The Rev. Dayle Casey                                                                                   Proper 22 -  Year A The Chapel of Our Saviour                                                                             Isaiah 5:1-7 Colorado Springs, Colorado                                                                                         Philippians 3:14-21 October 6, 2002                                                                                          Matthew 21:33-43

            Yesterday, at our diocesan convention, we did what we always do at this time of year; we discussed and passed a budget, a financial plan for our diocesan ministries for the coming year.  And our vestry is currently doing the same for this parish, just as we do every year at this time.

            And every year, about this time of year, rectors of parishes around the world are asked by their vestries to preach what is called a "stewardship sermon."   Almost always, this "stewardship sermon" coincides with the preparation of the parish budget for the coming year, and with the parish's mailing out of pledge cards.

             If the Gospel is faithfully preached, however, stewardship lies within and beneath every sermon throughout the year, and within and beneath every class, every reading of Scripture, and every meeting in the parish, because stewardship is at the heart of the Word of God.

            Consider some facts.  Are you aware, for instance, that one-sixth of all the words in the New Testament that Jesus is reported to have spoken concerns the relationship of a person to his or her material possessions?  Do you realize that one-third of all of Jesus' parables, like the one we just heard, is about this very same thing, about the relationship of a person to his material possessions? 

            The use and misuse of possessions, the use and misuse of physical things as well as the use and misuse of people, the use and misuse of the world we have been given by God to live in is what the history of salvation as found in the Bible is all about, because the way we use the life and world that is on loan to us is our spiritual business.  

            Calling us to come to grips with our use and misuse of the world is what God is using the Bible to do to us today, and every day.  Calling us to come to grips with our stewardship is what God uses the Bible for.

            Remember what God had to say last Sunday:  "If your teeth are set on edge," he said, "it is not because of the sour grapes your parents ate when they were taking care of God's vineyard.  If your teeth are set on edge, it's because of the sour grapes you are producing and eating from the vineyard you have been given to take care of."

            The message is clear  --  in Ezekiel, in Isaiah, and in Jesus' parable today  --  that both we and the vineyard belong to God and that we are responsible and held accountable by God for what we do with his vineyard.  Responsible for how we tend and care for it, responsible for what we produce from it, and responsible for how we use what we produce.  We are responsible to God for how we use everything from our checkbooks to our time and energy to our lives themselves.

            Sometimes we talk as if stewardship is easy to define, as if stewardship is a giving of 10% of our gross income to the work of God, because God commands a tithe in the Bible.  That's not a bad goal.  In the Old Testament we find that one is expected to return not just any 10%, but the best 10%, the first fruits of the harvest, not the leftovers.

            Ten percent is actually expected of the members of some churches, and do you know that a few years ago it was calculated that if we Episcopalians were ever actually to reach this goal, assuming only a poverty-level income for each one of us, Episcopalians' giving to the work of God through his Church would increase seven-fold?

            But a tithe, 10% of income and time and work and skills, is not the standard of giving for a Christian.  The standard of giving for a Christian is Jesus.  Our standard, our hope, is to be like him, not persons who calculate the cost of giving, but persons who consider the cost of not giving and who seek to give of their very selves as Jesus did.  Not because God commands it in the Bible, but because being the kind of person Jesus was is what we want to be as well.  Let's not fool ourselves about stewardship, because if we do we will be fooling ourselves about the Gospel itself. 

            This is what the kingdom of heaven is like, said Jesus:  the kingdom of heaven is like a vineyard that was planted by a landowner who did everything he could to make it the best and most prosperous vineyard possible.  The owner of the vineyard went away for awhile, and while he was away he left his vineyard in the care of tenants.  The tenants were responsible for tending the vineyard, and they were to return a yield of good grapes for the owner.

            Later, the owner sent his servants to collect the produce due him.  But the tenants seized his servants; they whipped one, they killed another, and they stoned a third.  So the owner sent more servants, but the tenants treated them in the same way.  Finally, the owner sent his own son.  "They will respect my son," he said. 

            But they didn't.  Instead, the tenants conspired to kill the son, thinking that if they killed the son, then they could inherit the vineyard for themselves.  They thought, in other words, that they could steal from the owner what was his and make it their own.  So they seized the son and killed him.

            And Jesus asked, "When the owner of the vineyard returns, how do you think he will deal with those tenants?"  "He will bring those wretched men to a bad end," they growled, "and he will hand the vineyard over to other tenants."  "Right!" said Jesus.  "The kingdom of God is like that.  The kingdom will be given to those who will produce the fruit of the kingdom."

            And so we come to the big point!  The Biblical view of things is this:  we were created by a loving God, who also created a magnificent world  --  literally a wonderful garden  --  for us to live in.  God has placed us in the garden as his caretakers and has given us responsibility to care for the garden.  The one thing God assures us is that the garden will be fruitful, that it will yield the good, sweet grapes of kindness, justice, and mercy, the return which the Lord is due and which he expects.  And we have been given oversight of the garden, to tend it for this purpose.  This is our stewardship.  Stewardship is our living our lives in such a way that we faithfully do all we can to see that such a return is realized, as Jesus did.

            And now that we've arrived at the big point and have identified what stewardship is, I want to share some thoughts about how we at Our Saviour Parish might give back to God what belongs to him in the first place, and so be good stewards of the world God has left us in charge of.

            Several years ago I visited our son Aaron about this time of year.  He was living in Washington, D.C., and on Sunday morning we went to a church near the Capitol Building.  It was St. James' Church, I believe. 

            We arrived just before the Eucharist began and took our seats.  It was the kind of place I love  --  kind of old and musty, with already enough incense in the air to fill the church even before the procession had begun.  Squinting, one could see through the smoke just well enough to find a seat and to make out that there was an altar somewhere up the aisle.

            Then, as the procession came down the aisle, my heart sank.  The priest was ancient.  He was literally physically decrepit.  I thought to myself that he might not make it all the way to the altar and that we might have to call 911 before we finished the hymn.

            But he did make it, and after the Collect for the Day we sat down for the readings.  When we got to the sermon, we were all in for a wonderful surprise.  This elderly man was a magnificent preacher, full of an energy and enthusiasm I didn't expect from his physical appearance.

            He started by explaining that he himself was a visitor, a retired priest filling in for the Rector, who was away that Sunday.  That wasn't news to the regulars, of course, but it was news to me.  The Vestry had declared that day Stewardship Sunday, so the Rector decided to take the weekend off.  And he had asked the visiting priest to preach on stewardship. 

            Not a bad idea.  Maybe I'll do that next year.

            Anyway, the preacher was magnificent.  In a thoughtful and thorough way, he went through all the Biblical commandments about tithing.  And then he said, "But you know, tithing is really for Baptists, not for Episcopalians.  Baptists love to tithe.  Tithing is a Baptist way of doing things.  There is a clear rule.  You just multiply your gross income by .10, and whatever the result is you give to the church.  It's simple and easy; any child can do it.  It's perfect for those who like their religion clear-cut and uncomplicated.  But it's not for us Episcopalians," he said.  "We Episcopalians, we're more sophisticated than that.  We're more at home with something with a little flexibility in it.  We prefer to tip."

            And for 20 or 30 minutes, he outlined some of the better ways we human beings have found to give back to God the fruit of the vineyard that belongs to God, and he also described some of the clever ways we've devised to cook our spiritual books by skimming off some of what God expects from us.

            And he finished the sermon, and we said our prayers.  And then, at the offertory  --  I kid you not  --  as we were preparing to bring our gifts to God's altar for the Eucharist that morning, at the offertory sentence, this physically decrepit old man, God's priest that day at that parish church, exhorted us to "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, who said, 'It is more blessed to give than to tip.'"

            In closing, I want to share with you three positive ways to be a good steward.  They come from Father John Claypool, the now-retired Rector of St. Luke's Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

            Father Claypool, who has been an ordained pastor for half a century, says that in his long years as a pastor, first as a Baptist and now as an Episcopalian, he has witnessed the whole range of attitudes and practices about giving, but he doesn't like to spend much time on the shallow and unhealthy forms of it.  He doesn't spend time on things such as tossing a tip on the table for God, even if it's in the form of a tithe.  Instead, he identifies the three best forms of stewardship he has witnessed in his lifetime of parish ministry.  He focuses, I think, on the way of Jesus.

            "The great majority of these positive stewards," Father Claypool says, "are the grateful."  The grateful "give out of pure gratitude and hearts that overflow with thankfulness.  They have [fixed their eyes on Jesus and have] heeded St. Paul's piercing question:  'What do you have that you did not receive?'  And [these people have] long realized that the appropriate answer is:  'Nothing!  Nothing at all!  My very life and all around me is pure and total gift.'  Once that basic vision [sinks in], the desire to say 'thank you' is as natural as breathing out once you have breathed in."

            This group of positive stewards, in other words, realizes the simple point of Jesus' parable this morning  --  that the world is only on loan to us.  Nothing we have is ours by right, not even our lives themselves.   "At every moment the universe is supplying us with oxygen that we did not create, and our lungs are breathing in and out and our hearts are beating without our telling them to do so."   Everything is pure grace, pure gift.

            "The best givers I know," says Father Claypool, "have recognized this primal fact and are moved 'to follow suit' as freely and as joyfully as the universe gives to them."  They give back to God for no reason beyond saying "thank you." 

            The second group of positive stewards Father Claypool has known are the wise.  The wise "give out of a deep wisdom as to how things in life really work.  They know that the practice of 'plowing something back in' to the processes that support them is the only way to assure a healthy future.  Companies that spend all their profits and never invest in research and development and maintaining their machinery soon begin to decline.  [This wisdom] is how the ancient practice of tithing came into existence [in the first place].

            "When agriculture was first discovered centuries ago, and people began intentionally to make food happen instead of [just] finding it growing wild, a discipline very quickly presented itself.  In order to have seed to sow at the next planting season, a portion of the present harvest had to be saved out and given back into the soil to grow more.  Our ancestors learned that ten percent of a harvest was what it took to insure a future crop, and this is how the practice of tithing came into being.  It is still a basic form of wisdom, far beyond the sphere of agriculture.  If you are not putting something back into the many institutions from which you are drawing life, those very institutions are going to suffer and in time will be [adversely] affected."

            Good stewards don't tithe because God commands it in the Bible.  God's Word to us in the Bible is to tithe  --  in financial resources, but also in time and energy  --  because such reinvestment is how the world actually works in a healthy way.  That's the reason for the Sabbath, the reason for God's commandment for us to stop, to pray, and to remember.  Father Claypool says that many of the good givers he has known in the past realize this basic truth, and they give not only in gratitude for the past, but also in the interest of a bountiful future.

            The third group of good stewards Father Claypool has witnessed are the involved.  This third healthy motivation for stewardship is "a positive excitement about a certain enterprise [by those who are involved in it] and a desire to be a part of helping it grow." 

            "The best stewards I know," he says, "see a need and believe in what is being done and want to enable the given process to continue and to enlarge.  It is my deepest hope," Father Claypool told his parishioners, "that the parish of St. Luke's is just such an enterprise for the great majority of you."

            And I say to you at the Chapel of Our Saviour that it is my deepest hope that our parish is just such an enterprise for the great majority of you as well.

            Throughout the past sixteen years, and before that, we at Our Saviour Parish, brothers and sisters in Christ here, have sought to grow together into the Gospel life of stewardship.  We have spent much time and energy and many of our parish resources on caring for those within our parish who need a special love or concern and on reaching out to those in need beyond our parish.   And we hope to continue to do so.

            And we have spent much time and energy and many of our parish resources on maintaining this beautiful church building and the classrooms and offices and grounds that were left to us by former parishioners, all gifts to us pure and simple.  And if we are to leave such good and wonderful gifts to those who will come after us, we, like our predecessors, will have to continue to invest in that future by giving generously of what we have today, just as those here before us gave generously of what they had in their day.

            So I close as Father Claypool closes.  The Chapel of Our Saviour is "the healthiest and most generous parish I have ever served.  When I speak of the heroes and heroines of stewardship I have known, many of you make up that company of the grateful, the wise, and the involved.  May the number of such good givers grow and grow.  As they do, so will God's Kingdom grow, and the joy of everyone of those who participate."

            In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.