored by others).
The steward of the gospel does these things because the steward believes if they do not, then what they compete against will win. And the steward competes against what would lay hold of and destroy others: warmongering, slavery, famine, natural disaster, family destruction, political animosity, multi-generational ethnic hatred, genocide, unchecked greed, hatred of self, bigotry, oppression and disease. These are a few of the steward's hideous competitors.
Money, time, talent, one's network of relationships, a person's body, one's spirituality, their vocation, any leadership role they may play in an organization or society, and any other endowment attributed to God's handiwork are tools for the life of a person pledged to be a steward of the gospel in the face of this horrific competition.
Money, in particular, is a most potent and powerful tool for the life of the steward. Money must be wrestled into place as a servant of the Master or it becomes the master we serve. When money becomes the master our hideous competitors win.
Jesus Christ, whom all little Christs follow, tells us money has a god-like power (Matthew 6:24). Money has a god-like power because:
1. Money outlives you. It was here before you got here and will pass from you to others once you are gone.
2. Money has a greater circle of influence than you do. It goes places you cannot go and fosters accomplishments beyond your capacity. Possessing money grants a person increased capacity to go and accomplish. Money provides possibility.
3. Money is mysterious. Its qualities and capacities cannot be fully known. Economic models are nothing more than weather forecasting, with ever more refined guesses exposing just how much more we do not yet know about the dynamics of money. All financial advisors and economic advisors can do is postulate. They fastidiously avoid pronouncements. They fail even more spectaularly than they succeed.
Consider the summary of every testimony of key economic advisors on Capitol Hill--those persons widely considered to be the most knowledgeable on the subect. They say "This could happen, but so could that." They cannot confidently assert anything beyond the fact they really do not know.
4. Money dwells in the realm of what we are tempted to worship. Humans worship what they believe to be eternal, powerful and mysterious. Essentially the first three items of this list.
Most of western culture has ceased the worship of natural forces or government leaders or fertility, because although we may be in subjection to them we think we know how they work. They are deities to us no longer and no longer live in the realm of what we worship. We might not sacrifice children to make hurricanes go away any longer, but we still sacrifice the well-being of children in pursuit of wealth. We do not pray to the fertility gods any more, but we spend gargantuan amounts of money for sexual performance enhancing drugs. We no longer have a death cult, but we want the lowest possible health insurance premiums even if it means shutting others with preexisting conditions out of the benefit pool.
Money still lives in this realm of what we worship. We are sorely tempted to offer ourselves to it whether we possess money or not. Far too many pledge their lives to money, sacrifice spouses, children or personal integrity to possess it, or place themselves in thrall to their next paycheck because they spend what they have not yet earned.
5. Money mimics everything God promises in the New Jerusalem. The descriptions of the city and society God builds (see Isaiah 65 and Revelation 19-21) are full of references to economic sufficiency, meaningful existence and personal well-being. The difference between God's promised new society and the pull of money in today's society is that we wait for the promise of God's eternal benefits, while money provides a right now fix. Consider these three examples:
* Why hope for a mansion in heaven when I can buy/build the house of my dreams with enough money?
* What benefit is there in waiting for a resurrection body when enough money buys the cosmetics and body sculpting to have that body now?
* Why pray to God for the health of my child when money pays for the prescription she needs?
When money is plentiful, one's hope is too easily rooted in the here and now rather than in aspirations for future generations or life eternal. Another way to say this is we pray for what we cannot pay for.
6. Money is an instrument we wield. Money is a sharp-bladed instrument, destroying or healing, often doing both with the same stroke.
Consider the image of a scalpel or a soldier's bayonet. Both bring destruction. Both hold the hope of making a better way in the future. When they are employed, the outcome is unknown. More often than not, trauma and healing get linked with no capacity to separate them. This is one way we know we live in a fallen world. Evil has adhered itself to the good.
Money's capacity to simultaneously bless and curse means the good we hope to accomplish for ourselves, our families, our vocation and even for our congregations are rife with ripples of harm we cannot always see. Whether we use money or refrain from using it, we cannot avoid living in the economic realm, having impact upon it, or having an inability to control the outcomes. Each dollar we spend or save quivers with the potential to bring joy or grief. More often than not, both happen at the same time in spite of our intent.
I write this as the husband of a 16-time cancer survivor (detailed in the book fighting disease, not death: finding a way through lifelong struggle). Over the past twelve years we learned to rejoice when we had enough money to cover medical bills, even though spending money for treatment means not having money to save, to share, or to enjoy. We also know every dollar spent on Lorie's care is not available in that moment for someone else's care who needs it, and who may be more sick than Lorie. Joy and sorrow are deeply intertwined in this life. Wielding money brings both.
7. Everything can be monetized. Whatever it is you want to do, even the most altruistic desire, gets a price tag placed on it. We create marketplaces for everything, from carbon emissions, to sewage cleanup, to cyperspace. Participation in an economy is inescapable. It is as pervasive in our lives as God intends to be
8. Money can influence you to think you are God. Having access to money helps us purchase technology, making it possible to be virtually present in several simultaneous locations, increasing our access to knowledge and broadening our sovereignty over the little universes we think we create. Omnipresence, omniscience and sovereignty are qualities we would normally assign to Deity, but with money we approximate them now and start believing that divine pretension is our birthright.
9. Money transforms life. Do you have a lot of money? Remove it and watch how pervasive the resulting changes are. Do you have few funds? Notice how profoundly life changes when there is sudden access to wealth. The transformational change in either direction shows yet again how money is an instrument of simultaneous pain and gain. Worry and benefit are found at both ends of economic life, shaping how one sees themself, how one lives in relationship to others, and what one's values are.
For all these reasons, and reasons not yet discovered, money is akin to a god.
*****
As we move to consider our perfotmance in this wrestling match with money, let's remember that the gospel is the proclamation that God chooses not to hold our sins against us, and that all creation's relationship with God can be restored because of the work of Jesus Christ. The Christian believes this gospel is the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46) and places everything they have and are in service to it, including money.
We 21st century western culture Christians have moved far from this understanding. A recent eye-opening description comes from William F. High in Christian Research Journal (33:1, 32-38) in an article titled Short-term Recession or the Long Winter. He demonstrates how Christians moved away from teaching that God is the owner of all to teaching that God is the recipient of a percentage, to teaching that it is good to give a ministry a little something so that it can keep going. Mr. High then calls for Christians--if that is what they truly are--to return to the original and correct understanding of God as owner.
In the move from God is the owner of all to God is the recipient of a percentage, we do not just shift downward in the amount of the gift. We also move from considering how to give from all our assets to thinking only about gifts from our take home income. We also attempt to change God's role from an owner who entrusts us with our endowments to a recipient of tribute we bring from what we own.
In the move from God as the recipient of our tithes, to ministries serving as the recipient, hoping to persuade us that they are worth any gift we choose to give, we do not just ratchet down our giving even more. We choose to center giving around human activity rather than a worshipful response to divine grace. Even more, we ignore and cease to properly support the local fellowship of believers as the cell structure of Christ's body, creating long-term damage in our capacity to take good care of the gospel and our ability to teach about the life of the steward.
It is a long way back, and it starts with me declaring myself a steward of the gospel, bringing all of life's resources to bear on this precious gift I've been given as a trust. It then proceeds to you joining me, consecrating not just your income and estate to the Lord, but the way in which you earn them, the way your organize your time, the methods by which you gain wisdom and how you dispense it, in how you develop and influence your social networks, and by how you live within God's creation.
From here it moves outward to others as we say and show what it means to be forgiven and reconciled to God, inviting others to join us in our battle against the hideous competition.
Wrestle the money demi-god to the ground. Free yourself from its shackles and begin again. Pray the prayer, God be merciful to me a sinner. Sing the hymn, I surrender all. And as you do, let the wonder and awe of God's forgiveness renew your desire to take good care of the gospel message--for the glory of God rather than for your material gain, personal tribute or organizational advancement.
Be free that others may know freedom.
*****
Mary grew up in a community that guided her spiritual maturity--a maturity that helped her recognize the coming of her Messiah and to celebrate it in song. Because of this I too was nurtured in faith and learned to give myself to the God who made me, who saved me and who makes a home in heaven for me.
The challenge for you is to do the same for the specific congregation you are part of, not just for those who are here, but for those who will come. Your ability to do this grows from your listening to this God who gives all to you and asks that you give yourself to him in response. What you choose to sacrifice to God in financial giving and service to the community of faith makes all the difference for others also being able to do so in the future.
Just as Mary sang from her generous heart, I've been toying with lyric and rhythm that expresses the generous heart of a congregation I've been serving:
For First Baptist Church, Beloit
Let us be upon this hill
Our one another shining bright
As a light upon a sill
Invites from out the night.
Upon this hill may worship ring
In song, in word, in spoken prayer
In requests and praise and offering
In casting all our care.
Upon this hill may others find
They cannot stay away
Wide open arms and service kind
Their new name and hopeful day.
This hill was here before we came
Others placed the chapel stones
We will help it keep its frame
So others might make live these bones.
-mark l vincent
__________
All blogs reflect the thoughts of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Design Group International, Inc.