An Incomplete Sermon on Stewardship

If you were to put an anxiety thermometer in the mouth of our society, you would see the mercury explode the thermometer and bounce in bubbles on the floor. Unless we exert extraordinary concern, each of us can become infected with the collective unease our society is feeling over the ups and down turns of the stock market, fears over the possibility of yet another buyout by the federal government of first insurance companies, then banks and now perhaps the auto industry.
If you think that today’s stock market is a gamble perhaps you did not pay careful attention to today’s Gospel story. The parable of the talents comes close to high rolling with mutual funds.
But for us to understand the high risks of the story, lets start by converting the biblical money into dollars.
When the Gospel talks about talents, a talent is not a good trait you have, a talent is a sum of money. A talent is worth about 6,000 denarii. A denarius is a day’s wage. How much do you make in a day? If you make $80, then one talent is $420,000. Two talents is $840,000. Five talents is $2,100,000.
If you make $160 a day then we are looking at $840,000, $1,680,000, and $4,200,000. I think we are now in the league with Warren Buffit and Bill Gates.
The investors in the Gospel story take the money they receive and the first two double it.
The third one sits on it and does nothing. What is this money that Jesus is talking about? Let’s face it, Jesus is talking not about small amounts of money, he is talking about excessive money. Money that we might imagine a Wall Street Stock Broker makes. Money being given to the CEO of a major corporation. Money that a Mafia godfather collects.
What is this excessive money in God’s eyes? When God invests in the world, God throws out money in abundance. God flings the money at us. God’s mercy overflows. God’s love is endless.
God wants to invest lavishly, loving without restraint, showing mercy without limit.
The parable invites us to be lavish spenders, unrestrained givers, limitless hosts. God does not hide God’s money under a mattress. God invests it in the world.
You know that today is the day we are going to look at our parish’s money, where it comes from and where it goes. I guess that when I was talking about lavish spenders, unrestrained givers, limitless hosts you might have begun to wonder if that is the way the Vestry spends your money or perhaps worse, how the Vestry expects you to make your financial commitment to the church. If our congregation included Warren Buffit and Bill Gates, I would hope that they would exercise some excess in giving. I don’t know about you but I am no Warren Buffit or Bill Gates. So let’s take a look at this budget and see where the money comes from and where it goes.
Most of the money we receive comes from you. The members of the parish contribute $104,000. Our next biggest source of income comes from donations from the various groups who use our property. You can see that in our budget, on line 24, we are not taking any money out of our endowment. That means that we have a balanced budget.
Let’s now take a look at where our money goes. We give money back. On line 29, you see that we give $7,567 to the Diocese and $630 to Episcopal Relief and Development which supports a variety of charities throughout the world.
We clergy are a large expense: on line 47 you see that we account for 45.6 % of our expenses.
Our buildings make up a good deal of our expenses. Starting at line 62, you will see the cost of our utilities, maintenance and insurance comes to 40,900.
Beginning on line 70, you will see the cost of our office supplies on l77 the total is 17, 300.
Our education costs start on line 78 and with Sunday School, the youth program, and other expenses, we come, on line 87 to $6,500.
Those of you who have been members of the parish for a while know that for many years we have been taking money out of our endowment to balance our budget. When that money was taken out of the endowment, it was called a loan.
On line 96 you can see the repayment of that loan back to the endowment.

I think when it comes to the expenses of the church we are not practicing today’s gospel message of liberality. We really try to keep our expenses in check. In a letter I wrote to you, I invited you to consider your own situations from the perspective of abundance. I invited you to consider that God has provided enough for you to do what you need to do for yourself, your family and your community. I invited you to consider your priorities and work to arrange your priorities so you would be able to support yourself, your family and your community and your church.
I know that we are entering into a difficult economic time. When considering your pledge, I ask you to try to at least sustain the level of giving you presently make.
At this point in the sermon, I think that I am on National Public Radio or Channel 13, doing a fall campaign. So bear with me as I make this pitch. If each of us sustains that level of giving, we could easily make our budgeted amount of $100,000. If you have not pledged before, I invite you to consider making this your first year. If you have pledged before I would ask you to consider moving your pledge to a new amount.
All of us have found a home at St. Peter’s Church. Together, we make this place the inviting community it is. Together, we make possible the ministry by which we serve the broader community.
Remember the God who has so lavished you with love, and be generous in your own giving.
Now I bet you think the sermon ends there.
It only begins. I invite you during coffee hour to talk with someone about your experience of giving.
Not about how much you give. Not about how much you plan to give. But what it means for you to contribute to St. Peter’s Church. Tell someone why you do it. Tell them what you get out of it. Tell them how it changes your relationship with God. So you see, the sermon is not ending, it is only beginning. Amen.

Forming Character

Most of us live with laws. In this area of Clifton, we put the garbage out on Monday and Thursday nights. If you want the garbage collected you have to obey that law. Driving down the street, we come to a traffic light, or a stop sign or a yield sign. For the common good, we obey these laws so that we, or the other driver, does not slam into another car. Every April 15, we have to meet the deadline for filing our taxes. Now while here in New Jersey we always hear of government officials not obeying that law, most of us dutifully file our taxes and most of us comply with the laws that regulate those taxes. If you are a young person living at home, you know full well how your parents regulate your lives with rules to be followed. How many of us have heard or how many of us have said: If you live under my roof you live by my rules.
We all live according to rules, some of those rules are imposed on us by the government, some are accepted as rules for polite society, some regulate our private lives at home. Yet most of these laws do not impact our relationship with God.
It was not so for Jesus and the Jews of his day. Any observant Jew in Jesus’ day would observe 613 laws. The same is true for most observant Jews today: If you want to be a true Jew you must observe the Law, all 613 commandments. Read through the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and you will see laws covering every possible situation in the ancient world. These rules established a system of justice and equality, sometimes to an exacting degree. The law ranked high among the Jews, not only as a way to establish their society, but foremost as the revelation from God and the means of keeping the covenant they made with God.
In today’s gospel, when the lawyer comes to Jesus and asks him what is the greatest law, Jesus knows that the lawyer is setting a trap for Jesus. Everyone knew that the correct answer would have been: all 613 laws are important and all are to be observed.
Now this Lawyer would have known that Jesus failed to observe some of those 613 laws. He broke the law when he worked on the Sabbath by healing the sick. He broke the law when he associated with sinners and those who did not observe the Law. He broke the law when he and his disciples did not follow ritual laws about bathing, hand washing and eating particular foods. If Jesus does not praise all 613 laws, he is breaking down respect for the entire law. If he does endorse all of those 613 laws, he condemns himself and discredits his ministry.
Notice what Jesus does: He turns the question on its head.
He establishes as the highest law the commandment which every Jew would have said every day from Deuteronomy 6: 4-5: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Therefore you shall love the Lord with all your heart and with all you soul and with all your mind.” Then he adds to it a small verse from Leviticus, 19; 18: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. He shifts the argument away from the law to the heart. Jesus does not deny the value of the law, for he quotes the law in his answer. But he makes observance of the Law subservient to the movement of the heart.
For all of us here today, if we are the ones who impose the laws or the ones who observe the laws, or if we are both, I would ask you how do the laws you impose foster the development of love? If we think about the purpose of the laws we impose on our children, or the laws our parents imposed on us, those laws are intended to develop good habits, patterns of healthy behavior that become second nature to us. We do not usually hear much talk about character development, but I think that many of us would agree that laws are in place so that we can develop those habits which we believe to be the mark of a responsible and healthy individual and a person who has developed those habits we call a person of character.
Jesus lays out for us two important areas of character development: love of God and love of our neighbor. I would summarize those gifts as worship and service. Notice how Jesus frames our worship and love of God as engaging our not only our hearts and our souls but our minds as well. We Episcopalians do not shy away from engaging the hard questions and we do not give out predetermined answers to the questions. Episcopalians wrestle with the hard questions about the faith and we form our own answers to the questions. It is not always easy living under a big tent where the answers to the questions are all slightly different.
But we agree on the boundaries to the questions. We call those boundaries the Baptismal Covenant. We agree to a minimum of beliefs which are summarized in the Creed. We also agree to a standard of behavior, we commit ourselves to worship and to respect for others.
As we look at the way we carry out our baptismal covenant, today’s Gospel challenges us to look at our motive for doing what we do. Are we engaged with God and with one another because of love? Are we working with each other because of love? When we come together for worship, do we go from this place with our hearts expanded? When we gather during this week to work on the Rummage Sale, when we cook a meal to share with others, when we prepare a lesson for Sunday School, when we bake for coffee hour, when we sing in the choir, are we doing these things to grow in love? For all of us love because we have been loved, loved with a passionate love by this God who has taken on our flesh, lived our life, suffered our death and in the power of his resurrection opens to us possibilities we have not even imagined.

The Spiritual Gift of Water

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco
At St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton NJ

Today we heard in the first lesson the story of the parting of the Reed Sea. That story brings a variety of characters. Whom would you say are some of those characters?
(Moses, Pharaoh, the Chosen People, the Egyptian Army) One character we tend to forget, and it’s the character whose name appears in the title of the story: The Reed Sea.
Bodies of water play major roles in many stories in the Bible. When you open the first pages of Genesis, in the second verse, you cannot move deep into the chapter one before encountering the primeval waters over which hovers God’s Spirit. When you come to chapter 2 and the description of the Garden of Paradise, four great rivers water the garden home of Adam and Eve. Only a few chapters later, Genesis tells you yet another story of water, when God destroys the earth and rescues Noah, his family and the sets of animals.
We hear stories of wells of water. You will recall how Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for his son Isaac and Rebecca is discovered at a well. Moses finds his wife when she and her sisters draw near to a well in an oasis to water their sheep. Jesus also meets a woman at a well in Samaria. wonder if God is telling us that if you want to meet the love of your life you should go to the local watering hole. But let’s get back to Exodus.
Moses and Aaron changed the waters of the River Nile into blood. Moses gives water to the Chosen People out of a rock in the desert. Joshua leads the people through the waters of the Jordan River. That Jordan River witnesses the cleansing of Naaman the leper. Later, John the Baptizer will baptize people in that river Jordan and the disciples of Jesus will continue that water bath as they also baptize.
Not only in today’s story but throughout the bible, water is a significant character in many stories. Water brings life to people, it nourishes crops, it provides for cleansing.
Water also brings death. Its destructive forces overwhelms people. Just recall the fate of the Egyptian army in today’s story about the Reed Sea. All of them are drowned in the waters. Noah’s flood makes us think of the December 26, 2004 Tsunami that struck in the Indian Ocean. We have only to consider Hurricane Ike and the water destruction along the Texas coast line.
Water is both beautiful and terrible, a source of life and death.
We all live close to some body of water. What is the body of water closest to your home? What is your relationship to that water? How many of us know what is happening in Weasel Brook? What are the issues around the Passaic River as it moves through Clifton? What do you know about Barber’s Pond in Garrett Mountain, or the New Street Reservoir, or the Great Notch Reservoir? Does anyone know where Highland Lake is? When was the last time you visited the Paterson Falls?
Or the Dundee lake and dam in Garfield?
We are all surrounded by water. Much of that water is in danger. The Passaic River is slowly being restored after once being called the most polluted river in the country.
The water that surrounds us on all sides forms part of the great mystery of water about which we read in the bible.
While we considered it as a character in many stories from the Bible, water is also a character in our lives. I wonder what would happen if we make the water near us a part of our lives?
I wonder what would happen if we began to relate to the water around us in a more conscious way? Would we take time to find a favorite spot on the water and watch the water flow at different times of the day? In the dance of the soft morning sun, in the strength of the afternoon’s light, in the beauty of the sunset, in the gentle moon light? Would we weep when we saw the water polluted? Would we cry when we saw bottles and other debris floating down the water? Would we be concerned when we knew about the chemical pollutants that infect the waterbeds and aquatic life in the water?
Water is not just out there. We are water. Do you realize that we about 50 or 60% water? If you understood that you are about half water how would you relate the rest of the water that surrounds you? Would you begin to see that the water that surrounds you and the water that is you are but one?
Would you begin to see that the water that surrounds you, the water that is you is part of that original sacred water, that original holy water, over which the Holy Spirit hovered and sanctified? Would you begin to see that the sacred water in which you lived in your mother’s uterus is part of the sacred water in which you received the new life of baptism? Would you see that our most important sacramental actions involve water, bread and wine? Would you begin to see that you are part of one sacred pool of water that flows through the earth as its life blood, spreading the holy life of God through the planet, through your body, through your soul?
As we consider the water of the Reed Sea, I invite you to consider the sacredness of water in your life. To open your heart to the mystery of water that surrounds you. To feel the beauty of water that is you. To sense that you are one with the water of the world, one with the sacred flow of water from the heart of our God. When you come into the church, touch the water not only to remind yourself of your baptism but of the mystery of water in God’s creation. Of the mystery of water that is God. Of the mystery of water that is you.

Transitions in Leadership

A Sermon preached by the Rev. Peter De Franco at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Clifton, NJ
November 9, 2008

In any society the transition of leaders brings no small amount of worry. In today’s first reading, we heard about the end of the rule of Joshua. This reading follows on what, if it were not for All Saints’ Sunday, we would have heard last week: the transition from Moses to Joshua. When Joshua began to lead the people, Israel entered a significant new era. The generation of slaves who escaped from Egypt under Moses had died. The bible says that because the slave generation rebelled against Moses and God they could not be enter the land of promise. I read biblical commentators who state that a generation of slaves could not inherit freedom. That slave generation needed to die off and a new generation, a generation of free persons, a generation which did not experience slavery in Egypt, would inherit the land of Israel. Joshua brought the free generation across the river Jordan into the land God promised to Abraham. Just as the generation of slaves crossed through the Reed Sea, the freed children of slaves crossed the Jordan River into the land of promise.
When Joshua crossed into Canaan, all hell broke loose.
He unleashed a wave of terror on the inhabitants of Canaan, killing kings, decimating armies, destroying the entire populations of cities. We are spared those chapters of the book of Joshua which detail the war of conquest by which the Jews overtook the inhabitants of the land of Canaan. Today’s reading brings us to the completion of the conquest. Today we hear Joshua speaking to the nation of Israel at another historical crossroad. Joshua is about to die. He is asking Israel not to backslide and betray the God who brought them into the land of promise. The people stand at this historic moment and promise that they would be faithful. They promised fidelity and then the tribes slip into the greatest period of anarchy among the Jews.
For four hundred years, the Jews existed as a loose confederation of tribes and they were constantly attached by one of their enemies or another. That generation did not live up to the challenges of freedom. It would take 400 years until Samuel was called as a prophet in Israel and he would anoint as King first Saul and then David, the greatest of the kings of Israel.
The Sunday readings do not always present a parallel between the situation of the bible story and the times in which we live. The story from Joshua is one of transition. We as a nation are in a similar situation of transition.
No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you must admit that we have witnessed a most historical week in our national history. We elected the first African American President in our history. If any of you stayed up on Tuesday night, you saw tears streaming down the faces of so many people as they heard the CNN and NBC declare at 11:01 that Barack Obama was elected president. General Colin Powell, in an interview following the election, said that he was profoundly moved, moved to tears, at the news of the election of President Elect Obama. Jesse Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee all cried at the news of the election results.
I was a high school student in Paterson when Dr. Martin Luther King visited the city only a few months before his assassination. Many of us remember Dr. King. We remember the struggle for civil rights which Dr. King lead. Who among us could have imagined we would have lived to see the day an African American would become president. No wonder tears flowed on that night.
I do not want to celebrate the triumph of one candidate over another. I think something profound is happening in our country,
Something profoundly religious is happening. Just think back with me over the past two years since the candidates began the road to the White House. Think back with me, not on the bickering and the political antagonisms. Think back on the language the candidates used. Were you startled, as I was amazed, by the religious language which the candidates used.
Both candidates used the word change in looking at the past few years in our country. We have a religious word for change.
We call it conversion. In religious terms, both candidates were saying that the United States needed a conversion.
Then other words crept into the political discourse. Words like hope and humility and healing and cooperation.
I do not think that any one person can change our country. I doubt if any of us think that we have elected the messiah. But like the Jews of old, we too stand at a crossroads.
Many of you know Maya Angelou. Some would consider her the premier African American writer. When she was interviewed by CNN about Barack Obama’s election as President she remarked: “With this, the country is finally able to see through complexion and see community.”
Together let us pray that God is using the election of Barack Obama to heal our nation of the sin of racism that has divided us for centuries and is uniting us as a community.
Together let us pray that God is healing our nation in the sight of the other nations of the world so that we can assume our place, not as the political or economic or military leader of the world but as the moral leader of the world.
Together let us pray that God is healing our nation of the uncontrollable greed that has undermined our economy and brought our nation to the brink of disaster.
Together let us pray that the Spirit of God will so blow over this country with a purifying fire to cleanse us of all that has defiled us and bring us today, like the people of Israel of old, into that land of promise, rich with promise for all people.
We stand at a crossroads, as did the people did in the days of Joshua. Let us be attentive to the ways God is looking to heal us, bring us together, lead us forward, forward into a land of promise.