Stewardship Sunday, "Earning the miracle"

A Proper 27 32 Ord Stew BFC 2017

Matthew 25:1-13

November 12, 2017

          What we give our attention to, grows.  It does.  It grows.  At the first church I served, my best friend was a hog farmer, Alan Van de Woestyne.  Al sold junk hogs and we enjoyed extended conversations about the interplay between theology and hog farming.  I was a little amazed that he was would take the church pastor as a friend.  But I also know Al liked to tell everyone that the pastor had come down to eat a Casey’s pizza for lunch on his hog farm.  I was noodling over what I might say for Stewardship Sunday one year and Al shrugged and said, ‘The eye of the master fattens the beast.”  Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?  He said it again.  And it was the title of my sermon that Sunday.  “The eye of the master fattens the beast.”  What we give our attention to, grows.  It lights our path. 

The Statement of God’s Love and Passing of the Peace today come from a poem by Jewish poet, Marge Piercy, “The Art of Blessing the Day.”  Tracy used to have the quote posted on our refrigerator.   Some of the larger poem reads,

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree

of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.[1]

I find myself drawn to language like that, succulent language, Hurston-like, that is almost like a perfectly ripe pear dribbling down your chin.  I find it the most Divine.  What we give attention to, grows.  It lights a path.  And attention is love. 

          In the parable of the 10 virgins,[2] all of the virgins pay attention to trim their lamps upon the arrival of the bridegroom, the wise virgins are the ones who plan for failure, knowing that oil might run out, prepare by bringing extra oil, are that much more attentive to their situation.   Weddings and wedding banquets were times of great joy for a community. And oil was a sign of messianic joy and liberation.[3]  In the context of this parable, oil lights the way for joy.  In the book of Isaiah, oil brings good news to the oppressed, binds up the brokenhearted, releases the captives and the political prisoners.    You may prepare and pay proper attention by trimming your lamp, but if you have not prepared and paid attention to bring oil that can light the way for joy, how will the host even know that you are ready for joy? 

          On this Stewardship Sunday, what we do through our tithes and pledges is we practice resilience for when this church goes through hard times, we pay attention to the needs that are found in our church and in our wider community so that we might be part of the wedding banquet, the divine table of joy.  What I hope you see in this community of faith and its leadership is hard work being done to pay attention to that messianic joy found in Isaiah.  We build an oil reserve (for all vegetarians and vegans, this would be olive oil) throughout the year:  failing at times but paying attention to share good news with the oppressed, bind up the brokenhearted, work to release the captives and the political prisoners.  Then we ask all of you on Stewardship Sunday to come forward and say, “We want in.  We will bring our oil, trim our lamps to be part of this grand project which is Billings First Congregational Church.”

          What we give attention to, grows.  It lights the way.  And today, what we asked of you is that you would pay attention, give your love, to Billings First Congregational Church so that we could continue to be on the path of messianic joy. 

          We ask you to pay attention here because in today’s world, “attention is one of our most valuable resources.”[4]  As poet, activist, and doula, Adrienne Maree Brown writes, attention is what grows in our lives.  If our attention is focused on gratitude, collective power, experimentation, community, and celebration, these things will grow.  So we need to learn to train our attention, to put it where we want it and where it needs to be, because there are wider cultural forces that are trying to distract us, run a shell game, inundate us with scandal and controversy, further our cynicism, draw our attention away from messianic joy. 

          Adrienne Maree Brown writes:

i don’t want to spend my life reacting to other people’s cycles, their mistakes, lies, or ignorant projections, or the domination cycles of those who measure their humanity in false supremacy. those things will continue. but what we pay attention to grows. so i pay attention to the places we as a species are learning, changing, getting free, experiencing pleasure and joy.

my life feels so different when i liberate my attention that it almost feels like the universe is gifting me attention reparations. instead of being frozen by hopelessness and fear for my species, which is often my reaction to the news, i experience a lot of days where i’m full of awe, laughter, work that induces pride, noticing the small and massive miracles that are part of each day.

it’s taken a long time to train my attention even a bit, and i’m still super beginner level with it. but the results in my daily life are already so powerful. i feel somewhere between productive and prolific on the days i wake up and set my mind on freedom.

i want to see people with a transformational world view be as productive and prolific as possible. it’s aways off yet, but i imagine it all the time, that we burst the shell of the old world with our vibrant, biodiverse, generative resistance in the form of willful, manifested ideological evolutions.

let us put our attention on a revolution for our species, and grow it until we earn the miracle.[5]

Here at Billings First Congregational Church, we are preparing for resilience, knowing that we will sometimes fail, in our effort to stay woke.  But we also want you to join us this Stewardship Sunday in pressing olives to build a reserve we can use far into the night.  We are about the midwifing of messianic joy.  For we have been planning, building doors, hosting worship, welcoming the LGBTQ community, crying tears of joy for Big Sky Pride.  We have been welcoming into membership, hosting recovery groups, planning spirituality conferences, providing leadership for, learning from and accompanying the Native American community in Billings. We have been protecting, advocating for, hosting suppers, growing and stewarding God’s good earth through all the people in this church connected to sadly, Good Earth Market, but also Northern Plains and the Western Organization of Resource Councils.   We have been protesting, writing letters for, providing leadership for, accompanying families, sending out email showers, providing funding and material help, seeking release for the unjustly detained for the immigrant and refugee communities.  We have been providing funding and advocacy, raising money, building awareness for the poor and hurting families in our community.  The gospel of Messianic joy, declared by Christ in the gospel of Luke as his mission statement, is being done and lived out here in profound ways.  We are Billings First Congregational Church.  There are small and massive miracles happening here every day.  And we are training ourselves to pay attention so that we burst the shell of the old world for a messianic joy that tastes much like a sweet, succulent peach running down our chin.  We are earning the miracle. 

          Attention is love.  If you did not get a stewardship card, I hope you will pick one up from the back of the sanctuary and join us.  For after this worship, there is a banquet, a feast downstairs where there may not be peaches but there will be a harvest of love, hard work, tryptophan, hospitality, vision, and years of messianic joy practiced by this congregation.   And we only get stronger when a more diverse, absurd group of people join us.   We are earning the miracle.  Amen.

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[1] Marge Piercy, “The Art of Blessing the Day,” The Art of Blessing the Day:  Poems with a Jewish Theme (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 3-5. 

[2] The dichotomy Jesus used by Jesus in this parable is hyperbole used to press a point.  In ancient Jewish mythology, idol worship was considered the sin of all sins.  Idol worship summarized what it meant to be sinful for it reflected an abandoning of God and God’s priorities in favor of something else.  In Greek, faith literally means loyalty.  So to have faith meant loyally follow the way, the path, the teaching and instruction God had set before the people for their own well-being and flourishing. 

Pharaoh was the earliest challenger to God.  But after the Jewish people became less nomadic and more settled as farmers, it was the Baal gods and their temple prostitutes which called men to show the gods how to do fertilization by, well, fertilizing.  Long in the Jewish tradition then, idol worship became synonymous with sexual impurity.  So when Jesus starts off with 10 virgins posing as bridesmaids to tell this parable, I think he is trying to indicate that they are not impure or sinful in any way.  He is inviting us to see their faithfulness in another way. 

[3] Psalm 92:10; Isaiah 61:3

[4] Adrienne Maree Brown, “attention liberation, attention reparations,” http://adriennemareebrown.net/2017/10/28/attention-liberation-attention-reparations/October 28, 2017.

[5] Ibid.