[Propertalk] Draft of sermon for August 2 on John 6:24-35

[Joe Parrish]

Here is a draft of my sermon for August 2 on John 6:24-35.  A final version will be posted on our church web site at http://sjnj.org on our Home Page early this week, God willing.

Peace and blessings,

Joe 

St. John's Episcopal Church

61 Broad Street
Elizabeth, New Jersey 07201

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 13B

DRAFT

August 2, 2009

A Sermon by the Rev. Joe Parrish

The Holy Gospel according to

John 6:24-35
 

     Lord, give us the bread that comes down from heaven, your Son, Jesus Christ.

     Amen.

 

     A story is told about a Jewish family who survived a Nazi death camp by observing the Sabbath religiously, faithfully, week in and week out.  Despite their stringent conditions each Sabbath they managed to find and light a candle, recall their Sabbath prayers, and pronounce the Sabbath blessings every week without fail in the midst of this camp of death.  Their captors gave them each week barely enough food to survive-some water, stale bread, and a spoonful of lard.  One week they found there was no candle to be had anywhere.  So when it was time for the Sabbath meal the father took some of the lard, molded it around a sting from their tattered clothing, and lit the makeshift candle while leading his family in prayers and blessings.  His son was enraged.  When the prayers were over, he confronted his father: "How could you waste what little lard we have to make a candle?"  His father answered: "Son, without food we can live for several days.  Without hope, we can't live for a single hour."

     What would you do when there is little or no hope?  Most Christians would skip church on a Sunday.  They would seek some place else to express themselves.  Many would attend to a feeling of some urgent need to shop.  If you don't believe me, just go over to the Garden State Mall sometime today, or to a big grocery store in Elizabeth.  There you will see tens of thousands of people without hope, trying to fill in the emptiness of their lives by shopping or looking for something that will make them happier, or so they think.  They will spend their meager paychecks on some frivolity, or on something they could just as well live without, and they will go home just as empty as when they began their shopping and looking spree.  They are living without hope.  They live with a day to day horizon.  

       I go through the toll booths of the New Jersey Turnpike and the Holland or Lincoln Tunnel each day, and I am amazed at how many people are living without enough credit on their credit card to buy an EZ Pass.  You can observe how many have to wait in lines for up to an hour or more a day to pay cash for a six or eight dollar or so toll.  And it's not just New Jersey; this week driving north to a Christian retreat I found exactly the same thing happening in New York State, and Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.  People are overwhelmed with credit card debt, most paying up to twenty-five percent interest or more on their maximum credit limit.  They live from hand to mouth to spend all they can get their hands on for things they really don't need.  And their time is worth essentially nothing.  They will wait in line up to an hour or more a day to pay something less than twenty dollars in daily tolls.  It is incredible, but it is true.  It shows how little they value their time, how much they have overextended themselves, how little concern they have for their wellbeing on an ongoing basis.  But at a mall or grocery store, they will charge anything to get something that makes them feel they are as good as or better than their neighbor, as good as the person in the car riding next to them, until they hit the toll booths.  And the more clever ones will even keep away from the toll booths so they won't have to face the reality of their precarious financial situation.  America, in a word, is charged out.  And until spending habits change, America will continue to be charged out, and the financial doldrums will continue to haunt us.

     So what is the antidote for us?  I think it is to get back to a true Sabbath observance, where at least one day in seven we don't spend what we don't have.

     Bill Hybels who heads up one of the largest churches in America, the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, says churches themselves need to focus more on what is their mission, and to articulate their mission in a phrase that can be written in large letters on one side of a t-shirt.  I must say, St. John's and the Diocese of New Jersey have both articulated their mission, our vision statement, in seven sentences, not likely something that will go on the front of any t-shirt that is smaller than the side of a very large tractor trailer truck.   I won't even begin to tell you this Vision Statement of the Diocese that we as a church have adopted as our Mission Statement.  And let us not quibble about what is a Vision Statement and what is a Mission Statement.  We all know we try to get the very best "Christian angle" on what we do, making something that sounds very loving and kind, and indeed the Visioning Group that has helped us articulate what we are all about has spent enormous amounts of effort, and not inconsiderable money and staff time and volunteer time, to develop this elaborate and beautiful Vision Statement.  Every church has even been given a DVD expressing their Vision ideas, and I consider that very thoughtful and considerate.  But in my humble opinion, having heard Bill Hybels express his growing church's view of a mission statement, I think we all may have vastly 'missed the mark'.  Each year our Diocese gets less and less money for its Fair Share pledges from the churches and missions.  And each year we have to cut back and cut back.  And still the churches are unable even to fulfill their meager pledges.  We are on a road to perdition, I believe.  So how can we turn this thing around?  Aren't we all living on money we don't have?  Certainly St. John's has done this as long as I have been aware, at least since the 1950's when St. John's was the richest church in the Diocese, and the Diocese was one of the richest dioceses in The Episcopal Church.  And now as a result we are one of the poorest churches, and our Diocese can barely pull its weight among all other dioceses in the land.  In April, our single bishop will have to try to visit 160 churches every three years by himself, and that's impossible to do mathematically on Sundays since there are 156 Sundays in three years, assuming our bishop takes no Sunday off, and that's not going to happen.  So what will happen is that our bishop will gradually be worked into the ground; he will be making more and more visitations on a Wednesday evening when most churches can't get even a quarter of their parishioners to attend.  And finally we will have to admit we can no longer fulfill our pledge to the national church.  Sooner or later reality will sink in.  This very year our Diocese is spending $400,000 it does not have, from so called, 'prior investment earnings'.  And those 'prior investment earnings' will be depleted by the end of this year or early next year.  What that means is that the Missions Budget will be further curtailed-this year $100,000 was summarily cut out of the Missions Budget just to keep us from invading our Diocesan principal before December 2009.  Otherwise our deficit spending would throw our Diocese a half a million dollars in the red instead of only $400,000.  We have cut out our Church Diocesan Deployment Officer already, and by April of next year we will cut out our Assisting Bishop.

     And for the 'local issue' right here at St. John's Church, sometime in mid November we won't have enough money to buy another tank of oil.  The three quarters of a tank of oil we have now will be gone and the church will be concerned about which pipes will freeze first.  We do expect some salvation from a large bequest that will 'tide us over' for a year or so, but beyond that we have no idea of how to keep this church going.

     A very simple solution would be for everyone to double their pledge or their giving here at St. John's Church.  That would at least solve our problem on a local basis; then our deficit would only be about $20,000 a year, one fifth of the deficit we are currently running.  But without the help of the Diocese, which is already greatly strapped for funds, this big building could get very, very cold on a Sunday sometime in 2010.  So we at least have to ask people now to consider doubling their pledges, or simply pay twice what they pledged.  Our treasurer and stewardship chairs think no one is tithing anyway, so doubling our pledges will still not actually require tithing for most people.  We are probably far richer than we admit.  But we don't really have tithing on the top of our personal or family agendas.

     Now for our mission statement, what would you say should be on our t-shirt?  What simple five or six words would describe what we are about?

     Jesus came up with seven 'words'.  Today we hear one of them that would go on his t-shirt.  "I am the bread of life."  Isn't that succinct?  Isn't that very descriptive?  "Jesus is the bread of life."  That could go on our t-shirts.  Or what about, "Jesus is the good shepherd"?  Or "Jesus is the door"?  Or maybe, "Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light"?  That's nine words, probably longer than Bill Hybels envisioned for a Mission Statement.  But we have to give Jesus some leeway, don't we?  After all, Jesus Christ is our Savior!  I guess even that could be our t-shirt phrase.

     Thursday night I attended an outdoor concert up in New Hampshire that was attended by at least fifteen thousand other people, mostly Christians, I assume.  It was the largest outdoor concert in the state of New Hampshire, and has been for a number of years, I believe.  But what impressed me as I looked around was that people were more or less divided up into sections of maybe fifty or a hundred or so per section.  Most were sitting on blankets on green grass.  And, maybe you can see where I am going with this.  It was a crowd about the size of what Jesus and his disciples fed out there in the wilderness of Israel; and we were in the wilderness of New Hampshire.  And amazingly enough, we were all fed, spiritually perhaps, although there were probably enough hot dog stands to feed most of us if we paid for them, and many brought food from home to share with each other.  We were re-enacting the Lord's Supper, at least in a spiritual way.  And the Bread of Life fed us, each of us, enough that we were satisfied by the end of the night. The Holy Spirit was indeed there.  And we were satisfied.

     So think of what you would put on your personal t-shirt to show the world.  Would you be willing to declare yourself a Christian to the world?  Or would you rather hide that fact from your next door neighbors?

     Once I wore a button to work that said, "I found it", and I was fired by unbelievers.  It changed my life, actually.  I went from a nice salary to nothing.  I was told it was OK to be religious, but that I could not 'show it'.  In a year my church had pity on me and hired me to do their business and building things-that church actually had more money than the Diocese at that time and had a commensurate staff of 65, pretty large for a church, wouldn't you say?!  I'm not sure any Diocese in The Episcopal Church has 65 employees.  We have less than a dozen employees in the Diocese of New Jersey, I think.  Of course our international church headquarters in Manhattan had 180 employees up until our recent General Convention, and now we are cutting about a fifth of them, about 30 are now looking for other jobs.  So the national church has this week and this year suffered significant downsizing.  I use the term, national, but really The Episcopal Church represents 16 nations, it's just that the US is by far the biggest contributor.  But in any event, the cuts are in.  And of course we have had to make serious cuts here at St. John's as well, as has our Diocese.

     So what we need to do is to figure out what our personal 't-shirt' will say.  What would you wear on your t-shirt?  "Jesus is Lord"?  "Jesus is my Good Shepherd"?  "Jesus is the Bread of Life"?  I sort of like that one, actually: "Jesus is the Bread of Life".  Wear that to the Stop and Shop and see what comments we might get!

     But let us in all seriousness decide Who is our Savior and why we think that.  And come up with some small phrase we should have here at St. John's as our Mission and Vision Statement.

     Amen.

 
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