Stewardship, Part 1: “Prayers”
October 22, 2023 — Ordinary Time
Psalm 37:1-11
Pastor Mike
Psalm 37 is a wisdom psalm. Wisdom psalms are prayers that sound almost like proverbs because, in praying them, the worshipping congregation reminds itself of God’s unchanging desires and intentions for human life, and of the deep structure of God’s creation. Unlike prayers heaved up toward heaven in times of crisis, and unlike prayers that thank God for stepping in and redeeming a situation, wisdom psalms celebrate the essential characteristics of life lived well – in all times and all places. But you and I know how bad the world can be, don’t we? We know how far from God’s hopes we have wandered. Perhaps wisdom psalms strike us as naïve: The wicked will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb (v. 2)? Are you sure, God? Jesus found value in praying the wisdom psalms. The third beatitude in his famous Sermon on the Mount – “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” – is a direct quote of Psalm 37:11. Since Christ is our teacher, we ought to listen to these psalms, too.
Psalm 37 brings into focus the question of how we are to secure the material conditions of our communal life. The prayer is all about how the people are to “live in the land and enjoy security” (v. 3), how future generations will be able to “inherit the land,” a phrase that shows up in verses 9, 11, and 34. The ancient Israelites had been promised a land, a place to put down roots and make a home, but from the very beginning the land was a gift from God. The people could receive it through faith and keep it by living justly, or they could lose it by forsaking God and oppressing the poor. We usually think we have to wring fruitfulness out of the land by any means necessary, but this story was different; the people were promised stability and prosperity at home if only they could take a proper posture before God and neighbor.
Psalm 37 invites you and I to ask several questions: “As a congregation, what are the material conditions of our life together? What is the place, what are the resources, who are the people on whom we depend for our flourishing? And what’s the proper spiritual posture to take toward those things, since we live not according to the wisdom of the world but the wisdom of God?” Those questions bring us to the theme of stewardship, the proper care for our resources. We’re going to explore stewardship over the next five Sundays using the five United Methodist membership vows as a scaffold. We practice stewardship through our prayers, presence, gifts, service, and witness.
Let’s take a crack at those questions: “What are the material conditions of our life together, and how do we care for them?
Several things leap to mind: First off, we have our building, here at the corner of 15th and Clark. We have our bank accounts and reserve funds and endowment. We have our pastor and other staff. We have the Oregon-Idaho Annual Conference. We have our people – we have you.
Are all these things essential for being a follower of Jesus? Jesus’ own ministry was poor and propertyless, and he never told his disciples to go build all these different institutions. There are Christian traditions that don’t have ordained clergy in the way United Methodists do, or at all. There are monastic orders that take vows of poverty. There are creative ways to be a church community without owning a building.
We would be okay if we didn’t have some of our possessions – but we wouldn’t be us. We wouldn’t be this community, First United Methodist Church of Pocatello, in this place and in this way and with our particular history. And since, so far as I know, we have not discerned a call to go into the future buildingless or pastorless or budgetless, I think we can say that for the time being these things are some of the conditions of our flourishing, and as such we need to take proper care of them.
Whenever the material health of a congregation is brought up, it is easy for us to think that the first question to ask is, “What do we need to do?” We formed to think that, culturally. We believe that if we run ourselves ragged, exhaust ourselves with unrelenting activities and meetings and programs, if we do, do, do, that we will get the blood pumping in this Body of the Christ. If we press a little harder, stay awake a little later, stress a little more, we will at last arrive at a time when we can simply be, a time when we can kick back and enjoy our wonderfully efficient and important church, and the worthwhileness of all our striving will be obvious.
Which is a lie. Times like that never arrive. The world and our lives are always changing, new challenges and opportunities rise up and old ones wear away. It is at the cost of our peace, our joy, our thankfulness, and our spacious presence that we do, do, do. In God’s economy, the ends do not justify the means. “Do not fret—it leads only to evil,” the psalm says. Only: “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” That Hebrew verb for “fretting” literally means “to heat oneself up in vexation.” Anyone here ever heated themself up with vexation, especially over what others seem to have gotten through wrongdoing that you’re trying to get through righteousness? But the call of stewardship is first and foremost a call to prayer, a call to be. If we are a people of true prayer, we will become a people of worthwhile activity, but if we start from anxious activity we will never arrive at prayer – and we will miss the whole point.
Psalm 37 calls us to a higher and more holy wisdom: the wisdom of being, the wisdom of prayer. In its first eleven verses, it lays out four commands linked to the holy name of God: “Trust in the Lord” (v. 3), “Take delight in the Lord” (v. 4), “Commit your way to the Lord” (v. 5), and “Be still before the Lord” (v.7).
Trust, delight, commit, and be still – the strong, four-sided foundation of prayer.
Trust is a synonym for faith in the Bible. Trust and faith are not about belief in the sense of believing in doctrines or ideas. We don’t trust concepts, we trust people and their promises to us. When we trust God, we open our lives to a relationship with God and we consent to who God says God is for us – our Creator, our Helper, our Provider, our Healer. To provide means to see ahead, and if we trust that God sees ahead and will take care of us when we get there, then we can release our anxieties about securing our own way, and we can let go of our need to be in control. When we trust God, we acknowledge that we are held, and we don’t need to hold on so tightly.
Delight is a word we don’t use enough in our spirituality. But the Psalms are insistent. Another one says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” and still another, “In your presence there is fullness of joy, in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” God is truth and goodness and beauty in their perfection, and one of the great joys of being a person of faith is that God is enjoyable. God offers healing for our wounds, companionship for journeys, and God is always expanding our inner and outer horizons, leading us deeper into the adventure and mystery of life. Prayer, simple being with God, allows us to enjoy the truth of our belovedness. What would it mean if our activity was accountable to our delight? What would we do if we treated with urgency our need to seize upon moments of joy in our congregational life?
Trust in the Lord, delight in the Lord, and then: “Commit your way to the Lord.” True commitment means brining all your resources to bear on your discipleship; it means actively integrating all the dimensions of your lives and aligning them with God’s will. Commitments means that you have given God the final say over every face of your being, that there is no area you have roped off from God’s touch. We can’t experience true delight or trust in God if we are not bringing our fullness to God. There is joy in alignment, in choice and responsibility. Commitment means you’re in for the long haul, and that is freeing, too, because your perspective can expand, and the true value of any doing can be made clear. And notice that the psalm does not say, “Commit your way to the Church.” I wonder, if the Church focused more on helping people joyfully commit their lives to God, would it have to worry about people committing to care for its own material needs?
Finally, the Psalm tells us to “Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him.” That verse is a good example of a poetic device known as parallelism, where the two statements sort of say the same thing but are really deepening one another. Be still…wait. Stillness is not passive or lazy or sleepy. Stillness is attentive and alert and ready. When we wait before God with a quiet, steady focus, we can receive what God wants us to receive. We are people, not cogs in a machine. And our desires are easily tangled up with the world’s notions of success; we need to still ourselves before God in order to keep our focus true.
There’s the prayerful foundation of stewardship. Trust – release control and depend on the One who provides. Delight – seek and celebrate the joy of life with God. Commit – bring all that you are to the table, so that you can receive all that God is. And be still – don’t rush ahead just because it’s more comfortable to be on the move. I wonder which of those four instructions resonates most with you this morning and how you will respond? And I wonder which of those you think our congregation most needs to heed?
The good news is that the doing does come! I said this earlier, but I’m going to say it again: If we are a people of true prayer, we will become a people of worthwhile activity. Trust frees us. Delight frees us. Commitment frees us. Stillness frees us. That kind of poised, unshakeable posture unleashes deep wells of energy. Vitality will come – if we pray. And you know what, there are times when the life of a congregation is packed with happenings, when things feel chaotic and even get nail-bitingly tense because the stakes are high. There’s nothing wrong with that so long as the activity rests upon the bedrock of prayer and is faithful. Even the hard stuff, like living the urgent questions of our time and bearing one another’s burdens and making a moral witness to the world can be deeply satisfying when they rise from joy, trust, commitment, and stillness.
Look, I’d really like our building to have a new roof. We’re beyond the point of needing it.
I’d like to receive my salary every month.
I want parents to drop their children downstairs with peace of mind every Monday through Friday, and for TLC to have better facilities than they currently have.
I want the heat to kick on in the winter and the printer to spit out paper when I tell it to.
I want our corner of 15th and Clark to become a sanctuary for queer people seeking spiritual refuge, and a gathering place for disillusioned evangelicals, questioning Latter Day Saints, spiritual-but-not-religious youth and religious-but-not-too-spiritual-please academics, and even for that strange cousin you haul here with you once a year on Christmas Eve to make sure he doesn’t forget that God loves him, too.
I want love and light to emanate from this block to touch our neighborhood and city, the university and prison and reservation and ecology, if God should will it, but you know what? –
I don’t want any of that if it means we must become an anxious, miserable, wishy-washy, busybodied people. There are many reasons in life to be those things, but God is not one of them. We are told that where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom, and I’m going to say, even when it comes to stewardship.
I’m reminded of the words of Christ, “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:33). May we consider 2024, and the ways we will give in support of the congregation, as a people of prayer. May we trust, delight, commit, and be still. May we not fret. May we “live in the land and enjoy security” and trust in God to act.
Amen.