Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Philippians 2:1-8;  1 Peter 4:7-11

Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one
another with whatever gift each of you has received. — 1 Peter 4:10

For four weeks now in the Adult Sunday School class, we’ve been reading David Ottati’s book Theology for Liberal Presbyterians and Other Endangered Species.  Ottati roots his theology in the Reformed understanding of grace alone (sola gratia)—God’s sovereign grace alone, or in his way of saying it, “We belong to a God of grace.”   Everything follows from that.  A God of grace does not coerce.  So God does not manipulate us by a system of rewards and punishments, and we cannot manipulate God through our behavior or by our prayers.  God freely loves us; God freely redeems us—all from the very beginning and extending into eternity.  And our response, when we realize this good news, is naturally rooted in gratitude and expressed through such things as openness and hospitality.

I’ve been thinking about this while working with our Stewardship & Finance Committee on our Stewardship Drive for this year.  Then I came across those words from 1st Peter: “Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gifts each of you has received.”  “Stewards of the manifold grace of God”—1st Peter sees Christians as stewards of God’s grace.  It’s a strange sort of phrase, and it gives a new slant on stewardship.

We all know what “stewardship” means, don’t we?  It’s a code word for giving money to the church?  As in years past, in three weeks we’ll gather for our annual Commitment Sunday Stewardship Dinner after closing worship by making our financial commitments to the church.  So many of you commit more than money, giving of your time and talents, á la 1st Peter’s call to “serve one another with whatever gifts each of you has received.”  All of this is needed to continue being in ministry in this time and place.  Volunteering and raising enough to pay our bills is important stuff.  Oh yes indeed.  But it is also important to consider why we give.

Giving is about more than meeting the church’s needs and doing all the ministries we want to do. David Ottati would say that stewardship is somehow rooted in our experience of God’s grace.  Our giving therefore arises out of gratitude that responds to God’s generosity and so enables our giving to reflect God’s generosity.  Former Moderator of our PC(USA) General Assembly Marge Carpenter, reflecting on how well off we are versus many other nations, writes, “We Christians in this country are blessed.  And when we realize how blessed we are, we have to be grateful and generous.  We have to give thanks to God, and as we are being thankful, we need to remember to share.”  That’s all well and good.  But if we truly are stewards of God’s grace, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

You see, God’s grace has to do with God freely choosing to meet our deepest and most crucial needs.  This means two things for us as stewards of God’s grace.  First, our giving ought to be every bit as free as God’s giving.  But all too often we end up feeling compelled to give.  Marj Carpenter’s words are meant to inspire us, and perhaps they do.  Yet notice the “have to’s” and “need to’s” she uses.  There’s guilt in “them thar words.”  Guilt also lies in the huge gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” of the world.  But while guilt can often generate lots and lots of giving, it has nothing at all to do with the grace of God.

The second implication of being stewards of God’s free choice to meet our deepest and most crucial needs is that our giving—whether monetary or through service—should connect us with our own deepest needs.  The problem we have as givers is that we tend to focus on what we have to give on the one hand and on how needy the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable are on the other.  Here’s how it goes.  We have no needs, but they do.  Hence we give because they need us to.  Notice how one-sided this is.  We have enough to give.  We’re OK.  All’s right with our world.  They, on the other hand—the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable—are not OK.  They have nothing to offer to us.  Even when we couch our giving in terms of serving the cause of justice, we have a tendency to think of ourselves as better then they are—better off anyway, because they need us and we don’t need them.  We have no needs.  After all, we’re the blessed, the fortunate, the givers.

Oh, maybe that’s a little extreme.  All of us do have needs.  Some are serious and others not.  I “need” the latest mystery novel by Tony Hillerman. I "need" a new computer.  And I need enough money to pay my daughter’s bills at college.  Maybe you need a new car, or a job, or money for medical care.  We all need peace.  But still, we don’t like being reminded of our needs.  We prefer to be independent, to take care of ourselves, to stand on our own two feet.  So when it comes to giving to our church or to charity or serving those less fortunate than we are, we’re “up here” and they’re “down there.”  And God’s grace often comes up only when we say to ourselves, “There but for the grace of God, go I.” 

The problem in all this is the gap between our charity and Paul’s admonition to the Philippians to “do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”  Paul points to Jesus Christ as the prime instance of how God works through grace.  God doesn’t stand apart and dispense charity. “Christ Jesus”, says Paul, “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself to become human—coming as a child and growing to adulthood—fully human, even to the extent of experiencing death…”  In this, God comes to us, meeting our need for salvation while at the same time coming to know what it is like for human beings to live and to suffer and die.  There is a kind of mutuality here that we reenact when we truly are stewards of God’s grace.  The poor, the sick, and the vulnerable don’t just need us.  We need them—and we learn something from them.

Some years ago I came across a meditation in a book from the Iona Community in Scotland.  It deals specifically with the interaction between those who give and those who appear to be “in need.”  I want to share it with you now. Listen for the twists that open the speaker to new understandings.  (It’s a meditation, so, yes, go ahead and close your eyes to listen—but no nodding off!)

The Teachers [from He Was In the World by John L. Bell, G.I.A. Publications (1994)]

I met him on the train,
and before long I felt I knew him,
I felt I could trust him.

He was in education: ‘Learning for Life’ he called it.

I said I was interested in education too,
so he invited me to come with him
to where he taught and learned.

It was off the main road, near the fire station.
It didn’t look like a school…
You walked in the door of a second-hand shop
and, going through the back,
you came to a big room with a lot of people in it.
We stood and looked around.   (pause)

In the corner was an old man with a white stick.
Beside him sat a girl reading him the newspaper.

‘Nice to see young folk helping the blind,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘he’s actually teaching her how to see.’

Across the floor, in the direction of the toilets,
came a wheel chair.
A paraplegic boy of 18 sat in it
and a boy the same age pushed it.

‘It’s great when friends help each other,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘the boy in the chair
is teaching the other how to walk.’

An old woman lay in a bed at the bottom of the room.
She was covered with open sores.
A woman, much her junior, was dressing her wounds.

‘Is she a nurse?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘the old woman is a nurse.
She’s teaching the other how to care.’
Seated around a table were a group of young couples.
A doctor in a white coat was talking to them about childbirth.
He spoke slowly and used sign language with his hands.

‘I think it’s only fair
that deaf people should know about these things,’ I said.
‘But they do know about these things,’ my friend replied.
‘They are teaching the doctor how to listen.’

And then I saw a woman on a respirator, breathing slowly.
These were her last breaths.
And around her were her friends, smoothing her brow,
holding her hands.

‘It’s not good to die alone,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ he replied,
‘but she is not dying alone.
She is teaching the others how to live.’

Confused and not knowing what to say,
I suggested we sit down.   (pause)

After a while, I felt I could speak.
‘Seeing all this,’ I said, ‘I want to pray.
I want to thank God that I have all my faculties.
I now realize how much more I can do to help.

Before I could say more,
he looked me straight in the face and said,
‘I don’t want to upset your devotional life,
but I hope you will also pray
to know your own need.
And I hope you will never be afraid
to be touched by the needy.’

The grace of God is transforming, renewing, redeeming—every bit as much for those who give as for those who receive.  We may well be in the position of serving the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable because they need us.  But we need them every bit as much—to teach us our own needs for healing and wholeness.  There are many times when I’ve heard someone say something like, “I signed up to work at the food pantry… or the soup kitchen… or the tutoring program because I wanted to give something back.  But in just meeting and talking with the folks and getting to know them, I have gotten so much more in return.”  Lots of teachers have told me how much they themselves end up learning from their students.  And from time to time, someone will confide in me how as they have increased their giving to the church and to charities they’ve become more content with what they have, more generous, and more deeply aware of what their own true needs.

There is a well-known prayer that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.  Where there is hatred, let me sow love…” and so on.  It is the “Prayer of St. Francis.”  The final sentence of that prayer begins, “For it is by giving that one receives…”  There is much truth in that, but it goes even deeper.  In the relationship of giver and receiver, God’s grace bounces back and forth—an endless echo of grace that ultimately makes it nearly impossible to determine who is giver and who is receiver.  Both parties bring needs to the encounter… and both bring gifts.  And over all is the grace of God.  We give… and we receive.  But most importantly, in our giving as stewards of God’s grace, we learn our own deepest needs… and we encounter the very One who ultimately meets those needs.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.