A Portal for God's Peace We warmly welcome single persons, people of all races and families of every kind.   Sunday Service: Holy Eucharist at 9:30 am Child care is available   Church of Our Saviour 191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094 Map and Directions   Tel: 201-863-1449 Fax: 201-863-1474 Mark A. Lewis, Vicar MLewis@secaucus.org Dorothy Fowlkes Pastoral Associate   This page revised 10 Oct 01 http://www.secaucus.org/ oursaviour		The Church of Our Saviour in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links ----------------Leave frames---------------------   Measure your wealth by way you dispose of it A Talk on Stewardship on the 17th Sunday after Pentecost 30 September 2001 By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar Amos 6:1-7 / Psalm 146:4-9 / 1 Timothy 6:11-19 / Luke 16:19-31   If I just gave in and joined the fundamentalist club, I could ignore any responsible reading of today's gospel and just talk about how it's telling us to feel guilty because we don't give enough money to the church. It would be perfect for our stewardship wrap-up. Mostly because it would be a wrap-up for any serious understanding of stewardship. And when stewardship goes, the church's wrap-up Sunday isn't far behind. But that's not the gospel. Not the Good News. And Good News is what we have here at the Church of Our Saviour. And Good News is what we talk all year round whether we're on the subject of stewardship giving or not. So I guess I have to talk about what this story really drives home: Richness. And the paradoxes we all juggle when we explore plenty and famine, richness and poverty, every day of our lives. Amos and Timothy and Luke all talk about that kind of struggle in today's lessons. They talk about God's abundant grace. They talk about the call to live your life as a mission. And they remind us how we can get downright artistic with the ways we steward the marvelous gifts God gives us. Paul, writing to his friend Timothy, does it by reminding us to fight a good fight in our lives. Being people of faith, he says, isn't about keeping to a list of dos and don'ts. The Bible says -- once more -- that there's a new and bigger way of living out there beyond preoccupation with surface things. Things like wealth, and work, and problems -- as important as those things are. Look past that stuff toward bigger possibilities -- even the biggest of them all: how our own loving can get more and more like God's love. The biggest character in today's lessons is that Rich Man. He goes down in flames (in this Christian retelling of an older Mesopotamian poem) because he's preoccupied with the wrong stuff. He forgets that his free gifts from God's treasury are given out to be used -- not worshipped, not archived. It would have been so very easy for him, the story goes, to have done everything he needed or wanted to do and still have had buckets of money left over to do something for Lazarus. The Rich Man misses the big point. He is so wrapped up in being rich (or, it could just as easily be in something else: but in this story, he's rich) that he doesn't have any time to celebrate his gifts by making an impact with them, by sharing them, by changing the world with them. He doesn't share his assets -- his time, talent, or treasure -- at all. Let alone share them well. He just keeps them. We all give this concept lip service. And that's a step in the right direction. But it's just plain true that we don't create our own wealth. Otherwise, everyone would be wealthy -- I guess. We make good choices and bad choices all the time. And that's about all the creating we do in the wealth category. It's a lot, but it's certainly not enough to explain all the chances and changes in life. There are plenty of hardworking poor people. And plenty of stupid rich people. Even if that Rich Man worked really hard for his riches and made lots of shrewd decisions. The whole package of his life would still be -- fundamentally -- the creation of a loving God worked out in coalition with the Rich Man's free will. We have so many illusions about our own power and security. It's never been easier than now to point out what a dream we all try to live in. And how soon it can all fall to pieces. Fall to pieces despite our best efforts to shield and defend. A thousand things -- with death heading the list -- can lay our pride and our plans to waste overnight. I come from a family that -- back when they were alive -- worshiped the concept of land ownership. As a child I thought "Land is the only sure investment" was a Bible verse. But even the notion of private property is an illusion, when you think about it. The property that has become "private" was there in God's hands before there were any individuals or families owning it. And it will exist as part of creation after we're all gone. A few weeks ago when my friend Magnus was here playing the violin he played an instrument that was made over 300 years ago and played constantly by artists ever since. Whose violin is it? And whose will it be 300 years from now, if it survives? That sobering realization is as convincing a rationale as can be for good stewardship. We are obliged, of course, to take care of ourselves and those who depend upon us as well as we can with what we have. Communism and monasticism just aren't the ways -- history shows -- that very many people want or need to live. But the way we can lift ourselves out of the Rich Man's fix is to do all we do with all we have all the time strategically and with genuine flair. That's our real treasure: A chance to shine in our moment of opportunity. Opportunity to make and live one good life. And God, like most good parents, just loves it when we try hard and do the best we can. Americans, using Amos's phrase, have been "at ease in Zion" for a long time. We've been living a comfortable dream of security. But now -- ill at ease- - we find ourselves paradoxically enriched with strengths we haven't used much in awhile. There is a common spirit and unity recently shown among us that absolutely makes up for many of the profound losses staring us in the face. Amos offers the comfortable Israelites who think they're "better than those kingdoms" the prospect of a destabilizing exile along with loss of life and lands and identity. Until recently, I think we wouldn't have identified very personally with those words. Now we do. But an evolved and deepened Christian spirituality is a tool that helps us to look into the core of human suffering. Whether we find it in ourselves, or in others, even others who seem incomprehensible to us. More than ever before in MY life, that's a terrible challenge. It's a challenge because we are not simply called to give our leftover bread to the Lazarus on our own doorstep. We are called to seek out real wisdom. To look at the underlying structures and assumptions of our society. To address the distribution of wealth and power. Not every ordinary person necessarily needs to do that on a global scale. But God's call is of one voice wherever it goes out -- to great or small. The call is for us and all creatures to foster in our own orbit a zeal for justice and peace -- and to do whatever we can to make those concepts into facts the world lives by. That call has never been direct for us. And now, more than ever, the answer to the call remains faith. And the engine that drives faith -- makes it connect with the real world -- is stewardship. ALL we do with ALL we have ALL the time. The life of faith is all about waking up from dreamland and seeing a new vision. And stewardship richly informs the Christian vision of a transformed world. Nothing lasts forever, except God. Nothing is really yours alone except God's love for you. And there is no better measure of your wealth than the way you dispose of it. -- Mark Lewis Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org. Readings from the Bible for this Sunday. Links to additional sermons by Mark Lewis will be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page. © 2001 -Church of Our Saviour Home | Welcome | News | Sunday | Bulletin | Sermons Bookshop | Stewardship | Justice | Community | Links http://www.secaucus.org/oursaviour Webmaster - DRoberts@Secaucus.org