Our Gospel passage picks up with two of the close apostles of Christ – Ss James and John, sons of Zebedee, sons of thunder—asking our Lord to sit one at His right hand and one at His left in His glory. This is their processing of the Transfiguration of Jesus, which they, along with S. Peter, witnessed. They were in awe of Christ’s Transfiguration, and wanted to emulate the two they saw with Jesus at that moment: Moses and Elijah, and Christ’s right and left hand. They wanted to emulate Moses and Elijah out of their yearning for intimacy with Jesus, of Whom they were utterly in awe. And their awe, along with the awe of the whole of the Upper Room Church of Jerusalem grew when they read passages out of the prophet Isaiah as we hear today—that this Jesus, the eternal Son and Word of the Father, begotten before all worlds, King of kinds, Lord of lord, this Jesus has bourne our griefs and carried our sorrows; that this Jesus was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. And their humility grew when they realized they too were the sheep that had gone astray, that they too had turned every one to his own way, away from Him who poured out His soul to death, bearing the sins of us all.
Awe and humility—I believe both are tied in to stewardship, as I will seek to illustrate.
This is the second of my sermons on stewardship. I am offering sermons on this topic because stewardship summarizes our entire attitude to the Church, which includes the local expression of the One Church our parish. In my first sermon I spoke of stewardship as seeing ourselves, members of this congregation, as gardeners. Understanding the stewardship of this parish means seeing ourselves, seeing this congregation, as gardeners.
I went into last Sunday what this means. God has brought each and every one of us here, to this Parish, to be gardeners of His new creation. God wants us to help Him bring about the increase of the harvest. God has called each of us forth to do in this Parish what gardeners do in their garden: help it grow. That is what our tithe of time, talent, and treasure is for: the means for growth. If we want this parish to grow, then let us do the hard work of giving our time in attending the Liturgy and praying at home, let us give our talent in support of the ministries ongoing in this parish, and let us give generously of our treasure, to allow the parish to operate within the financial realities of the world today.
I also spoke last Sunday about having an inspiring image in our minds, as we take up the work of offering our threefold tithe. We need such an image because the work is often arduous, difficult, and in the immediate sense, it can be not very rewarding. A gardener would have in his mind the image of the harvest, and this image inspires hard work in the present. For us, I offered up the image of an adoring and merciful congregation in a beautiful church with a strong desire to know God. Adoring: in that with reverence we adore God Who transcends all conditions of time and space; merciful: in that we perform acts of mercy to help those in need; all with a strong desire to know God: in that we are a congregation with inquiring minds, discerning hearts, a courageous spirit that perseveres to know and love God, with the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works, and in God Himself, as He is known in the power of the Holy Spirit through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. This image, this portrait, is both who we are now, and who we seek to become more intensely, more thoroughly. We seek here nothing less than participation in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, not as a superficial social club as is sadly too common in today’s American Christianity, but as a holy organism, in holy fellowship, filled with the Holy Ghost.
Another aspect of stewardship is humility. If we are gardeners in the garden of Christ, then we must be humble. As Saint Paul teaches, it is not us but God Who gives the growth, only God Who gives the increase. As it is with a garden, so is it with our parish: God gives the increase, the growth: our job is to cooperate with God, and do all within our power to cultivate the conditions by which God-given growth can occur.
And we are made humble by our awe of God. Let again be in awe of the fact that all creative power comes from God, Who is the maker of all things, and through Whom all things are made. To be a gardener in the garden of Christ is to have profound respect for God’s omnipotence. It is to have profound respect as well for the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life. In Christ’s garden, the Holy Spirit dwells. For our parish to be Christ’s garden is for us to recognize that the Holy Spirit can act powerfully, such as to make the impossible possible. Our stewardship is thwarted by our pride, yet it is genuine in our humility.
As is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” And, the Epistle goes on to say, “Before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do.” This is true power, indeed flowing from the heavenly realms, the aroma of which fills our church. Our God is indeed an awesome God, because of His awesome power, His incredible creativity, His boundless loving energy. He gave Himself on the Cross that we might grow into Him through the Sacraments. Let us in the stewardship of our parish always seek to serve our awesome God, serve His awesome power, serve His incredible creativity, serve His loving energy that gives all things life, that fills all things with His sacramental blessing, that shines with the brightness of heaven in even the darkest of places, illumining all things with the torch of Christ’s light which ever burns with health, with salvation, with the peace that passes all understanding because it is of the mind of Jesus, Who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.
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