Sermons

“A Faith You Can Touch”

Psalm 46:1-5; Luke 24:36-49 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – April 19, 2015

Annual Stewardship Campaign #1

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that our hearts and minds might be opened to the living presence of your Risen Christ. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

This is essentially an Easter story. That is where it begins, and that is where it ends. Not just any Easter, but the first Easter. The one when the disciples are still struggling to grasp what has happened. They were “startled” and “terrified” Luke writes. They thought they were seeing a ghost. Which makes about as much sense as what was actually going on. “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” Jesus asked them.

And he goes on, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And then comes the clincher – not something Jesus said, but something he did – he ate a piece of broiled fish, right there in front of them. Everybody knows that ghosts don’t eat fish. Or anything else for that matter.

“Touch me and see.” I think it was in those moments – the touching, the witnessing of that simple meal – that the disciples’ faith became real in a way they’d never imagined before. Suddenly, everything was different. Their faith was a whole other thing now, and it was going to change their lives.

Does your faith make a difference? Not even in the world, to other people, but just to you – does your faith make a difference to you? Is your faith real? People expect churches to be different. They count on us to operate with different values than the rest of the world; they come and ask for help because they believe that we root our lives in compassion and generosity. Does your faith do that for you?

How does faith make a difference? How does it become real? I know that it’s been real lately for one family. Many of you remember Duane McDaniel. You remember how he was our guest at Interfaith Shelter, and how he adorned the fountain in our prayer garden with his beautiful collection of mineral specimens and rocks. You remember how he showed up a year or so later, with Maggie, his fiancé, and how they got married in that same prayer garden. They were around some, in worship with us, often staying for coffee hour. And then this past winter, because of bureaucratic confusion I will never quite understand, Duane’s life got even more complicated. Instead of being on probation for just a couple more months, he was informed that he was now on parole, until next December! And he needed an address immediately.

Now, one of the things I can tell you about Duane is that despite whatever book smarts he may lack, his street smarts are incredible. From my conversations with him, I developed a deep admiration for his capacity to make a home out of practically nothing. The man was a street-living genius, as far as I can tell. But the parole office wasn’t impressed. They demanded that he have an address. So Duane and Maggie came back into the Interfaith Shelter, while we were hosting it here in January, and they gave our address to Duane’s parole officer. The shelter moved on, of course, but things seemed to be going okay, until they weren’t. Suddenly, the parole officer wasn’t satisfied with a church address. And the shelter was closing soon. Duane was informed that he’d better get a permanent address ASAP, or he would be hauled off to jail.

So Duane headed for the only permanent address he had – his parents’ house in Ohio. He and Maggie had been there a couple weeks before they called me. And they hadn’t told the parole officer yet. Honestly, I think Duane thought it was a little funny, because he was just following instructions and getting himself a permanent address! I wasn’t really sure what I should or shouldn’t be doing in this situation, mind you, and I was struggling with how deeply to get involved. But when Duane asked me to write a letter to the judge, I agreed, because it really seemed like he was doing the best he could, and they just kept hassling him. So I wrote a letter, carefully describing what we knew about Duane here at church, and how sincerely it seemed he was trying to do the right thing. And now here comes the exciting part – the part Duane wanted me to make sure to tell you all – a week or so later, I got a letter from the judge, saying he had ruled that Duane was fully released from parole! Duane and Maggie are starting over there in Cambridge, Ohio. They are happy and productive, and most of all, Duane wanted me to tell you how grateful they are for the support this congregation gave them.

People come to churches, expecting us to be different, expecting that our faith makes us different, makes us more compassionate and generous, and when we prove that to be true, people’s lives are changed! That is how we know our faith is real. One of the fastest ways to make your faith real is to start connecting it to your finances. The spiritual discipline of stewardship is quite possibly one of the most effective ways to grow our faith that there is. And stewardship isn’t just about how much we give to the church; it’s about what we do with the rest of it too.

When I was growing up, it was clear – sometimes painfully so – that we were kind of different from other families in town. One of the starkest contrasts was in how my parents spent their money. We didn’t do the things other families did. We didn’t buy the things they did. We washed and saved bread bags. My mom made a lot of my clothes. She also made her own ketchup! We bought things because we needed them, not because they were trendy. We used things until they were un-repairable, rather than updating them with every available upgrade. I’m not sure how exactly, but it was very clear to me that the values that guided my parents’ spending choices were rooted in their faith. It made a difference in how we lived our lives. A tangible difference. A difference you could touch and taste and see.

If you want your faith to be real, to be something that matters, something that makes a difference in your life and maybe even the lives of others, getting your money involved is the fast track to getting there. Jesus taught us that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” You might assume he meant it the other way around – that we give our money to the things our hearts hold dear, but that’s not what he said. Because he knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows that if we invest in something, it becomes so much more important to us than it was before.

And so today, we’re kicking off our annual stewardship campaign, and it is essentially an Easter story. You are being offered an opportunity to make your faith real, to invest in this church’s ministry, as a way of developing a faith you can touch. In case you haven’t been involved in a stewardship campaign before, let me just outline the basics. Stewardship is a spiritual discipline, one of the ways we align our lives more closely with God’s abundant love and the gospel’s good news. It is also a way of working together to build up the ministry of our congregation. Stewardship is highly personal, but it’s also something we do together. Next week, during worship, you will be invited to turn in an Estimate of Giving card.

Now, here is an important thing to know. That card is exactly what it says it is – an estimate of your giving. It’s not a contract, though it does help if you put your name on it. No one is going to come after you if you don’t live up to the commitment you share on it. It’s a way of helping the folks in this church who will be putting together our proposed budget for the next fiscal year have some idea of should go in the income line. But it’s also a way for you to be more intentional and regular about your giving. In any aspect of life, if we decide ahead of time what we’re going to do, our choices are better reflections of our values than if we just make decisions willy-nilly, making it up as we go.

Even more important than sharing the totals so our budget folks know what to do, doing stewardship together gives us the chance to invite God’s presence into the making of those commitments. You may be branching out, trying regular giving for the first time. Wouldn’t having God’s blessing make that easier? You may have chosen to increase your giving to a level you’re unsure you can maintain. Asking for God’s help seems wise. Maybe circumstances have changed in your life, and you’ve had to decrease your giving. Continuing to make some commitment, especially if not as large as what you once could, is so much more of a blessing when it’s done in the context of God’s everlasting grace and understanding love.

Most importantly, when we engage in stewardship as an intentional spiritual discipline, we start to notice how it’s helping make our faith more real. And here is where the fun part comes in. I’ve got these baskets of fish up here. In the Easter story we read from Luke, it really is the fish – or more precisely, the public fish-eating – that is the moment of truth. So I’m going to hand over these baskets, and I want each one of you to take a fish. DO NOT EAT THE FISH! At least not immediately. You will find in your bulletin another little slip of paper with some instructions. I want you to use that fish as a way of reflecting on your faith and how it makes a difference in your life. There are a few different ways to do that. The lowest-risk option is to eat the fish yourself, while giving thanks for a time when your faith was especially real or while praying for God to help your faith become more real. The medium risk option is to trade your fish with someone else’s here at church while telling each other stories of times when your faith was especially real. And if you’re extra fired up and feeling bold, here’s an even more exciting possibility. Do you think you could give that fish away to someone you don’t know very well, and use it as an opportunity to tell them about how your faith changes your life? Could you say, “My pastor wants me to give this fish to someone, and I choose you, and I need to tell you a story about how God was present in my life this one time”? Blame it on me, if you want. But tell that story. It’s an Easter story, a story of how your faith became real. If you’re still just a little shy, it can be someone here at church that you don’t know very well. That’s just fine. But maybe there’s someone at work, or a neighbor, or someone at your exercise class that you could tell that story too.

Because here’s the other thing about faith becoming real. It happens when we start to let our faith affect all parts of our lives, and the real-ness keeps growing when we tell the stories. Here we are, 2000 some years later, still telling this Easter story. And it becomes more and more true every time we tell it. Christ is risen! How do we know? He ate broiled fish! Alleluia and Amen!