Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 7, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

We all, or most of us, know about church stewardship campaigns. They happen in the fall, and they are always grounded in the notion that the church doesn’t have enough money because the people aren’t giving enough. The wisest speaker on stewardship that I ever heard, our former Conference Minister Hollis Bredeweg, says that these stewardship campaigns should really be called the fall anxiety drive. They tend to be grounded in anxiety, and they often seek to create anxiety in the people of the church so that they’ll cough up more money. Hollis says, and he’s absolutely right of course, that that’s no way for a church to operate. And he says: Have you ever seen an ad for Southwest Airlines that goes “ Fly our airline. We really need the money. Do you have any idea how much those airplanes cost, and what has happened to the price of jet fuel? Fly Southwest. We don’t want to go out of business!” That’s basically what most church stewardship campaigns, the fall anxiety drives, far too often come down to.

That approach to church fundraising, which is what we really mean by stewardship, isn’t it, has a long, long history. The passage we heard this morning from the Old Testament book Haggai—everyone’s favorite I’m sure—is kind of along those lines. It comes from the time after the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem following the Babylonian captivity. When they did the first thing they set out to do was to rebuild the temple. King Solomon had built the temple way back in the nine hundreds BCE, and the Babylonians had destroyed it in about 589 BCE. Only the returning exiles quickly found that they lacked the resources, and maybe the skills, to build a new temple anywhere near as grand and glorious as the old one had been. The prophet Haggai says to the people “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” Sounds to me like he’s trying to lay a guilt trip on the people: “Listen up people. This isn’t cutting it. We’re falling short here. This new temple is a piece of junk compared to the old one. So pony up, folks. The temple capital campaign is falling short. So up those pledges. Write bigger checks. Drop more coin in the offering plates. Let’s get with the program, folks, or we’re going to end up with a temple that is a disgrace to the God to Whom we dedicate it. We’ll look bad to the neighbors, and the followers of other gods will laugh at us. So more money please.”

Well, most of you know that we have money problems here at this church, but I’m not going to try to lay a guilt trip on you this morning. Instead, I want to consider with you what this church is all about. And I think we see what this church, and any true church, is all about in the passage we heard from the great chapter 55 of Isaiah, one of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. In a passage of great poetic power the prophet known as Second Isaiah here bids the people to “come to the waters,” to buy wine and milk without money. He asks them “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” He invites them to come and listen so that they may live. He says “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.” He reminds them that God’s ways are not our ways “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

This church, and any true church, is about things money can’t buy. It is about the food that has no price, spiritual food, symbolic food like that of which we are about to partake in the sacrament of the Eucharist. It is about coming to a place where, we hope, God can be found and spending some time here seeking to enter consciously into God’s presence. It is about contemplating the higher ways of God, the ways that are so much superior to the ways of the world. The church is a place where we may consider those higher ways and what they mean for our lives and for our world.

The church offers us all of that, and it truly does it without price. We charge no dues. There’s no admission fee. We don’t sell tickets. No one is turned away or disrespected in any way because they don’t have money they can give to the church. I don’t even know what individual people of the church give precisely because I am so convinced that how I and the church as a whole relate to each one of you has nothing to do with money. We offer a way to connect with riches, but they are spiritual riches not worldly ones. The food we offer you can’t buy for money. They don’t sell it at Safeway, and it doesn’t go on sale. It doesn’t have to. It’s free. Free for all people. The spiritual gifts of God that we try in our halting and imperfect way to connect you with are priceless. They are of infinite value but of no monetary value at all. They are the way truly to live, and they don’t figure at all in the cost of living. Worldly treasures all have a price, but their value is as nothing compared to the spiritual treasures the church offers without price.

What we offer is free. It has no price, but it the unfortunate thing is that it does have a cost. Or at least this church, this worldly institution through which we try to offer those priceless treasures, has a cost. It has buildings to maintain. It has staff to pay. It incurs a lot of very worldly expenses, like insurance and gas and electricity bills, payroll, and payroll taxes. It has office and kitchen supplies to buy and cleaning services to pay for. What we offer is not of this world; but we offer it very much in this world, and we incur very worldly expenses in doing it.

And right now we are not covering those costs, we aren’t meeting those expenses. Yes, the bills are being paid and payroll is being met—for now. But we are eating up the church’s financial reserves to do it, and that can’t continue much longer. We must start paying our way as we go, or eventually we won’t keep going, not at least as we have been going these past several years. There are only three ways to do that—reduce expenses, increase income, or both. Our financial statements are available to anyone who wants to review them. We’re open to any ideas anyone has for balancing them, but without significantly increasing income and/or reducing expenses our financial future, frankly, is far from bright.

Which doesn’t mean it’s time to panic, or even to be anxious. Anxiety is the opposite of faith, and we are people of faith. We can take heart from the words that Haggai spoke to his people so long ago when their temple wasn’t shaping up to be what they wanted it to be. “Yet now take courage… says the Lord; work, for I am with you….My spirit abides among you; do not fear….The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the Lord….In this place I will give prosperity.” If we pray together and work together with trust in the Holy Spirit to be with us and to prosper our work, we will find what we need. When we consider the value of the priceless treasure that we offer, the cost of offering it seems a small thing. When we consider the word of grace and of God’s unlimited love for all people that we offer the cost of offering it seems a trifle. When we consider what this church has meant in the past and what it means now to this community and to those of us who find our spiritual home here, the cost of the church seems no obstacle. Certainly no obstacle we can’t overcome together.

So let us work together. Let us pray together. Let us worship together, and let us discern together how the Holy Spirit is calling each one of us to help. Each one of us to give, as we are able. Not because we have to give to belong. We don’t. But give because so many of us can and because we value what this church is in our lives and beyond our lives. Isaiah says “You that have no money, come, buy and eat!” And we can add: You that have money, consider anew what you can give. Amen.