October 2, 2016 (full size gallery)
After a week of rain, the skies finally cleared by the end of the service. We have 44 in the service with the addition of the Sunday School children who sang two songs – "Johnny Appleseed Prayer" and "This is the Day" at the offertory. We celebrated Roger’s birthday. Catherine and Karen Richardson combined for 1st Sunday Social with bean soup, ham biscuits, fruit and pumpkin among many goodies.
It was Pentecost 20. The readings are here .Today’s readings call us to believe in God’s ability to make the impossible possible. Habakkuk is called to patience and faith in the face of incomprehensible evil. Paul encourages Timothy to endure in power and love, guarding the truth of the gospel. Jesus teaches that faith thrives in simple obedience in Luke’s Gospel.
We began the stewardship campaign today where we do try to make the "impossible possible".
Catherine set the stage for a month series of speakers on stewardship. We need to pledge for both religious and practical reasons. Our baptismal covenant calls us to support the church and realistically pledging helps the church budget for the next year. The stewardship letter was in this month’s newsletter which spotlights Jesus’ generosity and is the theme of the campaign.
"The very essence of Jesus is generosity. Jesus spent his whole life giving—love, hospitality, welcome, bread, wine, forgiveness, joy, peace, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the gospel according to Luke, Jesus talks to his disciples about the power of love and mercy, the power of forgiveness, and the power of giving and sharing all of these blessings with one another. He tells the disciples to “forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap, for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
Elizabeth Heimbach was the first speaker. She spoke of the need to stop, prioritize and be thankful for the outreach in the church with the Village Harvest and support outside of our community for Nepal. Consider what your funds have done when you contemplate your pledge.
In the book The Bible, Stewardship and Money by Chick Lane and Grace Duddy, They write:
“Stewardship is about how you understand yourself to be in relation with God. Do you understand God to be a generous loving God who has entrusted more into your care than you could ever deserve or exhaust? Or do you understand God as one who must be appeased by you diminishing your already scarce possessions through giving some to the church, because you really ought to? Is your relationship with God characterized by abundance or by scarcity?
"Stewardship is also about how you understand yourself to be in relation with the rest of creation. Do you live so that you can make the lives of other people and the created order richer through encounters with you? Or do you live in competition with other people for a finite pool of resources? Is your life invested in others, or is your life invested in yourself?
Stewardship rightly understood is about money, but it is also about these very basic spiritual matters. The writers of the Bible understood that money and possessions have a distinct hold on our hearts and what we do with the money that God has entrusted to us has the capacity to affect not only us, but our neighbors and communities. The Bible invites us to use the money and possessions that God has entrusted to us to love our neighbors and by doing so enrich our relationship with God” (Grace Duddy & Chick Lane, 2014).
That’s why we are using generosity as a theme. We have to see Jesus was generous and to imitate his example. We have to place our resources which God has given us graciously in the work of building the kingdom.
The sermon was about one man who did this William Friend, our first rector and one who established St. Peter’s, the longest serving rector and the first buried in our graveyard.
The sermon imagined a letter he would have written as in the example of Timothy in the the readings – "For this reason, I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you, for God gives to you, as God gave to me, a spirit of power and of love, and of self-discipline…Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit that lives in us."
Ironically "he gave that treasure away, over and over!".."In order to accomplish everything he did in his lifetime, he had to be open to God’s spirit of power, love and self-discipline. "
He built up this church but took what he had, his knowledge and energy to build up more than 9 churches. "Six that are still alive and well, guarding the faith, are standing because of the generations of parishioners who have passed through these doors over the years, and have guarded this treasure of the faith by giving it away."
"One example of what this generation has done to guard the treasure of faith is on the wall behind me"…"And it is our hope that these powerful words will continue to be available to the generations of parishioners who come after us in this church. But in order to make that happen, and to restore the panels, we had to part with some money so that the work could be done.
"If we wrote a letter to those who come after us in this place, what would our letter to them say?
"Hopefully, the letter we are in the process of writing together is a lasting testimony to God’s spirit of power, love and self-discipline working in us as we live out our own holy callings.
"Hopefully, in the words of our letter people will be able to see that we have a deep and abiding relationship with God. They will read in our words our willingness to serve God and our willingness to share.
"Hopefully, they will read that we too, like our ancestors here, have guarded our treasure by opening our hands and giving what we have for spreading God’s work in the world through this church. "