‘First Fruits’
Excerpts from Deuteronomy; Romans 12:1-3 (The Message)
It’s not so easy to give away a $10 bill to a stranger! I’m not sure how many of you tried to do that suggested Action this week in our At Home Activities to start our Stewardship worship series. Or maybe you did a random act of kindness. I thought I would try to do it last Friday morning. I got out a crisp $10 out of my wallet and put it into my jacket pocket, ready to give away. But where and who? I had a fleeting thought that I just bring it to Tim Hortons in St. Jacobs when I go for Men’s Group. Surely there would be someone at Tim Horton’s that wouldn’t mind an extra $10. It is a public place with all sorts of people who come in there. But do I really want to do that with the guys there? Harold Martin or Stew Sauder or Brent Horst might just razz me. Maybe I go to a Mall and wander around and find someone? Or I give it to the man that is always at the entrance onto the Expressway at Bruce Street, holding out a sign that he needs help. But then I thought about downtown Kitchener, right in my own broader neighbourhood. That should be no problem. I was driving at first, so headed towards the Kitchener Farmer’s Market area. I could see a scattering of different people around there – from so many backgrounds and cultures – some going to work, students heading to school, a Dad with a 2-year-old on his shoulders, no one obvious to give $10 to. So I thought maybe around City Hall would be better. Problem was – even though I found parking just past City Hall, the whole area was blocked off for OctoberFest. I wandered down King Street then towards Victoria, walking now. I saw a business woman, a construction worker, a woman coming out of a bank no less. But how do you simply go up to someone and give them $10. It feels presumptuous and offensive. I could just imagine the suspicious looks. Why are you giving me money? What do you really want? This was not going to be so easy. In my mind, I had deliberately avoided going towards Victoria and Weber Streets, where the large homeless encampment has been for several years, that I drive by so often, but have never walked by. But my feet just brought me in that direction.
As I walked, I was remembering an experience way back at Welcome Inn Community Centre and Church, where I did Mennonite Voluntary Service in the North End Low Income Hamilton community. Once a week I was what was called ‘The Welcomer,’ the person at the front desk whose role it was to welcome anyone who dropped by, get them a coffee or tea, tell them about our programs, direct them to the right person and so on. One morning, a very rough looking man came in reeking of alcohol and clearly homeless. I was wary and on guard. He gruffly asked for money, but I tried to re-direct him. Suddenly, from behind me, Marg, one of the regular members of our community, who lived much of the time in an old car, came up and gave the man $10 cash, out of her generosity and compassion, while I just stood there. I learned something about generosity and hospitality to the stranger that day. There was much I needed to learn from the community at Welcome Inn! Those were years of transformation for me.
As I walked on Victoria Street now, I started to ponder my relationship with money. Growing up, I was a bit of an entrepreneur – I had a paper route and regularly collected pop bottles and cans, often right out of the garbage, because I could turn them in for money, and sometimes I hired my younger siblings to do the dirty work while I took most of the profits. I simply internalized and bought into the values of capitalism, and assumed that if anyone just worked hard enough, they would do fine. I didn’t yet understand some of the broader systems of inequality that are at work in our world, or the place of middle-class privilege I came from. So I would make money, but my natural tendency was to save it or invest it and watch it grow, hardly ever to spend it or give it away, or do anything spontaneous with it. I might even have been called miserly. Generosity, freely giving something away, offerings and charitable giving, were things I needed to learn and practice, and do in a structured way, like my parents insisting on giving an offering out of our allowance or the stories told of their parents writing and dividing their wills in a way that charitable giving was treated as an extra equal child. I still lean in a careful direction with money and find it important to structure my charitable giving’s as the first monies we do each month. I love automatic withdrawals. Deuteronomy would call this ‘First fruits giving.’ I still struggle with more spontaneous giving and probably still hold my money too tight.
As I walked I also thought about my years at the front desk of the House of Friendship Men’s Hostel. I had the privilege of getting to know and interact with a whole community of men from the downtown and from whatever situation they found themselves in. I heard their stories. I felt their pain. As staff, we treated everyone with respect and honour, we provided a bed and a meal and bus tickets, and we helped point people towards the resources and help they might need … but we didn’t give out cash. I still carry that hesitancy, and maybe underneath, that judgement of others and how it might be used.
My feet kept walking and there I was at Victoria and Weber. I remembered again how hard eye contact can be, when life is so hard. Various people were in and out of tents and shelters, but did not even look up. I walked all the way around the corner, to under the rail bridge and back again, with a quick little smile passed back and forth with one man as he disappeared into the encampment. I crossed the street to the other side of Victoria, again with a little nod to one older man standing by himself, smoking and waiting. I went to where you see the entrance to the St John’s Soup Kitchen, with too many people standing around to approach just one. I returned back, and this time, went up the older man, and simply said ‘would you appreciate an extra $10?.’ He gave a slight nod. No words were exchanged. I gave him the bill, and walked away, and that was the extent of our interaction. Was that so hard? As I walked away, I realized that it was my inner dialogue as I walked that morning that I would most take away with me.
During these next 4 weeks we are being invited to reflect on stewardship, generosity, giving, economics, attitudes, finances, discipleship, contentment, and the systems we are a part of in our world. It can be hard to know where to start. In planning for this series, we got together a little brainstorming group of Nelson Scheifele, Karen Metzger, Mathieu Cain and myself, to simply ask what a Stewardship worship series could look like. It was a fascinating conversation! We named how much the topic of Stewardship has changed over the years. There used to be a more regular yearly Stewardship sermon, but also one that was more heavy-handed, that almost made you feel guilty. We recognized that Stewardship is a broad term – having to do with time and talents and volunteering and using our gifts, and with our money, and we named that this series would probably lean more into the financial end of stewardship. We also recognized how hard it can be to talk about money, especially when it gets personal. We would rather keep that to ourselves. We started to define what it means to be a steward – and that it is being a caretaker on behalf of someone else or an organization, responsible for something that is not ultimately your own. I like a definition I found in a short set of sermons by the late John H. Neufeld, former President of CMBC, what became Canadian Mennonite University, who wrote ‘Stewardship is the link between what we believe and how we live.’ (From Grateful to Generous: Stewardship sermons by John H. Neufeld, Mennonite Foundation of Canada, Winnipeg, MB, 2007, p. 4). John Neufeld was our resource guest for a stewardship retreat here at SJMC many years ago, and I will refer a few more times this morning to his wisdom. We also heard Karen share about being a long-time church Treasurer at Hawkesville Mennonite, and what it meant to be good stewards of a church building in the selling process after the church decided to close. More than anything, this little reference group hoped the worship series would be practical, and lead to lots of good constructive reflection and conversation, and spark a spirit of generosity. They choose the overall title ‘Living Into Our Stewardship, ’ as a way of getting at this and making it personal for each of us. It is also why they came up with the At Home Activities that get us doing very hands on Actions and thoughtful Reflections, of which giving away $10 to a stranger is just one example. It sure got me pondering! The Reflection question for today was to reflect on how you make your charitable giving decisions.
So as we start this Stewardship worship series, Deuteronomy is a good starting point for us, a foundation. It is written almost like a sermon, in the words of Moses standing at edge of the Promised Land. It is Moses reminding the people what it means to enter the Promised Land as a landed people, after 40 years of wilderness and 400 years of slavery. The world will be different now. You will have land and resources and prosperity. How will you respond? What will faith look like? How will you live. What is that link between what you believe and how you live? The answer in Deuteronomy is to Remember, to not forget your history and who you are, and to thus respond generously with your first fruits. The words of Moses use story, reminding the people of their story. A wandering Aramean was my ancestor, who went down to Egypt and became a great nation, but then became slaves and destitute. God heard our cries and took us out of Egypt with strong hands and a long arm and brought us to this land flowing with milk and honey. Be careful not to forget. Make this story known to you children and your children’s children. Remember, any prosperity is not your own doing if you see them as gifts from God. Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbour. Open your hands, meet the needs, bring the first fruits of the land, the best, the first, and offer them to God, share them with those most in need. This, and other places in the Old Testament, is where the concept of the tithe comes from, giving 10% of the harvest right off the bat – your first fruits. The overall message – Do not forget. John Neufeld writes ‘Like Israel we are in danger of amnesia, enjoying our prosperity and forgetting our true calling.’ (Ibid, p. 1)
It is about our basic attitudes towards resources and money. John Neufeld preaches about the 3 ‘Ts’ of stewardship – time, talents, and treasure, but wants to add a 4th T – our thinking, the way we think about our identity in relation to God. He names some of the ways of thinking or narratives our culture would have us believe (Ibid, p.11):
- We are consumers. ‘I shop, therefore I am.’
- We are self-made individuals. ‘Look out for numero uno.’
- We are masters of our environment and can exploit it for our immediate use
- We are owners of all our stuff – ‘I own what I have, I’ve earned it, it’s mine to do with as I please.’
- Our goal is to acquire as many things as possible. ‘The one who has the most toys at the end, wins.’
Do any of these sound familiar? How do we un-learn these dominant cultural narratives? How do we Think in different ways? Deuteronomy provides a different narrative. Do not forget. God is the ultimate giver of all we have. We respond with our first fruits in worship and gratitude.
We also heard the Romans 12 passage this morning. I am familiar with the NRSV translation, ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.’ I also like the refreshing Message version we heard this morning ‘Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out.’ It is about transformation. It can be so easy for something like Stewardship to be talked about in legalistic terms – give this amount, tithe this percentage of income, take these actions, give away those possessions, because it is your Christian duty, what you should do. What changes when stewardship is intimately connected to transformation, to how God moves in our lives? Generosity is our response to God’s surprising grace in our lives. It starts in worship, in prayer, in encounters with the Spirit, in interactions with others who show us generosity and love, in compassion for the stranger, in God changing us from the inside out, in sometimes taking the risk of doing a spontaneous act of generosity or act of kindness, even if that is $10. Then we can take our ordinary sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life and place it before God as an offering. This is maybe a part of my own personal slow lifelong transformation from a miser to a generous giver. I can’t help but think of some lines from a Bryan Moyer Suderman song:
I can give with joy because I trust in you. (sing first line?)
I can give with joy knowing that you’ll do
Greater things that I could ever imagine to be true
And I can play a part and give myself to you.
So is there a new list of narratives that can guide and inspire our lives? That can help us make that link between what we believe and how we live? Here are a few:
- Do not forget. Remember who you are and whose you are
- We need not be conformed to the culture and values of our world, but rather shaped by God’s values
- We are stewards, not consumers
- What we have comes as gift, which gives us freedom to be generous
- Our ordinary lives can be offerings to God
- In giving our first fruits, our very lives are transformed
- I can give with joy because I trust in you
- We can approach life with open hands rather than clenched fists
I want to end with a quote from John Neufeld, the ending of one of his Stewardship sermons based on Romans 12:
‘Imagine your congregation as a community of stewards, all responding to this challenge to be renewed in our minds, working to figure out God’s will and intention. Imagine everyone seeking to exhibit these traits – having a hopeful attitude each day, each year; being patient when we suffer, praying for each other and for the world; actively seeing and meeting other’s needs and not only looking after our own needs. Imagine everyone contributing to the needs of the saints and extending hospitality. This is how we are called to be in the world and in the church. This is the rich subsoil in which Christian stewardship can flourish, forging a strong link between the faith we profess and the lives we live.’ (Ibid. p.9)
May that be our imagination too. May it be so. Amen.