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The Rev. Frank
Logue
Offer Everything Antici…[significant pause]…pation. Anticipation. As a child, I anticipated Christmas with great eagerness. The Sears and Roebuck Christmas catalog would come out and I would pour over it greedily. I would beg to go to toy stores to wander around looking for options I could hint about for Christmas. All this led up to the anticipation of Christmas Eve and the difficulty of falling asleep while wondering when Santa Claus would arrive. Now that’s anticipation. Stores build their year around this anticipation. As soon as Halloween is cleared away, Christmas starts to make its debut. Retailers need a good Christmas season, particularly in a down economy. There is the fear that with less money being spent, not capturing enough of the market share could mean not being in business when out next Christmas shopping season rolls around. So with a zeal based on having not just profits on the line, but the viability of a business, the Christmas shopping season kicks in fully on the day after Thanksgiving and keeps the shopping stress torqued up through after Christmas sales. Christian churches seek to counter balance the consumerism of the culture. We all try to remind everyone of the reason for the season, which was the gift of Emmanuel, God with us. But by the time, Advent starts four Sundays before Christmas, it is already the shopping season and we consumers are already on alert about the number of days until Christmas. Rather than a joyful anticipation of celebrating Jesus’ birth, when can have a stressful season of trying to get everything they want to make Christmas meaningful. This year, King of Peace is trying an experiment. We begin Advent today. Historically, this is how it worked. Advent began seven Sundays before Christmas. The word Advent is from the Latin “adventus” for “coming” and in this time of anticipation, we are to look for Jesus’ Second Coming to end the present age, even as we wait for and anticipate the celebration of Jesus’ first Advent as a baby born in a manger in Bethlehem. Advent was, like Lent which is the seven Sundays leading up to Easter, a time of self examination. Advent was a time for deciding whether your life was in line with what it should be as someone anticipating Jesus’ return. This seven-Sunday long season is still celebrated by 225 million Orthodox Christians largely in the church’s of the east, like the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox. Our experiment at King of Peace is part of the Advent Project by liturgist Bill Peterson. With a handful of other churches in the U.S. and Canada, we begin Advent today. The goal is to let the true season of anticipation sink into our bones before we ever get to the consumer driven one. It also gives us a chance to more fully highlight the theme always present in Advent of preparing for Jesus return in glory. By beginning earlier and holding out the anticipation longer, we don’t hope to crank up the anxiety, but to lessen it. This sermon’s reference to Christmas shopping is not to get you focused on that goal earlier, but to remind us all to turn our hearts and minds not to the marketplace, but to Emmanuel, God with us. Hear our scripture for today through ears attuned to Advent: A constant refrain in scripture is that we are to take care of those in need. This plea is familiar to us as Christmas draws closer. There are the calls to remember those in need at Christmas. Here in Camden County, our own efforts shine brightly. Both Christmas for Camden Kids and the work done by the Saint Marys Police Department make Christmas happen for children who would otherwise have nothing to anticipate. In scripture, the call to assist those in need, was stated in a way that made sense for the needy of Jesus’ day. People were taught to care for widows and orphans. It was the husbandless women and parentless children who had the least standing in the community. So, Christians were to look out for these most needy of persons. This makes it quite counter-cultural that we have two readings today in which widows are asked to give everything they have. In our reading from First Kings, Elijah goes to Zarapheth and there encounters a widow gathering sticks for a fire. He asks for water that he may drink. Then he asks for a morsel of bread. It is then that the widow tells him that she only has a little meal and a small amount of oil. The sticks she is gathering are for a last supper for herself and her son. There is a famine in the land and after this one last bit of fresh baked bread, she is convinced that she and her son will starve to death. But Elijah says that if the woman will make bread and give it to him first, that there will be meal and oil enough for bread until the famine breaks. Then in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples encounter a woman in the Jewish Temple in very much the same situation. She is broke save for two mites. The smallest coins in the realm, the two represent together a fraction of a penny. They are all she has. The Greek of Mark’s Gospel describe them as her “bios.” It’s the word from which we form the word “Biology.” These two coins are all she has on which to live. They are her very life. The widow has gone to the temple and offers them to God. Jesus sees her and points out that she gave more than all the others. For the rest gave out of their wealth and she gives all she has. Two stories. Both of tell similar tales of widows entrusting their last source of survival to God. These are not stories of trusting God by giving God a tithe, or a tenth of what we have. These are the amazing accounts of women who give all they have to God, holding nothing back. The reading for Hebrews tell of what God offers. We were told in that reading how Jesus sacrificed himself to remove our sins. Jesus offers everything, his very life, holding nothing back. This is the time of year when churches tend to talk about money. It’s budget time for churches and so it is also stewardship time. Lots of churches all around us will be talking about tithing at this time of year. Certainly, we talk about tithing at King of Peace as well. It is our standard for giving. Yet, the scripture for today reminds us that what we are really taught by our Lord is not giving ten percent of our money to the church as much as we are taught to give our whole lives to God. Certainly one part of how we give our whole lives to God is to give a portion of our income to support the work of the church through our local congregation. The standard advice on giving monetarily to the church is to consider what you give as a percentage of your income. So if you are here a couple of times a month and give twenty dollars each time, then consider how much money that is each year and what percentage of your income that gift represents. Then once you know you are giving a half a percent, or two percent or five percent of your income, look at increasing that percentage and then recalculate what that means in dollars and give appropriately. This is all good and true. It will help you in changing your thoughts about how much you give to your church, but it is only a small step toward a larger goal. Victoria and I tithe to King of Peace. That is great and by the usual advice of increasing the percentage you give, Victoria and I would have long ago arrived at our destination with no more spiritual growth to go. That is not where we are as tithing alone does not meet our obligation to God when it comes to finances. Our obligation to God is to spend everything we spend knowing that what we do with our finances is related to what we think about God. In that, how we use the other ninety percent of our income is as or more important as what we dedicate to God through our giving to this church. Even if ten percent of your income went to the church, but the rest of your money was used in ways that do not honor God, will you have really been faithful in your finances? I think not. The widow Jesus saw giving two small copper coins was held up as an example of faithfulness with finances not because of the size of her gift, even when percentages are considered. The widow’s mite was a prime example of faithfulness because it was the outward sign that she put her whole trust in God. Where do you put your trust? If it is in social security or a 401k or the job security of a government job or whatever it is, putting your essential trust in anyone or anything other than God is misplaced trust. Trust your life to something other than God and you will be disappointed, perhaps disastrously so. In this enlarged season of Advent, let our early start be an early reminder to dial down the volume on the hype of the holiday season. We begin this season anticipating that which has already occurred. We look to celebrating Jesus birth in a manger, yet Jesus has already come. We look to his return in glory, but not in a way that distracts from Jesus already being present in our lives. The widow of Zarepheth faced starvation. The widow I the temple in Jerusalem faced financial ruin. What each of them did was bet everything on God. They put their whole trust in his love and grace. Their trust in God was not misplaced. Scripture teaches that neither were forgotten by God. No matter what you face, know that the Good News this seven Sunday season of Advent is that God is with you in that struggle. You are not alone. God knows the problems. And as you work toward solving your problems, put your trust not in your solutions, but in God. Offer God everything. Trust that he will be present and anticipate that God will be present in your life in a mighty way. Amen.
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