The Sermon of the Amount

The Sermon of the Amount The Dover Church
November 14, 2010 – 25th Sunday after Pentecost, Stewardship Sunday
Scripture: 2Corinthians 9, Luke 8: 4-8, 16-18, Luke 6: 38, Luke 12: 48b

Our Lord put it this way: “Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you receive.” (Luke 6:38)
The Apostle Paul later said: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. The one who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.” (2 Cor 9:6).
Much later, my old crew coach used to yell from his launch: “There’s nothing worse than crossing the finish line with something left in the tank. Leave everything on the race course.”
I have poured all of myself into a few things in my life: my family of origin, friendships, rowing, fly fishing, and academics. While I did not always reap exactly what I had hoped for or expected, in every case the harvest was bountiful beyond my expectations. In one way or another, these things are all still bearing fruit long after I backed off my intensity level.
A number of new things came to me in my mid to late thirties, the things which I now give my all to: being a pastor, being a husband, and being a father. These are my three primary spiritual disciplines, the three parts of my life which I give all of myself to and the three places where I seek and find God most fully.
Marriage. I came to it relatively late in life, because, quite frankly, I had had no place in my life for a wife any earlier. I was too busy pouring my life out into academics, fishing, and my family of origin. My call to seminary had moved all the old things to a lower level of priority which made room for Marie-Laure when she showed up. I chose her and she chose me. And I decided. This is the person to whom I am finally going to give all of myself, not just my worldly goods and my sexual fidelity, but the whole catastrophe: the hopes and dreams, the weaknesses and limitations, understanding, compassion, time and effort. This is the person I am going to entrust with my forgiveness and trust that she will reciprocate. In a word: Love. No holding back. All the way. 24/7, day in day out, as long as we both shall live.
All of you married people out there will know exactly what I mean when I say that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We all say “I do,” but we really ought to say “I don’t really have to foggiest idea what I am promising right now, but count me in.” I have found that you can’t be a little married. You’re either in or you’re on your way out. The measure you give is the measure you receive. No one is perfect, so there is plenty of work involved. The theologians who describe marriage as a sacrificial offering of oneself to another and both to God are really on to something. You have to give it all away if you want to experience the experience of life which only marriage has to offer.
Fatherhood. Once again, all of you parents out there will know exactly what I mean when I say that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And that’s a good thing. All the sleepless nights and endless tasks, all the challenges of raising children, the fears and anxieties a parent feels for their child’s well being, happiness, education, and maturation…well, it would be enough for anyone to just take a vow of celibacy and go into the monastery. And yet, and yet, my God…the blessings of it all. Not to wax too prosaic, but being a parent is really getting a second chance to discover life, to see it all again as if for the first time through your child’s eyes. There really is nothing like that hug and kiss those words, “I love you, Daddy.” Hanging in there when the going is tough, hanging in long enough to see the change and feel the world turn and know it is all going to work out. I know we have so much more to look forward to. I also know we have so much more to dread, but I can honestly say that I could die now and say with absolute conviction that I have come face to face with God in the lives of these two little boys. Like it or not, those two little guys demand total sacrifice.
And last but not least, being a pastor in a church. I was called by God to go to seminary for two reasons. The first one is about me: I really, really, really wanted to get to know God and seminary seemed to be the only place where the depth of my longing could be met. Call me an extremist, but anything less didn’t seem to be enough. I didn’t want to just know about God. I wanted to actually experience God, come face to face with God, to feel God walking with me. Tall order, I know, but the second reason is even more preposterous.
Second, and this is where all of you come in, having grown up in the church, having been in several churches, some that were pretty good and others that were not, watching most of my contemporaries walk away from the church through boredom, spiritual starvation, trivial preaching, bad group dynamics, bad theology, uninspired leadership, ineffectiveness, a fundamental disconnect from real life, all talk and no action, and other reasons, watching so many people see church for all the reasons I just mentioned as a very low priority compared with all the other things in their life, hearing folks like me say that God and Jesus were for wimps or fools, I felt called by God to ordination, to offer my life to one church, any church, as it turns out this church, to reverse that trend.
The folks on my search committee might remember reading my mission statement in my profile, but here is a paraphrase for the rest of you: I am going to pour my entire life into a church so that worship is authentic, meaningful, and joyful, like we really are standing in the awesome presence of the living God and not just pretending or going through the motions; where God’s Word is not some dead and boring thing to think about, not some museum artifact we look upon dispassionately, but a living hand that reaches inside our very beings and grabs our hearts; where people really can’t stop themselves from being God’s hands and hearts in the world; where we are not limited by our church-experience-starved imaginations but are blown away by God’s vision of what might yet be; where relationships are nurturing and enriching and not superficial and noncommittal; an authentic, genuine community in the midst of world full of communities which are communities in name only; where we clear away all the processes and rules and traditions, and accretions which have crept in over the years and are now the way we’ve always done, no one knows why, how it got started, or why we keep at it except for the seemingly compelling reason that we always have, and the committees which have bogged down every well meaning bunch of Christians I have ever met, all the inertia nurturing stuff that we find in every church which gets in the way of our living a vibrant and meaningful faith…well you get the picture. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m here for. That’s what I am up to every Sunday when I get up here to sing, preach and pray. That’s what I am up to every time I come into a meeting with yet more ideas about how we might clear all the stuff out of our ways. That’s what I am prepared for every time I get together with small groups or pray with someone, every time someone is bold enough to tell me who they really are. I want the church I am in to be the all the people who left the church had hoped for but didn’t find, the church most of us probably do not believe is possible because we’ve never seen one like that before. I want pay back for all the loyalty so many people have given the church over the years when it really wasn’t working for them but they kept coming because they felt that had to do something, payback for all the parents who brought their children to church and made do with what the grown-ups had to offer, for back for all the young people who get all the way to confirmation without being touched by God and then drift away assuming rightly that this adult religion doesn’t work for them. I want to invite every disaffected former Christian, every turned off former church person, every agnostic and atheist I know, particularly my friends who think that I have lost my mind, I want all of those folks here every Sunday morning and have them say, “OK, Max. I see what you’re so fired up about. I get it. I may not be on board, but at least I get it now.” This is God’s altar on which I am offering my life.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, what about you? We’re all at different places in our spiritual journeys. Most of us are unclear with ourselves what we really expect out of our participation in the faith and fellowship of the Dover Church. But I can tell you this: if you only put a little of yourself into your faith, then that is exactly what you are going to get back. If good enough is good enough for you, then that is exactly what you’ll get, exactly the good enough that so many of our friends and neighbors don’t think is good enough to bother being part of. If you are sitting on the fence with your faith and your participation in our faith and fellowship here, chances are a lot of others all around you are sitting right there with you, like those kids in the old Life cereal advertisement trying to get the little brother Mikey to go first: “Try it. You’ll like it.” The measure you give will be the measure you receive. You will reap what you sow, abundance or scarcity. As Paul put it, “each of you has to give as you have made up your mind, not under or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” (9:7). A church full of people sitting on the fence gets just that, a church sitting on a fence.
It’s another one of those God paradoxes. On the one hand, everything we are and do here is about God. On the other hand, it’s really our choice. God is showering us right now with potential abundance, more than most of can even begin to imagine, dangling the church of our dreams right in front of our noses if you will, and we have to make up our minds if we want to be the good soil which will bear extravagant abundance, or if we want to stay in the weeds, get ground down in the rocks, or just get baked on the road. The truth is, if you jump into this whole God, Jesus and the church adventure, you really have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. But if you don’t get in, then you’ll really never find out.