Sermons

The Future Is Now: Renewing the Covenant

John Wilkinson	Third Presbyterian Church
October 21, 2007	Jeremiah 31:27-34

                           
It would take a year of sermons – as exciting as that sounds – to begin to tell you all that goes on in this place. You get a small taste on a Sunday morning, or from reading the newsletter or bulletin or visiting the church website.

* Arts opportunities – musical arts particularly but other forms as well.

* Outreach opportunities – from serving to advocating. Bread for the World is but one example.

* Fellowship opportunities – all types of people gathering in all types of ways to connect more deeply with others and their own spirits.

* And education, education to be sure. A whole lot of education. For children, for youth, for adults.

Allow me to tell you about one program. It is called Qabats. Qabats is loosely translated from the Hebrew as “gathering” or “community,” and every Wednesday evening, nearly 100 children and adults gather in community in this place. It is quite the scene. Half of the children sing before dinner, the other half after dinner. The half that is not singing is engaged in some kind of learning activity that seeks to share a bit of the faith with them.

In the middle is dinner, a wonderful meal shared by children and adults and prepared by a dedicated kitchen crew. I love eating dinner with the Qabats children. It is the best 30 minute education on life that one could wish for.

This fall, the Qabats theme is Presbyterianism. The kids are exploring things like the Presbyterian seal and the church’s stained glass. Another group is taking a tour of the church, visiting unexplored nooks and crannies.

Some of you may know that on the second floor of the parish house, near the area that houses many of the staff offices, there is a display case of historical items and artifacts. In that case is a very old Bible, from the 1850’s. That is cool in its own right, but what is even cooler is the fact that the Bible was rescued from a church fire all those years ago.

You will have to visit that display case to learn more, but suffice it to say that the rescued Bible is a very good story. This past Wednesday night, as the Qabats group was learning about the Bible, the teacher asked the children who they thought rescued the Bible all those years ago. The children pondered that for a few seconds, until one voice spoke up. “Either Jesus… or God.” Never a bad answer, I thought. We must be doing something right.

I thought about that episode a lot this week. If the U.S Postal Service has not told you already, it will do so in the next day or so – it is stewardship season at Third Church. The mailing you received highlighted the theme – “The Future Is Now.” By the time this is over with, you may really be wishing that the future is now.

I know there are some marketing people in the room, so I hope that what I am about to say is not too heretical, but I am not sure that stewardship themes make all that much difference. Nor do stewardship sermons, for that matter, though let’s keep that to ourselves.

Nonetheless, your stewardship committee, a wonderful group of thoughtful and committed people, has invested time and energy in a theme, and in producing materials, and in communicating with you. And while “The Future Is Now,” may not be the four magic words that unlock church riches beyond measure, I do hope, and we do hope, that they can serve as a kind of conversation starter.

You know as well that this congregation is ankle-deep, soon to be waist-deep and we hope never over our heads, in the final planning stages for a capital campaign. We went through the same brainstorming process there to discern a theme – “Faith for the Future.”

The stewardship themes for this month and the capital campaign theme for just a bit later are connected, and not just by the word “future.” While the capital campaign will focus on our facility, addressing much-needed immediate improvements and laying out a vision for the next several decades, there are still, as T.S. Eliot once said, “bills to pay.” In that sense, without putting too fine of a point on it, the future is now.

That’s why the Qabats experience spoke so clearly to me, and speaks so clearly to us. It all comes together.

Staff members, who we seek to compensate fairly so that they can provide the kind of expertise and leadership that our programs need. Simple things, like construction paper and glue.
Or the sheet music from which the choir sings. Or coffee for coffee hour, fair trade coffee. Or the gas and electric needed to power the appliances in the kitchen so that our meal could be prepared. Or computers to organize all of the comings and goings and communications.

You get the picture. And the picture is repeated over and over again, with a countless variations.

Our budget is not particularly sophisticated. The three big buckets, as I so elegantly refer to them, are outreach, personnel and building. The first of those three is somewhat fluid; the other two are fairly static. We also spend money on things like program, but not really very much.

It is not a very sophisticated budget, nor is it very extravagant. You need to know that the committees and boards that oversee this stuff are frugal and prudent. We have done our best to communicate the financial and programmatic needs of this congregation for the next year. And we have done our best to invite your generous support.

Again, no magical words to suggest. What I can do is communicate the need, and also to suggest to you and to all of us that we are called to look deeply at our own financial resources – even in challenging times – and to make decisions that are thoughtful, that cause us to stretch ourselves, that are made from a posture of abundance rather than scarcity.

The TV evangelists use guilt to raise money. We would talk about grace. Something called “the gospel of prosperity” is making the rounds right now, suggesting, falsely, that God wants us to be rich. We would talk, rather, about a “gospel of gratitude.”

That is to say, on two weeks from today, when we are invited to come forward and present our stewardship response, we will do so because we are grateful that we have been invited into the continuing story, the story of this place and the story that has called this place into being. We will do so because we seek faith for the future and because we know that the future is now.

We do so because we want to support those precious moments, glimpses of grace, when a child’s faith is nurtured in this community, and past and future convene in this most awesome and extraordinary present, and that whether they remember seeing an old Bible displayed in a display case, they will remember that they connected here, that there were welcomed and nurtured and taken seriously, and that their instinctive answer – Jesus or God – was absolutely the right one.

It happens in countless different ways in this place, as it has for 180 years, and, by grace, into the future.

We sometimes say that stewardship is not about money. It is, and it isn’t. We do have real needs – bills to pay, salaries to meet, programs to support, causes to fund, a wonderful old building to maintain.

But what differentiates us from every other worthy institution that makes similar efforts to leverage your dollars and mine is that ours connects with a deeper story.

Some 27 centuries ago, when the people of Israel were not so sure that they had a future, Jeremiah spoke God's words to them. Those words reminded them of their story, that they had been an enslaved people and had been liberated. That they repeatedly affected behaviors that belied their sense of gratitude to their liberating God. That they treated each other not with a golden rule, but with the notion that gold rules.

And yet, and yet, and yet. God continued to be in relationship, connecting past and future to the present.

“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

I believe that is what happened this past Wednesday night. The covenant was renewed. God’s promise was made real in the simple interaction of teacher and child, of singing, of sharing spaghetti and salad and garlic bread, of contemplating for a moment the very cool adventures of a very old Bible.

“I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

Stewardship is certainly about money. The church’s needs and how each of us think about the financial resources we have been given to oversee for a while. Think about the ways that the covenant has been made real in your life, and how it is renewed day by day and moment by moment. And think as well about your call to support the many ways it is renewed in this place, has been, will be, and even right now.

Because what stewardship is really about is keeping alive the possibility of covenantal moments, large and small, that make real this relationship that we have been given as a gift, and despite our human efforts, remains real and strong and true. Amen.