Fairhaven UMC

So I’m aware that this is probably more a pastor thing, but I wonder if it’s something that you might feel sometimes as well. And that is that I feel very spiritually tuned in with the church calendar. By which I don’t mean the gala or the rummage sale coming up, not that church calendar, but the liturgical calendar, you know, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and so on. So whenever we get to this time of year, or really about two months ago, I find that I am so sick of what’s called the season after Pentecost, or ordinary time, you know, whenever we got green up here and I’m wearing green.

I want Advent, right? I want something. I’m longing for this season of waiting for Christ, this season of O come, O come, Emmanuel, of darkness and light, of blues and purples and lighting the candles. And this is actually why I lean so hard into that All Hallows Eve service in October, because it’s the same kind of vibe. We get to do it a little bit early.

But we get there next Sunday, finally. It’s Advent, and we’re already here, right? Advent is around the corner, and with it is this new liturgical year as we start the cycle of our stories one more time. But at the same time, November has a lot to offer, such that we shouldn’t just jump straight from Halloween to Christmas like the Dollar General does. And something that I really appreciate about the liturgical calendar is the way that November seems to really be about eternity.

Recall that we started this month with All Saints Day. We remember those Christians who have come and gone before us from the very beginnings of the church all the way through this past year, who surround us now as that great cloud of witnesses that’s described in the letter to the Hebrews. And there’s such a beauty in that, I think, that we’re not alone at this time, but we’re serving Jesus, living as the body of Christ alongside everyone from the apostles to John Wesley to Cordelia Long-Horning, who donated this land, to your first Sunday school teacher, to the pastor who baptized you. I preached on All Saints Sunday at Hilltop, and I talked about the Reverend Walt Heyman, a name that none of them remember 50 years on, but who grew up at the Arlington Avenue Evangelical United Brethren Church, who became the first pastor ordained out of the new Hill Top United Methodist Church in 1972.

That church bought him his first stole, the red stole that he wore at his ordination. And he would go on to become my confirmation mentor in Slippery Rock 40 years after that, and he would serve as one of my first and best examples in Christian ministry. They don’t remember him, but they produced him. He helped get me here today.

And it’s amazing the way that we really exist in the company of all who have come before us in faith. Death and the passage of time don’t separate us the way we might usually think. And you never know how your life is going to intersect with the saints of the past or the future. And so now we’re finishing the month of November on Christ the King Sunday.

And we’ve turned to the book of Revelation, and we turn our eyes to the one who is called the Alpha and the Omega, the one who is and was and is coming. And that, of course, is Christ, our King, our Lord. And this is some of my favorite imagery in all of scripture. And in my mind, I still hear it in the King James, the one who was and who is and who is to come.

I just, I love that phrase. And here in chapter two, we begin with what is simply the introduction to the book of Revelation, the heading to the letter. And it starts, John, to the seven churches that are in Asia. And so what that tells us as we begin Revelation is that we’re reading a letter here from John of Patmos or St.

John the Divine, he’s known sometimes. And he may or may not be the same John as the Apostle John. But it doesn’t really matter. Because John is in exile.

He’s imprisoned on the island of Patmos, which is off of present day Turkey. That region is known as Asia Minor. So that’s why these seven churches are referenced as being in Asia. And John was sent to the island of Patmos in exile.

It was a result of anti-Christian persecution under the Roman Emperor Domitian. So Revelation is very long for a letter, obviously. But John has a lot of time on his hands because John is in prison, a prisoner for the Lord. And now we don’t know John’s exact relationship with the larger church, with those congregations in Asia.

But it seems that he’s a really well connected regional leader. He knows these seven churches in Asia personally. He knows their people. He knows their personalities.

Every church has a personality. He knows their situations. And his purpose in Revelation is to share what God has to say to those churches. So understand this when we’re reading Revelation.

It’s not intended to be some kind of hidden secret code or this piece of impenetrably complex theology. Many have obviously argued that. And it’s definitely filled with symbols that would have made more sense to them than to us. So it needs some digging.

But above all, Revelation is this pastoral letter. It’s a letter from a pastor to help guide seven little congregations in their lives together as they seek to follow Christ in a really hostile environment. They’re having a very rough time. So John is functioning as a pastor as much as he’s functioning as a prophet.

And he’s helping to guide them through the tough times they find themselves in by way of these visions that he’s received from God and transmits to them. And he does that by writing this letter in the form of what’s called an apocalypse. And we have an idea of what apocalypse means. But in Greek, that simply refers to the genre of writing that means unveiling.

Apokalyptos in Greek means just the curtain is open. You see behind the veil. And what John is doing is he’s unveiling by pointing the church’s attention upwards to things that are true but can’t necessarily be seen easily in the everyday muck and difficulty of life. And chief among these is Christ’s victory over sin and death, his imminent return, his kingship.

Even though it seems at that time, like the Roman emperor and so many others, are much more powerful. John’s point is that things are not as they seem. As dire as it appears, Christ is king. Christ will come in victory.

Christ has already won. We’re not going to dive into the whole book of Revelation over the next few weeks. We’ve got Advent stuff to do. But there is enough even in these four brief verses to get a sense for what God is trying to impress on these seven churches and now what he’s got for us.

And that is that Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Christ is king over all the universe. And John opens these two dozen chapters of Apocalypse with these first few revelations, these first few affirmations. And one of them is that the eternal monarchy of Christ includes now.

Whether it feels like Christ is in charge over our world or not, it’s now. Because he is the one who is and was and is coming. There’s a famous saying, Don’t believe everything you think. I think it’s very helpful in a lot of ways.

And that is so wonderfully true here. We might think, we might feel that we’re far from God’s kingdom. It might not feel like God’s running things. It certainly doesn’t feel like Jesus is reigning over our world.

But through John, through Revelation, we’re reminded of what God says and what the church affirms together. And that is that his glory and power is forever and always. Amen. Jesus is everlasting and constant.

And our present moment is just that. It’s just a moment. And again, I don’t know about you, maybe this is a me thing too, but for me, it certainly doesn’t feel like we live in the midst of eternity. It’s hard to get that big picture.

To me, it feels like we live in this just eternal now, where we’re just barely able to see forward a month or so. We can’t see past the next work week, the next major holiday, the next due date for the gas bill. And, you know, here in the church, the next finance report to church council that causes us to collectively go, Hmph! But Christ our King is hidden behind a veil if we’re unable or unwilling to take that longer view. And I’ve said this before, but I still believe it.

Those of you who are born and raised here, I don’t know if you feel this or not, but there’s this sort of spirit, I think, that hangs over Pittsburgh, over the South Hills, that I’ve never experienced anywhere I’ve lived before. There’s kind of this resignation that things will stay the same or get worse forever. When things are tough, we kind of spiral. We catastrophize, we’re sure the end is near, and not in the good revelation kind of way.

And we in the church fail to remember when we think like that, that we stand in the same lineage of these churches that are in revelation, and in the lineage of those that will be standing at Christ’s return. It’s a long timeline. And who knows, maybe we’re one of those churches that will be standing at Christ’s return. This is all so much bigger than us and our tiny imaginations, our brief lifespans, because so is Jesus.

You would think this would be easier for us to grasp when parts of our scripture are well over 3,000 years old. This is a long game. The gospel reading from Matthew 6, I have to talk about that, because I think it pairs so perfectly here. In addition to the reality of his reign till and beyond the end of time, Jesus affirms that there’s no reason to worry about tomorrow, because God will provide.

Short-term, long-term, today, forever, Jesus reminds us that God is sovereign over the whole thing, from clothing the lilies of the field to feeding the wild birds. God is the God of all creation, and Christ is the King, while we’re very much not. We’re not powerless, to be sure, and we’re called to serve God with the best that we have, with generosity, the best of our abilities, our gifts, but we’re certainly not in control either. And that hurts a little bit, but it should be an incredible relief, too.

It makes us free to recklessly love and serve and give of ourselves without making God reliant upon us. There’s a real freedom in that. What a relief that we do what we can, but it’s all really in God’s hands. Our job is to come alongside, using all that we have and all that we have been given by God to help build the kingdom, but when it comes down to it, we’re not the ones driving.

We’re helping. Faith in Christ the King is recognizing that he has got it, and we just do our best today and every day. And so we can give of ourselves without any reservation about failing or worrying about whether it’s enough, because we’re putting our lives, our faith, in God’s trustworthy hands. And we know how the story ends, in the victory of the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the King who is and who was and who is to come.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.

So, I’ll come right out and say it at the beginning here, because we’re in the middle of a series where we’re talking about giving. And first of all, I don’t like talking about giving at all. I don’t like preaching about this. So please understand my discomfort this whole month.

Notice that we have not done a pledge campaign in my five years, and who knows how long before that. No one can really remember the last time we’ve done anything like this. I don’t like talking to you about money. I don’t like doing it in the direct way that I’m doing.

Ben’s finance report, usually I feel like that’s good enough. And so this passage in Mark 12 is extra uncomfortable for me to preach on, particularly as someone who’s literally walking around in a long robe, someone who gives long prayers. Jesus talked about those people pretty derogatorily in that passage. This story is regularly abused too, honestly.

It’s not at all unheard of for churches, for Christian leaders to use the example of the poor widow giving literally all that she has as a tool to persuade people who have next to nothing to hand it over to them, right? We all know about the stories of pastors with private jets who get on TV and beg old people on social security to sew a seat of faith and cut them a big check. We know about churches who build stadium-sized buildings for themselves while not a penny trickles out to those outside their walls, all while lifting up the example of this humble widow giving her pennies. So I want to be clear that that is not what this story is meant to do. Jesus is not condoning that.

He’s not making a way for any of that. And in fact, the opposite is true. Notice that our reading begins with this fiery condemnation of the legal experts of the rich who cheat widows out of their homes while making sure they have the very best seat in the synagogue, that they’re honored by the community for their faithfulness and philanthropy. These are the Andrew Carnegie’s, the Henry Clay Fricks of the first century.

They build these grand shady side churches. They donate generous sums to libraries and museums with their names on them. And they do that while exploiting their workers, polluting the environment, flooding the city of Johnstown, right? That’s what these people are like. Jesus has nothing but hatred for that.

And he is delivering this fierce critique in this passage of the rich and of the powerful. This is a condemnation of the system where this kind of stuff happens. The rich get richer and are honored for it while the poor suffer more and more at their hands. And Jesus puts this on the religious sphere in the hands of the synagogue and the temple, which is of course nowadays the church.

And so I really don’t think, I do not believe that Jesus would advise that poor widow to do what she does. Jesus does not want people to starve for the sake of the kingdom. The rich should be sacrificing more and the poor widow much less. If there’s one consistent tone in Jesus’ economic teaching is that the rich need to consider whether they should be rich at all for the sake of their souls.

And on the other hand, God’s going to uplift the poor. All of that said, if we are not in the situation of desperation that that widow is, we shouldn’t feel like this story gets us off the hook. Consider, and this is always true in reading the Bible, what person in the narrative are we, right? Consider whether your position is more like that widow’s whose entire net worth fits in one hand or the rich person’s who is fundamentally capable of offering more to God. And then hear this story accordingly.

Jesus is calling us and his disciples in the story to a deep honesty here, and that’s with ourselves and with God. I can’t tell you which of those positions you’re personally in. I can’t tell you if you’re a poor widow or one of the other people in the long robes like me, but the Holy Spirit can. And I know where I and the majority of American Christians stand.

So faithfully following Jesus is of course not a matter of how much we give to the church to support the body of Christ. That’s not the case. Notice the supposedly generous rich here in Mark 12. Jesus says they give a lot of money to the temple treasury, but they get no credit from Jesus because they’re not actually generous at all in any kind of proportional way.

The same way it’s not an act of generosity for a billionaire to hand a homeless person a hundred bucks. It’s just not. The same way that it’s not generous for an investor to give a university $50 million in exchange for getting their name on the side of a building. That’s not generous.

Generous insofar as it can be measured is the degree to which we turn everything over to God, giving what we can. For most of us, this is in reality through our financial resources a lot of the time. But we have more than that to offer. It’s also our service to the church, to the community, our consistent prayers for the church, for one another, our willingness to witness to our faith to other people, and our commitment to simply take the time to show up, to worship, to mission, to ministry.

And these are the things that we promise to offer God through the church in our baptismal and membership vows, by the way. You might remember those, you might not. But we promise to give our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness to God through the church. And so even if you don’t have two copper coins to rub together, you’ve got the rest of these things.

You’ve got your prayers, you’ve got your time, you’ve got your witness, you’ve got your service. But we have to understand, we can’t dodge this, I always want to dodge it, we have to understand that there’s something specifically, uniquely important about trusting God and the church with our money when our lives and culture center around money so completely. Jesus says in Matthew 6 that where your treasure is, so too is your heart. Giving it to God’s work, whenever we trust ourselves to manage it better, and anyway, who knows, we might need it, right? Is a profoundly counter-cultural act of faith.

You can give to more efficient charitable causes than the church. You can. But we have to understand this, that giving is not about just the needs of the church, it’s something that we do to conform ourselves to the lifestyle that we’re called to in Christ. We give because God gives to us, and all of it belongs to God to begin with.

That’s why we switched up the doxology this month. So as I was planning this sermon, reading the scripture, I came upon a somewhat obnoxious hymn about giving last week. And I decided not to make us all sing it today, because like I said, it’s pretty obnoxious. We already did enough of that today.

But as I first rolled my eyes at this hymn, I found myself convicted that it’s correct, it’s just cringey. So much of our life, and by that I mean our viability, our strength as a church, as Fairhaven, and our spiritual health as individuals, so much of our spiritual life is truly in our hands, even as we like to pretend that it isn’t. So this is a couple stanzas here. The hymn writer is Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, and she writes, Giving God, we pause and wonder, what would happen if we tithed, if we gave our gifts, Creator, hearts and hands all open wide.

We might learn by gladly sharing not to trust in things we own, but to risk, it’s part of caring, and to trust in you alone. We could do abundant mission sharing Christ, who claims and frees. We could reach out with new vision in creative ministries, no more bound by limitations of what churches can’t afford. We could learn with jubilation whole new ways to serve you, Lord.

Like I said, obnoxious, but true. You might feel that what you have to offer couldn’t really possibly make a difference to the church, to God’s kingdom, to the world, and you’re wrong. The same way that the bread and the wine of communion are somehow transformed by God’s power into Christ’s body and Christ’s blood, your gifts, even if it’s two copper coins, are transformed into this vast wealth benefiting the kingdom of God because of what God adds to it. God sees our faithfulness and responds by blessing our work that we do together.

Remember that 2 Corinthians reading last week, our theme for the month. I’m going to keep going back to this. God has the power to provide you with more than enough of every kind of grace. That way, you’ll have everything you need, always and everything, to provide more than enough for every kind of good work.

No congregation in history has ever given itself to death, has done too much mission outreach, evangelism in the community that they had to shut the doors. And I think you’d be hard-pressed the same way to find someone who’s ended up on the streets because they’ve been too generous with their time and their giving. Faithfulness begets faithfulness. Our strength and our viability, our future as a congregation is much more than we’d like to believe, I promise you.

A choice that is in your hands. God’s power will always be with us, always accessible to us, but to a very large degree, the work is ours to take or leave. Churches do not, there’s few exceptions, but churches do not live or die through no fault of their own. We make that choice every day.

We do. What we offer up is of priceless importance and not just for the maintenance of our own facilities, our well-being, but for the kingdom worldwide. This is not just about the electric bill and my salary, not that those expenses don’t matter, in my opinion, but our giving can and does help alleviate the suffering of those poor widows of our world today, those people who have truly nothing. So we, unlike the rich people in Mark 12, we can orient ourselves differently.

We can orient ourselves towards the needs of the poor and the marginalized among us and in the global community. The offerings that we receive in this church, and we forget about this a lot, they join those of our United Methodist siblings worldwide. We rebuild in the wake of catastrophic hurricanes. Milton, Helene, the United Methodist Church was there first, helping people clean out their houses, helping with food, water, rebuilding.

We do that. We educate students from poor backgrounds so that they can reach for a better life. We built an entire university in Zimbabwe about 20 years back that has educated thousands of leaders in that continent. We provide dignity and care for refugees in Ukraine, in Africa, at the southern border.

We do all of that with our offerings. We send missionaries around the world from Indian reservations in South Dakota to the tiniest little islands in the Philippines or up in the mountains of Guatemala. We send those people. And it’s genuinely incredible what the UMC is able to do around the world because of millions of individuals and tens of thousands of churches giving together and working together.

And we all know, I think a little more intimately, the powerful impact we see up close. The Christmas store regularly provides for over a hundred kids. Think about that. They’re going to remember that for the rest of their lives.

Their parents will remember that we helped do that. We are pantries. We have one at Spencer and one here. Our food pantries are emptied every day.

And the regular help that we’re able to offer those who need assistance in keeping their gas or electric from being shut off or preventing an eviction, you all don’t know about that because I don’t report every time that I do it, but we do that all the time. So consider all of that. Look at everything that you make possible by making an active contribution to God’s work in the world. What we give, what we offer of ourselves matters.

It has an impact no matter how big or small. The point is doing what we’re able to do out of faith. I’m reminded of something that John Wesley famously said, and he said, Give me 100 preachers, he wrote, who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God. And I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen.

Such alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of God on earth. Now, that’s about preachers, and most of you aren’t preachers, but the principle holds. Give what you can. Don’t hold back.

Desire to love God and our neighbors and see what God can do through you and us together. So this morning, you’ve received two things. There’s an envelope, too, so three things, right? A giving commitment slip and a giving calculator. So I would challenge you to start praying now, and we’ll collect these back in two weeks.

I’ll be back in two weeks, and we can collect these. So if you don’t already, think about how you might approach regular, consistent, committed giving as a spiritual discipline. An act of faith where you say to God, Yes, I’ll do this every week or month, even not knowing exactly what lies ahead of me in the weeks, the months, the years ahead. Make the choice in advance.

Pick a number in advance in faith that God will make sure you have enough, and then follow through, you know, without evaluating each time you give how much it feels like you can give. Don’t give what’s left over in your wallet once everything is said and done for the month. Remember what Jesus says here in Mark 12, 44. He critiques the giving of the rich to the temple.

Those people are giving a lot, by the way, but he says they are giving their spare change. The opposite of that is the biblical concept of first fruits. Before you look at any other need you have, give to God and then trust that it will all come together. So I challenge you to use that calculator table that you receive, the cardstock piece, and just think about, evaluate how much you’re giving to God’s work through Christ’s church.

What percentage is it? Have you ever thought about it in those terms? Have you ever determined whether you’re giving 1, 3, 5, 10 percent? Or do you give your spare change? Evaluate whether that present amount is what you’re able to do and whether that’s what God’s calling you to do. It could be. It could be. But again, that’s a matter of honesty.

This is a call to honesty with yourself and God. The Holy Spirit will tell you, so pray over it. And so as squirmy as the topic of money makes us and makes me, this is something we can’t escape. If Jesus Christ is our Lord, he’s Lord of our finances as well.

And yes, that’s a call to sacrifice, to discipline, like so much of the Christian life is. But we also can’t forget that our giving provides us a tangible means to get involved with what God is doing among us, around us, and through us. And so once again, I just want to quote Wesley. Wesley, by the way, died with next to nothing to his name.

I think he had 10 pounds. Not because he was destitute, not because he was bad with money, nothing like that, but because he wouldn’t even get his hair cut so he could save all of his money to give away to poor people. Wesley walked the walk here, but he says this, Money is an excellent gift of God, answering the noblest ends. In the hands of his children, it is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, raiment for the naked.

It gives the traveler and the stranger where to lay his head. By it we may supply the place of a husband to the widow, and of a father for the fatherless. We may be a defense for the oppressed, a means of health to the sick, of ease to them that are in pain. It may be as eyes to the blind, as feet to the lame, yea, a lifter up from the gates of death.

Could it be any clearer what we are able to do? Watch God transform your two copper coins offered in faith into a life-changing fortune, both for the one who receives it and the one who gives it. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.

But with each century they do, they learn a little bit more.