A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

Sunday, October 16, 2005

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt, NY  13214

Phone:  315-446-0960     FAX:  446-0672

phillchu@twcny.rr.com     http://pebblehill.presbychurch.org

          One of the reasons I love living in the northeast is our change of seasons.  Most years, not all years, we get the best of each of them – the warm, sunny days of summer; the beautiful colors and crisp air of fall; the kind of winter wonderland that Johnny Mathis sings about; and spring that bursts with growth.  I can’t imagine living where the four seasons aren’t so clearly distinctly shown, and the cycles of life aren’t worked out in front of your eyes like they are around here. 

          Of course the church has its own cycles and seasons as well, and we have come to expect that this time of year is stewardship season.  This year we are especially aware of it as, in addition to inviting your pledge toward the annual budget of the church, we are undertaking a three-year capital campaign to pay off the debt we have encumbered in the construction and renovation work we have done in the last couple of years, and for which in our first campaign we raised over half the money we need; and hopefully to complete a couple of other capital projects that were not included in the original plan, as well as helping resource our growing “Friday Nite” program with middle school age kids in the community.  We are being asked to prayerfully consider making a sacrificial gift toward this campaign and this ministry, and I am asked to preach about it over these next four Sundays.  

          I thought that there would be a number of ways to go about this.  As a lectionary preacher most of the time (preaching on the assigned texts each week) I could actually look for the stewardship message in the readings assigned for each Sunday.  That would be a good challenge, but one I’m not much interested in taking up just now.  Another would be to choose some classic stewardship texts and preach on them – another solid option, but a little too predictable.  In thinking about it and praying on it, I decided that I wanted to focus these next four Sundays on this theme of “sacrifice” because I realized how little I (we?) actually consider sacrifice, not just in terms of our financial stewardship, but in terms of my faith in general.

          When I think of “sacrifice” I have a certain picture of it that has been influenced by old movies and growing up with a lot of Roman Catholic friends.  I remember those movies where they’d sacrifice virgins to the volcano gods, or some such thing, which always struck me, even as a little kid, as something more than a little unenlightened.  The Catholic part of it for me has to do with my friends always having to “give something up” for Lent, which was something we Presbyterians were never that big on.  I think it may have come from the idea that Christ has already sacrificed his very life for our sins, so the thought that somehow our own actions of self-denial or sacrifice, while perhaps noble, weren’t something that was in any way “owed” to God, since that price had already been paid.

          It wasn’t until later that I began to gain a more positive appreciation of sacrifice and what it is.  But even so, it still seemed to be an exceptional thing, in my mind – not a regular or even normal part of life, including religious life.  It was the soldier throwing himself on the hand grenade to save his buddies.  It was the single mother working three jobs to save enough to send her children to college.  It was the kind of thing that people would see, something that could be admired, willingly taking on hardship and worse so that others might benefit.

          It was later still when I came to a deeper appreciation of sacrifice – as not just an exceptional thing, but as something more basic and more integral to our faith and our giving of ourselves and our resources.  But this is where the idea of sacrifice can most easily be dismissed.  I know, because I know how easy it is for me to dismiss it.  By “sacrifice” we mean giving up something that is important to you for the sake of something that is more important.  Time spent doing one thing that you enjoy  - like sailing or golf, maybe – versus spending that same time with a kid who needs a mentor.  Money spent on that new car versus that same money going to meet some human need or enable a good work of some kind.  I don’t know about you, but my family and I don’t normally go about it that way.  It’s not as intentional as that.  Though there seldom seems to be much, if any, excess time or money, we do pretty much what we want to do.  We aren’t in the habit of denying ourselves much of anything, and we still manage to give and to share (within our “means”).  But to be honest, I think we’d have to say that even though we live fairly modestly compared to many in our community and society, we still give, for the most part, out of our abundance, without much thought toward what we might give up to give even more.    

          So I’ve got a ways to go to truly know about sacrifice – and I want to explore with you, instead of a “season” of sacrifice (which is what I thought I’d name this series over the next four weeks), “seasons of sacrifice.”  And I want to explore it from the perspective of the actual seasons of the year, in which the cycles of life, and death, and rebirth frame our lives. 

          I begin with winter, a time of waiting and hoping toward the spring.  It is a time of apparent stillness and quietness, when life is stirring, but under the surface of things.  It is an apt metaphor for the work we do under the surface of our visible lives, where deeper things are considered, whether they ever get to the surface or not.  It’s the level of dreams and hopes, the level of wonder and doubt.  It is this work, this subterranean work, that Christ would have us attend to, and not ignore.  It is where we take up his suggestion, if we take it up, to consider the lilies of the field, that neither toil nor spin, but God in his mercy adorns them so beautifully.  It is where we consider, if we consider it, his question, “What does it profit a person to gain the whole world but lose his or her soul?” or his question “Who do you say that I am?”  It’s winter work, work beneath the surface.  It can work “on you” while you are busy with other things, attending to the expected things.  But if it is to really grow in you, if this work is to be fruitful in you, you have to pay attention to it, not just on Sunday mornings, but daily. 

          What is sacrifice, there beneath the surface, under the ice, the crust that separates the sensible, the logical, the safe, the affordable from the life that is stirring in your soul?  What is the work that is going on there for you?  What is your work there?

          I think that the question is sometimes put this way: are we truly living the values and the priorities in life that we espouse, or want to espouse for ourselves?  This takes a certain degree of honesty with ourselves, of course, that is not always easy to muster.  It is some of the basic content of our weekly confession, that we have not lived as we ought to have lived - done those things we shouldn’t, left undone those things we should, that there is no health in us.  There is nothing that we can do about that, really.  We always fall short of what God’s law demands.  We cannot gain perfection by our own efforts, which are always tainted by sin.  We can’t sacrifice to atone for our sinfulness, for none is needed.  “Christ (has) offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins...” (Hebrews 10:12)  There is no offering we can make, no sacrifice, that can accomplish what only Christ can accomplish in us. 

          And so now we can only speak of sacrifice, not as an act or an offering to appease God or gain his favor, but as an act of response to God’s love.  It is not for God that we sacrifice, but for ourselves; as St. Augustine recognized centuries ago, “doubtless for our profit, not his own.”  But I think our resistance to the idea of sacrifice comes at just this point, that we are afraid that we will lose more than we will gain from it, since we are not gaining recognition or advantage or favor.  All that we gain from our sacrifice is our freedom.  We are realizing freedom when, of our own free will, we lay down or give over what the world says we need to provide for our life and our security, because we come to know that our true help is only in the Lord, who provides all that is needed.  We are called to be wise and not foolish, to be sure, but it is not foolish to be extravagant in love and sacrifice, for there is nothing more extravagant than God’s love for us in Christ.

          This is the work I think we are called always to be about, in all seasons of our lives, this attentive work, attentive to the movement and stirrings of new life in our souls.  I invite us into a time of attentiveness in this season, to pay attention to the promptings of the spirit within you – to consider in your own life not just what you can “afford” to give of yourself and your resources for the sake of your church and its future, but, beneath that, where that greater freedom is to be found for you.

          One of the things I am asked to do as your pastor in this campaign is to share, along with others over the next few weeks, my and my family’s process in moving toward our own commitment.  As many of you know, my wife Karen’s church, where she is pastor, is going through this same process just now, utilizing the same capital campaign program, even sharing the same consultant.  So we are both doing this.  As we have prayed about this and discussed it, a couple of things have clear for us so far.  One is that we haven’t been intentional enough in our giving in the past, and that really looking at the patter of our life together – our time, our work, our priorities – some things have opened up that we hadn’t really seen before because we weren’t looking.

          We’ve very busy, like many of you are, lots of evening meetings.  As a result, some evenings it’s just easier to go out for dinner.  As we talked about it our conversation expanded we started to ask ourselves questions like, what if we were more intentional about food, about entertainment, about how we shop (going once a week instead of several times, saving fuel and time), about eating more simply and healthfully.  And as we looked at costs involved in these personal lifestyle patterns, averaging them out over a year, adding just a little more, we are getting very close to a tithe of our income.  This is what we have decided to do.  We haven’t come up with the final figure yet, but we will, and we’ll be dividing this evenly between our two churches over the next three years.

          Life conspires to move us from appetite to appetite.  In our consumer culture we are so easily caught up in the ease and convenience that can be bought for a price that we forget there are things that are more important, and provide deeper joy, than making life easier for ourselves.  This pushes us toward sacrifice as an intentional approach toward life.  Without sacrifice our growth as a community of welcome, a community of learning, a church that worships with wonderful music and faithful liturgy, open to new things while rooted in the best of Christian tradition – all of this is thrown into doubt.  We need to go deeper than the worldly attitude that life is dictated by what is strictly affordable and reasonable, but rather guided by the faith that is made alive by hope, by reaching and striving and yearning, and giving.  Just so we will know that the kingdom of God is not just a vague concept, but is recognized in the midst of a people who have given themselves to that more certain reality, that life abundant, which comes from God alone, that is seen in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is our hope and our sure salvation.  Unto him be the glory, now and forever.  Amen.

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