The Good Treasure | A Sermon on Sincere Faith, Sacred Community, and Stewardship
A sermon preached on the seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost (C), October 6, 2019, at Christ Church, Georgetown, in the midst of stewardship season.
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; Psalm 37:1-10; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10
There is a book upstairs in the room where clergy and seminarians vest for services. It sits on the desk, always open, always with a pen close at hand, always waiting. Bound in red cloth, it’s where every service that we do here at Christ Church is recorded. Each daily office, Eucharist, Baptism, Wedding, Funeral. They are all there, neatly accounted for in the officiant’s handwriting in diligent columns and rows. When they are full, or when we have reached the end of a year, they are archived, placed one after another on a shelf – a silent witness to what has come before.
Friday, January 8, 1999, Evening Prayer was said in the chapel, as it always is. Five of you were present.
Sunday, April 16, 2006, the Reverend Frank Wade stood in this pulpit and preached. It was Easter Day. There was, as expected, a large crowd. Some of you might remember.
And, more recently
December 28, the first Sunday after Christmas, Holy Communion was taken from this place to parishioner Angie Leith.
As you can see, these books serve as both a ledger of service details and a testament to the life and work of this community of faith. To thumb through them is to be reminded of the many services and sacraments that came before, but it is also to remember the people of Christ Church and the lives lived within her embrace.
My own ordination is noted in these pages, as is my first celebration of Holy Eucharist. My initials carefully inked into the history of Christ Church, Georgetown.
But, I am also evidenced there long before that, as I was marked in attendance at a Eucharist back in December of 2017 – just one person, showing up as a guest in this space, before I knew any of you, before I knew that I’d be back.
I wonder about each of you. Where are you in these pages? Certainly you will be accounted for today; but I wonder where your presence was noted the first time, and how your life has been recorded there since.
It is probably not a stretch to assume that there is someone (probably more than one someones) who is remembered in the book as having been baptized, married, and buried at Christ Church (and everything in between).
One life held in the arms of sacred community, cradle to grave. One life held in communion with many, a testament to the unending nature of faith, the good treasure entrusted to each of us.
In Paul’s second letter to Timothy, he speaks with deep affection for the bonds that form between human beings, especially bonds rooted in faith and shared in Christian community. This is a letter animated by personal relationships. Timothy himself is, after all, Paul’s mentee, someone ordained by Paul to do the work of ministry in God’s church. Paul writes to him from prison, seeking to instill faithful courage in a time of upheaval, transition, and absence. Things are changing, and Paul writes of grateful courage and steady faith.
He writes: I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.
Paul speaks of faith as if it is something living, a live coal buried deep within us, in communion still with that first fire that produced it, a live coal passed forward by those dedicated to fanning the flame. Lois. Eunice. Timothy. All those who tended the faith before Lois. All those who will tend it after Timothy.
Individual after individual. Line by line. In an unbroken chain reaching back to Jesus himself and, with God’s help, extending forward to generations future.
Faith, Paul seems to suggest, is a gift to be received. But, it is also a thing best tended to and nurtured in community, a thing best shared. We are but stewards of the faith, called then with a holy calling, to guard the good treasure entrusted to us, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.
It is interesting to note that Biblical scholars have effectively challenged the authorship of 2 Timothy. It is unlikely that it was written by Paul. It is, as it turns out, the flames of a coal planted in Paul by God and tended by another and burning through many hands and hearts until it reached us. This is the nature of faith. This is the purpose of Christian community.
Individual after individual. Line by line. We have come together to guard the good treasure entrusted to us, to tend the fires of faith within us that burn far brighter when met together. When there is joy, it is multiplied. Our hearts fill together. When there is grief, it is multiplied. Our hearts break together. When there is steady faith, its flames burn bright and warm, a beacon of love and hope not only for us but for our neighbors and for the world.
Christ Church, we have a role to play in receiving and reflecting the Christian faith. This is a gift that we have been given, and we are stewarding it for a time with an eye towards a future that we cannot know. How we respond to this gift matters.
It is stewardship season, but both you and I know that true stewardship knows no season. If we come to think of stewardship as something to be checked off a list, something to be one and done, something relegated to fall giving, we have missed the mark I’m afraid. This season, instead, is a gift. It is a time to think purposefully and prayerfully about what we value, what we hold central in our lives, what we worship. Are we tending the fires that we’d want to burn most brightly?
Stewardship is the spiritual practice of gratitude. It is the acknowledgment that we have been entrusted with something precious. Something bigger than ourselves. Something calling us to place our trust in God and God’s work in this community.
If you are sitting here today, you have been called into the life of Christ Church as a participant. You will be accounted for in her books. You will feed at her altar. You are her, a community of believers here in the heart of Georgetown. Know that you are her steward and have a distinct role to play in the fanning the flame of her life. Prayerfully consider how you might serve here, giving your time and talents in ways that stretch you and nourish you, in ways that stretch and nourish the community. And do pledge, because committing financially to the support of Christ Church is an important recognition of the gift that is this Christian community.
In his book “The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine,” [1] A.W. Tozer writes:
“Has it ever occurred to you that one hundred pianos all tuned to the same fork are automatically tuned to each other? They are of one accord by being tuned, not to each other, but to another standard to which each one must individually bow. So, one hundred worshippers met together, each one looking away to Christ, are in heart nearer to each other than they could possibly be, were they to become ‘unity’ conscious and turn their eyes away from God to strive for closer fellowship.”
When the day is done, I will go upstairs and a book will be waiting to record my name as preacher. You will be there too, in the attendance column. One day, we will go on the shelf, and new books will be filled out, and they will go on the shelf, and so on and so forth.
There is, for me, something profoundly moving about the fact that so many of the souls accounted for in that book have worshipped in this place, all tuned to the same fork, past present and future. Through our good stewardship, and God’s grace, may it continue to be so, forevermore. Amen.
[1] A.W. Tozer, “The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine,” (Moody: Chicago, 2007).
