Sermon for Sunday, May 11, 2008

PLANTING TREES YOU DON’T GET TO SIT UNDER

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Commitment Sunday, Mother’s Day, Pentecost

Scripture: II Corinthians 9:6-9

⁶ The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. ⁷ Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. ⁸ And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. ⁹ As it is written, "He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever."

When we were planning for worship this week in our weekly staff meeting, Mark Zwilling reminded us that we have a confluence today of three important and wonderful celebrations in worship:

We are celebrating Mother’s Day and the unconditional and nurturing love that is part of motherhood and parenthood at its best. We are also today celebrating the third most important day of the liturgical year after Easter and Christmas—the day of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, the day the Christian movement began, the birthday of the church when the disciple Peter gave the first ever Christian sermon inviting people to come and join the Jesus movement and 3,000 people were baptized and began to study, pray, worship and serve.

And third, in our own congregation, we are marking Commitment Sunday to underwrite the expansion of our ministry and our building when we bring our three year building fund pledges to the altar table and begin to make our next building phase possible.

It is a formidable Sunday to combine all of those but this is an exceptional congregation so we will begin!

In more and more of the weddings I am doing recently we are including an additional ritual of a blessing of the marriage from the parents of both the bride and the groom. It occurs right after I have asked who brings this woman to stand beside this man. The next thing that many couples are choosing to do is to ask their parents to be involved in making some promises as well. I ask each set of parents if they joyfully affirm this marriage and receive the groom or the bride into their family to love and to cherish. I like it when the couple chooses to do that because it does a couple of things.

It recognizes that as we begin a journey together as partners and spouses that we do need the love and support of our families. More importantly for me, it recognizes something else—that if we have learned to love, to accept, to sacrifice, to forgive, to be compassionate and understanding of others, it has most likely happened in our families as we grow up. That parental affirmation honors our parents.

There is a risk in saying that because families are unique and most of us have mixed feelings about our families or our parents or step parents or blended families. But if we have learned to love and practice grace and forgiveness and compassion as well as accountability, it has usually been from our parents and our families. We have likely learned it imperfectly, but it has been and still remains the best and first place to live those incredible words from the apostle Paul when he defines love in I Corinthians 13 

Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful or conceited or rude, never selfish or quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs. It does not gloat over another’s faults or errors but it delights in the best. There is nothing that love cannot face.

For many of us it was a mother or a father or perhaps a grandparent who showed us that love and helped us therefore learn to love. Perhaps it was someone else. Whoever it was, we will take a moment now in silence to remember and thank God for those persons.

(silence)

The notion of being a family and caring for one another and supporting each other is present as we talk about the birth of the Jesus movement on this day of Pentecost as well. When Jesus began appearing to the disciples many times after Easter, they asked him what they should do next. He told them something very difficult. He told them to wait. Wait here in Jerusalem until the spirit of God comes to you and empowers you and then you will be my witnesses, my messengers, in this place, in the larger region of Judea and Samaria, and then to all the earth. They did wait, gathering to pray and study, until Pentecost Day fifty days after Easter when they felt God’s spirit like a rushing wind and flame burning in them and causing them to speak to all the Jewish pilgrims gathered in the holy city in their own native languages.

They reached out beyond the city and took the good news of God’s grace and of new life in Christ to all the world. They made room in the family of God for more and more people—that’s what we are doing today as well as we offer our gifts so God can use us to draw the circle wide—to make more room for people who need to be here and who want to be in a congregation that practices OPEN HEARTS, OPEN MINDS, OPEN DOORS.

You may know the true story of where the idea for that phrase came from: it is the story of Dr. Roger Swanson who is a Methodist Pastor. When Roger Swanson was a boy, he and a brother learned how to break into a Methodist church in his hometown because the church had a pool table in the basement. It was a smaller church than ours and was not typically open during the week. They would break into the church regularly to play pool after school.

One day at the pool table, they saw a shadow out of the corner of their eye. It was the pastor. They were very afraid because they knew he would be furious with them for breaking into the building.

The pastor said, “There is no one in this town trying harder to get into this church than you guys.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a key to the building, handed it to the boys and said with a smile, “Come on by boys anytime you want.”

Today Dr. Swanson says that act of radical hospitality, that posture of welcome and openness became the motivation for his family to become active in that Methodist church, his mother eventually became the church treasurer and his father was a trustee. A multigenerational family history of alcoholism was interrupted. The church helped pay his way through college. Because of that example of openness he became a pastor and later a national executive for the United Methodist Church. And then his story became the seed for our national publicity about the United Methodist Church as a community of Open Hearts, Open Minds, and Open Doors.

OPEN. That is a word that someone in every new member information session for the past six years says is a descriptor of Methodist Christianity. A welcoming and open community. It is why so many of new folks want to explore membership here.

We have been a place at St Andrew that wants to be open and welcoming; the challenge now is that the plan we developed 12 years ago has come to fruition sooner than we thought and unless we have more space, we are effectively turning people away. 

We are doing something very tangible about that this morning! Sixty five families have already made three year pledges of $3.5 million!! That is already more than we have ever raised from 600 pledges in our 48 year history AND it is from 65 families and it does not yet include our $2 million match!

The pledge that another five hundred of you make this morning and next week will be automatically increased/matched on a one dollar for four dollar basis because of the generosity of another family who said we are so excited about what we see in this church that we want to invest in St Andrew continuing to reach out and be a community of openness and radical hospitality and passionate worship and transformational spiritual growth!!

Let me go back to that huge advance pledge from 65 households of more money than we have ever raised in any campaign: two of those families will only be in this church less than twelve months before they have to move, and they have made pledges to support the expansion of space and ministry here. In fact the combined total of those two pledges is in six figures.

Why would someone do that—families who are not even going to be here to see the total fruits of their generosity—why would they make pledges to support ministry and space? Can you understand that? Have you ever done that so generously? 

How many of you have ever planted a tree? How many of you feel you have planted a tree and then been around long enough to enjoy the full benefit—the shade, the fruits—of a tree you have planted? Seven years ago we planted a lovely pine tree in the corner of our back yard. It looks great. It is growing slowly. I enjoy looking at it almost every day. But in twenty years it will be even more impressive and I will probably not be the one living in that place to enjoy looking at it. 

Most of us have planted trees that we will not see grow to the fullest fruition, but still we do that and still we make investments in other good things because we feel good knowing that we are giving a part of our lives and our resources to something that is larger than us, something that will outlast us and will make a difference long after we are gone. That is what ties the themes of this morning together. If we are parents, we have sacrificially invested ourselves in our kids and grandkids because we love them and because we hope through our love and sacrifice, they will carry on what our family has as its core values.

The disciples at Pentecost 2000 years ago were beginning a movement that would require everything of them but would let millions of people across the world and across the centuries experience the best life possible, abundant life in Jesus Christ. They gave themselves and God blessed and multiplied what they did.

We have seen that here in the past three years—those of who helped our church be here and build this space have seen God bless and multiply our gifts and sacrifices many fold. And others like the Hornaday family who have come here since then are saying as Bill did last week—thank you, and now it is our turn not only to receive what has been done for us but also to give just as generously and sacrificially so others can be welcome here as well. It is our turn to invest in the way you have done.

I love those words from St Paul that we heard: if we sow sparingly we reap sparingly. If we sow generously, we reap generously. God loves a cheerful giver. And when we give generously and cheerfully, God will bless us and will provide us with more than we need. Our family continues to find those words so true, and I invite you as you bring your commitment card forward in a few minutes to test them for yourselves and see if God does not make them true for you as well!! Amen.

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