Sermon: Sung Eucharist 20th September 2015

Preacher:

Date:

Sunday 20th September 2015

Service:

Sung Eucharist

Readings:

James 3.13-4.3, 7-8a

Mark 9.30-37

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 11.5M)

The row in our gospel reading about who is the greatest is transformed by Jesus when he shows that the greatest is not the one with the most accumulated power, but the one who is empty of power in the world.

He uses the example of the child but you could replace ‘child’ with anyone who is relentlessly side-lined or left out of what we tend to think of as great.

We live in a world of accumulation: the drawing to ourselves of things like power, the esteem of others, money, possessions, trinkets and baubles.

If we think this is what makes us great, then the gospel warns us that we seriously deluding ourselves.

The letter to James, our first reading, describes in hard hitting terms the corrosiveness of this acquisitive approach to life.

It is a spiritual issue. This matters. It matters because at the moment we are focusing on stewardship in these weeks before Harvest Festival.

Harvest is about gathering in that which we have planted and tended but to which God gave the growth. (cf 1 Corinthians 3.6)

Harvest is about being thankful. Stewardship likewise: God bestows upon us gifts that we are called to sow for growth and not accumulate and store up for ourselves. The grain needs sowing or milling, not being left to rot. When we sow the grain we are giving it away to the earth: sowing grain is an act of thanksgiving. Grain exists for more than itself:

As Jesus tells us, ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ (John 12.24) This is at the heart of the Eucharist. Christ exists for more than himself. Jesus Christ lived, died and reigns to draw us to the source of life. ‘Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain’,

Each and every week the Eucharist shapes who we are as stewards. The Eucharist tells us all we need to know about stewardship. It is a gratuitous transaction, a gift without cost, where the ordinary, the meagre, the empty, becomes divine, lavish and overflowing. The transformation of the ordinary stuff of things is the Spirit’s gift, as is the wisdom on which James reflects.

That same Spirit transforms all that she chooses to breathe upon: the Spirit breathes on the brooding waters at the creation and brings forth teeming life and abundance; the Spirit breathes life into dry bones and puts flesh upon them so that they become a holy people to God’s glory; the Spirit breathes on Mary enabling her to be the God-bearer, mother of the Lord; the Spirit breathes on the disciples in the upper room enabling them to speak the language of God to the diverse nations and peoples of the world.

The Spirit never stops breathing. The Spirit breathes on you and me transforming the offering of our lives: whether that’s our hopes and ambitions, our ‘productivity’ and worth or our money and giving.

The trouble with having a ‘stewardship campaign’ is that we think stewardship is  something ‘bolted on’, a discreet area of life and not connected to what it means to be a Christian day by day.

Jesus promised the gift of life in its abundance: giving is about living. Giving is at the heart of God, God’s free, gracious gift of life. I’ve never paid to be alive; yet I am; A gratuity not just what you pay a waiter out of your bounty: gratuity is one of the most fundamental descriptions of God. And from gratuity – that which is freely given and giving - comes gratitude. Thank you. Thank you.

Words attributed to St Francis of Assisi connect this gratuitous exchange of giving and receiving to the resurrection itself, ‘It is in giving that we receive, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life’.

And this is about tomorrow morning as much as this morning it has a direct, practical, ethical bearing on how we live our lives as people who live to give, and give to live.

As Ecclesiasticus puts it: ‘Do not let your hand be stretched out to receive and closed when it is time to give’. (Ecclesiasticus 4.31) What a challenging image: hands stretched to receive God’s gifts and blessing, (not least in the shared, broken bread) and then clenched when it is time for us to give. A challenging image, yes because it is one that good stewards instinctively know is wrong.

 

We open our hands to receive, and open our hands to give.

 

That is where being stewards is a lifelong feature of being Christian. Stewardship is a mark of citizens of the Kingdom of God. Stewardship - receiving and giving - should not be a foreign language to us because it is the language of the Lord, the Giver of Life, the Holy Spirit dwelling in you and in me. This is the vocabulary of God’s abundant gifts in creation and where we learn it is in the Eucharist, with hands open to receive and open to give.

Our readings today and our Eucharistic action, call us back to the Giver of all Good Gifts the One who entrusts to us the gift of life. The disciples had to give away ambition and see that the littlest person is the greatest; just as the smallest sacrificial gift is the biggest. Christ’s hands stayed open even to receive the nails on the cross, as he clung to nothing other than God’s mercy. We stretch out our hands to receive, needy as we are, and, by God’s grace may we keep our hands and hearts open, to be generous in giving and blessing that our hands may be the hands of Christ, giving that the world might live.