2025-01-27
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
Sermon We Can Do This Hard Thing
You might recall that I talked a while back about the revised common lectionary and I’d like to take a few moments this morning to remind you about this list of scriptures that is followed by many mainline Protestant & Catholic churches. It assigns texts for each Sunday in a three-year cycle with an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, a second reading, usually from the epistles, and then a gospel reading included each week.
Generally, those of us who preach in the UCC do so from the lectionary because, as a friend of mine always says, “preaching the lectionary keeps you honest.” He means that pastors don’t just cherry-pick passages to support their own agendas. It also helps to ensure that, over the three-year cycle, people will hear most of the important stories in the bible.
Sometimes the lectionary seems just perfect for a given time and the readings this week are no exception as they speak of the challenge of following the words of God and the teachings of Jesus. As Jeremiah is called by God to be a prophet, the young boy has every excuse as to why he can’t follow this call from God.
In our gospel reading, Jesus refuses to shape his message to make his hometown friends happy and instead reminds them that God calls us to love people across boundaries, to love people we just don’t consider worthy. Jesus tells the people of his hometown that he belongs not just to them, but to all the people God loves. And they are not happy!
I hope that many of you have had a chance to watch the sermon that the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, preached at the interfaith prayer service on Tuesday, the day after the inauguration. It was a sermon so impactful that one pastor suggested on FB that every-one preaching this morning should rip up their sermon and just offer Rev. Budde’s. It was a temptation . . . and if you haven’t yet listened to it, I commend it to you. It’s easily found online.
Rev. Budde’s words fit perfectly with the lectionary this week because they are ones of challenge, ones many people didn’t want to hear, and prophetic words that took real courage to deliver with the president sitting in the front row, just about 40 feet away. One could imagine the bishop arguing with God just as Jeremiah did, saying that she wasn’t ready to deliver such a message. She has received a boatload of criticism and even death threats from people who want to run her off a cliff. But she has also had a resounding chorus of support.
As our lectionary texts this morning suggest, oftentimes the word of God is challenging and includes things many people don’t want to hear. But, as Luke tells us in the final verse of the gospel reading, “Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” Even when the command is hard and no one wants to listen, we are called to proclaim God’s message of love, grace, justice and generosity anyway.
Did you know that there are more than 2,300 verses concerning money in the Bible? That's almost twice as many as verses about faith and prayer combined. And yet pastors are told over and over by their parishioners that they don’t want to hear about money in church. So guess what I’m going to talk about this morning? Well, not actually about money (although I am willing to do so), but about the spiritual practices of stewardship and generosity.
These practices are ones that have become very dear to me over the last few decades of my life, in large part because I was never taught them as a child. I remember when my friend Charlotte wrote an article about how her parents raised her in the church and taught her to be generous. My mother, a single parent who didn’t have time to take us to church every week, was always struggling to raise three girls on her own, and so could only afford to teach us about scarcity.
When Mike and I began taking our kids to church, I remember how, when it was time for the offering, we dug into our wallets to see if we had a 10 or $20 bill to toss into the plate. We never thought about it in a deeper way; just threw to God the crumbs we could find on a given Sunday morning.
After several years, we finally understood the concept of pledging, but didn’t have clue how much to give. So we looked at what we had left over at the end of the month and pledged that. We moved from giving God our crumbs to our leftovers. Our friend Kate often talked in glowing terms about tithing and how good it felt, but the idea of giving ten percent of our money to the church was too daunting to take her seriously.
Then one day I read an article that changed my faith life. It was an article by my friend Michael Piazza’s husband, Bill Eure. Bill talked about how, growing up in the church, he had heard countless sermons about tithing. But, he shared, there was one sermon that caused him to give it a shot. For reasons he couldn’t recall, and although he was in his 20s, living on his own and struggling to get by, he decided to take his next paycheck and give ten percent of it to the church. At the end of the month, somehow he had paid his bills and still had food in his cupboards. So he did the same thing the next month, and the next, and on and on for the next 40 years.
Bill talked about how amazing it was that, even when he increased his giving by an enormous amount, he never struggled and continued to do the things he loved to do. His words stunned me! “How could this be?” I wondered. Although I didn’t get it, I decided to try to emulate Bill’s plan and told my husband my idea. His objections were fast and firm: we had just bought a new car and had a car payment for the first time in years. Our kids were in college, and we had exorbitant tuition bills to pay. And on and on.
But . . . I am the one who handles the money in our house,
so I decided to try it anyway. Without changing our pledge, I began giving ten percent of our income each month to the church. And rather than writing a check when I paid bills each month as I had always done, making our giving to God just one more obligation, I wrote a one each Sunday to put in the offering plate, creating a meaningful spiritual practice instead. And just like Bill said, our bills still got paid, we still went out to dinner and traveled and enjoyed going to concert and movies.
I was amazed by just how much my faith changed and deepened as I began to understand stewardship as a spiritual practice rather than an obligation. And I finally realized that it was so incredibly easy to do because now we choose to give to God first – the best we have – rather than giving the leftovers or the crumbs.
You have been hearing a lot over the last few months about giving to the church. Some of you may repeat to yourself that old saw that all the church does is ask for money. But I think deep down you know that isn’t true. Just like the folks in Jesus’ hometown, we really don’t like being challenged by things any more than they did. And yet, isn’t challenge at the very heart of our faith: to follow a counter-cultural path to bring forth the realm of God?
And so this morning, I challenge you . . . and I hope you don’t run me off a cliff and into the Chagrin River. If you haven’t made a pledge, please make one today. Yes, for the church as the council finalizes the budget, but even more, do it for yourself. I promise you the benefit to your faith will be palpable.
If you have already made a pledge, consider increasing it, even a little. Then challenge yourself to give more. Perhaps you aren’t able to make a jump to a full tithe, but choose an amount that seems beyond your reach, and try to give that. See how it goes . . . and how it feels in your heart. Next year, pledge the amount you have been giving and then try to give a bit more. Before you know it, you’ll be stunned at the ways that God works in your life when you give to God first instead of last.
Finally, I want to make something very clear: making a big pledge is not what I’m talking about or what makes you worthy. If you have run into hard times, if you are retired and living on a limited income, if there are big demands on your finances, it’s okay. The point is to give a percentage of your income that challenges you a little bit. Maybe that means moving from one percent of your income to 1.5%. Or to making a small pledge where you hadn’t before. It might be $5 or $10 a week. It’s how you view it that matters. Give from your heart, not your leftovers.
Carrie Newcomer is one of my favorite singer/songwriters and you may remember a song of hers I quoted a few weeks ago. Another of her songs fits perfectly today. “You can do this hard thing, you can do this hard thing. It’s not easy I know, but I believe that it’s so. You can do this hard thing.”
And we can do the hard things, the things that challenge us to move out of our comfort zones, whether it’s preaching the gospel at a national prayer service or increasing our pledge. We can do it . . . because God is calling and guiding us. Amen.