Matthew 22:34-46
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs
The Rev. Joshua Rodriguez-Hobbs
Confession time: this is my first stewardship sermon, and I
am terrified that it is going to sound like an NPR membership drive.
I don’t know if you listen to WYPR, our local NPR station,
but this past week was their fall membership campaign. As luck would have it, I
spent a lot of time in the car this week, so I got to hear a lot about this
membership campaign. It seemed like every few minutes they would cut away from
the program I was actually listening to and tell me that for a pledge of just
$5 a month, I could be the proud owner of an NPR phone charger. It was maddening.
I’m halfway convinced that public radio and television fund raise in this way so
that people like me will get frustrated and make a pledge just to end the
campaign. I hope you don’t feel this way about our Walking the Way stewardship
campaign, so let’s get back to our regularly scheduled Gospel lesson.
What a Gospel lesson this is! For the past few weeks now, we’ve
been heard how the Pharisees and the Herodians and the Sadducees have been
asking Jesus trick questions, hoping to trip him up. Today, we’re hearing the
final exchange in this series of questions and answers, and Jesus knocks it out
of the park with his answer.
One of the Pharisees, an expert in the Law, asks Jesus to
name the greatest of the six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Law of
Moses, and Jesus responds with what is unquestionably the best possible answer:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your mind.” What makes this answer so great is that it’s an
excerpt from the Shema, the central
passage of the Torah. The Shema is
found in the book of Deuteronomy, and its name comes from the first words of
the passage in Hebrew: sh’ma Yis’ra’eil…
Hear,
O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God
with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep this
words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your
children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when
you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign upon your hand, fix them as
an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and
on your gates.[1]
This is the first passage of Torah that Jesus, and the
Pharisees, and all Jewish children learned. The Pharisees began the custom of
reciting it twice a day, as the first words they spoke in the morning and the
last words they spoke at night. If you visit the home of a Jewish friend, you
might notice a mezuzah, a small box on their doorframe with this passage of
Torah written on a piece of paper inside it. This is a passage that expresses a
central truth of what it means to follow God: there is only one God, the Lord
of heaven and earth and all things in them, who has chosen a people as God’s
own to love and serve God.
Jesus’ response to this expert in the Law’s question is so
simple that any child could have given it. But it’s also an answer that we
spend our entire lives figuring out what it really means to love God with all that
we are and all that God has given us.
That brings us back to stewardship. Loving God with all our
heart, all our soul, and all our ind is going to impact how we use our money. I
know, this isn’t the fun part of the sermon. But it’s important, and that’s why
I don’t what this sermon to sound like an NPR pledge drive. Making a pledge of
your time, talent, and treasure should not be something that you do so that we
will stop our stewardship campaign early, and Arianne and I will stop preaching
about money. Yes, your pledge is important because it supports the life and
mission of this community. It allows us to pay the bills and keep the lights
on. The time and money you donate allows us to serve people who are in need
through outreach ministries like Neighbor to Neighbor, Our Daily Bread, and
Loves and Fishes. It allows us to provide quality programs for our children and
teenagers. It provides for the upkeep of this beautiful blessing that we have
been blessed with. But more than all of this, what you pledge to the church is
the best possible barometer of where God is in your priorities.
I didn’t always think this way. When I sent to seminary, I
was not a pledging member of St. Christopher’s Church in Lubbock, TX, the
congregation that sponsored me for ordination. I told myself that I was just
out of college, I was about to go to seminary, and that I would start pledging
when I got a “real” job. And besides, I gave to the church. Each Sunday, I
would dig around in my wallet and put a few bills, generally the smallest, in
the collection plate. Now, in seminary, I had to do an internship in a local
church, and as luck would have it, almost as soon as I started there, they
began their fall stewardship campaign. And this campaign was all about how
making a pledge to the church was not about meeting an obligation that we had
to God. Instead, the act of making a pledge was our grateful response for the
blessings that God had given us through our parish family. Now, every month
while I was in seminary, I got a check from St. Christopher’s, and there were
some months when that check was the only thing that allowed me to make ends
meet. I didn’t pledge to the church, and yet they were supporting me with their
prayers and their finances. In response, I wasn’t showing any gratitude to
them, or to God, who had placed them in my life to be a blessing. So, that
year, I wrote my first pledge.
I would be lying if I told you that it was easy to make that
first commitment. It wasn’t a big pledge, but for me at the time it represented
a sacrificial amount of giving. And I would be lying if I told you that it was
easy this year to meet the vestry’s challenge to raise my own pledge to Good
Shepherd by five percent. It’s never easy to do that. But it’s important. It’s
a way of expressing the profound gratitude that I have for being a part of this
parish community. It’s also a way of loving God with all that I am and all that
God has given me.
So, as we continue to talk about walking the way with Jesus
in the coming weeks, I invite you to spend time in prayer, asking yourself how
your pledge of time, talent, and treasure reflects where God is in your
priorities. Ask yourself is that is where you want God to be. Ask yourself how
you can best love the Lord your God will all your heart, all your soul, and all
your mind. Amen.
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