I’ve been in your midst for almost a year now. I worshipped with you for the first time a year ago today on Consecration Sunday. Even though it wasn’t ‘official,’ I wanted to be here that Sunday to be counted ‘in.’ We have been getting to know one another. By this time next year, chances are pretty good that we will have reached a point where we feel like we ‘belong’ to one another, or that at least we are willing to begin the process of belonging to one another. (We all have different time frames for making such important decisions about allowing someone to be our pastor.)

Relationships take time. It takes a while to get to know one another. And it takes time to develop the trust needed to be able to share our selves from the deepest level of our beings.

One of the games I have noticed we human beings play with one another is a kind of ‘flashing’ game. At first, we only share what’s on the outside – what we want the world to see. Our Sunday best overcoats. As time goes on and we develop trust, we risk a little, open up and test the waters: “Here’s a little something about me I don’t share with everyone . .  .” Then we wait to see if we are still accepted. If it is reciprocated, and we are entrusted with a glimpse into the other’s soul as well. “Can you handle that? Do you still want to get to know me?”

Then, if that goes well, we share a little more, and the other person shares a little more. Each time wondering: “Do you still like me? Can you handle this?” Each time fearing that if the other person REALLY knows who we are – they may just run away.”  In the process, we find out how much alike we are, how much we have in common, how many scars we all carry. Hopefully, our hearts soften toward one another. Ultimately, the game is about values. Do you value me? Do I value you? Do I think you have worth? Do you think I have worth? It’s pretty scary stuff.

And as I said, the process takes time.

If you are willing to risk true and deep intimacy, you will talk about money eventually. Not how to make it or how to save it. But how you spend it and your real relationship with it. It’s the killer issue. More relationships end over money issues than over anything else. I was in a seminar once that was working on understanding the differences between men and women. The women were super sensitive about their appearance. The men were asked to write their salaries on a card and wear it on their chests. In the dialogue that followed, there was a lot more understanding following that exercise. I know how uncomfortable this congregation was when asked to write down your incomes anonymously. I suspect that one of the things that makes us so uncomfortable around money is that we have bought into the idea that when we say ‘net worth’ that we take that literally to mean that is what we are worth. We believe that our possessions are our ‘value.’

I have been in the ministry for over twenty years and it still amazes me that people are more willing to discuss the most private of matters before talking about money. That means, my friends, that we are talking about a faith issue.

We are talking about how our value is determined and who determines it.

We are in Stewardship season, and over the past few weeks, different people have shared with you during the minutes for mission some of their thoughts about stewardship.   Now it’s my turn.

First, I have told you that I think stewardship wouldn’t be hard to talk about if we were only talking about giving money. Then we could be clever (even if annoying) the way the public television and radio stations can be during fund raising. But stewardship is not about fund raising. It is about consciousness raising. It is about faith and values and our relationship with God at the deepest level, as well as our relationship with one another.

It is about the whole of our lives, and how we spend our lives. And that includes money.

Now, I know there are some among you who don’t like it when we talk about money in church. It is okay, apparently, to talk about money every where else, but not in church. And it’s okay to talk about how to make it and how to save it and how to invest it. But it isn’t okay to talk about how much we have or how much we make, or how much we give to the church.

It would be a lot easier to avoid talking about money if Jesus hadn’t talked about it so much. But Jesus talked about money a lot more than Jesus talked about sex or most other things. And it seems clear that Jesus felt that wealth created some problems in terms of our faith. The wealthy, we are told, have a hard time entering the kin-dom. (That should be a concern for us, since everyone in this room is among the wealthiest people in the world.)

Jesus also didn’t buy that ‘this is just between me and God’ stuff, either. In our gospel text today, Jesus points to how much a widow gives and uses it as a lesson for his disciples. Jesus taught that we are accountable to one another around financial matters. Our relationship with money impacts our relationships with one another in the church. Try being in a covenanted relationship with anyone without talking about money. You can’t go out to dinner or a movie with even the most casual of friends without having to talk about who is going to pay for what. Jesus taught that we are to feel neither pride nor shame about our gift to the church. The important thing is how our giving reflects our relationship with God.

Jesus taught that the two greatest commandments were to “love God with all your heart, all your strength, all your soul and all your mind. And to love our neighbors as ourselves.” I have a hard time imagining what in our lives doesn’t come under that umbrella. What part of all don’t we get? Who really believes that we can love God with our whole being, but that has nothing to do with our finances?

Some years ago, a part of my personal faith journey was beginning to come to grips with how I felt about money; my relationship with money.

My parents were children of the depression. They had some pretty mixed up emotional baggage around money, and they passed that on to me unintentionally. Add to that the strange messages we get about money from our surrounding culture, and you will understand I still have some healing to do.

I learned what money is and what money is not from Joe Dominquez, who wrote a book called, “Your Money or Your Life.”

Joe Dominquez grew up in a very poor Puerto Rican family in New York. He heard from everyone around him how much better life would be if they just had more money. Then, because he was very bright, he was given a scholarship to a prestigious prep school, where his friends were very wealthy. Soon he realized he was hearing the same things about money from these folks living in large homes, driving fancy cars or being driven by a chauffer. They, too, talked about how much better life would be if they had more money.

Dominquez saw a problem. He wanted to know: “How much is enough?”

And he embarked on a journey to learn about money and figure out how much was ‘enough.’

One of the things that I learned was that we all have different myths about what money is. And Dominquez does a pretty good job of helping us step back and separate the emotional baggage from the reality. He debunks the myths.

The bottom line about money, the one thing that is universally true about money is this:  it is what we trade our lives for. It is not security. It is not love. It is not evil or dirty. It is not magic. It is simply: what we trade our lives for.

Nothing holy there. Nothing scary there.

Dominquez asks the question: “Are you making a living or making a dying?”  It begs the question: “Are we still living under Pharoah or have we been liberated?” When we know how much is ‘enough’ we are on our way to liberation.

I have learned that it is important to talk about money, because how we spend our lives and what we trade our lives for is a faith issue. The matter of ‘enough’ is a faith issue.

When we talk about stewardship, (the careful use of the resources entrusted to us) our time, our money, our talents are the ‘all’ with which we are called to love God. To trust God is ot trust in the ‘enough-ness’ of God.

Which is, I suspect, one of the reasons Jesus talked about money so much.

I seek to be a disciple of Jesus. I have found wisdom and liberation in his teachings, so I pay attention to his words and actions.

Connected to my journey around money was the realization that the laws of the Hebrew people were intended as a correction to the excesses and abuse of Pharoah’s rule.

The ancient Egyptians spent their lives making a dying; that is to say, preparing for a good death. Their whole focus was on life after death, and so all their resources went into elaborate tombs for the very wealthiest. Those tombs were filled with treasures they spent their lives accumulating, and when they died, their servants and sometimes pets were killed and entombed with them. Slave labor was used to build those pyramids, which meant that their lives, too, were used to make a dying. There was never ‘enough.’

It seems a sad way to spend a life. The Hebrew people were liberated by God from spending their lives in slavery, making tombs for the very wealthy.

Free from Pharoah, they were given directions for how to live differently –some ground rules for, among other things, an economic system that, if followed, would always provide for everyone. And, if followed, would never result in such huge divisions between the rich and the poor. An economic system based on God’s providence and God’s enough-ness.

The idea was that each family would have enough land to provide for their families. Laws were given to assure that people wouldn’t be cheated out of their land, and to make sure the land stayed in the family through the laws of inheritance. Provisions were made for widows and orphans.

It was all based on an understanding that everything and everyone belonged to God. “The earth is the Holy One’s and the fullness thereof.” And the Hebrew people as God’s people: were meant to reflect God’s values. God cares for poor, so the Hebrew people were to care for the poor. God cared for the stranger and sojourner in their midst, and so should God’s people. God created, God redeems, God provides. God is one God and the people are to love God with their whole beings, and they are to love their neighbors as well.  What a difference from living under Pharoah’s rule!

Our story of the two widows in the book of Ruth this morning is basically about how an outsider (Ruth) reminded an insider (Boaz) of that economic system. Her actions reminded him that he had a responsibility to Naomi and to her, as the next of kin. It’s a lovely story, filled with metaphor and euphemisms, but the bottom line is that Ruth needed a son and Boaz was the likely person, under the law, to help her out. She and Naomi had come back to Bethlehem empty, but among this people, the Hebrew people, Ruth found someone who would see to it that she was cared for. It was a form of social security, if you like. It was a reminder of how the system can work. (The baby born of the union between Ruth and Boaz, Obed, became the grandfather of King David.)

Jesus was steeped in these stories from the Hebrew text. They were the stories that formed him. They were his family legacy (as they are ours.)

Jesus was not happy that his own people had abandoned the radical nature of their own economic system. He saw the abuses, the poverty, the corruption, and the rise of the Temple economy. He was not happy that the religious authorities were exploiting the poor in favor of the wealthy.

The story of the widow’s mite has, at it’s roots, the same ethical basis that is at the heart of Ruth. Jesus was angry at the Temple system, a new form of Pharoah, in which the poor were exploited and the wealthy favored. He is critical of those who have abandoned their responsibility to care for widows and orphans.

We read thise story, but it doesn’t grab us, because we can’t identify with either the widow or the scribes. Not really.

It reminds me of a tale popular among preachers this time of the year about a local church that had a special Wednesday night service where different people were invited to come and give their testimony about how God had been active in their lives. One night a very successful businessman got up to speak and he told his story;

          "When I was but a young man, I came to this church. I was down and out. I had only ten dollars in my pocket. I had nowhere to live and I was hungry. But the sermon so inspired me, that I took that ten dollar bill and I put it in the offering plate. I gave everything I had to God.  And because of that, God has blessed me with abundance, and I am now a wealthy man. And all because I gave everything I had to God."

          Those who were gathered there were moved by his story but just as he was taking his seat an elderly woman in the congregation said to him; "I dare you to do it again!"

We laugh because we know we aren’t going to do that.

But the story in Mark is not ultimately about how much is given. The story is about loving God with all our souls,  and all our minds and all our hearts and all our strength and loving our neighbor as ourselves.

It is about trusting God to provide and because we can trust God to provide, we no longer having a need to hoard.  It is about being willing to be generous to those in our midst who don’t have enough, and to one another.

The term, stewardship, means ‘one who manages affairs of an estate on behalf of his or her employer.’

Everything belongs to God. We are the ones who use what has been entrusted to us for the good of the whole. The good news is that because of God’s generosity we have more than enough to do whatever God asks of us. We have enough to pay off the organ, to repair and beautify this building, to do amazing ministry in Jesus’ name. We have enough. God has already provided it. The catch is: it is in our pockets and purses and bank accounts.

Jesus understood that.  Jesus understood God as a God of abundance. And Jesus got it that we don’t need to worry about money, we don’t need to hoard or grasp. “Consider the lilies,” he said, “they neither toil nor spin . .. but look how God has provided for them.” “Be not anxious,” he said. Over and over. He got it. He was open to God’s abundance and he let it flow through him. That’s what the metaphor of turning water into wine was about: When we are open to God’s abundance, life is a celebration! When we are open to God’s abundance, life even tastes better and is more intoxicating!

I long to be a disciple of Jesus because I want to be as open as Jesus to God’s love and grace.

In the words of the folks from the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, I have a “desire to discover how to be on an authentic journey with others – inward toward our true selves rooted in Love- and outward toward whatever blocks Love’s entry.”

In the little church I last served, every Christmas we delivered at least 100  food baskets, to, among other places,  an apartment complex that housed people with Aids. It was not easy for most of those folks to receive charity. Many had been professionals, all of them contributing members of society, until the disease took a toll on both their bodies and their financial resources. One year, in an unusual turn of events in Houston, Texas, there was an ice storm the evening before we began our deliveries. It was still freezing and no one in Houston has really warm clothes. So hauling the boxes of food and the frozen turkeys from the cars and vans up and down icy concrete steps past palm trees coated with ice, was tricky and chilling business for the twenty or so people from the church. (When I say food baskets, let me be clear: each ‘basket’ contained enough food for a family of six for two weeks. There was everything needed for a big Christmas meal, plus staples and canned goods, and some items like cocoa, marshmallows and candy canes, in an effort to provide some holiday cheer.)

As we were nearly done, and close to frozen, one of the residents on the first floor, who had seen how cold we were, ran out to say, “Don’t leave yet! I have something for you.” He then disappeared into his tiny apartment – too small to hold our entourage. So we stood outside dancing up and down trying to keep warm, until this gentle fellow returned. When he did, I noticed how incredibly thin he was because of the illness. He was dressed in a summer-weight cotton robe. On his feet were open-toed shocking pink satin mules, bedecked with soft fluffy feathers. He was laboring under a huge tray covered with an assortment of mugs he had apparently rounded up from neighbors on either side. Each cup was filled with hot chocolate, some topped with marshmallows, and some sporting candy canes. We weren’t sure how he was able to carry that tray, but as he held it out to us he broke into a smile that took away the chill.

He had used the sugar, cocoa and milk we had brought to him to make hot chocolate for us.

 We all thanked him over and over. Then he looked up at us, still smiling, though tears had formed in his eyes. and said, “No. Thank you for giving me something to share. The thing I miss  most of all is giving to others.”   

Today, we all count the ways in which God has blessed us so that we too can share with others.

Today, we commit our lives to following Jesus. We commit to be on an authentic journey with one another – inward toward our  true selves rooted in Love- and outward toward whatever blocks Love’s entry.”

Count me in!