I Used to Give to the Church

A Homily for Stewardship Sunday 

November 17, 2013 

I like to say: "I used to give to the church.  I don’t think badly of people who give to the church.  I used to give to the church myself."  

Don’t fall out of your pew just yet. Hang in there while I explain myself. 

In the mid 1950’s when I was born, the Church was a growing, thriving, institution.  My family was a God-fearing, church-going, fundamentalist Christian family. 

So I grew up giving to the Church.  I grew up tithing to the Church. Through good times and bad, my family taught me to tithe to the Church. 

I grew up understanding the tithe (giving ten percent) as the standard set by the witness of Scripture, by the Church itself, and by my own family.  

As I became financially independent from my family, the tithe continued to be my standard for giving.  It also became a journey of faith. 

As I struggled with money, and bills, and trust, and faith, I often gave less.  Sometimes gave more. But I never backed down from tithing as my personal standard.  

I don’t see anything magic about ten percent.  I just know from personal experience that giving ten percent is enough of a commitment to make me aware of money as a spiritual issue in my life, enough to make me aware of who I am and Whose I am in this old world, enough to discover that God is able to both use me and to take care of me, enough to change my lifestyle and my life. 

So I used to give to the Church. And tithing was my personal standard.  

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But over the years, something happened.  Something happened to me, and something happened to the Church. 

You know when you reach the age when you realize that your parents aren’t perfect?  When you realize that your parents are just human?  That they have stuff wrong with them,

just like everyone else?  When you realize that there were some ways that they had let you down as a parent?  That they had even wounded you in some ways? 

Well, you know where this is going?  I reached a time in my life when I realized that the Church was just human. That the Church has let me down.  That the Church had even wounded me in some ways. 

But that wasn’t just a personal insight for me.  It was a time when the Church had become a strong institutional force in society, an institution that expected loyalty and respect,  at the same time that it was getting lost in its institutionalization, at the same time that it unconsciously perpetuating itself became its main agenda. 

I grew up in a generation when hundreds, thousands, multi-thousands began to lose faith in the Church. 

So tithing became a much more interesting journey of faith.  I didn’t leave my mother because I figured out that she was human.  Nor did I leave my Church.  

(I did leave the non-denominational denomination I grew up in. They would tell you that I left “The Church.”  But here I am. Obviously, I didn’t leave what I would call the “Church.”) 

I did have to take another step in my journey of faith, including tithing.  

That’s when I say: "I quit giving to the Church. That’s when I quit giving to the Church 

as a naive giver who simply gave out of a sense of moral duty because that’s the way I had been brought up.  That’s when I quit simply supporting an institution, which in many ways in many places had become just another club, or cause, or charitable organization.  

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But that’s when giving became more to me than that.  That’s when I began giving to God, THROUGH the church, as well as through other opportunities in life. 

I don’t mean this to just be a play on words, or a matter of semantics.  I mean that I had to come to terms with the fact that, in some ways, I had substituted the Church for God.  The Church had always been the perfect parent, who I had always trusted.  Whatever the Church said was what God said.  I gave to the Church because giving to the Church and giving to God were the same thing.  It took a developmental crisis for me to begin differentiating between the two.  

But now I’m pretty clear.  Now I do give to the church - if you want to look at it that way.  Or maybe it would be better to say that I entrust my resources and myself to the Church.  I entrust more than a tithe to the Church.  I am entrusting my life to the Church.  

But I look at it another way, that, for me, makes all the difference. 

I get it, that the Church is still an institution, that is motivated by institutional concerns, and that has institutional needs. 

But I also get it, that, here and there, and now and then, the Church is more than just an institution.  

For all its human-ness, and for all its institutional-ness, the Church, at its best, is the cutting edge of the transformation of human beings into little Christs, and of the world into the Kingdom of God. 

I get it, that the Church as it is being reimagined in our time is not just the people who meet on Sunday mornings for worship, but that is still the most visible manifestation of the Church. 

And the institutional Church, as it raises its consciousness about what it means to be the Church, is engaging the world in new, and creative, and powerful ways.  The Church is the community through which I partner with God to build the Kingdom. 

And I am all about partnering with God to build the Kingdom.  I have to quit worrying how much of my money is spent on repairing the air conditioner and replacing the ceiling tiles, and how much of my efforts don’t seem to have any return. 

It’s kind of like Centering Prayer for me.  I might spend twenty minutes in Centering Prayer, just for the one minute or less when something happens, when I am in touch with my true Self, and I am in God, and God is in me.  

In the Church there are those moments, there are those dollars,  there are those hopes and prayers, that make it through to other side, that change a life, that bless a community, that heal a person, that transform someone a little more into their Christ self, and the world into the Kingdom of God.  

For me, it’s about what God does through the Church. It’s about what God does with at least something that I give back to Him by entrusting it to the Church.  

It’s about the healing of seriously hurting people who come to the Teddy Molina garden in our Community Garden plot at Reconciliation, and find a little consolation. 

It’s about the social change that some members of Reconciliation are struggling to imagine and engage in a bully-creating society.  It’s about being a Christ-making institution  in a bully-making society. 

It’s about the personal interviews with homeless people for the Texas Homeless Network, some of whom had a stories, and hopes, and dreams, and some of whom were making real progress toward becoming financially, emotionally, and psychologically strong enough to make their own way in life again.  Telling their stories to another human being turned three minute interviews into thirty minutes of listening and encouraging, which I got to do because Reconciliation was already involved in giving clothes to the homeless. 

It’s about two and three and four year olds in our school learning at Children’s Chapel that Jesus loves them when they’re good, when they do the things they should, and Jesus lives them when they’re bad, though it makes him very sad. 

It’s about all that, and much, much more.  It’s about partnering with God, to change human beings into little Christ’s, and the world into the Kingdom, by giving to God THROUGH the Church.  

I am all about partnering with God.  

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My cutting edge is yet another step in my journey of giving and of faith.  My cutting edge is growing in my love and gratefulness toward God, that even if God didn’t use anything I gave back to him, I would give it to him anyway. 

My cutting edge is in becoming more than a partner with God in changing the world.  My cutting edge is in becoming so in love, so smitten with God, 

who is so in love, so smitten with me, that I can’t help but to the most and the best that I can, just to express my desperate gratitude, my hopeless affection, my deepest and most secret desire to totally entrust myself to Him as my Beloved who has totally entrusted himself to me, His beloved. 

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So giving has been a journey of faith for me, and it will probably always be a journey of faith. 

I used to give to the Church, but I see giving a little differently now. 

And that’s what Consecration Sunday is about.  Not giving to the Church, but giving to God THROUGH the Church, and through any and all opportunities that God gives us  to change the world and to become His beloveds.  

Unto him be glory and power, dominion and splendor, forever and ever. Amen.