| Sermon for Sunday, October 24, 2004 LOVE THAT SHOWS ITSELF IN ACTION by Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz Scripture: I John 3:11-18
I would like to have you look at the large insert in your bulletin with me. It tells about how our 2004 income of almost 2 million is being spent, and as we look together, I ask you to imagine something with me. Imagine that we are a family and we are talking about our family finances. Now, already we have rung some unpleasant bells with some of you because sitting down and discussing family finances can be a very unpleasant topic for many families because it often means that something is wrong and we have to do some belt tightening. We don’t think that is the case here – certainly not yet in this large and capable family. We just want to talk about where our money is currently going and what that says about us as a family – a 1500 member family that is actually about to add some more members even this morning – new members who are very enthusiastic about us and who like what they see in the energy and vitality of this large, active family. In every family our spending plans says something about our values and ethics, about what we really say is important. (Incidentally, if you want to take advantage of a free service our church offers your family as you plan and organize yourselves to be good managers of your resources through good tax planning at the end of the year, our team of leaders will be offering a seminar on end of the year planning in mid November and we will be telling you about specifics next week. It is part of our life stewardship training that helps us all be better managers of our resources.) So let’s look at how we are currently spending the resources of this large St Andrew family. We are spending a great deal on outreach beyond ourselves, and we hear about some of those ministries and agencies once a month. This sheet shows the actual money we spend beyond ourselves and does not include some other important things like all the mountains of food that you and I brought last weekend and distributed to four food pantries who were just delighted to see us last Monday because more of their cupboards were bare. Outreach beyond our four walls is important in this church and it is one of the things that we hear new members tell us that they like about St Andrew church – that we do what the reading from First John says, we put our faith into action for people in need. There are some other significant messages in this pie chart on the insert. We devote lots of our resources to music, for choirs and groups for all ages. We have a large number of children and youth involved in choirs and we have families tell us how important this is for their kids. I know about that because I grew up singing in children’s choirs and youth choirs and it was a very important part of my church experience along with the drama productions our youth group would do. And our adult music program is one of the many reasons that worship is so valued and important. Here again new members tell us how inspired they are by the music program at St Andrew. The same comment is heard about our worship life, and Mark Zwilling, Tam and Stacy and I hope this is true because we spend huge amounts of time preparing each week for our time of worship together – for this to be a place of contemplation and inspiration and instruction and redirection if we get on the wrong path. We believe worship together is the number one building block for your spiritual life and your spiritual health and if people are missing this time on a consistent basis, they are being cheated and making it harder for themselves. Missing worship would be like the Broncos trying to play a football game without having any huddles. Worship is like our football huddle in some ways where we get our signals, our instructions for what to do next and we get encouragement and help from each other and from grounding ourselves in being a team and being on God’s team. We devote a lot of time and resources to do it well at St. Andrew. We also devote a lot of time to ministry for youth and children and we are serving a lot of children and youth!! We have been averaging close to 200 children in our Sunday morning Sunday school classes this fall (we are fully staffed with 80 volunteers in our Sunday School program now!) and almost 100 youth in Sunday School. But Sunday morning is only a small part of our youth ministry here. And Sunday evening ministry – as large and vital as it is – is another part but there is an incredibly larger part that goes on other times beyond Sunday! Mike Ratliff was telling us last week that we actually have 12 different youth group meetings each week from this active church – this is incidentally, the largest and most active youth program of any of the 260 churches in our whole three state conference of Methodist churches. Those groups include our breakfast groups at McDonalds and Panera’s restaurants each week and dinner groups on Wednesday with groups of senior high boys and girls groups. And then there are our summer mission trip experiences for kids that this summer involved 100 plus youth and adults in outreach trips across the world. We are privileged to hear this morning the report from people who traveled together and worked together and compromised together and sweated together and did what our Bible reading says – put their love and faith into acts of service. Youth Mission Speakers... Have you ever planted a tree that you did not get to see grow to its full and complete maturity and growth? Most of us have. I think of the trees that are being planted at our new site and what they will look like in thirty years from now – many of us will not be able to see that because we won’t be here, but still most of us believe in planting trees because we believe in investing in something that is bigger and more lasting than ourselves. Together we put a lot of resources into youth ministry here and we do not know what the final results of that will be. We heard some results just now, but the real results will show up many years later when the ethic of service these youth are learning and the moral compass they are receiving here in learning the difference between right and wrong gets used in even more critical places. We may not see those results but we are planting the seeds for that and it is just the sort of investment we make when we plant trees that we trust will prosper and grow. That is what we are doing next week on Consecration Sunday when we bring our commitment cards to God’s altar table and devote our resources to something more important and more lasting than just ourselves. We will be responding to Jesus’ words, “Of those to whom much is given, much will also be expected.” We will be responding to the words in Genesis where God says to Abraham and to us, “I will bless you so that you may be a blessing.” There is another bulletin insert I want us to look at: it is the chart that tells us how to keep growing and moving in our faithfulness to God. It is the chart that is about how we are supporting God’s work through this church family, about how we are really living beyond ourselves or not. We ask each other in this church to do what Jesus says, to tithe – to devote 10% of our wealth back to God so we can do the sort of ministry you have heard about today. People are at different places on this chart. Some people start at a low range. Others are able to start at a middle range or higher range. We have some people in this church family right now who are not able to do much, who are in dire financial straits. We have people we have been able to help through your generosity. We have others who feel more secure and have been very fortunate and are living out their thankfulness in how they share their blessings. We ask each other to move up each year toward a tithe if we are not there yet so we can be faithful followers of Christ and so together we can do even more of what you have heard about today. We ask you to pick a place on this chart that is a stretch for you; don’t pick a place that is comfortable and convenient and lets you give to God out of your leftovers. God asks our generosity to others to be sacrificial and to be in proportion to how we have been blessed. You are the expert on both of those – what is sacrificial and proportionate for you. Next week in worship we will hand out commitment cards and we will sing “Here I Am Lord” as we bring those pieces of paper to the altar table. And because we do that we can continue to invest in the outreach ministry and children’s ministry and youth ministry we are making possible here. Yesterday we sent teams of youth to help with yard work with some of our older members who have not been able to do the work themselves. One of the places we sent kids to help with was a lady who is not a member of this church. In fact she has, as far as we know, never ever been inside our building. That’s OK. She is part of our church because in one of our Breakfast at McDonald’s groups she and her husband were regular customers at the same Mc Donald’s. A couple of years ago now she started just coming to McDonalds by herself and Cindy Klick learned from her that her husband had died. Grace is about 80 and lives by herself in a trailer park on Santa Fe. She still has been coming on Tuesday mornings and sits on the edge of our group of kids and when they hold hands and pray at the end of the devotional, Grace always moves into the circle and holds hands and prays with our youth there in the middle of McDonalds restaurant. Cindy asked her a few days ago if there is anything that she needs that our youth group can do for her and she told Cindy, so yesterday several of our youth in their make a difference day work were at her home raking her leaves. How does it feel to you to be part of a church where youth are growing up learning to think outside their own lives and learning to serve and to share and to show God’s love in action especially with the neediest persons around us? Don’t you want to support those kinds of learnings so that more and more persons can learn that and can be changed by that? Your commitment card on Consecration Sunday will make that continue to happen. What a privilege it is to give ourselves to make that kind of difference. |
