On Generations of Generosity…

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abundance, celebration, church, commitment, compassion, faithful, future, generations, generosity, giving, God, journey

Photo credit:  https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201510/small-acts-generosity-and-the-neuroscience-gratitude

This past week, my daughter and I were out shopping for a birthday gift for a friend.  As we were doing the self-checkout, the computer asked us if we would like to donate to charity.  I quickly tapped “no,” and my daughter was incensed.  “Don’t you want to help, Mommy?!?”  As we walked back to our car, I explained how we do help others.  She seemed incredulous, so I detailed our charitable giving, starting with what we give to the church.

Though she seemed mildly satisfied, our conversation made me realize a couple of things.  First, I could stand to have more explicit conversations with our children about our giving to church.  We already talk about budgets, treats, and how we spend money otherwise.  I realize now that our eldest may be ready to understand the commitment we make to church too.  Second, my daughter’s initial indignation is really good thing.  Her frustration with me reveals a sense of compassion and generosity that I was not sure she had fully developed.

This Sunday in church, we are celebrating lots of things.  We are celebrating the 100^th anniversary of the consecration of our historic church.  After hundreds of years of our church being used as a school and hospital, a faithful community gathered once again in 1917 for the original purpose of the building – to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.  We are also celebrating the paying off of our mortgage on our newest worship space.  After one final push this summer, and years of generosity before, we are able to be debt free!  We are also celebrating In-Gathering Sunday: a day where we offer our pledge cards for blessing.  These pledge cards indicate our commitment to the upcoming year of ministry, and reflect our journey toward generosity.

As these three celebrations combine into one day, I am ever aware of Hickory Neck’s own journey to generosity.  From the faithful who worked to reestablish our church after years of dormancy, to the faithful who saw a vision of a more modern, spacious place of worship just over ten years ago, to the faithful who see the new things budding at Hickory Neck and want to be a part of that growing community, we are a community who has always been on a journey to generosity.  I am grateful for the chance to celebrate together, especially for the ways in which our celebration is an example for the future generations who are also being shaped into faithful servants of compassion and generosity.  From the past and present, and into the future, I see God’s abundance all around us!

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On Seeing Sacred Moments…

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blessing, church, compassion, fellowship, God, holy, laughter, light, love, moment, outreach, sacred, support, witness, work

In general, my children are pretty typical in many ways – they have their good days and their bad days.  They tattle on each other, try to sneak in a hit or shove, and one will occasionally shout how she “hates her life.”  But then, every once in a while, totally unprompted and seemingly “out of sight,” I will overhear the love, care, and affection they have for one another.  One child will walk over the other who is crying, and she will give a hug and offer reassuring words.  Or the two children will gleefully play with one another without arguing or fussing.  Or best of all, I will hear them laughing pure, innocent laughs together.  In these holy moments, they show me the light of God’s presence, and reveal their best qualities – that they are individuals full of love and compassion.

These last few weeks at our church, I feel like I have been able to see similar holy moments.  We are preparing for our Annual Fall Festival, from which all the proceeds go to support local ministries.  As we lead up to the event, I have seen countless tasks being done by parishioners:  from making up food order forms and staffing tables for pre-orders, from cleaning out closets to pricing and sorting donations, from recruiting donations from local businesses to developing the silent auction booklet, from breaking down our worship space to setting up parking space.  As the weeks and days have gotten closer to our festival, I have seen hard work, commitments of time, generosity of spirit, and joy in participation.  Most of the work could go unnoticed; even those of us who volunteer do not always see all the other work that is happening somewhere else.

But today, I want to say, “I see you.”  I see you, Hickory Neck, giving your cherished time to support the church.  I see you, sharing in fellowship as you work together on projects.  I see you, passionate about your neighbors in need and working a little bit harder.  I see you in holy moments, individually and collectively, and I am so proud of you.  Your laughter together is a sweet, sacred sound.  Your labor is a witness to me and to our community of God’s abundant love for all.  Well done, good and faithful servants!  You are a blessing!!

Photo credit:  food.ndtv.com/health/10-surprising-health-benefits-of-laughter-1464095

On Redefining our Work and God’s…

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bring, Christ, church, culture, evangelism, faith, friend, God, invitation, invite, success

This Sunday our church has planned “Bring a Friend Sunday.”  The day is the culmination of a series on evangelism, and we had imagined that bringing a friend would be a perfect way to conclude the series.  Some people have excitedly shared with me whom they plan to bring with them this Sunday, others have expressed a tinge of anxiety, while others have not mentioned the day (or their fears about inviting friends) at all.  We have been using a series of videos to inspire us, distributed postcards and other invitation tools, and created fun social media posts.

But our class this past Sunday had me wondering if we were approaching our event all wrong.  In his book Transforming Evangelism, David Gortner talks about the fact that evangelism is not a program or an effort to “get more people in the pews.”  Instead, evangelism is about creating an ethos of sharing the good news.  That ethos involves doing our own inner work about our own journey in Christ, and cultivating the skills for evangelism, such as practicing gratitude, listening for the holy in other’s stories, strengthening a sense of humility, and knowing the sacred stories that speak most powerfully for us.

We concluded our session with a talk by Michael Harvey, who argues that evangelism is not about bringing people to church, but creating a culture of invitation.  He suggests that events like “Bring a Friend Sunday” place “success” in the wrong place.  In fact, he says the most important work we can do is invite others.  “Whether someone says yes or no is God’s bit.  That is not our bit.  Our job is to just offer a simple invitation,” says Harvey.  By both worrying about inviting and labeling “success” as acceptance, we confuse our work with God’s work.  Instead, Harvey suggests that faith communities focusing on faithfulness, not some measure of “success.”  Whether the friend you invited comes or not, the church says, “Well done!”

So, I’m officially changing the name of this Sunday to “Invite a Friend Sunday.”  If you come to Hickory Neck this week and tell me you invited a friend, I’ll have a gold star waiting for you.  I want to hear about your experience in invitation, whether the experience was different than your expectations, and what it was like knowing that the invitation was more important than the return.  I suspect we will all grow in Christ in the process.  I cannot wait to hear about your experiences in invitation!

Photo credit:  davisstreetbaptist.org/how-to-invite-people-to-church/

Sermon – Matthew 21.33-46, P22, YA, October 8, 2017

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balm, comfort, covenant, darkness, forgiveness, generosity, God, goodness, grace, Jesus, Journey to Generosity, light, love, mass shooting, mercy, parable, scripture, Sermon, tenants, vineyard, violence

One of the things I love about coming to church week in and week out is the practice setting time aside to discern how Holy Scripture is speaking to our everyday life.  Whether I have had a stressful week or a week of celebration, whether I am struggling in life or am experiencing a time of joy, or whether I am pained by the world around me or encouraged by the world around me, the Holy Scripture that we hear on Sunday always finds a way of speaking to me – of comforting, encouraging, challenging, and journeying with me.

But I confess to you I have been struggling to hear a good word from God through Holy Scripture this week.  You see, six days ago, we awoke to the news of the deadliest mass shooting in our modern history.  I cannot seem to shake the awful images and sounds of that night – the rapid sound of gunfire, the screams of terror in the crowd, the panic created in a crowd who had no idea how to escape the unseen shooter, and the sheer volume of deaths, injuries, and psychological trauma.  A week later, having no real leads on motive, all I am left with is the reality of violence in our society that seems inescapable – of one more city to add to the growing list of instances of mass violence:  Columbine, Blacksburg, Aurora, Newtown, Charleston, Orlando.

With the weight of the sinfulness of our violence upon one another, what I really wanted from Holy Scripture was a balm or a promise from God that love would win.  Instead, our gospel lesson today feels more like a mirror of our modern violence.  Jesus tells the leaders of the faithful a parable about a landowner who plants a vineyard and entrusts the tending of the vineyard to tenants.  When the time comes for the tenants to proudly show the landowner the fruits of their labor, instead the tenants do something awful.  They beat, kill, and stone the servants sent by the landowner.  And their action is not a one-time occurrence.  The landowner sends even more of his servants to the tenants, and they beat, kill, and stone them too.  The landowner even sends his own son; but filled with greed, entitlement, and violence, they kill the landowner’s son too.  Instead of redemption at the end of the parable, Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.”

Because this is a parable, we know that Jesus is trying to tell the people of Israel something about themselves.  Stanley Hauerwas interprets the parable in this way, “The parable of the wicked tenants can serve as an outline of Matthew’s understanding of the life of Israel.  God [calls] Israel to be his vineyard fenced by the law, grounded in the land, and protected by worship of God in the temple.  God [sends] his prophets to call the people to faithfulness, but the people beat, [stone], and [kill] them.  Finally God [sends] his very Son, but even he [is] rejected…Jesus [leaves] no ambiguity about how this parable is to be understood.  The chief priests and the Pharisees [realize] that they are the ‘rejected.’  Yet they are not in any fashion to repent.”[i]

The starkness of Jesus’ parable has left me wondering whether we have become like the tenants in this story.  Not knowing the motive of the shooter in Las Vegas, we can somewhat distance ourselves from him – perhaps blaming mental illness or labeling him as an outlier in an otherwise healthy society.  But what concerns me more is that this is not an isolated event.  This is not the first time I have had to talk about a mass shooting from the pulpit.  We have not just beaten, killed, and stoned a couple of servants.  We keep committing awful violence, and what is worse is I fear we are becoming desensitized, accepting violence as the status quo – a consequence we are willing to live with in order to have the things we want in life.

In the spiral of darkness between our news feed and Holy Scripture, I had to take a deep breath, praying for some glimmer of hope.  So I started with where we started in worship today – with our collect.  We prayed, “Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve: Pour upon us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things for which we are not worthy to ask, except through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Savior…”  The collect today reminded me that no matter how dark things seem, there is always light to be found.

With the encouragement of the collect, I was able to go back to the parable.  I realized that perhaps the tenants, or perhaps even ourselves, are not going to be the origin of our hope.  Instead, our hope in darkness rests on God.  The landowner in the parable is marked by goodness.  The landowner plants the vineyard, puts a fence around it, digs a wine press, and builds a watchtower.  Then the landowner allows tenants to use the land, having given them the tools they need, trusting them to care for the land.  Heard another way, we hear all the good news of our creative God.  God creates this beautiful land which we are given the privilege to tend – our own breathtaking vineyard.  And because tending vineyards is hard work, God gives us the “fence” of the law – a set of guidelines to order our common life.  God gives us the tools for work, protection, and worship, knowing we will need those things too.  God even sends us prophets, knowing we will likely go astray.  Eventually, God sends us God’s Son.  This parable is the story of God’s covenantal relationship with us – a relationship marked by love, forgiveness, and grace.  And just like the whole of our Christian story, there will be moments of faithfulness, and moments of repentance.  There will be moments of honor and moments of shame.  In spite of the winding nature of our journey, God is ever present, pouring out love, abundance, mercy, and grace.  Even on our darkest days, when we crucify God’s Son, God does not answer violence with violence.  As one scholar conveys, “… rather than return violence for violence, in the cross of Jesus God absorbs our violence and responds with life, with resurrection, with Jesus triumphant over death and offering, not retribution, but peace.”[ii]

In the midst of stewardship season, I have been wondering all week how in the world I could talk about stewardship today.  But I think stewardship might be the perfect response to the seeming hopelessness of the world and this parable.  A Journey to Generosity is just that:  a journey.  Each one of us has been gifted a vineyard to tend, is surrounded by the gift of God’s word to root us in love, is given the tools needed to tend the vineyard, and is promised that even when we are pretty terrible farmers, Jesus will redeem our darkest days.  God has given us all we need, walks with us in the darkness, and makes a way for us toward light.

The invitation for us today is two-fold.  The first is to go back to the beginning – whether we go back to the collect we heard today, go back to the covenantal stories of our walk with God, or go back to our own vineyard to look around at the abundance in which we find ourselves.  Sometimes in order to appreciate where we are in our Journey to Generosity, we have to look back at the faithfulness of God that is often only evident in the rearview mirror.  After we have immersed ourselves in the abundance of love, grace, mercy, and forgiveness offered by our God, then we take the next step on our journey.  What that next step is will be different for each person in this room.  But if we can envision each person in this room as agents of God’s light and love, imagine the collective power we have to drive out darkness, and transform the world into goodness.  We do not do this work alone.  We are encouraged today by fellow companions on the Journey to Generosity.  I cannot wait to hear the stories from your adventures in generosity.  God is doing great things through you.  And that is reason enough for hope.  Amen.

[i] Stanley Hauerwas, Matthew:  Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids:  Brazos Press, 2006), 186-187.  Verbs in quotation changed to present tense for preaching purposes.

[ii] David Lose, “Pentecost 18A: Words and Deeds,” October 6, 2017, as found at http://www.davidlose.net/2017/10/pentecost-18-a-words-and-deeds/ on October 6, 2017.

A Journey to Generosity…

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bless, evangelism, generosity, giving, God, gratitude, Holy Spirit, idea, inspire, journey, life, light, stewardship, vision

I am always amused when I discover the Holy Spirit at work because the discovery usually happens when I am in the thick of executing something I thought I had planned myself.  Ideas come to me, I test out the idea with others, I do the planning to implement the idea – basically the whole process involves a great deal of self-direction.  But when an idea really blows me away is when the idea takes off in even better ways than I planned.  When I finally realize how inspired the idea is, I realize that the idea could not have possibly come from me alone.  The only way those incredible moments of confluence occur is through the Holy Spirit.

I had one of those moments this week.  On Sunday we kicked off our stewardship campaign entitled “Journey to Generosity.”   All sorts of activities are a part of that campaign:  inspirational materials from our Stewardship Committee explaining the campaign, reflections from fellow parishioners, Parish Parties, sermons from the clergy, and meditations from national church leaders.  All of those experiences would be enough to situate us in a place of profound gratitude.  But then other things started happening.

The first has been attending our adult formation series.  The series is about evangelism, so I had expected our energies to be focused on the work of spreading the good news.  But the first sentence from the book we are using says, “Evangelism is your natural expression of gratitude for God’s goodness.”[i]  While I thought our conversations about gratitude and generosity would be limited to stewardship, here gratitude was permeating other areas of church life.  The second thing that happened was welcoming the first of three babies due this month at church.  As I held the first one yesterday, especially after a rough twenty-four hours of mourning another massive shooting in Las Vegas, I looked at that tiny child and felt a profound sense of gratitude for the gift of life.

Our “inspired” idea to talk and pray about our Journey to Generosity has already morphed into something much bigger.  I find myself being grateful not just for the generosity of parishioners who are passionate about our church and support its work through financial giving.  I am also grateful for a community of people who are so enthusiastic about their gratitude that they want to go out and share the good news with others.  I am grateful for a church community so generous in spirit that they can take tragedy and find rays of light and hope all around.  I am grateful for a community whose gratitude is so powerful that they have a vision of making our community a better place:  through our Fall Festival, through our visioning work with our Vestry, and through daily service to others.  What seemed like a catchy campaign slogan has actually been naming a way of life at Hickory Neck:  a life rooted in gratitude and generosity.  Thank you for letting me be a part of this journey with you all.  You inspire me every day and you transform my relationship with God every week.  God bless you on your journey to generosity!

[i] David Gortner, Transforming Evangelism (New York:  Church Publishing, 2008), 1.