Somewhere tomorrow morning in Manhattan, the deadline will arrive at some unremembered publisher’s office, a call for a proposal for a new book. I am intrigued by the premise. The call has gone out for a sequel, or actually for a sequel to a sequel to a sequel, at least, to Mario Puzo’s Godfather series. I didn’t read the books, and remember only parts of the three movies – make me an offer I can’t refuse and poor Fredo. 

Apparently, the story is not over; there is more to be told, and so a call has gone out. The biggest challenge to continuing to tell the story is the fact that the aforementioned Mr. Puzo is no longer with us. A new author needs to be found who can do the job, move this epic forward, devise new plots, develop new characters. I can’t quite tell if the story – the call for a new book – is a P.R. venture or not; either way it is surely more about profit than literary excellence. But I am intrigued nonetheless by the notion of continuing a story.

All of which is NOT to say that the Third Church Stewardship Committee should have chosen “make me an offer we cannot refuse” as its theme for 2003. Not even close. Every illustration breaks down at some point. No, rather, the committee, as you know, chose “Telling Our Story.” 

I am never sure that stewardship themes make a significant difference in how things go. This theme, however, has provided a fascinating opportunity to think about things a bit differently, to connect this stewardship effort to our anniversary celebration. Worship each Sunday morning over the course of the fall has included wonderful moments of sharing – Third Church “then and now.” We have remembered some things we might have forgotten; we have learned some things we might never have known. And, we have embraced future trajectories, new directions based on tried and true commitments. Education for children, youth and adults. Music for children, youth and adults. Worship. Outreach. Congregational life and care and fellowship. 

Those who have shared with us – and those who shared at two congregational lunches as well – have woven similar themes. A vision that has caught a sense of hope or joy or service or caring, all carried out in the context of community, where leadership has mattered and where lives have been impacted, influenced, transformed, even. Those are the stories we have been telling, and they have been inspiring for our understanding of the past, for our ability to live as grateful creatures. But there has been more to it than that, which we will explore a bit more. 

Frederick Buechner writes of a dream he once had. “I dreamt that I was staying in a hotel somewhere and that the room I was given was a room that I loved…I think it wasn’t so much the way the room looked that pleased me as it was the way it made me feel. It was a room where I felt happy and at peace, where everything seemed the way it should be and everything about myself seemed the way it should be too…As the dream went on, finally, after many adventures, (I) ended back at the same hotel again. Only this time I was given a different room where I didn’t feel comfortable at all. It seemed dark and cramped, and I felt dark and cramped in it. So I made my way down to the man at the desk and told him my problem…the clerk was very understanding. He said he knew exactly the room I meant and that I could have it again anytime I wanted it. All I had to do, he said, was ask for it by its name…The name of the room, he said, was Remember.” (A Room Called Remember, pages 1-12)

Moses, in recounting to the people Israel, and in calling for their faithful obedience into the future, as they have left one place and are about to enter another. “But take care,” he says. “Take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life.” 

That’s the remember part; here comes the telling part. “Make them known to your children and to your children’s children.” Remember and tell. Every story remembered to Moses, to the Israelite people, would not be a happy story. Some WOULD be happy; some grim; some challenging. All would be told – and this is the point of remembering and this is the point of telling to those who follow – all would be told in the context of God’s continual presence, and the people’s continual journey toward that presence. 

Buechner writes of the power of remembering. All kinds of emotions are stirred up, he says. Sometimes we remember to claim an “extraordinary sense of well-being.” Sometimes we remember because we are “escape artists.” Sometimes we remember to claim our purpose, to remember that we have survived, to find peace, to count our lucky stars. But mostly we remember to hope. "(Hope) is the driving power and outermost edge of our faith,” Buechner writes. And we have this “high and holy hope that what God has done, God will continue to do, that what God has begun in us and our world, God will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition.” 

And so Moses told the people to remember, to tell stories. Jesus did the same. As we have claimed this fall, among the many extraordinary and earthly things Jesus was was a storyteller. He wandered from place to place and told stories. And people listened. That’s what got him into trouble – the fact that people listened. I have a hunch that he was good at it, but I have a stronger hunch that what really compelled people was what he had to say. It punctuated Moses’ message from centuries back. God is present, God is with us, God is with you, God invites you into something infinitely more interesting and challenging and transforming. 

And so it is Stewardship Sunday, and we are far more compelled by the vision of a room called Remember than the vision of the Godfather. It is a rather uneasy time to be discussing these things. Peter Gomes’ cover quotation about says it all. Perhaps you saw the cartoon in this week’s New Yorker. A group of people sitting around in a living room. “We used to be an investment club. Now we are a support group.” That is the way many of us are living these days, with battered portfolios and uncertain financial futures. Plus, there is precious little more that I might say that the members of this church haven’t said over the course of the fall, or that Fred Smith’s Stewardship Committee has not articulated so well for us all. 

And yet, in a moment, we will sing an old chestnut of a hymn, “I Love to Tell the Story.” How could we sing anything else today? As we sing, you are invited to bring your pledge cards forward and place them in the basket. 

As you do so – with some figure carefully and prayerfully and faithfully inscribed on the card – as you do so, remember a story as well. Remember some way that the story of this church has touched your life. Remember some funny thing, some poignant thing, some illuminating thing. Remember some small act of kindness or some friendly moment, some keen point made in a sermon long ago, some lesson learned. Remember some risk you took because of the story of this place, or some way you were picked up and placed down in a new location. Remember what this place has meant for your kids, our kids. That may not impact the number you have written down, but I do hope it will undergird the spirit with which you place that card in the basket. 

And then do one more thing. As you return to your seat, embrace another facet of the stewardship puzzle, if I may mix a metaphor. Listen for Moses’ voice, for Jesus’ voice, for the voice of some certain saint who has influenced your life, for the voice of the spirit of Third Church, and hear how it is calling you. Hear where it is calling you. Hear the “now” of “then and now” and determine once again in your heart how you will continue to live out the continuing story. 

The financial needs are very real these days. Those who spend time around here thinking about things like budgets and endowment management and the economics of all this are working very hard. The needs are real. We are a growing church. That’s not a bad thing to say. We are a growing church, and growth does have a real cost – more things, more curriculum, more music, more stamps, more coffee. So the needs are real. 

But beyond the very real needs lay the very real opportunities. Because in the every day activity of singing and teaching and serving and caring, in the rhythm of worship, for that matter, stories are spun and lives are shaped and transformed. We remember the story in order to be able to tell the story, to connect then and now and the yet-to-be. 

So we are most certainly stewards of our financial resources, our own as well as this church’s. But clearly and more so, we are stewards of the story, this most current generation called to tend to it, nurture it, and then add to it and pass it on. It becomes not so much our story as THE story, God’s story, the church’s story. And we live with it for a little while even as it lives with us. That places our modest activity of this day, of placing pledge cards in a basket, in a context both daunting and extraordinary. And it makes our shared vocation, that of story hearers and storytellers, as important and as profound as anything, anything, we will ever do.