Listen to the Sermon.
Good Morning, St Hilda St Patrick! I am so grateful to be here with you this morning. My heart is literally bursting with love and gratitude for all the ways being in ministry with you blesses me, helps me continue to learn about being a priest, about having healthy balance in my life, about being a mom and wife – and that paycheck helps too.
Speaking of gratitude, I want to tell you about my friend Jan. She was looking for a new way to focus her prayer life a couple of years ago. She often prays while she rides her bike in the morning, so she decided to start her prayers by naming her gratitudes. She said when she started she could only think of 3-5 things that were blessings for which she was grateful. But she persisted with her practice. By the time I was hearing the story, she had been praying her gratitudes for several years, and she told me that she often finished her 45 minutes on the bike before she finished her gratitudes.
This time of year, we often think about the things for which we are thankful. Today, Veteran’s Day, we are thankful for the freedoms we enjoy because of the service and sacrifice of many women and men in our armed forces. We may be planning to gather with family and friends for Thanksgiving. We come here to St Hilda St Patrick to be with our community of faith, praising God and being in community with one another.
What are some things for which you are thankful?
Today we’re going to use our 3x5 cards for some thinking about our blessings and gratitudes, instead of our Love Notes to SHSP. These are your notes, to keep and take home.
So grab that 3x5 card. Does everyone have a card and a pen? [Hand out if needed]
I’m going to ask you several questions that are all related.
First – what are a couple, literally 1-3, things or people that you LOVE? I mean really, truly, deeply love.
[pause]
Now – how are those people or things gifts or blessings from God? We often say something is a gift or blessing from God, but do we stop to think about and name how our lives are changed for the better that person or thing. How are the things or people you LOVE a blessing from God? Be specific about how they change your life for the better.
[pause]
Great. Now, one more question. What would you give or do out of love for those people or things? Out of joy? Out of fear? Out of hope?
Jot that down – 0r at least the question if you need to think and come back to it.
[pause]
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that one of Bishop Rickel’s stewardship sayings is, “Loving = giving.” If we love something, we will give of ourselves – generously and eagerly – to see it grow and thrive. It’s that same spirit with which God loves us – giving us what we need to grow and thrive, to live into the fullness of life.
As I thought about this idea, I thought of a 50th birthday celebration I’m in the middle of planning for my husband Julien. This party is a way I can demonstrate the gift that Julien is to me, how much I love and care for him, for his well-being, and to celebrate who he continues to become and the journey he is on. He has been looking at the receipts so far, and he will tell you that I have been giving to it generously and eagerly.
When we love someone or something, we give of ourselves to it. We offer ourselves. We make an offering, giving of ourselves without expectation because we love.
It’s not a far jump from offering to Offertory. The Offertory is that time in our worship service when we make our offerings to God. We often hear an offering at that time, to celebrate the blessing of musicality. We offer bread and wine – raw materials of grapes and wheat harvested and shaped by human hands. We offer money – a symbol of our lives and blessings. Indeed, we offer our whole selves – bodies, minds, spirits, and lives – to God at the Offertory – in our prayer, in the symbols, in our participation.
We offer all that we have, all that we are, and all that we will be to God in love – to be blessed, transformed, and returned to us in new ways, to nurture our growth and fullness of life.
Our widow stories in today’s readings add another dimension to offering all that we have to God. These two widows literally have nothing else to give. The widow of Zarephath is preparing to go home, make a last meal for her and her young son, and die. The temple widow has nothing more than two lepta, the smallest denomination of coin made at the time – think of two copper pennies – and she puts them both in the offertory.
The question that comes to mind is how do we give with eagerness and generosity when we have almost nothing, when we quite literally can see the end in sight? Some of us may have known those moments – the fear and desperation, the sadness and sense of failure that this nothing is what we have to offer.
And yet, somewhere in these stories there’s hope and faith. Hope that there could be, will be, something different, richer, to come. Perhaps in the unknown of the future, there is hope. And faith – trusting in God, trusting that by feeding Elijah, by giving half or all of the meagre bit she has, those gifts will be returned in generosity and love. And, we learn, they are.
On one hand, these seem like very simplistic and self-serving interpretations of these stories. And they are. There are other more complex, more political ways to read these stories.
And, we remember that the reason we read scripture is to recall how God’s people have been challenged, how they have responded in faith, and how God has been faithful to God’s people.
Where do we find ourselves in these stories? Are we living with fear and scarcity? Holding tight to what little we have, or planning how to allocate the last measure of meal and oil in our jars. Or are we living with a sense of abundance? That we have what we need, we have enough to share, that God will be in our sharing, and that God will bless and multiply and return those gifts to us?
God delights in the gift of our lives, given eagerly and generously because we love God with the same reckless abandon that God loves us. We give, we make offerings, to God as a form of stewardship. As a way of taking care of what we have been given in the very same way the Giver, Creator, God would take care of it. Offering all that we have in love, to be blessed and transformed, and ultimately offered back to us as a free gift of love.
As we enter this final week before our Pledge Ingathering, I invite you to continue to be in conversation with any other financial decision-makers in your household, AND to be in conversation with God in prayer, about how you have been blessed and how God is calling you to give in love to support the life and ministry of St Hilda St Patrick in 2019. We will offer and ask God’s blessing on our 2019 pledges as part of our offertory next week.
In the spirit of offering our whole lives to God, I invite you to put your 3x5 cards in the offering plate today. Not to be read or shared, but as a holy offering to God, in thanksgiving for the blessings of your life. Or perhaps you’d like to slip it into your purse or pocket, to ponder and pray about in the days and weeks to come. Either way, God delights in the thankfulness of our hearts.
Let us pray.
God of fierce justice, you close the mouth of those who devour the poor and hide behind their prayer: humbled by the giving of those who have so little, let us live from your abundance; through Jesus Christ, the judgement of God. Amen. [1]
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[1] Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church (New York: Church Publishing, 2009), Collect for Proper 27, Year B, page 76.
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