The St. Thomas More Society Scranton, Pennsylvania

2301 N. Washington Avenue

Scranton, Pennsylvania 18509

Mr. Eric L. Bergman, Executive Director

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost

October 30, 2005

The 5PM Service of Evening Prayer

 Nehemiah 5:1-19 and Luke 12:22-31

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I watched every game of the World Series this year, the most television viewing I have done since the last Fall Classic. The biggest difference between actually being at the ballpark and seeing the game on TV is the advertising one must endure after every half inning and pitching change when one is sitting in the comfort of his living room. The marketing folks have always tried to get me to drink more beer, but this season I noticed some rather annoying ads for financial services. More than annoying, the ads were from the Christian perspective offensive, as banks, insurance companies, and investors told me I needed to begin saving money now so that I would be set for retirement. Now I have no problem with retirement if the purpose is to pursue a different calling in the service of one’s fellow man, but most of the ads I saw implied that I have some years of self-indulgence coming to me, and I better start preparing now if I’m going to enjoy them. The problem for the Christian is that God calls no one to self-indulgence, so the suggestion that I should spend my last years on earth engaged in conspicuous consumption sounds to my ears like an invitation to eternal damnation. I might be tempted to fill my storehouses and eat, drink and be merry, but I’d still have to answer the question God poses to everyone: “What should you be doing?” Needless to say, there weren’t any ads during the World Series encouraging people approaching retirement to consider that question.

The ads that annoyed and offended me are really just a reflection of the consumer culture in which we live. The world tells us we are to be consumers, but the Lord tells us we are to be contributors. Where the world tells us to contribute only insofar as it enables us to consume, the Lord asks us to contribute selflessly, to give of ourselves so that others might benefit from our works, even if we do not. Our Old Testament lesson tonight is an example of people giving themselves and their labor for the greater good. Nehemiah recounts the building of the walls of Jerusalem after the Jews returned to the Promised Land after the Babylonian exile. Nehemiah was not only the narrator of this amazing event, he also oversaw the construction, and today’s lesson is the story of how one glitch in the process was resolved.

The intention in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem was to provide a safe place wherein the people of Israel could engage in the worship of God. That is, rebuilding the walls was part and parcel of rebuilding the Temple, the only place where faithful Jews can offer up ritual sacrifices to God. Thus, the entire enterprise was a gift to the Jewish nation, those who were living at the time as well as their posterity in generations to come. To do this work dedicated wholly to God, however, the people had to be assured that their necessities were taken care of. The lesson tonight tells us that they did not have this assurance. They had to mortgage what they owned to eat, their daughters were the victims of violence, and their children were being sold into slavery. Nehemiah intervened in order to get the wealthy Jews to be charitable towards their poorer brothers, so that with their needs provided for the wall builders could again focus on devoting their labor to the glory of God and the benefit of others.

The bible here gives us a valuable insight that the Church has long recognized: people living without security, food, shelter, and clothing think mostly about self-preservation and rarely consider working for the glory of God. They work to eat, and charity takes a backseat to ensuring one lives another day. Because this is true the Church understands that part of her calling is to offer to the poor ministries of charity, so that they can consider their call to work for the glory of God and for the benefit of others. The Church’s charity, in other words, enables others to be charitable. As members of the Church, we then should recognize our purpose: to donate our time, talents and treasures so that the Church’s ministries can be built up and more and more people can consider the higher things in life, secure in the knowledge that their necessities have been met.

We in the St. Thomas More Society are not building the walls of Jerusalem, but we are building a church. Our temporal needs are being met, so we are able to focus on this work we do to the glory of God and the benefit of others. The money that has been given thus far has aided in the establishment of a group of Catholics in the Diocese of Scranton with a common Anglican identity, a first in the history of northeastern Pennsylvania. Our ultimate goal and hope is that Bishop Martino will erect a Pastoral Provision parish, which will stand as a clear invitation to Episcopalians and other Protestants to come home to the Mother Church. That is, the establishment of this community is like the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem. While we will certainly benefit from an Anglican Use parish, our work is to the glory of God and the benefit of others. We want others to have what we possess, and in the parish we are founding we are creating an instrument that will help us give to our neighbor the great gift of our Catholic faith.

To build this church, however, we must take Jesus at his word. The dilemma of the Jews building the walls of Jerusalem is not ours – we have food in our stomachs, clothes on our backs, and we have no fear that our children will be sold into slavery. The dilemma we have is the temptation with which I began this evening, the temptation to store up our goods rather than share them, because we doubt that God will provide for our needs. Jesus tells us, “Do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, nor be of anxious mind. For all the nations of the world seek these things; and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things shall be yours as well” (Luke 12:29-31). To give away our money towards the building of this church when we could instead save it requires faith. We must trust that Jesus is telling the truth, that as we seek God’s kingdom we will be provided for. God will give us all we need now and forever, even as we have given away our money to meet the needs of others.

This truth got me thinking about another temptation. Because I know you so well I do not get the impression that anyone in the Society is particularly inclined to spend the last years of his life blowing the money he’s saved on things he doesn’t need. Those ads beckoning us to self-indulgence don’t have a lot of resonance among committed Christians. But we are tempted in another way; we think we need to have enough money to pay for the medicines and the nursing that we’ll need when we get older. We save and invest to make sure that we won’t spend our dying days in one of those horrific nursing homes for the indigent, places where the state warehouses the dying that can’t afford better care. This temptation is so strong because relationships are so weak. What if we invested our money in creating a community as eagerly as we invest in the stock market? What if our relationships with our brother and sister Christians were so strong that the mere thought that we might be abandoned to fend for ourselves would seem ridiculous? I am sure that if we gave as we are called to give we’d find such fears to be unfounded.

Since the outset of this ministry we have been serious about community, so when we began to take in donations we did something new, something we had not done in the Episcopal Church. Rather than earmarking all our income for administrative expenses we set aside ten cents of every dollar towards a reserve fund for charity. Over these past ten months that fund has been utilized to help people who had nowhere else to look for help. Some of those that have benefited have been our neighbors, and others have been our members. The important thing is that our charity has enabled others to be charitable, for in having their needs met those who were the beneficiaries of our charity could again commit themselves to the consideration life’s purpose, the glorification of God and service to one’s fellow man. Elsewhere in the Society some of our members have been an example to the rest of us of what community means, as the Hendricks have taken into their home their ailing uncle, who has no one else to care for him. These sort of sacrifices, both individual and collective, are the sort of deeds that make Jesus’ words easy to believe and even easier to understand. To give to the Society should be your assertion that you value community and that you intend to build the community Jesus intends for each of us to enjoy.

God doesn’t want us to be consumers. He wants us to be builders. He wants us to erect communities wherein people are assured their needs will be met so they can devote themselves to His glorification. Erecting such communities is not easy. It requires we sacrifice our desires in order that others may have what they truly need. And it requires we trust that as we care for our fellow man so will we be cared for. Even as we reject the lie that life is about self-indulgence we must reject that lie’s counterpart, the lie that we cannot trust our loved ones to be generous to us in our time of need, so we better make sure we take care of ourselves. Both lies are equally pernicious, for the first tells us to ignore our obligations to God and second tells us to ignore God’s promises to us.

What we must understand in every moment of doubt, in every instance of temptation, is that even when our faith is weak, the faith of others is strong. God continues to act through others even during those times we refuse to let Him work through us. To build the community God desires us to have, to be saved from the evil of consumerism, we must be able to give away what is precious to us even as the world tells us to stow it away. There’s no other way to give others what they need. After all, we’ll never build a community by saving up for retirement. We can only build when we’re willing to let others consume what we’ve earned. So give generously and we can show the world how to build a community.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.