DATE: October 21, 2012
BY Michael Hendricks
Good Morning. My name is Michael Hendricks, and I’ve been asked to serve as lay speaker for this morning’s giving season meditation. The giving season launched last week and will culminate on November 18 — Gratitude Sunday. I was asked to speak again this year at this special service, and it occurs to me that I am at something of a disadvantage. On a normal Sunday, when we worship together, there’s always a little surprise. We look at the bulletin and sneak a peek at the sermon title. Is Alison going to address something in the news or in the life of this congregation from the past week? And what angle will she take? There’s always a little anticipation and curiosity. And that’s good. When I speak these days, on the other hand, you know exactly what’s coming. It’s Hendricks? It’s money. Hold onto your wallets. I will do my best not to disappoint.
Please join me in prayer. Holy One, your light shines on us in so many ways we know and in so many more we don’t. We ask that you help turn us so that the light you shine on us can be reflected to shine on others. Our theme for this year’s Giving Campaign comes from Matthew Chapter 5, verses 14–16. It comes from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, the longest extended section of Jesus’s teachings found in the Bible. It is right up front, very close to the beginning of his sermon that Jesus gets to the words that guide us today. “You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus says. “You are the light of the world,” he continues.
So, I ask you this morning, if you are the salt of the earth and you are the light of the world, “Who exactly are you?” If you’re like me, most of the time, when you’re asked this question, your answer is simply your name. And that might be what most people are looking for when they ask that question. Or maybe you’ve answered that question at various points in your life with your job, your role, your family relationship, your sports team allegiance, or any number of other descriptive aspects of yourself by which it is easy for someone to identify you.
But I’d like to ask the question in a slightly different way. What I’d like you to do is take a moment right now and think back on some time in your life when you were really a great example of God’s shining light, and perhaps more you than you’ve ever been. Maybe it would help to close your eyes. Think on some time when you, in whatever you were called to do at that moment, stepped forward to do something only you could do. Some time when it was up to you to say or do the right thing in the way that you, because of your personal history and personal set of relationships and personal style, could do more appropriately than anyone else in the world.
Now, I wonder how many of us were thinking of a time when they won a race or a game or got the best grade on a test or got that promotion that everybody else wanted or some time when they beat everyone else at something that mattered to them. Some time when it was they who were shining, and not God shining through them. I’m not sure that’s where most of us go when we try to think of our truest selves. And, alternatively, for obvious reasons, I’m not going to ask for a show of hands here, but if I were to ask who here was thinking just now of a time when they were mean-spirited or cruel or dismissive or condescending or disrespectful or violent or any other dark areas that plague our natures, I would venture to guess that I would see no hands at all. In fact, I would go further: it is one of my most core beliefs in God’s creation that when we live up to who we were created to be, we really are pretty okay. The problem is not when we live up to who God created us to be, but when we don’t.
And maybe that’s what Jesus is saying here. When each of us lives into who she or he was created to be, when we live into the particular form of God’s love that each of was given to reflect, we are the earth’s salt (which I think in this context speaks to the preservative power of that substance, that quality that keeps other things from spoiling), we are God’s shining light. And when we don’t, we might as well not be salt at all, we might as well be that light that we hide under a basket. We do not live love. We do not preserve the world. We do not shine God’s light at all. But Jesus does call us into our love. Jesus does call us to preserve the world. And Jesus does call us to shine God’s light. And a big part of our shining God’s love, a big part of our preserving God’s world has to with our individual giving. And that’s important. But I’m not sure it’s all that Jesus is saying here.
Now, you know the old saying that ignorance is bliss. I’m about to get to that part of this meditation where I deliberately decided not to look something up. I don’t know what you know about ancient Aramaic, but, aside from knowing that that was the language most of the New Testament was written in, I don’t know much. In particular, what I don’t know is if Aramaic was a language like Spanish that has a different word for you in the singular and you in the plural. Or if it was more like English that uses the same word “you” for both the singular and the plural “all of you.” I’m speaking here of course about New England English, and not Southern “y’all” English. Because, in the context of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, we must remember that he is not speaking to me or to you or to her or to him. He is speaking to “the crowds” who had come out to the Mount to hear him. In short, he is speaking to the crowd together. And I think that is crucially important. Because the question I would ask you is not how much better it would be if you lived out the love it was given you to live a little better?
The point is not to make each of us feel guilty for not making use of our true selves, but to open all of us to the amazing opportunity given to us if we all tap into our true selves together.
The question I would ask is what would it look like if we all loved together even just a little bit more? If we were salt together even just a little bit more? If we shone together even just a little bit more? Because in so many ways it really is up to us.
What would it look like if this congregation, if Saugatuck Congregational Church in Westport, Connecticut shone a little more? Maybe even “sunglasses” shone? What would we have to be doing that we’re not doing now for it to happen when you identified yourself as being a member of Saugatuck for people to just immediately know that God’s light was shining forth from there into the world, that God’s preserving salt was emanating from there?
Of course, this has to do with so much more than money. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have anything to do with money. We can’t kid ourselves. It does.
Earlier this year, we asked our boards and committees to identify what they would do if their budgets suddenly grew by $25,000. A couple of answers? The Christian Ed Search Committee is already exploring different models of youth ministry including full-time to help us create an amazing program that would attract young people to our congregation from throughout our community. Our Board of Deacons might like to make sure that person was ordained so we could turn that position into an Associate Pastor who could also support Pastor Alison in her many ministries here. And our Board of Missions would like to be able to double or triple or even quadruple the giving we’ve been able to provide in this community and around the world.
More answers? How about building a relationship with a village in Mexico or a town on the Lakota reservation in South Dakota. Or reaching out to existing members and new people by posting our worship services and sermons on our website, on Facebook, and other social media.
Or expanding the kinds of music and musicians we include in worship? Or again becoming a Teaching Church by offering an annual internship with stipend to a seminary student?
And, of course, there are other dreams that will come to us as we set off on this road to truly living out the love of God.
Now, some of you may be wondering why we picked the number $25,000 when we asked our question to the boards and committees. Couldn’t we have asked what dreams they could achieve with an extra three dollars and seventy-seven cents? And of course we could. But there’s something about when Jesus gets around crowds that leads to miracles. Because with just the number of pledging people we had in our congregation last year, $25,000 represents a little less than what it would mean if every single pledger gave an extra $5 a week over what they gave this last year. $50,000 would be less than what it would be if everyone increased their pledge by just $10 a week.
I will resist the temptation to translate that into Starbucks visits. Somehow I feel poor Starbucks became the poster child for ways to fritter away money. The simple point is that with the miracle of crowds, with just a few loaves and a couple of fish, maybe, it really doesn’t take all that much more from each of us, for all of us to make a great big difference.
The catch is though that the multiplication only works if each of us buys in. If those of us who haven’t pledged recently, decide to pledge this year. Just $5 a week. Just $1 if that’s what you can do. But to do what you can. And for those of us who have been blessed enough to be in a position to pledge, to increase by $5 or $10 a week. Because it’s not just your individual gift when you pledge. There’s multiplication at work throughout this congregation.
I ask you again, what would it mean for this congregation to even more truly reflect God’s welcoming love to the world? What would it mean for us to be even more the salt that serves to preserve God’s creation? What would it mean for us if we joined together each of us giving a little more so that together — through this covenanted community that is bigger than any one of us — we could shine even brighter with God’s light and love, both within our walls and without, than we ever have before? Wouldn’t it be funny if all it would take to begin to find out would be if each of us increased our pledge by just a few dollars a week?