Care for People Sermon Series -- Part 2

Care for People Sermon Series – Part 2

Adam T. Trambley

St.John’s Episcopal Church, Sharon, October 1, 2017

This is the second of a four-part discussion looking at the second piece of our purpose statement “care for people”.  Last week, we looked at some of the issues we are confronting, as well as an overview of Biblical passages to keep in mind.  An outline for today’s sermon is found in your bulletin.  Today, I want to talk about vocation, stewardship, and some of the different goals church outreach programs can have.

I want to emphasize again that we are talking about caring for people because our outreach ministries have grown and succeeded to the point of facing harder challenges.  I am proud of what we have been doing, and engaging these questions together can help us all grow and our ministries thrive.  I also want to say that I don’t have the answers.  I’m raising questions for us all to think about. 

This week, I want to start with vocation.  Vocation is that work that God has given us to do.  Vocation also recognizes that we can’t do everything.  Saying “yes” to some things means saying “no” to others.  A few years ago, we looked at our vocation as a parish and came up with a purpose statement to capture what we believe God created St. John’s to do. “Worship God, Care for People, Grow as Christians.”  If we are living into who God made us to be, what we do will be for us a form of worship of God, will care for other people, and will help us grow in our walk of Christian discipleship. 

For at least the past couple of years, a key part of our vocation to care for people has involved feeding them.  We have our food pantry, Episcopal Community Services or ECS, and we have our Saturday Community Lunch.  We have even folded the food pantry from First Baptist Church into our food pantry.  This merger allowed them to focus on their work with the neighborhood young people through West Hill Ministries, while our volunteer efforts and fundraising has focused more on providing food.  Lunches and food bags are a straightforward way to meet people’s basic needs, which is one of our strategic directions.  Most people at St. John’s seem to agree that feeding ministries are an important piece of our vocation.

We are discussing vocation now because the vestry is working at taking our purpose statement and thinking about the vision and strategic plan that needs to accompany it.  We can confirm whether feeding people is still a key part of our vocation or if we believe that God is calling us to a slightly different focus.  Or, perhaps, we still focus on feeding people, but that we accompany that feeding with other efforts, parallel to how we involve Keystone youth at the lunches or offer blood pressure screenings at ECS.   

Switching from vocation to stewardship, I want to mention two aspects of stewardship that inform our current discussion.  In November, we’ll talk about stewardship more generally. 

First, we know that all that we have belongs to God.  We are merely God’s stewards for the gifts given to us. Everything we have is to be used the way we think God wants us to use it.  Certainly, God wants us to take care of our own needs, but Jesus also calls us to share generously and give joyfully.  He told the rich young man to sell everything and give it to the poor.  We probably haven’t received those same all-encompassing instructions, but we can be sure that Jesus wants us to give away something meaningful to care for others.

Second, if we have more than we need, we have a moral obligation to share. Basil the Great, the Archbishop of Caesarea in the 400’s put it this way: “The bread in our cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”  The most basic call of stewardship is to give out of our abundance, and most of us have an abundance to give from.  Most of us, in fact, are weighed down by dealing with the amount of stuff we have.  We know that if everyone shared, there is enough food and other resources to take care of everyone in the world.  So we need to share.

At the same time, Basil the Great is not saying to give poor people all our junk.  We may need to wear our perfectly serviceable old clothes for another season and give the money for new clothes to a neighbor.   Loving our neighbor as ourselves mean that we help everyone have what we want to have.  How we do that, of course, is not always so simple, but that’s the call.

Now I want to look at different goals for church outreach programs.  All outreach programs are designed to help meet people’s needs, but the specifics about how they are designed may meet a variety of goals.  All of these goals are good, and a church firing on all cylinders will have all of them met by some ministry.  We also always treat those we help with dignity and respect.

The first goal just to help people.  Last week we talked about that great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.  We also mentioned the parable of the sheep and the goats when Jesus said whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters we do for him.  This first goal is simply to care for people because Jesus told us to, because it is the right thing to do, and because we can.  Success means that someone who was hungry had a meal.  Feeding ministries and emergency assistance ministries focus on this goal. 

The second goal is to make our community a better place.  We know that beyond just directly helping individuals, our community is only going to a healthy, thriving place if there are spaces of art and beauty, opportunities for healthy recreation, vibrant social, cultural, and religious institutions, and the necessary community and economic development efforts.  I personally feel a strong call in this area, and St. John’s has traditionally played an important role here, as well, whether through community art show or a swimming pool.  God has a dream for our communities, and when churches have a role to play in making this dream a reality.

A third goal of some outreach ministries is evangelism.  The good news of Jesus and his love is one of the best gifts we can offer someone.  As we help people with what they need, we can build relationships with them that can lead to opportunities to share the gospel with them.  This kind of thinking is usually not what motivates Episcopalians.  We are wary, for good reason, of offering something to eat with one hand, but only providing it if someone does some churchy thing.  Yet some churches do amazing ministries because they love people enough to want to share the good news with them.  We also know that in some cases, nothing in a person’s life is going to get better without a spiritual change.  Twelve-step programs tell us that addicts need to admit they are powerless on their own and then surrender their lives to God if they want to get clean and sober.  Their message is based on Jesus’ proclamation of “repent and believe the good news.”  Practically, people need to stop the doing the harm to self and others they are doing and have faith that God both loves them and is able to help them change.  In our community, the Salvation Army and Joshua’s Haven, the local homeless shelter, would both probably consider their ministry goals as reaching people with the good news and all the other work they do as means to that end.

A fourth goal for some outreach ministries is to build up the church.  Effective outreach can help our church to grow.  In some circumstances, people who need help experience something powerful and might join the church.  More often, however, people looking for an opportunity to volunteer and give back to their community join a church with effective ministries. People look for a church to find meaning, make friends, and have fun living out their faith.  We have a number of people who came to St. John’s or who stayed here, at least in part, because of their positive experiences working at ECS or the lunches or another ministry. 

The church is also built up through outreach because loving others and encountering them can be transformational.  People who do mission trips usually say that they get more out of the experience than what they give.  As we love other people, we grow in our capacity to love.  We see a broader picture of the kingdom through our ministry.  Maybe we experience Jesus in a disturbing disguise that makes us rethink some of our assumptions.  Maybe we come to know and love and understand people across a divide of class, color, language, or nationality. These transformational outcomes are important, and we need to experience them.  At St. John’s, the experience of many members of our congregation eating lunch with a variety of different folks on Saturday afternoon has allowed us to be much more hospitable and more of a true church community to people on Sunday mornings. 

While we are blessed individually and as a church community as we care for people, we need to remember that poor people don’t exist so that churches can develop programs for them.  Sometimes church outreach, whether feeding programs, mission trips, or other ministries, can focus more on building up the participants instead of serving those in need.  That is a problem. 

One example of where this balance is important is on foreign mission trips.  Some foreign missions can be almost entirely focused on giving American short-term missionaries a “good experience”.  Gratefully, our recent trip to the Dominican Republic was designed primarily to meet the needs of the church we went to partner with.  We worked with young people at a Bible school in the morning and we ran an eyeglass clinic in the afternoon.  We did have a day for some local sightseeing that we paid for ourselves.  Although we were housed safely and fed well, we didn’t have a “Camp Dominican Republic” experience.  The local church didn’t need to find a way that we could all get to the beach, or put on “authentically Dominican” programs for us.  We got to work with our brothers and sisters, but we didn’t want to burden them, so we didn’t add experiences that would just be for us, even if such programming might have helped us sell the trip to others in future years.

A second example of navigating the difficult balance between what makes sense for us as a church and how we best help others is providing emergency assistance from the alms fund.  The most effective use of our funds would probably be to give the majority of the money to the Salvation Army or Prince of Peace and just refer everyone to them.  Yet it also feels that as a church, we should be able to offer emergency help to people, and that people should see us as a place that cares.  On rare occasions, people who come for help participate in the life of the church in some way.  There are also times when it feels like we were able to make a difference that might not have happened if someone was referred to a larger program.  The outcomes for emergency assistance are very difficult to evaluate, however.

Discussing these four goals is important because we need to know why we are doing what we are doing.  We need to know what our goals are for our ministries so that we can evaluate them.  Just because our volunteers had a good experience doesn’t mean that we actually helped someone.  A program designed to better the community may not be able to provide emergency assistance in the same way another ministry can, and that is OK.  A feeding program may not be able to meet people’s needs for shelter or medicine, but another program might.  An outreach program may not bring people into church or into explicit relationships with Jesus, but a ministry that doesn’t have evangelism as its goal does not need to evangelize to be successful.  We do need effective evangelism efforts, but we also need to consider questions like vocation and spiritual gifts and what we are trying to do in any given effort.  We also need opportunities to do God’s work where we can find meaning, build friendships, and have fun together.  Many of these ministries involve caring for people.  Any particular effort may meet any of the goals of simply loving people because Jesus told us to, of strengthening the community, of sharing the good news, or of building up the church.  We just need to respect the dignity of everyone we work with and know what we are trying to achieve.    

Next week we will talk about the spectrum of ways we can help others, the poverty trap, and some of the dangers to avoid as we care for people.