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Sermon for Sunday, October 19, 2008
Pastor Sara Kay Olson-Smith
Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost
Texts: Isaiah 45:1-7; Psalm 96:1-9; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22
Grace to you, and peace from the true and living God, and from Christ Jesus our Lord.
Today, in our Stewardship Season talking we continue to talk about the actions: Take, Bless, Break and Give, the verbs which Jesus used in his Eucharistic prayer. We read, “Jesus took break, blessed it, broke it and gave it...” Today, we focus on our stewardship action of breaking. We talk about the power of breaking as an action of faithful stewardship because it calls us to remember the work of Jesus, his self-giving act on the cross which allowed for the life of all the world, his body broken that all might have wholeness of life. In the prayer at communion, we remember this breaking. We also know that as Jesus took a loaf of bread, he broke it so that it could be shared, so that there would be enough, so that the one loaf might feed many. It is like when we just have one sandwich, but two people who need to eat. The easiest thing to do is break that sandwich in half, and the two are fed. Breaking is about sharing, about preparing what we have to be distributed to our shared purpose. Instead of keeping it for ourselves, we break it, open ourselves and our resources so that it can be shared.
Our Gospel reading today is sort of a like a slow underhand pitch for preachers preparing a stewardship sermon. When the powerful ones try to trap him, Jesus answers their question, should we pay taxes, not with a easy yes or a no, but instead asks to see the imperial coin, which carried on it a picture of Caesar, along with his name and title. The image and the words would have been seen as idolatrous for the community of Jesus, with Caesar and his oppressive regime naming itself to be divine. Jesus wisely says, upon looking at the coin, “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Give to God the things that are God’s. We know and trust, as God’s people that everything that we are and everything that we have is God’s and as such, we are called to give all that to God. Yes, we’ll have to pay taxes but we are called to give back to God that which is God’s – ourselves.
You see, just as the coin has on it an image of the emperor, we are the ones who are created in God’s image. We carry in ourselves an imprint of God. (Though in our sinfulness it is sometimes hard to see it in ourselves and one another.) In our baptism, God has made a claim upon us, has named us as God’s own. We are God’s. And as God’s, we, if we listen to Jesus in this, are called to give ourselves back to God, in our actions and in our financial stewardship, in our lives of prayer and our love of neighbor.
The economists say that the power of a coin is in its circulation, in its being used, being spent. We, coined in God’s image, are, in a sense, God’s money made to be spent, to be used. God longs for us to be God’s coin, in circulation in the world, to pay off our debts to one another, to bring about God’s way in this world. We, with all of our gifts and stories, resources and abilities, are meant to be used, circulated, spent, to bring about God’s way in this world, not hidden under the safe mattress inside our homes, or even hidden in church.
We've heard it before. We are God’s, all that we are comes from God. We could hit a home run out of the park on this one, that is, if we started to actually do it, trust it, live this promise of life, of being broken and shared for the sake of the world, of being spent and circulated. So often we fail at this. We keep our sandwich in one piece to make sure that we will have enough, that we will have our fill. We think of ourselves and our resources as our own, which we’ve earned, for our own purposes, or we trust that we can do better with it on our own than we could if we shared.
Yet, in all this, we forget that this God of ours is not just anybody asking us to give of ourselves. We are not just invited into another great cause for the world. In giving back to God the things that are God’s, in our time and our talents, in our lives in service to the world and for the mission of the church, we are not just giving to something good (which it is), but we are participating with the powerful and living God in the healing and redeeming of the world. In giving ourselves to God, we join with God in the miraculous and life-giving mission that God is on to bless and love us and the whole world – a blessing and love which was first given to us in our baptism.
The church is not only some great non-profit doing important stuff (though we do some great stuff). Rather, we are the people of the one, true living God. The thing is, we belong to a God who is doing miraculous things in the world. As we work with God, we know that it is not by our own power alone, our own resources alone, our own failings alone, our own exhaustion alone. With God, we’ve got a whole lot more than just a sandwich.
We have been claimed in our baptism by a God who, as Isaiah writes, “subdues nations and strips kings of their robes, who levels mountains and cuts through iron, who created light and darkness.” We are claimed by a God whose only Son chose to be broken on the cross that all might share in the life-giving ways of God. It is this God who conquered death by raising Jesus from the dead. As we give back to God the things that are God’s, we place ourselves into the power and movement of God, who is bringing God’s way in the world, with us or without us.
Today, in our second reading, Paul writes to the community in Thessalonika. Paul gives thanks to God for this congregation, in present day Turkey, for their “work of faith, labor of love and steadfastness of hope.” These are tremendously active ways of being people of God, not just being faithful but working the faith, not just loving but laboring in love, not just hopeful, but being steadfast in hope. Faith, hope and love - these are the ways in which we give ourselves back to God: faithful that God will not fail us, hopeful that our God will bring about a new thing, loving others with generosity and compassion.
Paul talks about the ways that the church in Thessolonika, by the work of the Holy Spirit among them, as God’s chosen ones, are bearing witness to Jesus in all sorts of places. Paul names the way that they are part of God’s great movement of blessing and loving the whole world. “For in spite of persecution you received the word with joy to all believers in Macedonian and Achaia. For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from not only Macedonia and Achaia but in every place your faith in God has become known. . . For the people of those regions report about us what kind of welcome we had among you, and how you turned from idols to serve the living and one true God.”
That congregation, by their welcome and the ways they gave back to God what was God’s, in serving the living and one true God, participated in the work of spreading the good news of Jesus all over the place. The gave back to God and look what God did. God did miraculous things through those folks. “The word of the Lord sounded forth from them,” and people could not stop talking about that place, and the God they served. They gave back to God and through that welcome and service participated in God’s great and miraculous way in the world.
I am sure that they could never have imagined that people are still talking about them 2000 years later. I am sure that it was beyond their wildest dreams that God would use their community as a testimony to God’s power and the good news of Jesus centuries later. All they could do was respond to the gifts they were given, to live in faithful response and give back to God what was God’s even in the midst of persecution. Yet look what God did. Those folks didn’t even know the world was round, yet here God is, in New Jersey, using that community to inspire us. What a God! What a vision! What a movement we are participating in. In giving ourselves to God, we never know what God will do with and through us.
Despite Thessalonika’s miraculous mission and all their work, that church community is no longer there. In present day Turkey there are some rubbles of old Christian churches, and the tiniest percentage of practicing Christians. It would be hard to go and find the spot where those believers used to gather and break the bread and care for the poor and proclaim the good news of Jesus. Yet, because of the power of God, that community is still testifying to the Living God. God is still using them, and their witness is still alive. They gave to God what was God’s, in courageous faith, hope and love, in acts of welcome and service and boldly proclaiming the good news of Jesus, and their witness could not be stopped. This is the power of the God we serve, this is the work that we are blessed to participate in, this is the witness that we make.
Here at St. Peter’s, we don’t know what our future will be (and I hope that it will not be like those ancient churches throughout Turkey), but I do know that we serve a living and true God. This God has named us and claimed us, in our baptism, and will never let us go. It is this God to whom we belong and whose mission we are a part of. Even as we discern our future, God will not stop working among us and through us. Now, we can continue to do the work of faith, the labor of love, the steadfastness of hope.
The testimony of the people of this congregation, as we continue to tell stories of the Living God among us, as we live in the faithfulness that has been alive here for generations, as we welcome as Paul was welcomed and serve with courage, this testimony will never be silenced. As we give ourselves to God, breaking and giving ourselves away for the sake of the world, God will use us, without fail and beyond our imaginings, to bring people into the blessing and love of Jesus. We cannot even imagine the ways that God will use us and the witness of this community. We cannot imagine it just as those folks in Thessalonika could not imagine it. All we can know is that we are part of this mission of God, who loves us and cares for us.
Through God’s grace, we have and continue to give ourselves back to God, our living and powerful God who made the cosmos, who conquered death, and who is working to bring all people to life eternal and abundant. It is this living and powerful God who came down as Jesus, who comes to us today, in bread and wine, broken and shared. This little bit of bread - not even enough to make a sandwich - fills our hunger and makes us whole, whole enough to be broken and shared that all might be fed!
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
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