Stewardship
1989 (Year C), 21 May /
Trinity Sunday
St John on Bethnal Green
Four weeks ago, at the beginning of the Area Synod all the members were given a piece of paper. Some of you might have been there. The paper was just like this one. We were invited to hold it on top of our heads and close our eyes. The man who was leading the part of the Synod then played a recording of a great wind and told us to open our eyes and see what the church looked like that first Pentecost. I wanted to die of embarrassment. My only thought was that if this is really what the first Christians looked like, then it is a miracle that the church lasted two minutes let alone two thousand years.
The experience wasn’t helped by two members of our congregation who had come in late, and so as it were were flameless. They sat behind us proceeded to giggle at the rest of us.
Of course they had every right to giggle. The hundred or so of us, with paper flames coming out of our heads, must have looked like some of the biggest load of wallies under the sun. I am left wondering why Christians always seem able, with such apparent ease, to shoot themselves in the foot.
Afterwards I was angry. Angry not only that we’d all been made to look and feel silly but what had been done to our vision of God. The vision which was experienced by those first disciples and what has been felt by countless numbers since.
One of the visions of the early Christians is that there is enough for all. Listen to what is says in the Bible, ‘and when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Now the company of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things which they possessed was their own, but they had everything in common. There was not a needy person among them, and distribution was made to each as any had need.’
Now here’s secret, Gerald’s got it wrong. It’s not often he gets things wrong (in fact the last time he was wrong was over ten years ago) but he has today. In your Christian Responsibility Campaign he says that St John on Bethnal Green hasn’t enough. 135 not enough each week to be exact.
Well that’s wrong – and I’m here today to tell you all so you’ll know. Of course St John’s has got enough – it’s got all of you for a start, and that’s more than enough. It’s just that enough isn’t being shared out in the right way at the moment.
There is enough for everything and everyone. That’s what I’ve come to tell you, even for St John’s there is enough. But how can that be – prices are going up all the time and people find it very difficult to make ends meet. And now here comes the church dressing up a Stewardship Campaign into something called a Responsibility Campaign trying to screw more money out of you. From the very beginning men and women have lived in want with empty stomachs and thirsty throats. You don’t have to look very far to see that. In our own communities there are people living with not enough. Over 600 Kurds have come to Hackney in the last ten days or so and they have only the clothes they stand up in. How can there be enough?
The vision of enough. The story of those first Christians is a story about an experience of God. It is the experience of the Spirit who descends on men and women, permeates them through and through, soul and body, and brings them to new community and fellowship with one another. In this experience people discover that they are filled with new energies they’d never imagined existed, and they find courage for a new style of living. They start to assess their gifts and their needs differently. They begin to behave responsibly. That is why this Spirit is called the creative Spirit, the life – giving Spirit, the Holy Spirit.
That’s what you are all being asked to do over the next three weeks. To recognise the energies which maybe you have forgotten about. To see your own gifts and needs, and to assess them realistically. To see the needs of your church and to know that you are being asked to share those needs just as you share in its gifts.
Gerald, when he comes to preach at St Peter’s saves up a little joke for the end. People have now come to expect it, so by way of getting my own back and ensuring that I’ll never be asked here again – here is mine.
I hope this Campaign will be remembered not as the worst experience of your lives but as one of the best. AMEN