Enticing Through Love

Enticing Through Love

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector

St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Arkansas

October 27, 2013; 23 Pentecost, Proper 25, Year C

Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Luke 18:9-14)  Jesus told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, `God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, `God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted."
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t is Stewardship Sunday.  Stewardship preachers tend to use a lot of different strategies to motivate generosity and giving on this Sunday.  Several times in the past we’ve invited Corky Carlisle to come to do his persuasive pulpit magic.  I remember one of his “tricks” a few years ago.  He started out his sermon saying, “If you’ve already filled out your pledge card, tear it up or scratch the dollar amount out.  I want you to see how good it will feel for you to put an amount twice that much on your card.”  And after some nervous laughter, he could talk you into it. 

I’m not going to do that.  Here’s where I want to start.  I want to say that God only has one strategy.  God always entices us through love.[i]

A lot of us picked up a wrong-headed message some time in our past.  A lot of us were taught that God looks at us in judgment, and if we would just change or do something good, then God would love us, and even save us. 

That’s backwards.  The fact is that God loves and accepts us first.  God loves us so we can change.  What empowers change is the experience of God’s love and acceptance. 

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ne of the most famous sermons of the twentieth century is Paul Tillich’s You Are Accepted sermon.  He spoke of the experience of “being struck by grace.”  It usually happens when we feel pretty broken or stale or alienated.  “(W)hen, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.  Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying:  “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you…  Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much…  Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!  If that happens to us, we experience grace.  After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before.  But everything is transformed.  In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement.  And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”[ii]

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esus starts a story, “Two men went up to the temple to pray…”  One was pretty full of himself.  Satisfied.  Keeping score, and obviously scoring more points than the pitiful tax collector standing far off crying for mercy. 

Jesus says the tax collector crying for mercy went to his home “justified.”  That is Biblical language which means the man went home accepted.  In the midst of his stuckness in a notorious job that alienated him from God and his community, he was struck by grace.  He was accepted. 

And it doesn’t say that he did anything.  Except maybe he simply accepted the fact that he is accepted.  And now that he has been loved so freely and deeply, he’s free.  Free to be who he most deeply longs to be.  It’s all motivated by love.  God always entices us by love. 

I believe that giving is motivated by love and thanksgiving.  It starts when we realize how fortunate we are to be, and to be loved.  When we know ourselves to be loved, when we fall into God’s great generosity, we find, coming almost from nowhere, a capacity to act and to change.  It can be surprising.  It feels like a total gift.[iii]

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ur job at this church is to help God give that gift of loving acceptance to every person – every person in this congregation, every person in this community, every person on the planet.  God loves you.  And Jesus shows us what it is to be a human being entirely motivated by love – to be fully alive.

So, if you give to this church and its work, give because you love.  You love being loved.  You love spreading the message of love.  You love supporting the works of love that are activated through this church and its ministries. 

When I was in seminary, I worked at Grace Church, Nutley, New Jersey.  I’ll never forget the way the rector Wade Renn started his stewardship sermon one year.  He started with the Great Commandment – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your mind, with all your strength, and with all your soul.”  “And we do!” Wade exclaimed.  We love God with all our heart and mind strength and soul.  We love God, and we want to give God everything.  All our heart and mind and strength and soul.  We want to give God 100%.  Everything.  But God says, ‘Whoa!  No!  Not everything.  You need something to live on.  Don’t give me everything.  Just give me 10%.  You keep the other 90% to live on.”

I’ve been grinning about that one for over thirty years.  But I do like the connection between what I am given and what I give.  That’s why Kathy and I have practiced Proportionate Giving for all of our married life.  We’ve chosen to give 10%, the Biblical tithe, because that’s what Kathy learned and appreciated from growing up Baptist.  And it feels good to me, despite being a life-long Episcopalian. 

Some years ago, when Kathy left a good salaried job to try to build her own business, we went through some lean years and our income dropped.  But we kept giving the same percentage, so we didn’t feel like we were giving less.  That felt good.  And as we’ve been blessed financially, we’ve given more dollars – same proportion, same percentage.

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’ve been teaching Proportionate Giving now for sixteen years, and it’s become something of a norm here at St. Paul’s.  A number of people give 10% of their income.  Others have chosen what is sometimes called the “modern tithe” – 5% of you income to the church, and other financial gifts to other worthy charities outside the church.  If you’ve never tried giving away a percentage of your income, I encourage you to look at it.  Consider what 3% of your income is.  Stewardship tends to begin around that level of giving. 

But don’t misinterpret my invitation.  I’m not asking you to do something so that you’ll be good like that Pharisee in the Gospel lesson who was proud because he gave a tenth of all his income, unlike that tax collector in the corner.  I only want you to give out of love and thankfulness. 

This is a generous church.  And somehow we always are given whatever we need.  Sometimes we feel some financial strains because we are growing, and it takes money to support that growth.  That’s a great problem to have.

But in closing I want to tell you a bit about what we hope to do if, out of love and thanksgiving, people give St. Paul’s more money. 

First, we’ll underwrite what we need for the natural growth that is happening in our church and in our programs.  But beyond that, we’ve got two new things we would love to fund.

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uzanne and two lay leaders went to Nashville recently to learn about the ministry of Magdalene House, a movement that reaches out to women who have been victimized, who have been on the street and in prison.  Magdalene brings those women into a “community of radical love, which is nonjudgmental and that believes in the lavish work of resources to do the healing work of God.” 

Suzanne said of that meeting, “I cannot describe how moving it was to be welcomed by these women into their homes and into their lives.  Hearts as wide open as their outstretched arms.  One woman, with a tattoo stretched across her throat ‘Trust No One,’ channeled the hospitality of St. Benedict himself.  Everywhere we went we found gritty humor, courageous truth-telling, genuine humility, sweeping love.”

Here at St. Paul’s we are in relationship with women who share Eucharist with us each Sunday in the Northwest Arkansas Community Corrections Center.  We believe God has something better for them than going back to the environment they were in when they got into trouble.  In Magdalene House we’ve seen a model that works.[iv]  We’d like be part of that movement and create a branch of that ministry here that would become a community ministry much like the Community Clinic at St. Francis House and 7hills Homeless Center which were both birthed from St. Paul’s.

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he other ministry we would like to expand is to make our worship and our message more accessible through the Internet.  We would like to be able to stream our Sunday morning services so that anyone with computer access anywhere around the world would be able to join us in worship live.  We’d like to post videos of our sermons and our choirs’ anthems and our Parish Hall classes and our special speakers.  We think there is the potential to touch even more people through the Internet than we already serve here in person. 

Both of those programs will take some financial resources.  But I think they are both well within our reach. 

So today, Stewardship Sunday, I ask you to feel the love.  Feel the radical love and infinite acceptance of God.  And then, out of your sense of gratitude and thanksgiving, freely and joyfully make a pledge of any size to St. Paul’s.  We will give it back to God, and God will help us turn it into ministry and service.  

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[i] Richard Rohr, from Yes, And…, p. 18.  Adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate….  Seeing God in All Things (CD, DVD, MP3)  Several phrases in this introduction come from Rohr.

[ii] Paul Tillich, online copy of his famous sermon:  http://bit.ly/6FcyaN

[iii] Rohr, Ibid.

[iv] Episcopal News Service story about the workshop at http://bit.ly/1hWk4te