Mystic Congregational Church, UCC

Mystic, Connecticut

Sermon from November 12, 2006

“The Roots of Stewardship”

Rev. Patricia L. Liberty

Scriptures:

Mark 12:28-34

Psalm 146

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where this is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Known in over a hundred different languages and quoted by everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Mother Teresa, the words of the prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi have comforted and challenged people of faith for almost a century.

Though Saint Francis lived in the 12^th century, this prayer didn’t make its debut until early in the 1900’s when it appeared in a French Catholic newspaper.  Between the first and second world wars, it was circulated in Europe and was attributed to Saint Francis for the first time in about 1927.  The prayer first appeared in the United States in 1936, quoted in a book by Kirby Page.  He was a Disciples of Christ minister, attorney, pacifist, social evangelist, writer, and editor of the publication The World Tomorrow which is based in New York City.

In the years after the Second World War, Page became a prophet of peace and a tireless worker for social justice.  He latched on to the prayer of Saint Francis as an antidote to all things war, and a comfort for a world wearied by the burdens of war. 

While it may be more comforting to think about this prayer originating in a chubby little man wearing a 12^th-century Friar Tuck outfit with a bird resting on his shoulder, the truth is that it’s roots are planted in early 20^th-century French Roman Catholic piety and watered with a fair amount of the subversive Gospel of justice and peace.  As such, it makes a good foundation for our Stewardship focus.

The antidotes to hatred, injury, doubt, despair, darkness and sadness are within our hands as we join our hands together in faith.  The origins of those same pains lie in some of our times’ greatest injustices.  And while much of our thinking about stewardship is focused on the local church and the upcoming budget season, both our texts for this morning and this prayer suggest a much larger backdrop.

The familiar story from Mark’s Gospel is one that is trotted out for the stewardship season in just about every church across the land.  The traditional rendering of the text goes something like this:  the temple is the equivalent of the church, Jesus notices the widow gives everything, we should be like the widow and be more generous, trusting that God will bless us and provide for us if we are more generous.

There’s only one problem—that’s not what this text is about.  There are other problems, but let’s start there.  As Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza suggests, we need to approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion which mean a willingness to question the assumptions we bring to the text; like assuming we know what it says and what it means based on previous hearing and teaching.  This text is so frequently used at church budget time that the interpretation that identifies the widow as a model of faithfulness for us is hard to get past, but let’s take a closer look.

If we go back to the beginning of the passage, in most Bibles it is subtitled warnings about the Scribes, which suggests the focus is on the temple leaders and not on the widow.  As we think about the text, we begin to shift our focus.  Let’s remember that the word widow in the New Testament is code language for the poorest of the poor, those most marginalized by a patriarchal society.  Second, if you read the text with that hermeneutic of suspicion, there is absolutely nothing in the text, not one word, that suggests that Jesus thinks it’s a good thing that this woman put her last two coins into the temple coffers and goes away destitute.  

Verse 38 begins with Jesus warning his followers to be aware of “those who put on long robes, receive seats of honor, put on a good show of prayers and devour widows’ houses.”  The focus here is not on the widow but on the Temple leaders who required such a gift in order to maintain their lifestyle.  The role of scribe was important and honorable in the life the temple, but not all in the position were honorable.  Some scribes served as guardians for widows who lacked male relatives and as such were at the mercy of society, having no intrinsic rights.  Unscrupulous religious leaders exploited the vulnerability of widows and there was no place for them to go to seek justice, as they had no voice in religious or social structures.

Remember, too, that Jesus is instructing his followers, a sort of field trip to the temple.  It’s an opportunity for some on-the-job learning, as it were.  Jesus was showing them the things not to do.  He would later send his followers out to preach with a prohibition against  accumulating wealth.  He also constantly warned his own disciples against seeking honor rather than serving others.  Pointing out the ostentatious clothing of the scribes was a way of illustrating that these religious leaders had ceased to care for God’s truth.

The text reminds us that the greater condemnation that comes to such leaders is calculated on a simple formula:  greater knowledge means greater responsibility.  From the one to whom more is given, more is expected.  That the scribes failed to be scandalized by the demands temple worship made on one who had so little is what raised Jesus’ ire.  He neither praises nor condemns the widow; his judgment is on the injustice of the temple system and the lack of compassion for those in need.  (Breuer)

Again and again in the Gospel of Mark, particularly, we see that what makes a time, a place and a people holy is caring for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger—those whom the world defines as the last, the least, and the lost. 

Inherent in that care is a radical welcome, an invitation to be part of the community, to take an equal place with everyone else, because place is defined by God’s welcome and not having things the world deems important.  Jesus’ vision for religious community included everyone standing on equal ground and understanding that equality is something rooted in God and not in the trappings of the world.

Jesus bore witness to a time and place where people would seek God and acknowledge God as the author of all that is.  Out of that deep faith and inner conviction, followers would live in faithful, joyful obedience, spent in service.  It was not an act of volition, not of will power, not of thinking the right way.  The in-breaking of the Kingdom that Jesus comes to bring was rooted in passion for God’s way of being in the world, in faith that was life changing, a vision of success that was dramatically different from the world’s, nothing short of wholesale embrace of the upside down values of the Kingdom.

Jesus’ judgment on the religious community of his time was indeed about their failure to act but it was more about the spiritual bankruptcy that allowed that failure.  Jesus calls attention to the empty prayers offered for the sake of appearance and balances that against the devouring of widows houses.  And that is the razor’s edge of this text.  Jesus sees their actions as indicative of their faith.  Their failures of mission are an expression of their inner emptiness.

The deepest root of stewardship, as suggested by this text, is faith—the kind of faith that, as Psalmist cries, “does not put trust in princes or in mortals in whom there is no help.”  The deepest root of stewardship is found in those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.”

Faith is the root.  Action is the fruit.  The anonymous writer of the prayer “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace” has the right idea.  We are instruments of God.  If you look at the piano,  it’s really just another lovely piece of furniture until the right hands are laid upon it.  Then it leaps to life and is able to do what it is able to do and be what it was meant to be.

God’s hands are laid upon us so that we might be and become what God intends.  At the very moment of our baptism, God claims us as partners in bringing faith, hope, light, pardon, and joy.  It is not about who we are in our own strength.  It is about who God is in our lives.  Faithful actions and deeds are not the source of our salvation but, rather, the fruit of it.   We often get the emphasis on the wrong syllable, thinking that our good works are the most important thing.  Don’t get me wrong.  They are important but they become holy when they are expressions of our faith in God and our commitment to God’s vision for the world.  We are not saved by our own actions but by God’s.  What we give and how we live is the measure of our gratitude. 

So we join with faithful people of many ages, saying “Lord, make us instruments of thy peace.”  Amen.