'Tis the Season

No. I don't mean Christmas, though area big box stores have been anticipating for a while now. As little Bobby's fingers are still stained with chocolate from his Halloween haul, out goes the Christmas candy, decorations, and general noelia. 

The season of which I write is the season of stewardship. One of the gifts that worshiping on Friday evenings gives me is the opportunity to fill in for area rectors on Sunday morning. This season of stewardship has seen me preach less on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and more on an absent rector’s “Sermon on the Amount.”

Southside Abbey does stewardship a little differently. We certainly do give people opportunities to give of the gifts they have been given, but we do not pass a plate at weekly worship. We are fueled financially on the high-octane mix of gracious partnerships with area Episcopal and Lutheran congregations, a handful of generous individuals and families, and the Rube Goldberg-esque Leopold grant writing machine. It makes for quite the combustible stewardship season that causes funding things like our upcoming food-truck/mobile-chapel/people-mover to be comically Holy Spirit-driven.

I don't write all of this as an appeal for checks to Southside Abbey, but as a confession. I have not asked our congregation - of which three-quarters are homeless or in transitional housing - to give financially. I have asked for gifts of time, energy, presence, skill, et cetera, but not for money. This oversight was brought to me by a homeless man, who happens to be one of the most faithful people I know.

One ordinary afternoon, he showed up at my house and handed me a money order for $250, made out to Southside Abbey. He doesn't have a house. He doesn't have a car. He may not know where his next meal is coming from, but he made a gift of such magnitude ($250 happens to be what we had spent on food that week). I confess now that I tried to stop him. I asked, "Are you sure? Wouldn't you rather spend this money on . . . " Before I could finish, he cut me off: "Don't take this away from me! Don't rob me of this opportunity to give my gift. I want to buy dinner for all my friends at church."

I guess I still have a lot to learn about faithfulness. Thanks be to God I have surrounded myself with the right teachers.

This post was originally published on the Episcopal Church Foundation's Vital Practices Vital Posts blog on November 13, 2014. It has been reprinted here with permission.