THE GIFT IS EVERYTHING

2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 9:6-8; John 15:9-17

Epistle Reading: 2 Corinthians 8:1-9; 9:6-8
1 We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia; 2 for during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. 3 For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means, 4 begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing in this ministry to the saints-- 5 and this, not merely as we expected; they gave themselves first to the Lord and, by the will of God, to us, 6 so that we might urge Titus that, as he had already made a beginning, so he should also complete this generous undertaking among you. 7 Now as you excel in everything--in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you--so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.
8 I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others. 9 For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.
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.

Gospel Reading: John 15:9-17
A reading from the Gospel of John, the fifteenth chapter--the words of Jesus to his disciples just before his death on the cross:
9 As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. 10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. 11 I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.
12 "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. 16 You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. 17 I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

It is a great privilege and joy to be with you in worship this morning. I count several members of this congregation as special and close friends. I have taught with Dana Fearon, your former pastor, in the Doctor of Ministry program over several years at Princeton Seminary. I have had the joy of friendship and working together with Pastor Jeff on a number of occasions, and I am always impressed by his insight, spirit, and faith. We at Princeton Seminary appreciate the important role that good and faithful congregations like yours play as our seminary students come and work here as part of their field education. Such experiences in real-life congregations are critical for the formation of pastors and leaders in our churches, and we thank you for your service to the seminary and to the larger church as a teaching congregation for our seminary students. You are a blessed congregation in many ways, and I am delighted to be part of your stewardship efforts this year.

I want to begin this morning by highlighting a portion of the Gospel text that you have just heard read. It contains Jesus' words to his disciples in the Gospel of John, the 15th chapter. Jesus says to his disciples,

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you."

This Gospel text plays an important role in a true story I heard a few years ago that happened to a friend of mine named Susan. Susan was a fellow member of a neighboring Lutheran church where I and my wife have been members for over twenty years. On this Consecration Sunday that culminates your stewardship emphasis here at Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church, I believe that Susan's story might teach us something about the meaning of our stewardship of all the gifts and resources that God has entrusted to each one of us. The story may teach us something about how, as the theme of our stewardship efforts this year says, "the gift changes everything." I will have more to say about some implications for how we look at stewardship, deciding what we offer back to God, that flow out of Susan's story.

Now as an aside, I have had a few meetings with the stewardship planning team here from Lawrenceville Presbyterian over the last couple of months as we planned for this Sunday. At one meeting, we were talking about themes and biblical texts that I might use for this morning's sermon. I mentioned this story about Susan that I am about to tell. It turns out remarkably, perhaps providentially, that Susan's story actually intersects directly with this congregation in a way that I had not realized. But more about that later.

Susan's story is actually a story of two women. Their names are Susan and Kyra. Susan has been teaching for years as a high school health and physical education teacher here in Mercer County. One day some years ago Susan, the teacher, was reading an email on her computer from an assistant superintendent in the school district where she worked. The email had an unusual and urgent request directed to the school staff. The email asked if anyone would be willing to step forward and donate their kidney to a desperately ill young mother named Kyra. The assistant superintendent who sent the email was indebted to this young mother named Kyra because a few years before, she and her husband had agreed to adopt two young immigrant Chinese children, a brother and a sister, who had been elementary school students within the school district. The two children had tragically lost first their father and then, a year later, also their mother. Both parents, hard working Chinese immigrants, had died one after the other from two completely unrelated illnesses within a short period of time. The two young children were alone in this country without any relatives here, Kyra was Ukrainian Orthodox, and she and her husband had felt compelled by their Christian faith to reach out in love and to adopt these two children. This had all happened a few years earlier.

But now, the email said, this same young mother, Kyra, had herself contracted a rare disease. The illness had already entirely destroyed one of her two kidneys and was slowly eating away the other kidney as well. Her disease was unusual. In her case, the typical alternative of kidney dialysis, cleansing her blood through a machine three times a week, was not a viable option. Her only hope of survival was to find a kidney donor very soon.

Thus, her doctors were desperately looking for a donor of a certain blood type that matched Kyra's blood type. Susan, the physical education and health teacher, happened to have that blood type. So when she read the email from the assistant superintendent, at that moment Susan recalls, "I just felt it was something I had to do." She emailed back and a meeting was set up between Susan and the young mother. Kyra looked frail and ill. She had withered down to only 85 pounds, no energy. But she loved her children. And she desperately wanted to live for them and for her family. She especially did not want her adopted children to experience the death of another parent after having already lost their first mother and father.

Susan decided to go ahead and begin the exploratory process with a long battery of tests, each stage of which could have excluded her as a candidate. Susan agonized, sometimes having doubts, but she kept agreeing to go to the next stage of testing. Each step of testing went well until she was finally approved for the kidney transplant.

The young mother, Kyra, was Ukrainian Orthodox. And she invited Susan to her church for a congregational healing service in which the priest anointed the mother and Susan. The priest gave thanks to God for Susan's willingness to give of herself in this sacrificial way. Susan described the service as incredibly moving, and the congregation warmly and enthusiastically thanked her for her willingness to save the life of a beloved member of their community. Susan and the young mother met many times over those next months and became bonded as good friends in body and soul.

Susan, the kidney donor, is a humble and unassuming woman. When she speaks about her experience (and she does so reluctantly), she explains that she doesn't see it as some great heroic act, but only as what anyone would do. It just seemed right. She did mention one biblical text that was important for her as she prayed to God for guidance over many weeks of testing, as she struggled with the decision to continue with the donation or not. She read the words of John the Baptist who was preaching out in the wilderness, urging the people to repent and to bear the fruits of that repentance from Luke, chapter 3:

Luke 3:10 And the crowds asked [John the Baptist], "What then should we do?" 11 In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."

John the Baptist's words, "Whoever has two coats" became for Susan, "Whoever has two kidneys must share one with anyone who has none."

When Susan eventually received the final go-ahead, the date of the surgery was scheduled. She was at the hospital, on the gurney prepped and on the way to surgery. She passed the window of the second surgical room where she saw the young mother being prepped for her surgery to receive Susan's kidney. They waved and smiled through the window to one another, two strangers who had now become good friends. The surgical team all paused there with Susan. Susan recalls being startled by how quickly Kyra had gone down hill in the last few days since last seeing her. She looked even more thin, gaunt, pale, weak than before, almost a corpse. In that heavy moment, Susan said she realized fully what she was about to do. She would be giving a part of her body away so that this young mother could live. But she did not think, "Oh, what a great and generous person I am for doing this." No, not at all. What unexpectedly flooded over Susan were these words of Jesus from the Gospel of John, chapter 15:

John 15:13 No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you.

In the most profound way, Susan suddenly and unexpectedly experienced a momentary realization that hit her like a splash of cold water in the face. She saw more clearly than ever before the enormity of what Jesus had given up for her on the cross. Yes, she was giving up her kidney for this young mother. And yes, it takes some courage to willingly have one's own body cut open and to give over to a stranger something that is so intimate, so physically a part of you, something so important for one's own life and well-being.

But what overwhelmed Susan in that moment was not her sacrifice for this woman but Jesus' sacrifice for her. Jesus had given up not just a kidney, not just a part of his body, of his life. Jesus had given up and sacrificed his whole body, his whole young life on the cross for her and for the world. That's the kind of God we worship and serve, a God who so loved the world that God gave an only Son to die on the cross so that we might have live abundant, life eternal. Susan's act of giving away a kidney changed everything for her. She realized with an intensity that she had never before experienced that Jesus had willingly died a painful death, went all the way to the grave, so that she might live. God loved her that much. When Susan tells her story, which she has to be prodded to do because she is a humble soul, when Susan tells her story, this is the point in the story where Susan often breaks down for a moment. This is where she has to stop and collect herself, because the reality of Jesus' love and sacrifice for her on the cross is almost too overwhelming.

The experience of donating her kidney provided for Susan at that moment a crystal clear and dazzling window into the amazing love and grace of Jesus who loved her so much that he gave his life for her, as a friend lays down their life for another friend.

Susan's experience became not so much about her giving away a kidney but about her receiving back many times over joy and blessings in the form of a new and precious friend in the young mother, Kyra. But even more than that, it was about an incredible ripping open of the heavens and experiencing in a powerful and unforgettable way the love and sacrifice of God for her in Jesus Christ.

And that is precisely where stewardship, thinking about what we offer back to God, begins for you and for me. Stewardship is rooted first and foremost in God's gift to us. In Christ, God rips open the heavens to reveal Jesus' amazing love for you--I love you, Jesus says from the cross, I love you this much that I lay down my life for you, for you are not just a servant, Jesus says, you are my friend.

Susan is a public school physical education and health teacher. And whether by coincidence or providence, one of her units in her school-mandated curriculum is organ donation. And so she is now able to share with her students her own personal experience. The students, Susan says, are utterly captivated when she tells her story to them. Although it's a public school and she is not able overtly to witness to her Christian faith, students will come to her one on one after school and ask, "What made you do that?" Then she is able to say something about her faith and the love of God. But Susan also believes that she witnesses to Christ just by loving her students, by urging them to love and care for each other, by encouraging them to consider loving a stranger by donating an organ or some other random act of kindness for another person. Her young teenage charges are saturated with cultural messages and advertising that urges them to think only about themselves and their own wellbeing. Susan is able to testify to another way of life, a life of love, of reaching out to strangers. Her life testifies to the truthfulness of the claim that it is truly more blessed to give than it is to receive.

Here in this story at the confluence of ethnicities and religious traditions--an American Lutheran, a Ukrainian Orthodox, Chinese immigrants--strangers have become friends, love of others has become a window into the love of God, and life has become more joyful and complete. And what is also so amazing about this story is that when I first shared this story with your stewardship planning team here at Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church, the team said, "Hey, that sounds like Kyra, the mother who received the kidney--her husband, Phil, is a member of our congregation! Wow! So some of you may know the story from their perspective. But now, you know the rest of the story, from the side of Susan and what it meant to her. This morning I want to leave you with four words about stewardship that flow out of this story of Susan and Kyra and our biblical texts.

The first word is God. Christian stewardship begins with what God has done for us. The life of Christian stewardship and discipleship starts with living deeper and deeper into the growing realization of God's overflowing love and generous gifts that God gives us every day throughout our life. Everything we have belongs ultimately to God. Everything we have is a gift from God given to us temporarily to use in ways that bring life, joy, and blessing to us, to those we love, those we encounter in our life, our work, our congregation, and our neighborhoods. Everything begins in knowing that God first loved us and gave us everything in giving us God's own Son Jesus. And the stewardship question is, "Now what are you going to do about that truth and claim on your life--that everything you have is a gift given temporarily to you from a gift-giving God whose love is constantly overflowing?" What we give to God ought to be the "first fruits" of our harvest, the first check we write in the month, the first priority in our budget, as our acknowledgement that it all belongs to God.

The second word is thanksgiving. The Bible testifies that we can never repay God for the infinite gift of Christ and for all the blessings that God gives us. But we can say thank you to God through our worship, our prayers, our acts of love toward those in need. And we say thanks to God through our actions of offering a portion of our resources--our time, our energy, and today our weekly and monthly pledge of money. The pledge card that you will fill out this morning is an act of communication with God. It is a concrete way of saying "thank you" to God for the expressible gift of God to you in Jesus Christ. What proportion of your income will express a genuine and sacrificial, even if always inadequate, gesture of thanksgiving to God for the blessings that God has given you? That's the stewardship question to ask yourselves this morning.

The third word is growth. Relationships thrive when they grow and deepen, and that's true of our relationship to God. Now these are difficult economic times for many--high unemployment, a sluggish economy, families losing homes, lower incomes for some, and the like. But Scripture teaches us that such challenging times can provide opportunities for self-examination, for re-orienting our lives and priorities to what is truly the most important commitments that we have. We may need to let some things go in order to preserve and grow in our commitments to God and the work of this congregation as God's mission outpost to share God's love in word and deed. We are asking you this morning to grow one step, perhaps one percentage point, in the proportion of your income that you give to God each week, each month, over the course of this coming year. Scripture often lays before us the tithe, one-tenth of our income, as a target for our giving. You may be at that point. Some may be less than that; others may be more. The key is that wherever you are, you keep growing in that proportion, that percentage.

Now if you are one of those who has experienced a loss of income, then you may end up giving less in your total offering. You may give less this year, but perhaps it will cost you more in terms of sacrifice if you have less to give. That can still be growth. For others who have not been as strongly impacted by this current recession, this is a time for you to step up, to grow in your giving, to deepen your commitment to God and this church and its mission of sharing the gospel in word and deed, to take on a larger share of the load and responsibility. It's not about the amount. Some will give more, some less. But it's about you growing in your faith, taking a step forward in your commitment, however your circumstances allow you in this time to do that. And that you need to determine yourselves; it's between you and God.

The fourth word is joy. In our Gospel lesson, Jesus reminds us of the reason for his command to love one another as God has loved us: "I have said these things to you, Jesus says, so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete." Giving, stewardship, offering to God our first fruits, giving as our expression of love for God and for one another--that is done most faithfully when it is done in the spirit of joy, eagerness, overflowing generosity and thanksgiving. In the epistle lesson read this morning, the apostle Paul is writing to a fairly well-to-do congregation in the Greek city of Corinth. Paul is going from city to city collecting money from churches to help support the struggling community of early Christians in Jerusalem who were poor and suffering persecution for their faith. And Paul writes to the folks in Corinth about another congregation in another Greek city of Macedonia. The Macedonians had very few resources; they were extremely poor. But it's these Macedonians whom Paul puts forth to the folks at Corinth as a model of Christian stewardship: "We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia; 2 for during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. 3 For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means, 4 begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing in this ministry to the saints-- 5 and this, not merely as we expected; they gave themselves first to the Lord and, by the will of God, to us." The apostle Paul continues with these words: "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."

Christian stewardship is at its base an act of joy. You have the privilege, as the Macedonians did, of participating in God's work in the world. Our offering of our gifts back to God is an act of celebration for the good things God has given and will give to us in the future. That's the reason that we conclude our Consecration Sunday this morning with a party as part of our worship service today, a joyful meal of celebration and fellowship. That is the true spirit of stewardship--joy, laughter, thanksgiving. So make this commitment this morning joyfully, eagerly, even enthusiastically, as a privilege, as an expression of trust in God and the gifts that God will continue to give to you daily. As you sow, Scripture says, so shall you reap.

So I put forward to you these four words that form the foundation of Christian stewardship: God the great Giver of Gifts, Thanksgiving as what we communicate to God through our gifts and offerings, Growth as we seek to deepen our commitment to God, and Joy in the privilege of being called by God participate in God's work in the world. There is no greater calling.

We'll let the apostle Paul have the last word on stewardship. He wrote to the Corinthian church this reminder. I leave you with these words, words that embody well the experience of how the gift changes everything. Paul wrote:

"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich."

Thanks be to God for this priceless gift. Amen.

 

October 25, 2009

Dennis Olson, Charles T. Haley Professor of Old Testament Theology; Princeton Theological Seminary

 

(click here to go back to sermons)