Proper
24A 2014
Father Adam Trambley
October 19, 2014
Believe and Prepare.
In the Exodus reading this morning, Moses is on the Mountain
talking to the Lord. Things have been
rocky lately. The Israelites got out of
Egypt across the Red Sea. They’ve seen
God act in awesome ways. Then they’ve
grumbled about any number of details, and God come through with manna and
quails and water. Then Moses went up the
mountain to get the commandments from God, and while he was up there the people
broke pretty much all of them in a golden calf orgy. After a bit of tough love to clean things up
below, Moses has gone back up the mountain to talk with God.
Moses is laying the people’s future back on God. If Moses had any thoughts about how far he
and the people were going to get on their own, Aaron’s bovine bacchanalia blew
them out the window. Moses says to God,
“Look, if we are your people, if we have found favor with you, than you have to
show yourself.” The Almighty answers,
“Don’t worry, I’ll go with you.” Then
Moses really presses God. “OK,” he says,
“but if you don’t with us, we aren’t going anywhere. If you want us to be your people, to have
something special to proclaim to the world, then you have to be with us all the
time. You can’t let us go on our
own. You can’t abandon us. You can’t leave us to our own devises. Come with us.” Then scripture says, “The LORD said to Moses,
‘I will do the very thing that you have asked.’”
Moses was asking God for what God clearly wanted to do
anyway. We know that God planned to be
with his people. We know because God
said it. But Moses pushes him for
it. Moses lays his passion, his heart,
his soul before the Lord and begs him for it.
Moses plays his role in interceding on behalf of the people to pull an
even more forceful and committed answer from God. The image is almost one of God preparing to
walk down the street and Moses coming to him, grabbing his hand and pulling him
forward at a sprint. And as Moses pulls,
God runs even faster and ends up lifting him on his shoulders and carrying him
where he wants to go at a pace beyond anything Moses asked or imagined. God nudged him a bit in the right direction,
and then God responded to Moses passionate prayers with his own passionate
power and love.
This passage isn’t the only time when God and Moses have
this type of interactions. We see it at
the burning bush when Moses’ requests prompt God to reveal his divine
name. This sequence is also a model for
us in our own prayers and work. As we
pour ourselves out in prayer, we aren’t so much trying to change God’s mind or
convince him of something he doesn’t want.
Instead, our prayers and our first slow efforts are really the essential
ingredients to get us moving so that God can move us along at his speed to the
places where we both want to go. God is
going to get us there. We just need to
get ourselves prepared to cooperate.
Believe and Prepare.
Moses is, I think, our example this morning as we prepare to
kick-off our Believe and Prepare Capital Campaign. As many of you know, our kick-off dinner is
tonight at 4:00pm, and you are all invited.
Even if you haven’t RSVPed yet, please know you are welcome. As the invitation noted, tonight isn’t going
to be a push for contributions. Instead,
we are going to spend some time going through the building, which some people
may not have done before or very recently.
Then we are going to have a good dinner with an opportunity to spend
some time together. After dinner, we
have a short movie and some other details about what we want to accomplish. We should be done by 6:00, although I’m sure
the coffee pot will be on for those who want to linger longer over a second or
third dessert.
I want especially to invite people who are newer to the
parish, or even just visiting, to join us.
This dinner would be a good opportunity to find out more about our
parish and our facilities, our hopes and dreams, and just generally how we
roll. Obviously, if you haven’t been
here as long, you may not yet have the kind of commitment and investment, or
have had time to develop the relationships, that would lead you to support a
capital campaign. That’s OK. I’m glad you’re here to worship with us this
morning, and feel free to engage any of our ministries and efforts as God leads
you. Over the next month and a half you
will probably hear more about the capital campaign, about our annual
stewardship efforts, about money, and about how it all relates to the life of
faith. We talk about this not because we
are obsessed with money, but because Jesus talked about money, and how we
relate to money matters as we grow in our faith. But know also that we are not looking for anything
in particular from you, even when you are on our mailing list and receive our
appeals. We are grateful you are with
us, and hope you continue to find a way to develop your relationship with God
alongside of us. So feel free to come tonight and have dinner without any
pressure.
Now we could have chosen any number of names for this
campaign, and we passed on such descriptive options as “Keep the Water Out of
Our Walls” or “Give Your 401(k) to Jesus.”
As the campaign committee met and thought about names, we started to
talk about why we would want to give.
Nick Baron spoke pretty powerfully about how he believed that God had a
future for St. John’s with important mission and ministry and how we were
called to prepare for that future. Out
of that inspiration, Believe and Prepare was born.
At that meeting, Nick nailed the spiritual motivation for
what we are trying to do in our Believe and Prepare Campaign. First we believe that God has a future for
us. This belief is no small thing at a
time when the valley has been shrinking, churches are closing, and the world is
changing in ways that do not seem helpful to Christian congregations. Despair would be easy. We know there are fewer people showing up on
Sunday morning than were here five or ten or twenty years ago. But we also aren’t done yet. A whole batch of little ones has started
showing up. We have new people joining
us from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Hundreds of people are here over the course of the week for ECS and the
Saturday lunches and AA meetings and guitar lessons and Cana’s Corner and Bible
studies and any number of other activities, many of which weren’t happening a
few years ago. None of these good things
that are happening are the basis of our belief, however. They are just indications that confirm our
belief that God has a future for us. Our
belief is in God and what God is going to do, and, that by the grace of God and
our own obedience, we may get to be instruments of God’s work.
The second part of our campaign is Prepare. If we believe that God has future for us,
than we dare not sit on our hands and do nothing like the guy with one talent
who buried it in the ground and twiddled his thumbs hoping it all worked out
OK. Our call is to make ourselves and
our congregation ready for the work God is going to do with us. Much of that work is spiritual, and I’ll talk
about prayer and our prayer vigil in a moment.
Some of that work is relational as we reach out to new people. Some of that work is programmatic, as we
develop the ministries to help others experience God’s love and learn about his
good news. But some of the work is the
financial and structural stewardship of the facilities we have been given to
use and maintain for future generations.
If we believe that God has a future for us, then we want to prepare a
church sanctuary and classrooms and kitchens and dining rooms and bathrooms and
offices that have walls that don’t leak and have adequate heating and air
conditioning and good lighting and safe parking spaces and all the other things
that help people feel welcome and able to focus on the work they are called to
do. The facilities we have are actually
in better shape than probably any church I have ever worked in. But we have a lot of space and we need to
maintain it lest problems arise and the cost of fixing them skyrockets. We also want to prepare all of our buildings
to be well used, and not just some parts of our buildings. I believe God has enough work to do in the
valley that we’ll need all of our facilities, and maybe someday additional
spaces, to undertake it.
The abbreviated version of what we are preparing falls into
four categories. The first is basic
exterior maintenance. We need to repoint
the stone, fix the louvers on the tower over the narthex to keep the birds out,
repair the brick that is allowing water to seep into the corner of the lounge,
replace the Plexiglas over the stained glass windows and fix the windows in the
offices. Our second area is some minor
improvements like sealing the parking lot, fixing three ranks of organ pipes,
and air conditioning the upstairs dining room.
Third, we want to air condition the church, because in this day and age
people don’t go anywhere that isn’t air conditioned in the summer and having
air conditioning is an essential part of welcoming and evangelism. Then, fourth, we want to begin to prepare the
basement for new ministries that could be started there in three to five
years. We don’t know what they will be
yet, but we believe God has something in mind like maybe a pre-school or elder
day care, and we want to prepare for it.
Anyone who want to participate will have a variety of ways
to do so, ranging from immediate gifts to pledges paid over five years. Some gifts will be larger and some smaller,
but all will be important. $10,000 will
fix the organ pipes, and $10 will buy a needed can of paint. Those who can join us tonight will hear more
details then, and information will come in the mail in the coming weeks for
those who can’t.
Believe and Prepare
Remember Moses’ conversation with God in Exodus. How God had a plan, and Moses had to ask
enthusiastically so that Moses and God could work together to get where God
wanted them to go. We are in the same
place with this capital campaign. We
believe that God is leading us in a certain direction, both to raise the funds
we need to prepare the building for the work he wants done and then to do the
actual ministry as it comes. But we
aren’t quite ready yet. We, like Moses,
need to passionately beg God to show up and do the work he wants done. We need to plead with God to open his hand
for the financial resources we need to keep the building up. We need to implore God for all the right open
doors, the almost coincidental connections, and the seemingly serendipitous
opportunities to make our campaign successful and the work that comes after it
fruitful.
Our parish is undertaking this prayer work in at least two
ways. First, we are in the midst of a
twenty-four hour prayer vigil. People
have been praying in the chapel since 4:00 pm yesterday, are praying right now,
and will continue until our dinner starts at 4:00 pm today. If you have time this afternoon, please join
us or spend some time praying wherever you are.
Second, we are praying our campaign prayer in place of our offertory
sentence during our worship service, and we are encouraging everyone in the
parish to pray it daily. Feel free to
rip the prayer out of your bulletin and post on your refrigerator, keep it by
your nightstand, use it as a bookmark in your Bible or the John Grishom novel
you are reading, or in whatever other way is helpful. But please join us in passionately praying
that God would be with us and use us to do the work he wants to accomplish.
There is an old story about a church that has a capital need. The pastor gets into the pulpit and says, “I
have some good news and some bad news.
The good is that God has given us all the money we need. The bad news is that it is still in your
wallets.” Now I don’t know if this story
would be true in our case or not. I have
no idea what is in anyone’s wallets or bank accounts. But I know that God owns all the money in the
universe. And I know that this parish
has been able to do ministry in the past because of contributions that nobody
expected. And I know that if we are
pouring our hearts out in prayer to accomplish God’s work in God’s way, we can
expect God to give us the resources we need to accomplish what we have to do. As we beg God to show up for his work with us
and as we begin to run down his path, he is going to pick us up and carry us
where we need to go, quite possibly in ways we never expected. We’ll be blessed with what we need. If we do our part, we know that God is more
than ready for his part.
Believe and Prepare.
In closing, I’d ask you again for the following. Most importantly, please pray for this
campaign, for our parish and our ministry.
Second, come to dinner tonight with us if you can, and if you can’t,
look for other information about the campaign as it comes out. Then finally, believe in the future that God
has in store for our parish, and in whatever ways that God leads you, help us prepare
for it.
No comments:
Post a Comment