Transcript
“I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready.” Please be seated.
One of the many blessings of my ministry as ordained clergy in the Episcopal Church is getting to do weddings — and, more specifically, getting to do premarital counseling. Now, you might wonder, “How can Lisa do premarital counseling? She’s never even been married.” And I ask myself the same thing. But the reality is, I’m not telling couples how to be married.
I’m giving them tools to help them stay married. I’ve gone through a number of trainings on all of this, and I often follow a specific curriculum. But my favorite part of premarital counseling isn’t the training part or the equipping part. It’s the fact that for at least an hour every week or so, for five or six weeks, I get to sit down with two people and we get to talk.
We get to share stories and ask questions. Not every topic is easy or fun, but every topic is important. Usually at the beginning of each session, just to get the conversation started, I ask a getting-to-know-you kind of question. You know the kind: What was your first date? How did you know she or he was the one?
What’s the proposal story? One question I love asking couples is, what was the best gift you gave him or her, or received from him or her? And I have to say, of all the couples I’ve worked with — and I’ve worked with young couples and old couples, first-marriage couples and second-marriage couples, straight couples and gay couples — of all the couples I’ve worked with, this question always seems to get the same kind of answer. No one names that fancy piece of jewelry that costs whatever three months’ salary is the current expectation. No one names a car or a house or a boat. No one names a piece of furniture or a piece of artwork or anything that might have been wrapped in shiny paper.
Instead, just about every couple names an experience: a weekend camping trip, a tour of Europe, a made-from-scratch dinner on the beach watching the sunset, just the two of them. Even just a whole day with nothing planned except being together. Rarely is it an actual object. Instead, it is an experience — time spent together. And not just any kind of time spent together, like a Saturday morning where he’s pruning the hedges and she’s on the riding lawnmower, or he’s folding laundry and she’s fixing the washing machine. Instead, it is time spent together intentionally. So there is work involved to prepare for the time together: to imagine what the time will be like, to pack the picnic, book the tickets, check the camping equipment. And yet there is no real pressure, no expectation of anything massively extravagant — simply being present to one another through the gift of time.
I wonder if, in today’s gospel reading — the parable of the king who is trying to give a wedding banquet for his son — I wonder if the king understood this. It doesn’t have to be about extravagance. It can simply be about presence. It doesn’t have to involve slaughtered oxen and calves. Instead, it can simply involve time together. Which is perhaps why, when we talk about stewardship, we don’t just talk about giving money.
Yes, giving money is important, and we will talk about that, and you will be asked to fill out a pledge card at some point this month. And we also talk about quality time — set aside, intentionally spent together and with God. Some people have heard this called “time and talent.” Today we are calling it Works and Wisdom. Works, of course, are the opportunities we have to roll up our sleeves, to offer ourselves in service, to pitch in and help make things better.
And wisdom is the creativity used to help grow our mission. It is collaborating to serve more of our neighbors. It is the hoping and dreaming and imagining that I often talk about. So giving of works and wisdom is like giving those favorite gifts — the gifts of time intentionally spent together. Yes, just like quality time with a loved one, giving works and wisdom to St. John’s Church requires planning, and also thought, intention, sometimes creativity, and most definitely commitment. Take teaching a Bible study or a Sunday school class: you have to plan the actual time together, not just show up and start talking — and you also do have to show up and start talking. Or singing in the choir: you have to know the music and practice it, and then share it with the congregation and with God. Or offering flowers at the altar, or words of Scripture at the lectern, or even snacks after the service during coffee hour. None of these acts simply happen. They require thought and planning and preparation. And then, when they do happen, they involve time intentionally spent together.
And just like the gift of quality time to a loved one, the gifts of works and wisdom — of planning and then implementing — strengthen us as St. John’s Church. They strengthen our relationship as a community and our relationship with God. In fact, if I asked each of you, “What is the best gift you have received from St. John’s Church?” you might mention a bouquet of altar flowers when you weren’t feeling well, or a candle on the day of your baptism. But I suspect most of us would mention things like community, faith, fellowship, generations of believers and family, friendliness, love and support, nurturing faith, freedom to worship God, being God-focused, and even tradition. In fact, those are actual things written on our tree roots — and there’s still time to write things on our tree roots — things that have helped root us as St. John’s Church. And now, if those are the gifts you have received, it’s time to think about the gifts you give to St. John’s Church: those gifts of works and wisdom, of rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty and getting down to work, and of hoping and dreaming and imagining what could come next.
In a bit, during our welcome and announcements, Betsy will stand up and invite you to think about exactly that — to think about the works and the wisdom you have and are willing to give to St. John’s Church and to God. And as I said, if the roots we talked about last week are the gifts we receive from St. John’s Church and from God, then this week, our works and wisdom are the gifts we give back.
But here’s the thing: giving is not transactional. I don’t want you to think, “I get this much because I give this much.” Instead, I want to invite you to think about the love, the quality time, the community, the joys and the sorrows and the unconditional support that you have experienced throughout your faith journey. Because that’s what your giving should be based on — not a transactional get-and-give, like at a grocery store, but something a whole lot more like a romantic relationship, or a relationship with a best friend: the kind that simply involves giving and receiving.
Naturally, we have already received the best gift we could ever receive, and that’s the love of a God who took the time to create each and every single one of us. Now we get to give that love back — to God, to our neighbors, to ourselves — by giving to St. John’s Church. Not transactionally, but generously, boundlessly, abundantly, with all that we are and all that we have.
What works, what wisdom do you have that you could give back? Think about it, and then go ahead and give. Amen.