Prayer: Help us, our God to live as people redeemed by your love and grace and to be willing always to say so. Thank you for all you have done for us - for breath and life, for hope and healing, blessing and salvation. We are so grateful to number ourselves among your people. Now, O God, we ask that you let the words of our mouths and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

These five Sundays in September will be filled with signs of renewal. We begin a new season of music when the choir returns next week. We have a new Minister of Music; we will have a new organist, and we continue to be grateful to God for each of the people, Sydney and Lanie, who have shared their wonderful gifts of music so freely and so well. New solo voices will join the magnificent singers we have come to appreciate so much. And there will be some new voices in the choir.

Church school resumes next week and with its resumption comes a fresh opportunity to deepen and broaden our faith. These Sundays in September will move us toward making a financial commitment to our church by October 6 when Jayne Ryan Kuroiwa will be our guest steward and preacher. There will be a stewardship theme in our services that will be less about money and more about how we celebrate and use all of the resources God has for us.

We might say, that all of this newness is not really all that new. Except for having a new music team, the choir and Sunday school returns the Sunday after Labor Day every year. We do a stewardship campaign every fall. It is almost as predicable as the swallows returning to Capistrano, California, or the buzzards returning to Hinckley, Ohio.

Here’s what really new. We have around here what the singer Patti La Belle once described as a new attitude. I might even describe it as a stewardship attitude. As stewards, we are called to be managers, caretakers of all God has given us. For instance, most of you know that we have not had a janitor in this congregation this year. But people have stepped up and we are all grateful for those of you who have vacuumed the carpets, cleaned the communion preparation room, cleaned restrooms, mopped the floor, and in other ways kept this building looking like the fabulous household of God that it is.

The new attitude here is seen in a renewed spirit of hope and health. Our attendance has been fairly steady through the summer. We have gained several new members since April. And we have worked to be faithful financial stewards. This time last year we had a deficit of around $13, 000. At our last board meeting we learned that we are $3,771 and change in the black. That may not seem like a lot of money, but it is good news.

As we think about stewardship in the next few weeks, I want us to expand our thinking beyond money, though that is certainly part of what it means to be a creative, faithful, and joy-filled steward. I want us to include all of our life of faith. I want us to think about stewardship from the point of view of one who lives a renewed Christian lifestyle. To renew is to do again, to put together again, to recall and to make promises again, to the original recipient of the promise. That is what happens when wedding vows are renewed.

I believe that our renewed spirit here is leading us to recommitment and to a renewed Christian lifestyle. Last week’s reading from Romans describes an aspect of the lifestyle I am talking about. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your minds, so that you might be able to discern what is the will of God - what is good and acceptable and perfect. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another” (Romans 12.2, 4-5).

The hymn writer Lucie Campbell described the transformation this way:

"Have you that something, that burning desire?
Have you that something that never does tire?
Oh, if you have it, that Heavenly fire!
Then let the world know there is something within.
Something within me that holdeth the reins;
Something within me that banishes pain,
Something within me I cannot explain.
All I know, there is something within."
(“Something Within” verse 2. Copyright 2000, GIA Publications, Inc.)

There is something within us, there is something in the air, and it is renewing our souls. The question is what do we do with it? We can’t horde it, it begs to be shared. We can’t hide it, it longs to be seen. We can’t ignore it, it is too powerful and attention must be paid to it. We have to live into the fullness of what God wants us to be, and we start by living a renewed Christian life, one born of redemption and transformation.

I believe that we have all been blessed with different gifts and different personalities. We have different desires and different needs. And we have all been called to use those different gifts and to be transformed by them. As individuals and as a congregation we are invited to let ourselves be changed by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ operating in our lives be expressed in our relationships with God and with one another.
We are urged to find our renewed Christian life by having a right perspective. Love genuinely, love with integrity, hate evil, love good. We throw those words love and hate around so much that they threaten to lose their meaning. We speak of loving a favorite restaurant and loving spouses and partners with what sounds like equal passion.

We speak of hating injustice and hating someone who is 10 pounds lighter, or ten years younger than we are with equal intensity. These are not moral equivalents. These are not the same. Know the difference, Paul says to us. When you live a renewed Christian lifestyle, when our lives are transformed, changed on the inside, it will show on the outside. That something within us will break out and be seen.

Love is good, hating that which is evil is also good. Choose what is good. Do not choose evil. We understand that we cannot ignore the existence of evil, such evil is everywhere. We have seen it in the numbers of children kidnapped and killed this summer, and in the adults who do physical and emotional harm to each other.

Evil is all around us, and sometimes it is spoken in the name of the church and of God, about people who want nothing more than to take their place in the household of God. But we are called in the church to resist it, and to act and speak against it. That is one of the reasons we spent eight weeks talking and praying and worshiping and sharing communion together around the issue of gay and lesbian persons in the church. It is why we are a reconciliation church. We believe that God has kept this congregation all these years so that we might be among our sister and brother Christians who model what it means for the whole spectrum of God’s people to celebrate the grace and hope of Jesus Christ together.

Not only are we to love genuinely (and if you’ve ever claimed to love someone when you really didn’t mean it, or been loved by someone who you knew didn’t mean it, you know how empty disingenuous love can be), but our affections are to be mutual. That is, for people whose faith is in Jesus, love, mutual, responsive, spiritual agape love, the love that is shared by people who love and are loved by God will be shared. It is not the kind of one-sided love that leads to obsession. Mutuality in love does not lead to stalking, co-dependency, and dysfunction. When we can share in mutually loving relationships with each other, we will know companions on the journey, healthy inter-dependence upon one another, and an ability to function at our best.

Mutual affection means that we care about each other, what affects you touches me, what affects me matters to you because we are in relationship with each other. We love each other so much in fact that we are even in a friendly, loving, competition to see which of us can outdo the other in honoring one another. We love each other enough to give our best to each other - those of us who lead worship, for instance, pledge to bring the best that we are and the best that we have week after week.

Our greeters understand that they represent all of us when they welcome people into the church, and the nursery attendants show that they can be trusted with people’s children. And those of you who sit in the pews have a responsibility too. It is to let the love of God, the grace of Jesus, and the power of the Holy Spirit show through you as you are moved in worship. Raise your hand, say Amen, smile, do whatever you are led to do so that we know that God’s love is in you and for that love you rejoice. We are among the redeemed. Let us say so.

What else are we to do as we live this renewed Christian lifestyle? We are to be zealous, and ardent - be passionate. Develop a life of faith in God and in God’s Christ and express that faith in service to God and to people. Be excited about it. It is as we express and acknowledge how God has transformed our lives, that we find the strength and courage we need to rejoice in hope, find patience in hard times, and pray at all times. Remember, God holds the future and the future and we are in good hands.

Because we know that one who holds the future suffers with us, we know that suffering is not all there is for us. Because we know the joy and hope of Jesus, we can find reasons for hope and rejoicing now. Because God has been generous with us, we can be generous with others, especially to those in the church who have needs that we can respond to by our giving.

We can do all of that, but then Paul tell us something a little more difficult. Bless your enemies, feed them, develop a peace-filled attitude, don’t seek revenge. Live your life in Christ with such a sense of renewal that you can even bless your enemies. Yeah. Right.

That bit of advice is counterintuitive - it is the exact opposite of the way we are taught in the larger culture. If someone talks about you, says something worse about them. If they say something else, insult them, and their mother. What are you saying sounds too much like you are saying to us be passive, don’t fight back, take the abuse. I don’t get it. It is just that attitude that makes the church look weak and helpless. Why are you telling us not to worry about revenge? Because God says “Let me worry about it. You go and be the church in these days.” Why are you telling us to treat these people with respect and love? It is what Christians do.

So “Christians have no need to seek revenge or repayment of wrong. That is God’s prerogative, and God’s alone!” (Texts for Preaching. Word John Knox, 1995, p.467)

We need not be concerned with God’s business. Our concern is to be the church, the community of those whom God has called. Among church members and among our neighbors outside the church there is a way we are called to manage the parts of the world God has given to us.

We can with creativity pray that God’s favor and blessing upon those who wish to do us harm; we can love them enough to hold them accountable, to check them, and we can love ourselves enough not to allow them to abuse us. We are the children of God, they are too, whether they know it or not. And so we do for them what we do for other children of God, we offer them the ministries of the church. We can do for them what someone did for us. We can offer even to them, a bit of nourishment, food, water, a place to rest, indeed a place to find their own redemption not because we are weak, but because we are strong.

We can with faithfulness mourn and rejoice with people at the low and high moments of their lives. We know that because we do it here every day when we pray for each other and support and encourage each other.

Love what is good. Remember we are loved by and follow the one who when faced with the hatred of his enemies, went to a cross, was raised from death and taught us to live a renewed life of love and wholeness. Yes, there is trouble and danger all over this world. “But God’s people are to meet it the way Christ met it, with love and goodness” (New International Bible. Volume 10, Abingdon Press. 2000, p.715). Let it be so, and let it begin with us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.