100% Loved

I finally transcribed the sermon from 7.1: Stewardship, Jarius' Daughter, and the Woman who was Bleeding (gosh, I speak fast!).  Strangely, I might even like it a little better than the other one.  

I was so excited about this Sunday’s text, because Jairus’ daughter was my favorite Bible story growing up.  I remember being at church camp and the counselor pretended that she had been the girl, and I wasn’t very bright as a child, as some of you heard from my Dad.  I failed Iowa Basic Skills tests as a kid… Literally in the bottom 8% of kids in Iowa with respect to logic.  I loved this story.  I believed that she was the little girl that was brought back to life, and I was so excited to preach, but then, I realized there’s this section in internship that you’re supposed to work on, There’s this section in internship that you’re supposed to work on for our evaluations, and there’s evangelism, and mission, and preaching and teaching, and there’s one area that hasn’t quite come up this year, and it’s one that Lutheran’s aren’t very good at talking about, and it makes us uncomfortable, can anyone guess which area we’re talking about today?  EWWWW - stewardship.  I have been avoiding it all year.  I kept thinking: that’s a weird week to talk about stewardship; we might have visitors… and I don’t know, maybe not that week to talk about stewardship, and I kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off.

There are two different kinds of people: 1 that thinks that there is no good time to talk about stewardship because we don’t like talking about money and we think that stewardship is just about money, and the there are people who thinks that anytime is a good time to talk about stewardship, but I’m not sure I think these people get it right either.  When we talk about real stewardship, it’s really uncomfortable, and it’s really hard, and I think that’s part of the reason that we don’t talk about it.  Because a lot of times people expect there’s going to be a sermon about how you need to give 10% and how you need to be less stingy.  What I’m worried about has nothing to do with our finances and our pocketbooks stewardship and it has nothing to do with our pocketbooks.  I’m worried about us being stingy about our faith.  One of the things we talked about with the kids during VBS was keeping it to ourselves, keeping the light of Christ to ourselves.

Sometimes we think about stewardship the way we think about God.  So we give our 10%, or whatever, of our income, and we check off our little box.  Then we come to church on Sunday and we check off the church box and we think we’re done.  But living the life of faith, like we talked with Lily last week, is a full contact sport.  You can’t dive halfway off the diving board.  You can’t halfway dive off the diving board.  Doing a little bit of stewardship is like being a little bit pregnant.  It’s either all or nothing, yes or no.  You can’t dive off the diving board and change your mind halfway down, and if you do, it will be a belly flop.  So, when we think I give my 10%, I want it to do something, only wanting it to go to this or this or this, and we get all of these stipulations around our money and our faith.

Eventually we’ve drawn this box that makes us think we’ve done enough.  It would make sense if I’d preach about Paul today; he’s literally talking to the Corinthians about giving money.  Reading the text, I don’t think it’s a money issue.  I don’t think Paul is actually talking about giving money.  He’s been watching this community at Corinth, and at one point in 1^st Corinthians, he says, “So you’re getting full, while everybody else around you is starving.”  It’s really interesting how Paul engages this.  He isn’t talking about giving money for the good of himself.  Paul’s talking about being connected to your brothers and sisters.  If you’re well-fed while your brothers and sisters are starving, you’re not doing it right, Paul says.  Paul’s letter is about the offering to Jerusalem, but what it’s really about isn’t about how much they’re giving to Jerusalem.  It’s about them thinking about their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem even as they think about themselves and their own needs.  The reason we give is so that “the one that has a lot doesn’t have too much and the one that has little doesn’t have too little.”

But when I think about having little or having much, I don’t think about the Corinthians; I think about the widows mite. I  see this little old woman, hunched over, going up with her last coin.  This was bread.  This was the last thing she had, what she had to live on for that day, which for her meant death… and she put it in the coffer, when all these people were flashing out their huge bills, putting them in saying, “Look at me, look at all I have done; look at all I have done for the synagogue,” and this little old woman, walked forward, and Jesus said that her gift was the one that made the bells ring in the synagogue and why, “they all gave out of their abundance, but she gave out of her want.”

So often, when we think about stewardship, we think about ourselves: But I have barely enough to survive, I have barely enough to go on; I don’t know how I am supposed to give to church ,and I think then we’re thinking about stewardship all wrong because then it is just about money and just about the facts, and those of us who have been in church for any length of time know that we come here not because of the facts and the data, it’s about faith.  It’s about this Christ, about this faith that has a synagogue leader… by this time in the Marks’ gospel, the synagogue leaders have drawn their lines in the sand and they aren’t about to cross them, and Jairus comes up to tell Jesus about his little girl.  Now, little girls in this society aren’t the way they are in our society today.  Until they came of age, children had the same status as slaves in the family, and for little girls it was worse: they were often seen as a burden, because they were an expense to the family. Even so, Jairus goes up to Jesus; his twelve year old daughter, who might be married soon, was about to die.  I wonder if he was remembering tickling her or hearing her laugh.  He went up to Jesus because he didn’t want his last memory of her to be her lying in a bed, her face turning gray…  People would come and you could tell in their faces they knew she was going to die.  They touched Jairus on the shoulder and didn’t really say what they were thinking.  When they said, “It will be all right,” they knew better.  So Jairus goes up to Jesus, and Jesus says he’s going to come: there’s hope.  And then this woman comes up, she had spent everything trying to get better.  Kind of like us - if we gave everything we had - but she didn’t get better, she got worse.  All these doctors, being unclean, unable to be in society, unable to go to society, to synagogue, not seeing her family for 12 years, and she goes up to Jesus, with Jairus standing there - his daughter dying as this happened -and she touches his cloak.

She had given everything, but after giving everything, she risked everything.  Entering this group of people, if she had been caught, who knows what they would have done to her.  It was so important for her and for Jairus that they were willing to risk anything to talk to the teacher.  This is what makes me think that stewardship isn’t really about money.   It’s about putting our faith - all of our faith - in Jesus.  It’s about looking at this Christ and saying, “This is my 100% because there is no 10% about it with Christ.”  There’s no 10%, but I still wonder: what happened after the woman was healed and told the whole truth, went back to her family.  What happened when the other synagogue leaders came up to Jairus and said, “Give it up, don’t bother the teacher any more, she’s dead.”  And Jesus looked at him, “Only believe.”

That’s all.  Jesus doesn’t look at us and say, “You need to give exactly 10% of your income today in order for the church to work.” He doesn’t say that.  Our stewardship has nothing to do with our salvation.  It has to do with already having received salvation.  It has to do with Jesus looking at Jairus and saying, “I am enough.  It is going to be enough.”  And Jesus goes with this man.  I can imagine him, just biting back tears, not really believing Jesus but not really having a choice. But he goes.

His daughter isn’t raised 10%.  Jesus didn’t raise her halfway.  Jesus doesn’t work like that.  He says, “Get up, getup and go play, you’re alive - get up and play.”  It was 100%.  I think that’s’ why I don’t like to talk to talk about stewardship because I’m really good at doing the math of 10%.  But I’m not so good at doing the math of 100%.  Because the truth is, most of the time, I think I am only saved about 10%.  Because I feel like I have to be good and do it right to get the other 90% of my salvation.

Jesus doesn’t look at us and say, “I save you 10%; good luck with the other 90.”  Jesus goes to the cross and says, “One hundred percent, all of the time.”  And that’s’ what’s hard about stewardship: when it’s about money, we can do the math, but when it’s about our lives and how we live, there’s no math about it.  It’s daily, continually, always there, and it’s part of how we live.  It has nothing, really, in the end, to do with our pocketbooks.  It has everything to do with our hearts, and everything to do with our souls.  So as we look at our lives and our lives of faith and our church and our church finances, let’s remember: we aren’t a church of 10%, and the church was never meant to be 10%.  It was meant to be 100%.  One hundred percent of your faith, in this Christ, who has given us 100% of who he is.  Amen.