Sermons

Lenten Abundance

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
February 25, 2007                     Deuteronomy 26:1-11

I will apologize now if you’ve heard this account previously. One of the positions my father held in his ministry was as the stewardship officer for the Presbyterian synod that covered Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky. He would typically travel to local churches or presbyteries and provide stewardship training. He would also, on occasion, preach at a local church on a Sunday morning. I would, on occasion, travel with him. I treasured those opportunities then and cherish those memories now.

One sermon in particular was memorable. I must say I heard it more than once and I felt at some point that I could even preach it for him if I had to. It focused on the nursery rhyme “Old Mother Hubbard,” and likened the image of the bare cupboard to the way the church approaches money and stewardship. The church begins with the proposition that it faces a lack of resources, he would assert, and that it must scrounge and scurry to fill the cupboard with enough scraps to make it through. But in fact, he would insist, and I believe this strongly now, that our cupboard is not bare and we needn’t scrounge. But we need a reminder of that reality, the promise of abundance and the sure word that God’s providence gives us all that we might need, and to overflowing.

That might seem like an odd reminder at the outset of the Lenten season. We’ve done funny things with Lent, turned it into a season of denial and deprivation. To do such things for their own benefit misses the point, and I rather like a more recent turn of phrase that suggests “taking something up” rather than “giving something up” for Lent.

Spiritual disciplines needn’t be punitive. Rather, they should lead us closer to God, to God’s people, to the journey to which God is calling us. Regular reading or prayer, if those are the disciplines you keep, or a walk in the woods or a conversation with one you trust, reveal how much we have, rather than how little.

The Old Testament book of Deuteronomy seeks to affirm and interpret the covenant between God and the people of Israel. In provision after provision after provision, rule after rule after rule, law after law after law, Moses rehearses the events of God’s interaction with the Hebrew people, and opens to them the ways that they should live before God and with one another.

Moses is well aware of the reality of human nature. He knows our tendencies toward self-righteousness and self-interest. How to worship God rightly is at the heart of Deuteronomy, but also how the people will be organized, which include matters of justice and common life.

These words can seem over-legalistic at times, or at least excruciatingly detailed. Imagine the issues that emerge when forming a society, a culture, a people. Remember that this has been a captive people, a slave people, and then a wandering people. There is no precedent for how they will order their life together. And there is great concern about the perpetuation of the people; that is why so many of the provisions deal with matters of sex and sexuality and procreation.

In the portion of Deuteronomy we have heard this morning, Moses is concluding his long discourse, wrapping things up by anticipating a plentiful harvest from the providence of God. He describes a rather intricate ceremony in which a grateful Israelite takes the first portion of the harvest, not the leftovers, but the first portion, and presents it to the priest at the temple. The presenter is then to tell a story, recite the history of God’s providence in times of afflictions, in times of persecution. God saw us, God saved us, God provides for us. God gave us this abundant land that has produced to overflowing, and we return the first portion of the bounty to God and we celebrate with joy and gratitude and awe.

This is a thanksgiving story if ever there was one, a stewardship story that reminds us of the source of al that we have, and the manner with which we are called to give thanks. When we cried out to God, the story reminds us, God delivered us. How deep must our gratitude be, how profound our thanks for the saving response of God that defined Israel and calls the people of God into existence?

The promise, as Walter Brueggemann reminds us, is not that bad things will not happen to us. The promise is that we are never without God, never, finally, alone. (Texts for Preaching, Year C, page 189-198)

This is not ancient history we are considering, then or now, but it is the very promise of redemption kindled in each memory, then and now. God not only acted; God still acts, and by refreshing our memory, we refresh our ability to respond to God’s ongoing and gracious activity.

Brueggemann writes that “Deuteronomy knows that when a people forgets its past, it loses both its present and its future.” That is why we tell the story. We tell the story, and when we present the basket of first fruit from the harvest – in whatever contemporary form it may take – we acknowledge God’s grace and God’s saving activity in our lives and the life of the world, evidence of God’s continuing care of the people and for the people.

Read the story of the temptation of Jesus in that light, the story we often hear at the outset of Lent. Satan tempts Jesus, and three times Jesus reminds him that he already has all that he needs, by God’s grace – enough food, enough political power, enough religious power. Enough, and more than enough.

This abundance is celebrated in worship. In fact, it is worship. We receive an offering, not take a collection, but receive an offering, in worship each Sunday; it certainly would be more efficient to have ushers at the doors to receive your money on the way out. That would make giving an after-thought, though, rather than the central act that it is.

We give, Ronald Clements reminds us, in fact we worship, because we are the beneficiaries of a long history of God’s gracious providence, which has led us from slavery into freedom and poverty into prosperity. (New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume II, page 479 and ff)

God is concerned about the cosmos, beyond all of our thinking and imagining. But God is also deeply committed, Clements says, to the “demands, tasks and necessities of daily life. The world of faith and the world of food, clothing and territory are one world.” (Page 484)

We begin life, therefore, as we begin Lent, not with a bare cupboard. What does that look like? It does not mean that bad things will not happen to us (to double the negative), nor does it mean that we will not experience the bareness of life, a scarcity of spiritual or tangible resources. We know better. But it does mean that when we experience that bareness, that scarcity, we will discover resources, the least of which is certainly not God’s ongoing and continuing presence. Our task is to claim those resources, to remind ourselves and to convince the world that poverty – of money or of hope – is not God’s agenda or God’s people’s agenda. Abundance is God’s agenda.

What does that look like?

* It looks like 16 people from this place, plus countless other church groups, heading to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to rebuild after devastating hurricanes. An abundance of renewal.
* It looks like a small group, then a larger group, gathering to think about the environment, about caring for God’s creation, about reversing the ways that we are abusing the earth. An abundance of possibility.
* It looks like a group of caring church folk gathering around a member of this church after a loved one has died unexpectedly, providing food, prayers, conversation, flowers, more food. An abundance of compassion.

Or hear this poignant story from writer Anthony Esolen, from an essay called “A Manna for All Seasons.” “My grandmother had terrible circulation in her legs all her born days, but she was too busy to sit down, unless it were to watch Gunsmoke with her husband. I see them still, each more a child than I: two Italians cheering a sheriff named Dillon, laughing at the bad guy and holding a perfectly silly and animated conversation with the tube…Even when cancer had withered her right arm, she would some how swing her limbs and roll the dough for a great bowl of anise Easter cookies…by no means was her life all sweet: for many years without complaint she washed and fed her bedridden father, and then, with no intermission, she did the same humble and noisome duties for her half-mad ingrate of a father-in-law. She raised six children through poverty, then tended the grandchildren, of whom there were nineteen, all nearby…

I have never known a woman or a man who worked harder and more heroically than she, nor have I known anyone who tired less. She was no great intellect…but when it came to the tricks of this world, she was never trumped…I am persuaded that in her work she was one of the fools to whom great mysteries have been revealed, hidden from us noisemakers…Angeline was her name, and like an angel she ascended and descended. She was always working at something true, like a loaf of bread; therefore, she was always at rest. She was a laborer of the harvest. She was a lily of the field.”

And I would add, an abundance of grace.

Or how is this for an abundance of justice? We visited the home of Harriet Tubman this week, in Auburn, New York. It is a modest little historic site, largely preserved by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, of which she was a member. She prayed for the man who enslaved and abused her, prayed for his conversion, actually, an abundance of grace I would find difficult to muster. And with no resources she led more than 300 African-American slaves to freedom, over treacherous terrain, pursued by the law. Moses, they called her, and rightly so. To know her story, even just a little, is to connect with the greatest traditions of this nation, when those with an abundance of earthly power were overcome by those with an abundance of justice and hope.

To risk overplaying the preacher’s hand, for Harriet Tubman, the cupboard was not bare – it simply needed replenishing from the deep wells of abundant justice and freedom that the God of deliverance has provided and provides.

It begins, this Lenten season, with worship, as it does each day. Perhaps a simple prayer, a brief reading, an offering of some sort or the other. And from there, this rehearsal of the story leads us to all the places where perceived scarcity is simply overwhelmed with the gift and reality of abundance. Simply put, the cupboard is not bare.

This is not intended to be a thinly veiled, or not so thinly veiled, stewardship sermon. But if it is, so be it. And if it is, it is much more than a fund-raising sermon, but rather a stewardship sermon about God’s provision and God’s providence, about the story of a people who were, and are, at their best when they remember that providence is the central plot-line in the ongoing story, not unlike a forty-day journey that leads us from death to abundant life. Amen.