Think of a time that you did something that was the expression of your best self. Maybe it was helping a friend who needed a hand. Maybe it was volunteering to work for a cause about which you are passionate. Maybe it was a time when your compassion and generosity of spirit moved you to give money to alleviate suffering. I have seen this congregation respond with breathtaking generosity to special appeals after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. In the last few weeks people in this congregation have quietly donated more than $6000 to help Mayan refugee children attend school beyond the fifth grade. At least seven Mayan children will be in school next year because of us. My wife Phyllis and I were among the donors. We donated $800 — the annual cost for one child.
You know what? It felt really good. It felt really good, even though part of me is a real tightwad. I am sure that when you have acted out of love and a spirit of generosity it made you feel good, too. The feeling isn’t one of smugness or self righteousness. It is a warm feeling, a feeling of connection, a feeling of making a difference. When we act out of love, something happens to us. We touch something that is tender, something that is holy.
When you think about it, acts of generosity are amazing little miracles. What is it that possesses anyone to act in a way that is not in his or her rational self interest? Generosity is especially amazing when the person who gives knows that he or she will never meet the people who will benefit.
When I think of people I have admired, they are people who give of themselves. I think of teachers and mentors who gave so freely of themselves, expecting nothing in return. I think of people in this congregation who have been extraordinarily generous. Their acts of generosity flowed naturally, inevitably, out of a deep inner well.
A religious life, a meaningful life, is all about love. And what is love if not a reaching out, a spirit that wants to share, to connect? Love is not love unless it is given away. Think about that for a second. Love cannot be hoarded. Love must be shared; love must be given away. And deep down, if you and I are honest with ourselves, if we are in touch with our deepest longings and our highest aspirations, we want to give ourselves away. The happiest people I have known, the people who live the most satisfying lives, are people who have learned to give themselves away.
We call ours a free religion. We are part of a long tradition of free churches. We hold freedom as a sacred value. No one is going to tell us what to believe, what to think, or what to do. Our first principle affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We affirm each individual’s free and responsible search for meaning and truth.
And yet freedom is a lot like love. Freedom is like money. It only has value when we spend it. Freedom only has value if we give it away. Only when we lose some of our freedom do we build a life. Let’s explore that for a minute. What is getting married or entering into a committed relationship if not losing freedom? It isn’t freedom that brings us happiness; it is commitment. Think about having children. Any parent knows how much freedom we give up with children. Yet it is our willingness to give up our freedom, our willingness to commit to parenthood, that makes possible the sharing of love between parents and children.
Imagine a life without deep, lasting commitments. Imagine a life without making promises and keeping them. A life without commitments is a life that is empty and lonely. You and I create our lives by making commitments and keeping them. The larger our commitments, the deeper our commitments, the deeper and richer our lives.
I can read your minds, you know. You are thinking, “This is the kickoff to our annual stewardship campaign, isn’t it? When is he going to get around to making a pitch for money?”
Well, soon. But not quite yet. For this sermon really isn’t about money. In fact, I don’t believe that our stewardship campaign should be about money.
Stewardship, rightly understood, is about how we spend our lives, not just how we spend our money. Stewardship is ultimately about what we love so much that we want to care for it. Stewardship is about what we love so much that we are willing to commit ourselves to nurture it.
When we have a path to membership class, I always talk about stewardship as the three T’s: time, talent, and treasure. This is why I am so pleased that we have social action activities as an integral part of our campaign this year. Next month, on the weekend of April 21 and 22, JUC will take on a wide variety of projects in the community. We will be providing yard work for seniors, cleaning a park, planting trees, building a library for Foothills Green, cooking meals or stocking supplies for food banks, visiting shut-ins, hosting homeless families through IHN, building a Habitat house, and volunteering to help with Jeffco Action Center, Project CURE, Newborns in Need, the Heifer Project, the Knitting Project, and likely more organizations. On Easter, we will have a blood drive.
Many of the service projects will be video recorded. Then, on May 5, we will come together here at church to celebrate the culmination of the campaign. Chris and Steve Sealy, our tireless videographers, will combine footage from many projects and create a video for us to watch. What a wonderful way to culminate our campaign. Put May 5 (that’s the cinco de mayo) on your calendar.
After the service you can sign up for a project out in the Commons. If you have children, I urge you to make it a family affair. Pick something you can do with your children. What an important religious lesson they will learn about the joy of service.
So, should I talk about money now? Nah. First I want to tell you about my record collection. My record collection is one of the joys of my life. I own 1779 recordings. That includes 839 lp’s, 932 CD’s and a handful of tapes. My collection contains 263 jazz recordings, 25 latin music recordings, 32 blues records, 115 guitar or lute recordings and 384 classical keyboard recordings. Heck, I own six different versions of the Bach solo cello suites and just about everything the Takacs Quartet has recorded. As you can tell, I am so into my record collection that I have the whole thing on a database. (I didn’t actually count all those records!)
Every evening when I get home, especially if I get home late after a committee meeting, I turn on the stereo and listen to some music. For me, listening to music is a spiritual practice. And it is a practice I have had since I discovered the world of music in college.
And you know one of the greatest things about my collection? It was all free. Really. Free. Well, sort of. You know what I discovered when I was in my early 20’s and just beginning to collect records? If I had a spare $20 in my wallet in the middle of the month and went to Tower Records (may it rest in peace) and bought four records, at the end of the month I had four records and my $20 bill was gone. This is not a major discovery.
Here is the earth-shattering discovery that is the secret to my record collection and the secret to JUC’s financial future. Listen carefully. If, in the middle of the month, I refrained from going into Tower Records, at the end of the month I did not have four new records. And my life changing realization was that at the end of the month I not only did not have new records, I also did not have the $20 bill in my wallet. The $20 bill was always gone at the end of the month. Always. Without fail. You know how it is. You have a little extra cash and somehow it just disappears. I don’t even know how I would spend it. I probably bought some snacks I really didn’t need to eat. I probably bought a few coffees and maybe picked up a magazine.
What I realized is a fundamental law of human behavior. (And I honestly cannot understand why the Nobel Prize committee has not awarded me the Nobel Prize for economics. It is a huge miscarriage of justice.) The money was going to be gone at the end of the month anyway. I might as well have a few new records to show for it. Now, forty years later, I have a wonderful record collection that gives me great pleasure. And it was free!
What, you may be wondering, does this have to do with our stewardship drive? Everything. My free record collection is the key to JUC’s financial future.
You have seen the materials on our campaign (though you may not have read them). Here is the short version. Things are pretty tight. The sad fact is that for the past couple of years we have not been paying as we go. Some pledges have not been paid. Also, we increased our programming using grant money. Grant money has made possible our increased staffing in social responsibility and has paid for our ministerial intern. But that money is about used up. We have postponed paying back some debt from our building expansion. For the first time in JUC’s history, we had to cut back on our support to our national association.
We made a decision to be ambitious and to staff for growth. It is a little like a growing family that needs to move into a larger house. There are a lot of expenses right away for furniture. Many of us have experienced times when our expenses were more than our income. We had to buy some things on time and then pay them off. There is nothing wrong with that. In time, as our income goes up, we pay off the debt.
That is where we are as a congregation. We simply need an infusion of income in order to continue what we have. Soft money is running out. We have some debt to pay back. Everything will be fine if we can get our income up.
And here is where my free record collection, my great discovery that should have won me the Nobel Prize, saves the day. We can solve our financial situation, we can raise our income dramatically, for free.
You know, $20 isn’t very much money these days. It disappears from my wallet a lot faster now than it did 40 years ago. To most of us, $20 a month is nothing. A few of us are in very tight financial circumstances. I understand; I’ve been there. But most of us are pretty comfortable. We don’t miss $20. But just watch what happens if we put a bunch of $20 bills together. We have 770 members. If every member gave just an additional $20 a month it would mean an extra $184,000. If we bump that an additional $5 a month, it increases our budget by $231,000. I am not talking about making sacrifices. I am talking about what we can do if every one of us does what he or she can. They key is that we each have to do our part.
I know I can do another $25 a month. It’s no big deal. I have lots of practice with my record collection. (And the truth is I am starting to run out of room for my CD’s.) But if only a few of us bump our pledge, we don’t get very far. If we all do it, we’re in great shape. Lots of us can easily do more than $20 a month. Lots of can easily do $50.
We can maintain excellence in our staff and programs, pay our debts, and help support our movement again. And we can do it for free — if, and only if, we each do our small part.
This year we are going to have a real face to face canvass for the first time in years. We have a team of canvassers who have volunteered to see a few other members. Someone will contact you. Make time to get together. It is a great chance to visit and share our dreams.
Let me tell you my dream. It is pretty simple. I want us to continue to respond to the need that is all around us. This is what drives my passion for ministry. I see people every week coming to us looking for a progressive, compassionate, socially engaged spiritual home. Yesterday we had another path to membership class. Another great group of people has joined our family. Our growth is not numbers. Our growth is people; it is us. I just cannot see us cutting back when the need is so very great. I cannot see us cutting back on our involvement in the community. My own call to ministry is all about responding to the need around us—and the need is huge, just huge.
I began this sermon asking each of us to remember a time we acted out of a generosity of spirit. I invite us to get that feeling again when we make our commitment to our church home. I urge you to deepen your commitment. You’ll be so glad you did.
Amen.