What do you expect?

“What do your expect?” The Dover Church
October 24, 2010 –Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Joel 2:23-32, Luke 18: 9-14

When Dave Melville first called me about a year and a half ago and we started talking about me being your minister and you being my church, it wasn’t long before a sense of excitement and possibility started to wiggle its way up my spine. I thought to myself, “This could be great. Judging from the demographics, that church has to be just brimming with really gifted people who are doing really extraordinary things in their lives. Judging by the cost of real estate in Dover, a lot of the members must be pretty affluent, which means that they can afford to do some great things as a church.” That’s what I thought a year and a half ago.
Now that I have been here a little more than year, many of my preconceived assumptions about you people have been born out. I’m still just getting to know you, but I am pretty impressed by what many of you have achieved in your lives. In business and finance, in engineering and applied technology, in law and politics, in science and medicine, in education and the arts, in academia and research, in athletics and community service, you people are high achievers. Every now and then I will brag to my clergy colleagues that we have two gentlemen in this church who have been knighted by the Queen of England, which is something I imagine very few churches this side of the Atlantic can lay claim to.
I haven’t had time yet to visit all of you in your homes, but the homes I have visited are, without exception, delightful. You folks live well. As your minister I live well in a very pleasant home. You drive nice cars, belong to great fishing, hunting, riding, golf and yacht clubs, have beautiful beach and ski houses, boats and other cool stuff. I always enjoy sharing stories of vacation adventures with you. You seem to have as much, if not more, fun than we do on vacation. You raise impressive children who are being educated to go to impressive colleges and will probably go on to impressive lives. The fruit does not fall far from the tree. One of the reasons Marie-Laure and I came here to Dover was for the educational opportunities for our children.
Some of you may be wondering what’s behind all my flattery. What is he building up to? The pessimists among you might be thinking that I am going to lay the conventional Christian guilt trip on you, about how wealth, success and privilege are somehow bad and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Having heard the lessons for this morning, you may think that I am about to compare you to the self satisfied Pharisee who has his act together and looks down with contempt on the guilt ridden tax collector beside him at prayer.
And you would be wrong. As I just finished telling you, I came here because of the potential for exciting ministries and missions which churches like ours have. You folks have the talent and the money to make exceptional things happen. I celebrate the lives you have built for yourselves and the pleasure you take from fruits of your labors. Let’s face it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.
I do not see this church as the self satisfied Pharisee in this morning’s lesson. No, believe it or not, in some very fundamental ways I think that, when it comes to being church, our church more closely resembles the tax collector who stands far off with downcast eyes, asking only for God’s mercy.
I know part of this is historical. You folks have had some tough times over the last few years, with declining membership and the resulting erosion of confidence in yourselves as a church. As your pastor, I truly feel for the ways these difficulties have tried your faith and fellowship. I wish I could have been here sooner. But for this morning I am interested in where we are right now and that is a place of low expectations when it comes to ministry and mission possibilities, specifically the money to pay for them. Many times when I am around money conversations in this church, I am struck by the sense of scarcity. Granted, I am exaggerating for dramatic effect, but there is often a palpable sense of futility and hand wringing around money in this church: “Oh God, have mercy on us. Our big givers of the glory days are gone and have not been replaced. Woe is us. What are we to do?” Believe me when I say I have heard this before in other churches, but here? A culture of scarcity in the midst of a culture of abundance? How is it that when I expected to be jumping into the mix with a bunch of hard charging, big dreaming, high achievers who would want to be members of a robust church, I found us struggling to flex our church muscles?
My friends, we have not expected much in the way of financial support in recent years and that is what we have received when compared with the bountiful abundance with which we all live. Not all of you. Some have been consistently very generous, but as a group we are far from our potential. I have done the math and the actual yearly giving potential of this congregation with the members we have right now is, hold onto your seats, two million dollars and change! I’m not asking you for two million dollars, but I want you to begin dreaming about what we might become as a church. It is time to get out of the past and start looking to the future. I want our church to be the church we have not yet dreamt of being. I want our church to be the church I always dreamed of. But most importantly, I want each of us and all of us to actually experience being the church that God dreams of us being. And that all starts with your generous support. Without that, we can’t even get out of the starting blocks.
So here are some dreams that I have. Imagine a church where worship is an awesome experience of the presence of God, inspiring, comforting, challenging….every Sunday. Imagine not just one good choir of 15 but one great choir of 30, a multigenerational choir, or several choirs of different age groups with various instrumental ensembles to help make our worship experience remarkable. No more ho-hum, wishing you hadn’t bothered to come after all Sundays. Imagine having a couple of different services every Sunday so all the folks who can’t be here at 9:30 could dive in at another time.
Imagine our facilities being state of the art. Not flashy of wasteful, but sending a clear message that “this is the temple of the living God”…albeit in subdued New England austerity. Imagine Kraft Hall and our Sunday School rooms looking every bit as delightful and inviting as the Chickering School, or my sons daycare for that matter.
And speaking of Sunday School, imagine having a program children flocked to, actually dragging their parents on Sunday morning. Why? Because it was both fun and spirit nurturing. Ingrid and our Sunday School teachers have worked hard to turn things around, but now it is time to start taxiing down the runway for take-off. Imagine weekday after school opportunities for children which they would want to invite their friends to. Imagine 100 teen agers in our youth programs, learning about God, experiencing God, getting guidance on how to live a good and faithful life, and then living it together in an open and nurturing circle of friends.
Imagine networks of adult friendships in which everyone who comes to be with us has at least a few folks with whom they really feel they are sharing their lives. I have started forming groups to get this going and now Ingrid is charging to, so in a few years this will be a reality. Imagine regular social gatherings, fun events which bring us all together like Rally Day, so fun that we actually prioritize them over all the other things we have to choose from.
Imagine a broad offering of adult faith formation opportunities at which all of us could learn about our faith, explore our experience of faith, and grow in faith. Imagine yoga, workshops on holistic living. Imagine regular retreats, pilgrimages to the Holy Land, a labyrinth on our property.
Imagine offering a number of opportunities for us to live our faith through mission service. I don’t have to supply the dreams here, because a number of you have already shared your dreams with me on this one. We have one couple who want to build a school in Kashmir. We have a bunch of guys who want to go to Haiti to begin building a mission opportunity for all of us. We have a lot of folks who are deeply moved by the plight of the homeless and want so much to do something tangible. IHN is really just the threshold to what we might do. Some of us helped build a Habitat home in Medway and would like to do more of that. We have folks who have personally funded an afterschool literacy programs for underprivileged children. Imagine learning how to connect our faith with the environment or peace and then doing it. I’m sure I am barely scratching the surface, but even with just a scratch you can see what a beehive of enthusiastic mission service we might be if we could just get going.
God’s word for us this morning is about honesty, about daring to be who we really are before God and our neighbor. So let’s be honest. We are not the church we can be. We are not the church God dreams we will be. We are not even daring to try. Since this is about honesty, I can honestly say that I am just the guy to tell you this: “Let’s go. You all know our church can be so much more. I think our giving to the church has been flat because the church hasn’t been all that much to get excited about. Pitching in to keep the old church open, which in itself is not inexpensive these days, is not nearly as energizing as pumping life blood into exciting and transformative ministries. You folks have told me that you enjoy sharing your wealth with organizations that excite you and are making a tangible difference in the world. Well, let’s be that church, exciting and transformational.”
Jesus taught a brilliant lesson about life when he said, “The measure you give will be the measure you receive.” What you put into life will largely determine what you get out of life. As in life, so it is with the church. What do expect out of our church? Give accordingly and you shall receive.