I was a little disappointed that during the prayer time nobody prayed thanks for the Apple Cup! (can’t believe I said that from the pulpit!)

This morning our Bethany family is spread all over the state. Yesterday I was with our Alpha group over on the peninsula at Seabeck, where a couple dozen people are gathered to talk about the Holy Spirit…and are in fact worshipping there right now. Our high school group is also away, down in Auburn at a weekend camp, and we want to pray for all these folks who join us in worship this morning…just in different places.

So it’s Stewardship Sunday. What’s supposed to happen today? According to the Minister’s Manual, this is Finance Week. The church Treasurer should come up and call attention to the budget plans for 2007. The pastor then follows with a stirring message, designed to inspire people to up their pledges substantially for next year. After all, we’re told, there are many places that people can give their money. Churches have to compete with other charitable giving possibilities. That’s what’s supposed to happen.

I’m sorry. I just can’t do that.

Though I tease you a bit, the approach I just outlined emphasizes some of the things about parts of the American church which absolutely break my heart. Stewardship is not about finances and institutions and budgets. Stewardship is about following Jesus. And if “stewardship” means caring for the things we have been entrusted with, then yes, we get to talk about finances, but many of other things as well.

Second, as I read our text over this week, I could not get the word "costly" out of my mind this week, which is how it slipped into the sermon title: “Costly Faith.”

Reading: Luke 9:18-27

-There is Jesus, kneeling down to pray by himself.

-There is Jesus, listening to Peter make the great declaration of Jesus’ identity:

“You are the Messiah of God!”

-There is Jesus, telling his shocked disciples what his future looked like: great suffering, the rejection of the religious leaders, death…and then life.

-And there is Jesus, speaking to his followers, in light of what his own future looked like, offering them a glimpse of their own. What would those first disciples have heard and thought?:

If any want to become my followers...

"If..."

Anyone following Jesus has a choice to make. And will have many choices to make. You don’t have to follow. “If” means you decide.

"become…”

Wait a minute Jesus. What do you mean? I am a follower of yours already, aren’t I? Haven’t I committed myself to you? Isn’t that what it means to follow you?

you need to deny yourselves and pick up your cross daily...

“deny”

Following Jesus means making choices that will cause us to deprive ourselves of certain things, cause us to make choices different than what many around us are choosing.

"pick up your cross..."

Pick up my cross? Only people on the way to the gallows did that. Jesus carried his own crosspiece in full views of people on the way to crucifixion. What’s Jesus mean? That I need to publicly identify with Him? Well, I’m doing that, aren’t I? After all, I go to church. My kids are in a Christian school.

Pick up your cross? Does he mean that old saying “we all have our own crosses to bear?” I have a bad back, you have a grumpy father-in-law, Joe doesn’t love his job, but those are “just the crosses we have to bear.” Unless…unless Jesus means you have to choose to pick up your cross. There’s that word again, choose. Choose to plan to deny myself. Or at the least, to choose to embrace the difficult things I encounter.

"daily..."

Oh. That’s harder. Matthew and Mark’s versions of this don’t say anything about “daily.” I think I like their gospels better! Without that word “daily,” we could spiritualize this saying. It could mean just being a Christian in general. Or it could be something spiritually spectacular, like martyrdom. But daily. That’s harder. You can’t spiritualize “daily.” You have to choose, and live a certain way…on Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday. Friday. Saturday. Sunday.

If you want to save your life, lose it.

Let go of it. Quit grabbing ahold of life, quit trying to squeeze out “success.” Let your grip loosen. Give up control. Find real life.

If you were one of Jesus’ disciples hearing these words, I’m pretty sure you would have been stopped in your tracks. I’m pretty sure we would have said “Whoa! I need to think about this.” Because if I choose to follow Him, everything about my life will be different. I will have to give up some things I want to do. I will end up doing some things I would never have imagined. My life as I imagined it will be turned on its ear. I need to think about this. Hard.”

I’m pretty sure if we were with Jesus as he made his way to the cross, we would have listened and realized: This is costly.

So where do we get off thinking in our day…that being a follower of Jesus is not costly? Where do we get off thinking …that being a follower of Jesus is not costly?

We’re being influenced by some very different gospels. I’ve labeled three of them.

a) “Faith Around the Edges” Gospel

It’s a marketing gospel. We live in the era of the “positive spin,” and churches look at people in the pews as customers, and you only want to tell the customers good things, so think positive. You can have it all!

You can have the big job, the big house, the kids in the right school, your retirement all set up, investments, status, move in the right circles…and oh, yes, faith too. It’s what will make you happy, and it fits in around the edges of a life built on the concept of “success.”

It’s a positive thinking gospel. But it’s not the Jesus gospel that says “deny yourself and follow me.”

b) Prosperity Gospel

This is getting a lot of play these days. There are huge, huge churches that combine part of the Jesus story with material prosperity. I read about one this week down in the southern United States.

• 29,000 church members
• a satellite campus in another city with 7,000 more people
• an 8500 seat coliseum
• The pastor with a suburban mansion, a downtown condominium, a private jet
• He had $28 million in income from books and tapes in last year.

This pastor advocates that following Jesus is intimately connected to material success. In fact, when interviewed, he was making the point that Jesus was not a poor person, but a person of means. How can he say this? Here’s what he said:

• When Jesus was 2 years old, kings brought gold, frankincense and myrhh to him, so he had some assets!
• Jesus’ band of disciples had a treasurer, so there must surely have been finances to manage!
• When Jesus was crucified, soldiers gambled at the foot of the cross for his clothes, and they wouldn’t have done so for old rags, so Jesus must have been well-dressed.
• (my favorite) In the gospel of John, the disciples said to Jesus “where are you staying?,” and Jesus said “Come and see.” Evidence, this pastor says, that Jesus had a house!

Now, these are direct quotes. But it’s not one person, or one church. Hundreds of thousands of people in our country are in fellowships where the word is: following Jesus is not costly. That’s not the Jesus gospel that says “deny yourself and follow me.”

c) Feel Good Gospel

This is a psychological gospel. It says “go to church because it helps you feel good. Or happy. Or better about yourself.” All of those may be true. But it’s not the gospel.

The Feel Good Gospel says

• Don’t tell me there’s a right and a wrong way to live, I’ll decide those things for myself.
• Don’t put expectations around my political behavior or my sexual behavior or my work life, I’ll draw those lines where I want.
• I know Jesus wants me to feel good, it’s why he came.

The Jesus Gospel has some very prickly edges to it. Like when Jesus says “deny yourself and follow me.”

These are popular gospels, especially in America. And I only bring them up because there are millions and millions of people who follow them. You Can Have It All. Jesus Wants You to Have Wealth. Feel Good About Yourself.

By contrast, listen to these words from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran pastor imprisoned and executed by the Nazis at the end of WWII. 1937:

“If our Christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship, if we have watered down the gospel into emotional uplift which makes no costly demands…” we are stuck “in a Christianity which can no longer see any difference between an ordinary human life and a life committed to Christ.”

Stewardship means taking care of what we’ve been given. It is part of our following after Jesus, which is a costly following.

What are we supposed to steward?

Called to be Stewards of God’s Creation

Christians should be leading the charge in taking care of our world, providing leadership but also individually doing the things that make a difference.

• It means we can’t heat our houses to 70 degrees.
• Or have a car for every member of our family or drive gas-guzzling tanks.
• It means supporting political moves and people that consider the destruction that our lifestyles are wreaking in consuming the earth’s resources at a dizzying rate.
• It means supporting international resolutions that fight against global warming.

To be a steward of God’s creation…means changing the way we live. Starting with me. It is a costly thing.

Called to be Stewards of God’s Ministry

We are Jesus’ people. We are called to be ministering the gospel, and that of course can take place in any number of ways. But I want you to consider that your ministry might be something that isn’t easy for you to do. That is uncomfortable. That you’ve never done before. What is that? I don’t know.

• Becoming surrogate parents for a child in your neighborhood who has a tough home life.
• Making friends at the Wednesday Night Dinner.
• Working with street kids.
• Hanging in there with a friend who is hostile.
• Talking with someone about Jesus.

It could be a million things.

My concern is that we are intentional about being Jesus’ people. Right now there is a very strong American Christian movement that encourages us to only minister in those areas where we identify our personal gifts. It’s not all wrong. But it usually ends up meaning where you feel comfortable and capable.

But you know what? God might well call you or me to step forward exactly where we are not comfortable and feel incapable. Where we have to literally depend on Him instead of ourselves. Where we have to deny ourselves and follow.

Called to be Stewards of our Time

Now we get close to home, don’t we? How are we investing our time in kingdom things? Where does our decisions about where our time goes reach outside of ourselves, or outside of our immediate families?

Rick Reilly is probably my favorite sportswriter, writes for Sports Illustrated. About a year ago he wrote a column about a man named Dick Hoyt. There’s a little video that’s making the rounds of the email world right now, so you could easily have seen it.

Dick Hoyt and his wife Judy had a son in 1962 that they named Rick. Because of complications during birth with the umbilical cord, Rick was born with brain damage and unable to control his limbs.

Doctors told the Hoyts he would be a vegetable the rest of his life and they should put him in an institution. But they didn’t buy it. They thought they could see Rick’s eyes follow him around the room. They took him for a huge series of tests when he was eleven, to see if anything could help Rick communicate, but were told there was nothing.

Then they told the doctors to tell Rick a joke. They did. He laughed. His brain worked.

They rigged up a computer so that by using his head, Rick could communicate. When he was in high school, a classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run to benefit him. Rick told his dad via computer, “Dad, I want to do that.”

Now, Dick Hoyt had never run more than a mile and was carrying all sorts of extra pounds. He pushed Rick in a cart the whole 5 miles…and could barely walk for two weeks.

That was only the start of it. Because that was the day when Rick typed out on his computer “Dad…when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore.”

I have no idea where Dick Hoyt is faithwise, or how he makes things work financially. I only know that beginning in 1962, his concept of the stewardship of time changed radically. In the ensuing years, Dick has pushed Rick in a chair in marathons 85 times. 8 times they have finished triatholons…pushing the chair 26.2 miles, swimming and pulling Rick in a dinghy 2 ½ miles and pedaling him on a special bike 112 miles…in the same day. Last year they completed their 24th Boston Marathon, their best time being 2 hrs and 40 minutes.

Amazing story. But it caught my attention as I thought about time this week, and where we invest it and whether we ever make decisions that are costly to what we might want to do.

Dick Hoyt gives up an awful lot of things to spend time with his son Rick. It’s cost him a great deal. Though in Jesus Gospel fashion, he has reaped rewards he had no idea were in store, the rewards were not why he started this crazy business in the first place. It was just the right thing to do.

Called to be Stewards of Our Money

Jesus talked a lot about money. It’s another part of following after him. Here’s what C.S. Lewis had to say in Mere Christianity about money and the call to be open-handed with it:

I do not believe one can settle (the question of) how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.

In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little.

If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.

I guess that brings us full circle. If we want to think about Stewardship, yes we have pledge cards, and a budget for 2007 to consider. Yes, I feel great about the ministries that God has called our community to be part of. But Stewardship is part of discipleship, part of our answering Jesus’ question: “Do you want to follow?…then deny yourself …pick up your cross each day and follow me.”

It’s not the You Can Have It All. Jesus Wants You to Have Wealth. Feel Good About Yourself. It’s the Jesus Gospel. It’s the one he modeled out for us on his way to the cross. It’s the one he chose, for our sakes, to experience. It’s costly.