Today as we celebrate Consecration Sunday, on this day when we will make our financial commitments to the church, I want to tell you four stories. The first is a story Peter Gomes tells about his family and their practice of stewardship. He writes:

“By no means was my family wealthy when I was growing up, although they worked very hard to conceal from me the facts of just how poor we were. For my parents, poverty of means was an attitude to be overcome by wealth of spirit, and so we were rich but just didn’t have very much money. I remember as an absolute principle of our household that when the monthly accounting of the family income came around, before the bills were considered - the mortgage, heat, food, and clothing addressed - the church money was first set aside, taken out of the file, sealed up in envelopes to be given in church, and put in the drawer so that we would not be tempted to raid it for necessities as the month went along…

This is the day we think about money and about what our contribution of it along with our time and our talents means to the church. Keeping our theme of "Stir Up The Gifts", we are asked today to use some of all God has given to us to build up and support the ministries of our congregation.

We are called to stir up our gifts with faith and energy. It will not do to skim the surface of those gifts lightly, we cannot go deeply enough if we do that. Remember, it is as if we are making a wonderful soup and there, beneath the broth is the good stuff. In this great soup of the church, the really good stuff is in us waiting to be brought to the surface.

Dig deep, stir from the bottom, and let’s be creative and put what we have all together and see what God will do. That is the point of the second story. Do you know the story of Stone Soup? There are a number of different versions of the story. The one I found goes like this:

Our greater good is a congregation growing spiritually, growing in its knowledge of God’s will for it, growing in its support for our ministries, and led by the Holy Spirit, growing in our love for God and for God’s Christ. The third story is the one Luke tells today.

Whenever Jesus wanted to make a point to his disciples, he would often tell them a story.

Two men are at prayer, one is a Pharisee - a core member of the religious society whose mission was to see to it that all matters of faith be expressed in a carefully correct and prescribed way. The Pharisees are often portrayed as the opponents of Jesus, and so they were. The problem was that the Pharisees believed that salvation came from following every jot and tittle of the law, with no exceptions. But Jesus knew that while the law was important, after all he called himself the fulfillment of the law, salvation came by faith through grace and mercy. It is God's doing, not our doing. The good news is that the Pharisee is at prayer. The problem is that his prayer if full of unhealthy pride. The Greeks call it hubris, we call it conceit and arrogance.

“His prayer, while in the form of a thanksgiving, turns out to be an implied request that God confirm what the Pharisee has already decided, namely, that he is ‘not like other people’ and that his rigorous piety is exceptional. In fact, regular fasting and tithing were more exceptional and well beyond what was required. Perhaps the recitation of his devotion to God seems not so unusual until we encounter the excessive number of first person singular verbs, (‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’) and the arrogant comparison to others less religious than he. His specific mention of his companion in prayer, the tax collector, pits the two characters against each other in an intense fashion” (Texts for Preaching, p. 574).

The tax collector’s prayer is anything but pride-ful. Rather than telling God how good he is or how bad he is, he prays a prayer of humility. God, who knows all about us, doesn't need our list of attributes or detriments. What God wants is a relationship with us. The tax collector looks down, he beats his chest in a sign of repentance and utters a simple prayer of petition, “have mercy”. Like the Psalmist in our first reading, the tax collector knows who God is. He knows the creator of the world is the God of everything and everybody. He knows that God to whom he prays will grant him what he needs. His is a prayer of petition, asking for what he needs most.

Just in case they miss it, the point of the parable. The one who is righteous in his own mind, is too full of himself to really know the righteousness of God. And the one who is an outcast, after all tax collectors were agents of the Roman government who regularly cheated their own brother and sister Jews, is considered the righteous one. "Amazing Grace" will always be his song of praise. Jesus says, the one who prayed humbly will be lifted up because he knew how to petition God for what he needed. The one who prays with pride will not be justified.

The truth is, there is a bit of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in all of us. Like the Pharisee, we want to be recognized for what we have done right; like the Tax Collector, we know in our souls when we have messed up, and we know what our weaknesses are. We also know we can talk to God and that God will hear us when we pray.

The fourth story is our story, and it is yet unfinished. So while we stir up our gifts and claim our ministries, there are some things we can do. The question is will we do them? I love youth led worship services. It is creative, honest and vulnerable, and risk taking before God and the congregation. It is in many ways it is what worship ought always to be for adults too. During the closing worship service for Regional Assembly, the young people played a song called, “Dare You To Move”. To dare is to find the courage to act; it is to challenge, it is to confront.

I understand that the word dare gives the impression of one party coercing another into doing something they might otherwise be reluctant to do. We dare, double dare, double dog dare all the time: “I dare you to drive fifty in a thirty mile an hour zone”, “I double dare you to say that word your parents told you never to say”, I double dog dare you to jump off the roof of your house”.

As we finish our chapter of Broad Street's story, I dare you to move. I double dare you to help transform this congregation, I double dog dare you to believe that your life matters and that you are a valued child of God. I dare you to help write the continuing story of Broad Street Christian Church and its transition and transformation from too little movement to growth beyond our imaginations. I want us to dare to act boldly and faithfully. Let me suggest that we use our financial support of the church to say that we will we dare to move boldly in prayer, in healthy pride, and in honest petition as the ministries of our church are shared with the world.

I want us to pray for wisdom and for the well-being of our congregation as we prepare to make our financial commitments. Last week when our Regional Pastor and President was installed, the General Minister and President of the Christian Church, W. Chris Hobgood told Regional Pastor Bill Edwards not ever ask the Disciples in Ohio to do anything that Bill was unwilling to do. Today, I am daring myself to move back to being a tither, it may be exceptional, but it is also part of a spiritual discipline I want to redevelop. I want you to dare yourself to tithe and if you can't, and there are valid reasons why you can't, then please be as generous to the church as you can be. As you prepare to make your commitment, do so with a combination of pride and humility. What is it about this church that you are proud of, that you feel so good about that that you want to support it with your prayers, your time and your dollars? Give with a sense of humility understanding that humility is not self-negation, it is thinking well our ourselves without thinking less of others.

Finally, I want us to petition God to give us the vision to see that all we have is God’s and that we honor God when we give a portion of what God has given us back to God. God has offered everything to us. We praise God by giving some of the gifts we have stirred up back to God. Praise be to God. Amen.