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October 15. 2000
Alison Kolesar
St. John's, Williamsport, MA

Let me tell you a tale of two women.

The first is married with young children. She and her family live in rented accommodation. She would love to be able to buy a house, but house prices seem to be rising faster than she and her husband can save for a down-payment. She would love to be able to dress her children in the beautiful clothes from her favorite catalog, but it's hard to justify the expense and she mostly makes do with what she can find at K-Mart and with hand-me-downs. Sometimes she finds herself feeling envious of things that others have. Sometimes she lies awake at night worrying about how they will pay for this or that and whether they will ever own a house. Mentally she spends each check a couple of times over before it actually comes in. Worst of all she finds herself resenting the amount of money that she and her husband have agreed to give to the church and plays the mental game of saying "If we weren't giving this much each week, we'd have this much more each year that we could be saving for a down-payment or using for ourselves and our children".

The second woman is a student. She is coming to the end of her time at college and she's not yet sure of what is coming next. She certainly doesn't have a job lined up. Half a year ago something very significant happened to her. She had an encounter with God that changed her life around. First challenged to think seriously about God by the people of a dynamic and loving church, then nurtured in her fledgling faith by this same church, she feels an enormous sense of gratitude to this place, to these people and to God working through them. She decides, before leaving for whatever is next, to take most of her savings out of the bank and anonymously give them to the church's building renovation fund.

Now you may have figured out already that these two women are actually one person and they are both me. I tell you these two stories because to me they symbolize two different attitudes to God and money. The first is anxious, fretful, fearful that there won't be enough and influenced by the consumer society that implies that happiness comes with owning the right things. The second is peaceful, grateful, generous and trusting God with the outcome. In a way it would be nice if the stories had come the other way around and I could therefore point to a clear progression in my own attitudes to giving, but my path has not been entirely without detours and probably few people's are. I do know which attitude I find more attractive and which person I would rather be, and I suspect that however much we may sympathize with the worrying young mother most of us would rather be generous and giving than fearful and tight -fisted.

Now many a Stewardship talk centers on questions like how much do we need to meet the budget, how big a short fall will there be if people don't increase their pledges, what programs do we want to be able to initiate, how well will we pay our staff. And maybe those are the issues our treasurer would like me to focus on. Certainly those are important. We know that the cost of heating fuel will be up this winter, building maintenance needs never go away, we want to be able to do more as a Christian community both within these walls and outside them, and we want to be able to pay our staff well for all the hard work they put in. But this morning I want to focus rather on what giving does for the giver.

The churches I came from in Britain (a country by the way with a good bit less disposable income than this one) were not shy about stating that the tithe, or ten percent of ones income, should be the minimum standard for giving. That is what the Episcopal Church in this country also endorses, though you don't hear it talked about all that often. Arguably that's a somewhat artificial figure. It's based on the Old Testament system of laws from which we can legitimately say Christ has freed us. As a standard the tithe can certainly be used legalistically and without understanding of individual circumstances. But for all that I find it useful because it sets the bar at a place that feels like a stretch and that requires some faith to follow through with. After all, so much of drawing closer to God is about surrendering control and opening oneself to His grace, trusting Him with the outcome. It's an adventure. Believe me I'm not naturally an adventurous person, but I have learned that the more you put yourself on the line for God, the more God is able to work with and for you and ultimately the happier, more fulfilled and more at peace you are. Given the rather comfortable time and place we live in, our financial lives may in fact be one of the best opportunities we have to go out on a limb for Christ. Probably not many of us will be called to be medical missionaries or to take a hurting child, a troubled teen or a needy elder into our homes - or whatever other front-line ministry you can think of. But we all, with the exception of the smallest children, have financial lives and can make financial choices that either bring us closer to God or separate us further from him.

Time for another story. This one is not about me. Some years ago this diocese put out a little booklet called Ten who Tithe. As you might gather from the title, it told ten autobiographical stories about this particular adventure of faith. I'm afraid I haven't been able to locate a copy of the booklet but one of the stories made enough of an impression on me that I remember it from several years ago.

The author, who lived somewhere in this diocese, told of being a single mother in severely straitened circumstances. A friend had the audacity to suggest that the only solution to her situation was for her to begin to tithe the little she had, and amazingly the author agreed to try it. She began to experience blessing after blessing, including (my favorite) the very practical one of a carton of milk that did not run out. The point is that your income is never too small to start trusting God. And the more you do put your trust in Him, the more grace you are able to receive. It's hard to out-give a generous God.

If you do buy in to the benefits of a sacrificial level of giving, the question could still fairly be asked, "Why to the church? Why not to any number of other organizations that are making a difference for good in our world?" Again maybe our treasurer would prefer I didn't say this, but I think it's a legitimate question. I know of people who choose to give very generously to other organizations instead of to the church. There are a couple of points about that however that can be made. First, what we give to other organizations we tend to get kudos for- our names are printed for all to see in their publications, whereas what the church is able to do as a result of our giving is more likely only to bring glory to God. Second, the church is the only real locus we have of God's kingdom on earth. Yes, it's frequently fallible, annoying, even wrong-headed.

But just as we fool ourselves if we think we can make it as solitary Christians, so we need to give to the particular Christian community we find ourselves part of. It says to God and to ourselves that for better or worse this is where we live out our faith, this is where we are connected, this is where we belong, this is our family even during those times when it feels like a dysfunctional one.

I read a book on Stewardship recently that basically said," Don't try to reach the dollar-a- week pledgers or the five-dollar-a-week pledgers or the ten-dollar-a-week pledgers, you'll never make a difference with them, and you'll get a far higher rate of return if you persuade those who have already learned about generous giving to increase their pledges." Well I may be a naive optimist, but I figure there's always someone out there who just hasn't really thought about it yet and who may just need someone to point out the benefits for them of a radically different view of their money. Maybe we actually have some things stacked against us living where and when we do. It's interesting but true that the smaller someone's income is the larger percentage of it they tend to give away. The more we have often the harder it becomes for us to let go of what we have. And let's face it this is a community that is wealthy by most real standards. But I don't want to believe that there won't be at least some who, with God's help, are ready to rise to a new challenge. I'm also optimistic that our parish's recent news of a large bequest (not that it will show up for another couple of years anyway) won't give anyone the idea that they can now afford to cut back on their pledge. From all that I've been saying you must have gathered I consider it vital for our spiritual health that we allow this new money to lead us into new, creative and exciting ministries and not simply let it pay the bills for us.

But wait a minute, I can hear you thinking. Back to that first story. That young mother was already giving significantly enough to know that what they gave affected the growth of their down payment and she wasn't feeling unreservedly happy about it. She's not exactly a great advertisement for the joys of giving, is she? Well in some ways you're right and I can't promise that this financial adventure will be without anxiety. In fact if our level of giving is not somewhat scary I'd venture to say it may not be high enough to be doing us any good. But I can also testify to how unfounded her fears were and how consistently she has been blessed by God over the years. So what I would advise is, before you fill out that pledge card in the next week, think about the kind of person you want to be, trust God (who is our only ultimate source of security), be adventurous, and then wait and see what happens.

AMEN