We celebrate ourselves as “Body Parts &
Spirit Congregations” throughout this spring cycle of liturgical year –
Lent, Passiontide and Easter, fifty days of Jubilee, until Jesus comes again
as the Spirit on Pentecost Day, to create the church as the body of Christ
freed and filled with his Sprit! We hope for a Pentecost Party, May 15, the
Birthday of the Church, welcoming new members, and a Pentecost Potluck May
22, showing the new PBS film called “The Congregation.” For we celebrate
just how much like parts of our own bodies the bodies of life and love all
around us can be --beginning as homes, as households, as congregations, as
communities, and extending to regions and nations, world and universe. We
are all parts of one another! And what happens to any one part is felt by
us all.
Today we are called to lift up the life and
love of faith household and faith family as “stewardship,” “home economics,”
“taking care of the world-family business,” in eager anticipation of
Consecration Sunday with Rev. Bob Olmstead next week! If the universe and
all the earth may be seen as the household of God, then all stewardship, of
resources, lands and peoples, is good economy, good ecology, and good
ecumenicity. We are all in this life and this love together! Connecting
stewardship to our texts for this morning tempted me to preach on “Lamb’s
Stew----------ardship,” or “Good Shepherd’s Pie,” or even just plain “Sheep
Dip!” If Bob Dylan were preaching this Sunday, it might be, “Everybody Just
Get Stewed!” (Get the shepherd’s crook!) The best shepherds and leaders
have “been there” as sheep, as lambs, themselves. Jesus is both the Good
Shepherd and the Lamb! Sheeped shepherds and shepherded sheep: It takes one
to know one!
We are all in this together! Shepherds,
like stewards, are always concerned with wholeness of the flock. They
notice when even a single sheep is missing. Jesus says they leave
ninety-nine who are found in search of one who is lost. Stewardship is for
the flock, one made up of so many, wholeness of life and love in the body,
the home, the church -- birth to earth, womb to tomb, sperm to worm, as we
say. The good news of the church, in this most individualistic and
privatized of cultures, is we are not made to be alone but to be in
relationship, in connection, with anyone and with everyone. We are all in
this life and this love together! (Speaking of national “home economics,” I
hope we take time to consider “stewardship" both as “spiritual security” and
as “Social Security” these days. Both are based on what John Paul II calls
“Solidarity,” mutual trust and investment in the common good, the
commonweal, the common wealth!)
The early church used the 23rd
Psalm, not just at the end of life, as we often do, but at the beginning, as
an allegory for baptismal preparation, which happens to one but connects one
with all. According to Gail Ramshaw, “Green pastures” were seen as the
weeks of instruction for baptism. “Still waters” were baptism. “Restorings
of soul” were revival by the Spirit. “Paths of righteousness” were the new
life of faithfulness. “Oils” were the chrism of baptism. “Table” and “cup
overflowing” were eucharist. “Pastor” and “pastoral counseling” have to do
with work in relationship to the flock, the church as body of Christ, as
faith family. When I am presented with “pastoral” needs, from inside or
outside the congregation, I am clear that the source of care and nurture,
healing and wholeness, restoration and recovery I represent is the life and
love of the congregation. I am not any kind of therapist or counselor apart
from you.
We believe Jesus our shepherd, Jesus our
steward, knows each and all of us intimately, calls each and all of us by
our own names, looks after each and all of us as we have need, and offers
each and all of us everyday the chance to “have life, and have it
abundantly!” We trust Jesus as shepherd and steward with everything of our
lives and our loves – all that we are, all that we have, all that we feel
and think, and say and do. We know the voice of Jesus and how it differs
for us from all other voices. We know the difference between just
“believing in Christ” and actually “following Jesus.” We know it seems
possible for us to believe yet never get around to following. We also know
it is not possible to follow very long without also coming to believe. To
believe in Jesus as the Christ, the messiah, the one who brings New Creation
as God’s life and love for us all, is to believe in the body of Christ, in
the one membership of many parts. We believe in relationship and in
connection, not only with those we can see --for in that sense seeing is not
believing -- but with all those unseen by us as well.
To believe in Jesus as the body of Christ
freed and filled with the Spirit is to believe in the church as family, as
home, as that place where the poet says “when you go there they have to take
you in,” as base of support for our life and our love, our work in every
other part of our lives and in the whole world. Stewardship as home
economics is the care and feeding of every member of the whole household of
God. It is embodying, making real flesh, God’s life and love for us in all
the places, all the spaces of our lives. The church is made up like home as
a body with many parts. Please take a look in light of your own home, your
household of God wherever you are, whomever you are with, at the litany
called “Housewarming Blessing” on the inside of the front cover and apply
it. Please think through what “makes a house a home” – the various forms
and functions of rooms and spaces – living room, dining room, bedding room,
bathing room, cooking room, sewing room, studying room, praying room –
whatever!
In Chicago we once lived in a parsonage of
seventeen rooms. Including one we called the “mushroom room” under the
front porch! Talk about many mansions. Now the congregation is planning to
put it up for sale. Parsonages are fast becoming past reminders that we are
all in this together. So see our parsonage while you can! While we can
still get in and out of it, and even up the stairs! Think of the parsonage,
please, as partly a home of your own, and if you ever need to go there,
we’ll try to take you in! After all, you own it! You care for it. Like
this building we call our “church home,” it belongs equally to us all.
Pastors are just momentarily embodied signs of how all of us come and go!
(My mother sent us for Christmas a lovely
wreath for the parsonage door. She is coming to visit soon so we left the
wreath up. We noticed a flurry of finches around it. Last night we took it
down to move it off the door in the event they were making a nest. We found
the nest already there – with a delicate baby-blue egg in it! We quickly
put the wreath back. Let them be born “swingers!”)
So much of stewardship revolves around and
out of this church-building, the sheepfold we call home. I want to give
special thanks this morning to such individuals as Erv and Ruth, and
Margaret and Ray, and Jim and Jose in their love and care for this
building. Thanks also to the Board of Trustees, the Building Use Committee,
the Fellowship of Methodist Women, the Senior Adult Ministries, the Nevada
Shakespeare Company, the Quilters, and all other groups who give love and
care for us all. This building -- all that goes on in it, all that goes on
out of it -- belongs to us all in a process, as we are, of constant
becoming. We organize parts of our body into groups for most age levels –
for finance and personnel, building and property – for nurture, witness,
outreach – and in every way we are learning and changing and growing and
open to all!
This building, the life and work, the
ministry and mission this building embodies and represents, even now is
evolving, emerging, being born and baptized, and confirmed and commissioned,
again and again and again. Think of what its spaces meant to Babette’s
Feast this past week -- as to the Valentine’s Dinner. Think what its
catacombs mean to the Youth Group and Sunday School each week. Think what
this sanctuary, in all the senses of the term, means to every service of
worship and every wedding! Think what this building means to all AA and NA
and other healing and wholeness, restoration and recovery groups. Think
what it means to CCBN, IHN, NSC, and the whole alphabet soup of
building-users. Think even what it means to those who lie down in its
window wells and its stairwells, perhaps the only “green pastures” and
“still waters” they know, and, yes, they may well mess up appearances and
aggravate office staff.
So think of Audrey and Shirley as shepherds
to so many “lost sheep” and stewards of such precious resources. Think how
many of us, by choices and by necessities, serve in some shepherding,
stewarding roles and responsibilities, even in our own homes, own families,
even with spouses and partners. The safest thing to say in light of these
texts for this morning is, every one of us a shepherd! Every one of us a
sheep! And no sheep without plenty of sheep dip! It goes with the very
territory of hospitality! It goes with the “downtown church,” we are by
location and are becoming by vocation, trying to be “at home” to such a
changing and growing downtown community. It goes with “following Jesus,”
becoming the body of Christ, lives and life together freed and filled with
his Spirit.
We are called to ministry and mission by the
very nature of this building to us -- this building we both inherit from the
past and borrow against the future. We are called not to be “real estate”
or “property value.” We are called to be “sacred trust,” temporal
stewardship of eternal gifts and graces, and therefore, in our current
issues with the city and state, essentially “inassessible” (not
“inaccessible” – we need to be fully accessible! -- but “inassessible”) --
beyond measure, beyond calculation or commodification. God help us if we do
not put all of that on the line for God in Jesus by the Spirit everyday of
our life together.
Just see and hear in the Book of Acts, which
I hope we may study this summer as “The Book of Gifts of the Spirit,” how
the early church lived and loved out God’s word in body and soul, together!
Just look and listen to our shepherding and out stewarding of the parts of
our household and home, of our lives and life together -- in teaching, in
fellowship, in breaking of bread, in prayer! In what our membership vows
call prayers, presence, gifts, and service! In what the “base community”
movement, so much like the early church, calls seeing, judging, acting,
reflecting. In what every service of worship holds as praise, confession,
word, and offering. God is the giver of all parts of life and living.
Stewardship is our part and participation in the ongoing life-living,
life-loving, life-giving of God! Cosmic Creator, Daily Provider,
Sanctifier, Sustainer.
Please join me phrase by phrase for part of
the ritual we use at memorials -- commending our very lives as God’s sheep,
God’s lived and loved, God’s healed and made whole, God’s restored and
recovered ones – “Into your hands, O Merciful Savior, / we commend your
servant ________ . [Each give our name.] / Acknowledge, we humbly
beseech you, / a sheep of your own fold, / a lamb of your own flock, / a
sinner of your own redeeming. / Receive us into the arms of your mercy, /
into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, / and into the glorious company
of the saints in light.” Amen.
Rev. John Auer
