Prayer. Scripture. Confession. Sabbath. Worship. Discernment. Hospitality. These are the things we’ve looked at in the last weeks as we’ve talked about Spiritual Disciplines: not things we have to do, not activities for the super spiritual. But things we choose to live out, that help meet our longing to know God better. Ways in which we respond to God. Today’s spiritual discipline is…Stewardship. Of course. It’s Stewardship Sunday. Great timing!

For some of us, that means “Oh, we’re going to talk about finances.” Well, Exactly true. We are. In a few minutes, I’ll talk about financial stewardship. We don’t need to be embarrassed about that. Jesus spent a lot of time talking about money. In fact, fully half of Jesus’ parables have to do with money or material things. Jesus seemed to realize that how we spend our money has a lot to do with what we really value, and even more to do with who is running our lives.

But whenever I talk or write about financial stewardship, I always think it’s important to put it in context. Stewardship is a much broader topic than just money. Stewardship has to do with taking care of what we’ve been given. If we have given our lives to Jesus Christ, we are acknowledging that literally everything we have…we’ve been given.

When Todd read from Psalm 50 it emphasized that everything is God’s: “Every living creature, the birds of the air, the cattle on a thousand hills,” everything is God’s. So “stewardship” means taking care of what we’ve been entrusted with: relationships, community, the environment, houses, cars, time, whatever. Stewardship means it’s not yours. Maybe the broadest scope of stewardship is “life.” We’ve been entrusted with Life. How will we live it?

Bruce Devereaux is a person who has learned a lot about this in the last year, and I asked Bruce if he’d share a little of his story this morning.

Bruce shares:

Are you ready? While I lay on the road after crashing my bicycle on April 15 th, this is the question God could have asked me. Little did I know the adventure God had in store for me over the next 7 months.

All of us have metaphorical bumps in the road, mine happened to be literal. On that Sunday bicycle ride I thought about the week ahead and how great it was to be outside, as a tax accountant only two more days of tax season, then I’d leave the next Saturday for Mississippi to help rebuild Katrina damaged houses. Life was good.

Over that week I struggled to say alive. The accident caused a broken clavicle, 8 ribs and a shattered hip socket. Surgery to rebuild the hip required 13 pins and 2 plates. After the surgery two blood clots and a partially collapsed lung kept me in intensive care for another 7 days.

Pastor Dan and others from Bethany, neighbors and friends came to visit, pray and encourage me over the 15 days I spent in Harborview. I learned of the saints around the world who prayed for my recovery. Though I knew I was sick and recovery might take a long time, I gained a sense of hope that everything would turn out OK.

Last Sunday our first praise song was “Blessed Be Your Name”. As I tried to sing, tears flowed and I felt as though I’d lived the words of this song. We’ll sing this song again during communion later on. The first line goes: “Blessed be Your name in the land that is plentiful, Where Your streams of abundance flow, blessed be your name.”

For me it was easy to be thankful and to praise God before the bike accident. I was blessed in so many ways; good health and friends, a loving wife, material possessions, few worries.

“And blessed be Your name when I’m found in the desert place, Though I walk through the wilderness, blessed be your name.” My life changed in an instant and walking again became a question mark. The desert place was being in death’s neighborhood. It wouldn’t have taken much to overcome what little strength I had. The prayers of the saints sustained me. Now I try to live in the moment, life is uncertain.

“Every blessing You pour out I’ll turn back to praise, And when the darkness closes in, Lord, still I will say – Blessed be the name of the Lord, blessed be your name.” I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of joy. Joy doesn’t know circumstances. Despite the accident and effort to recover, I received the gift of joy. Being alive and seeing God work through others strengthen my joy and the sincerity of my praise and prayers to God.

“You give and take away, You give and take away, My heart will choose to say, Lord, blessed be Your name”. Our response to trials is both a choice and an attitude. I am thankful for the many good things that have come from the accident. They far out weigh the suffering I went through.

Two stories of reconciliation that resulted from the accident:

First- Close friends that hadn’t spoken to each other in over a year reconnected when one called the other to tell them of my accident.

Second- For 8 years I hadn’t spoken to my daughter since she graduated from college and told me she didn’t want me in her life. It became difficult to stay connected as she grew up living with her mother in another city. I didn’t make seeing and being a part of her life a priority.

After getting home from the hospital, I wrote my now 30 year-old daughter a letter saying I’d learned how fragile and uncertain life is and that we’d both regret never knowing each other as adults.

She responded by writing and saying she was willing to reconnect. Today we’ve reconciled and are on a journey to know one another again.

Are you ready? Before the accident I would have said no! Though I felt unprepared and out of control as doctors and nurses worked to rebuild my shattered body, God had been strengthening my body, spirit and community.

I recognize three ways God prepared me:

For over 30 years I regularly donated blood and platelets at the Puget Sound Blood Center without ever expecting to receive 5 life giving units of blood after the hip surgery.

I’ve attended Bethany for 28 years and served as a deacon, elder, choir member and Stephen’s Minister. Without the Bethany community, both the physical and emotional recovery would have been harder.

Last Sunday Dan spoke about hospitality. Two years ago, my wife, Glyn, and I started inviting our neighbors for soup and bread once a month. We hoped to get to know our neighbors better and for a closer community. Our neighbors along with others provided us meals every other day for over a month. There were many other acts of kindness and support.

In hindsight, God had been preparing us and others for the time when we would need help in so many ways. I am humbled by the ways God provided for me and allowed me to again help others.

Thank you for your blessings and prayers in the last 7 months. May you continue to be a blessing to others.

Bruce, we are so grateful for you sharing, and for you and Glyn opening up your lives so that our whole community can know more of God. Thank you.

Today we’re going to read a few verses in the gospel of Luke, and see how this story might apply to life, and to our financial lives. The scripture passage starts out with Jesus doing one of the things he clearly thought was a most important task for him to complete on this earth: training leaders for God’s people. After several fieldwork assignments in ministry, Jesus’ 12 apostles return to him. Jesus tries to sneak off and debrief with them, but a huge crowd of people follow them. Instead of being exasperated, Jesus welcomed them all, taught them about God’s Kingdom, and healed people who were sick.

Now I’ll read from The Message, Luke 9:12-17.

Interruptions. They’re the worst, aren’t they? Interruptions make it impossible to get anything checked off our to-do lists. Here the disciples are about to get seminar from Jesus with some good solid training in ministry in the Kingdom of God, and they get interrupted by a big crowd of people. What they find, of course, is what we almost always find…that a great deal of learning, maybe most of it, happens in the midst of interruptions.

So Jesus’ disciples hit an interruption. Instead of getting to train them, Jesus spends the entire day teaching and healing people, and now it’s late. I think the disciples are concerned. I think maybe they don’t think Jesus has noticed that the day is winding down. I think maybe they don’t think Jesus knows about the needs people have. “Lord, for goodness sakes, dismiss them so they can go get food.”

“You feed them.” Yeah, right. You want us to somehow go cater a meal for 5000?

“No. What do you have in your hands?”

Five loaves and two fish. Five thousand people.

“Okay. Put it forward and let’s see what happens.”

What? Has Jesus lost it? Actually, no. Jesus knows exactly what he’s doing. They’ve never received training like this before. Here’s four things they were learning, and that can apply to our lives of stewardship as well.

1) The Twelve have to take a leap of faith.

You’ll notice Jesus didn’t ask them if they felt like doing this, or if they could find a better use for the 5 loaves and two fish. He just told them to sit the people down to receive a meal. Period. Trust me. Believe me. That’s going to require a leap. It’s the way Jesus set it up. It’s one way God seems to consistently operate. When Israel was in the desert and God told them he would send manna, they had to take a leap. When Jesus called the disciples to follow him in the first place, they had to take a leap.

There’s a Leap of Faith part to financial stewardship. We do it and see what happens. It doesn’t always make sense. There’s all sorts of questions, and right now in Stewardship month, I’ve been asked a lot of them. We give God a tithe.

How much?

10%...that’s what the word “tithe” means. But the number isn’t even as descriptive as this: what we give is to be the best we have, the first we have…not the leftovers.

Do we have to?

You never have to…but you say you want to know God better? Give. Is it 10% of my gross income or the net? I don’t think that scripture answers that question. If you want my opinion, I’ll say net. But if we worry too much about which of those hairs to split, we’re probably missing the point. Should I give the whole tithe to my local church or some to other ministry or people? I don’t’ think scripture answers that either. But I do think that if the local church is to have significant ministry, we will all need to give significantly to it. Is there a maximum? Okay, I made up that question, no one asked me! But the answer is No. Some of us should be giving way over 10%, and living on way less than 90%.

One reason it’s a leap is, we don’t know exactly what’s on the other side. At least not until we try it. Will we be able to make a budget? What would we be giving up? The prosperity gospel folks will want to tell you there’s a perfect one-to-one correspondence (at least, if not one to two or three or 10) between the dollar you give and the dollar you get back.

Don’t believe it. Believe that God knows your needs, yes. Believe that God can and will provide, yes. But God is not some kind of celestial investment formula for getting dollar on dollar returns. Maybe God knows your needs have much more to do with letting go than gathering in. That’s what you’ll get back. Maybe God knows what you most need is to learn how to trust. That’s what you’ll get back.

The statistics will say that for a lot of us this whole discussion is a moot point.

In the church in America, during the Great Depression in 1933, when money was amazingly scarce, the average Christian gave away 3.3%. 75 years later in the most affluent country in the world we give about 2.5%. A lower percentage than during the most difficult economic time in U.S. history. In recent surveys, only 12% of American Christians tithed 10% of their income, whether to their churches or to church and charities combined.

Now, hear me. This isn’t to heap guilt on any of our heads. But I am wondering, for you, for Anne and me. How long since we took a leap of faith in our giving?

2) Following Jesus was costly. There was a lot on the line. Careers. Pride. How they were perceived in others’ eyes. Have you ever stopped to think how else this story might have ended? The disciples have people sit down. Jesus breaks the five loaves of bread, the two fish, the first 11 people in the crowd get a little bit to eat, and that’s it. It’s gone. The crowd boos. The disciples feel stupid. It’s a big risk.

To be good financial stewards is costly. If you give some away, you have less! That’s the way the math works. When Anne and I were first married, we knew a group of people roughly our age, doing similar kinds of work, we all were earning more or less the same amount. And after a while we realized that other couples were doing things we weren’t. Traveling. Buying new cars. How were they doing that? Well, several of them weren’t giving anything away. They had more to spend. Now, we were fine with the decisions to give we made. But that drove home that we were making a choice in how we lived.

Have we stopped to ponder lately, that giving generously with our finances means changing how we live?

3) God is the kind of God who takes a little and makes a lot. Five loaves, two fish. Five thousand people.

Jesus not only cared about the people, he did something. And through the Twelve he’s teaching us, the Church, to do the same. We care, we pray, our hearts are moved, all great. And we DO things to participate in Christ’s ministry.

Humor me here. Take your pink bulletin insert and look at the Stewardship Sunday side. In five minutes I filled up that middle part with a whole list of things God is doing through this community. And there’s tons missing, not close to room for everything. As a community, one small community here at Bethany, we are involved in ministry here, on Queen Anne, in Seattle, the U.S., and all over world.

No one of us could possibly participate in these ways, it’s too costly, we don’t have the resources, but you slide your five loaves and two fish out to see what happens. God takes a little and makes a lot. Somehow, someway these amazing things take place. Five loaves, two fish. Five thousand people. And Twelve baskets full (one for each apostle) come back.

A few years ago we felt God pulling our Bethany community toward involvement with HIV/AIDS ministry in Africa, and that was narrowed down to Kenya. We had no idea what we were doing.

We thought we’d sponsor kids. Now there are dozens and dozens of sponsored children, some we’ve even been able to visit. We thought we’d try sending a team to Kenya to build some relationships, now a number of people have been there. We have been led in worship by Kenyan brothers and sisters. We have partnered in all sorts of projects, urban and rural with folks working in AIDS affected areas, and there are dreams of much more. God took something very small, and is growing it bigger and bigger.

4) God uses what his people have in their hands, or maybe better put, God will multiply what His people give…for the sake of others. It’s what I hate about the prosperity gospel approach. It becomes all about us. Someone made the observation that when Jesus was hungry in the wilderness, he fasted. Stayed hungry. But when the crowd with him was hungry, he fed them. Jesus certainly doesn’t seem to be emphasizing the comfort and ease of life for himself or his apostles, but he is giving them an unforgettable lesson in caring for others. For the sake of others. It’s what His church is supposed to be about.

As Bethany’s Session struggles over a budget right now for 2008, the same question pops up each year: we’ve been increasing the % of the budget every year that goes directly to outreach partners and projects. It’s about ¼ of the budget now, just for direct outreach things. The question always arises, “How long can we keep increasing? Won’t we hit a point where it’s maxed out, where we can’t do other things?” Maybe. But we’re not there yet, and if we were…what a great problem that would be to have!

When Jesus used an interruption to train his apostles, they learned about another leap of faith, about the cost of following, about God’s ability to turn a little into a lot, and his heart to care for other people. At the end of the day, I suspect they knew God better and loved Him more than when they started.

We learn those same things in our financial stewardship: a leap of faith, the cost of giving, the joy of seeing God multiply resources and the ways we are privileged to participate in Christ’s ministry to others. And I suspect that if we will walk this road of generosity in our financial giving…we will find we know Him better and love Him more than when we started. Amen.