The Best of Our Love

In nearly 31 years of ministry I’ve participated in lots of stewardship campaigns, each with a different theme.

I remember the year the theme was peloton, and folks were encouraged to give generously enough so that those church members with fewer financial resources were able to draft along with them, while the whole church still moved forward.

Another year the theme we copied from another church was “Step Up to the Plate,” and church members were encouraged to hit it out of the ballpark with generous pledges.

One year had a circus theme with a goal that by the end of the stewardship period we would have pledges enough in hand to cover the next year’s operating expenses “with the greatest of ease” – no need to trim the budget or beg for more.

One stewardship chair chose O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi as the theme, and we tried to encourage members to a heartfelt level of giving to something they loved (the church) without completely sacrificing their only treasure as poor Della and Jim had done.

Another stewardship chair wanted me to read the section from To Kill a Mockingbird where Rev. Sykes directs the doors of the church be shut until the congregation gives ten dollars to support Helen Robinson while her husband is in jail. And because I was a very new minister, I did as she requested but I also read this passage:

"First Purchase African M.E. Church was in the Quarters outside the southern town limits, across the old sawmill tracks. It was an ancient paint-peeled frame building, the only church in Maycomb with a steeple and bell, called First Purchase because it was paid for from the first earnings of freed slaves. Negroes worshipped in it on Sundays and white men gambled in it on weekdays."

Because I have always been profoundly moved by the thought that a people could love and need a church so deeply, so utterly, that they would spend their first ever earnings to build it. That’s a depth of devotion, a recognition of the value of church, I hope the congregations I serve will instill in individuals members.

Yet another year a Unitarian Universalist stewardship chair dared to choose a passage of Christian scripture for the campaign theme: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21). When she gave her stewardship pitch she displayed pictures or symbols of the people, creatures, and experiences that have pieces of her heart: singing in the choir, her daughter, her cats, the church, preparing elaborate meals for friends, her horse. And then she arranged the pictures and symbols in order of how much of her heart each of them holds. She said that upon careful reflection she realized that the church fell in between her daughter and her horse. So she had decided to pledge to the church an amount just slightly more than the annual cost of boarding, feeding and providing vet care for her horse.

Some of the stewardship themes were more fun or easier to preach. I don’t remember any more which of the drives was most successful, raising the most dollars or garnering the highest percentage increase over the previous year, but all of them, and all the others I haven’t mentioned, got the job done, more or less. When the time comes for you to consider the pledge you’ll make to this church for the coming fiscal year, you could ground your decision making on whichever metaphor speaks most compellingly to you–the peleton, the circus, the baseball game. Perhaps even being locked in the sanctuary until you have given all that you have to give–if coercion is what motivates you, though that is far from my first choice. As they say, you do you.

However, Della selling her hair to buy a watch fob for Jim who has meanwhile sold his watch to buy combs for Della’s hair. The formerly enslaved people of Maycomb, Alabama using their first wages to build a church. That stewardship chair’s ranked display of her heart treasures. These are the images bringing life to my consideration of our stewardship theme this year, here at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah–the Best of Our Love. They speak of priorities. They speak of generosity. They speak of devotion. Selfless devotion that paradoxically blesses the giver. Tangible signs of the best of anyone’s loves.

Even after all these years, figuring out how to talk about giving money to the church both confuses my head and solaces my heart. The giving is at once a maddeningly complex concept and an elegantly simple gesture, because, as I wrote in this month’s newsletter, there is no church apart from each of us individually and all of us collectively. In a few minutes Jane Rago, this year’s stewardship chair, will stand up here to kick off our stewardship campaign. When she asks us to give what monetary treasure we have to another manifestation of what treasure we have (this church), she will in essence be asking us to give the best of our love to ourselves (and one another), through our pledge to the church. In my head that sounds convoluted. In my heart it feels like hope.

Since I was installed as your settled minister last October, my future is more certain that it was at pledge time a year ago. My overall family finances are a bit more stable, too. So the pledge I made last week reflects a fifty percent increase over what I’ve been giving the church this year. It feels risky because while my personal circumstances are a bit more solid, the world around me is anything but solid. But in uncertain, frightening times we need the church more than ever. When hatred, bullying, cruelty and greed cast individual livelihoods and lives into greater peril with each passing day, when our democracy at home and our alliances around the world are shattered, we need to proclaim and live into our values–justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence and generosity.

We need to both give and receive the best of our collective love in order that our church might continue to flourish; continue to offer us the blessings of community, meaning, and hope; continue to offer those same blessings to everyone who comes to us seeking something they may yet not be able to name; continue to act in the world at large for justice and care and protection of the most vulnerable of our kin.

….

If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.

If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.

A tip, a small purchase here and there,

And things just keep going. I guess.

Oh, the wistfulness of that final phrase. "I guess". We want to move in an economy as clean and simple as the one Gary Soto describes in his poem "How Things Work"–wherein all our mundane financial transactions are as so many links in a chain of equally mundane financial transactions, which taken all together just keep things going, and that’s how things work, ultimately meeting the needs of each participant. But that I guess reminds us that, alas, that’s not how things work in late stage capitalism. Instead middlemen, corporate greed, shareholders, unjust employment practices, and more processes and people intervene to corrupt every link of the chain. Perhaps, as my cousin David is fond of saying, come the socialist revolution that will all change. In the economy of the church, however, we don't have to wait for a socialist revolution.

In the economy of the church, we "err on the side of generosity".

In the economy of the church [we] "give because someone gave to us...[w]e give because giving has changed us."

In the economy of the church, when we give abundantly the best of our love–in the shape of our presence, our time, our skill, and our dollars–"[t]here is no start./No finish./Everyone wins."

Amen.