it's stewardship time...and pledging is good for YOUR soul!
Dear St. Michael’s Community Member:
Open your mailbox any day and you’ll be deluged by bills—Cox, SoCal Ed, the Gas Company, Visa, DMV, insurance, and a host of others. Then the computer generated requests for money from charities and political organizations of all sorts, plus credit card offers and it all adds up to stress. This letter from St Michael’s stewardship team is a personal heartfelt plea to support our church this coming year with a pledge of money, time, and talent. In the Gospels of Matthew & Luke Jesus says, “For where your treasure is there will be your heart also.”
St Michael’s is a treasure, a beacon of spiritual light in Goleta and Isla Vista. Our fabulous new vicar has energized the college crew, brought the Isla Vista and Goleta community into the sanctuary with Community Bilingual Yoga and Compline, added mariachi music to our joyous Lessons and Carols, and so much more. But ordinary Sundays at St Mike’s are also a special time, for we are a small congregation, a face-to-face church like so many in the early years of Christianity. No could mistake us for a mega church! We participate in the life of the church by reading the lessons from the Hebrew Bible or the Epistles, sing the creed and the Lord’s Prayer. We greet each other warmly exchanging the peace, newcomers, old timers; young children, college students, and our stalwart group of elders. We pass the collection plate to support our church with money. And we gather around the altar for communion, renewing our baptismal commitments in taking the bread and wine.
In these tough financial times we are all cutting back on expenses. Everything seems to cost much more--gas and groceries for a start. But think of St Mike’s as a source of spiritual energy and food for the soul. It is easy to give when times are abundant, but when times are hard, giving is tough.
Now think about where your treasure is. And then renew or make a new a pledge today. At Lessons and Carols on December 7 at 7pm we will bless the pledge cards—and once again give the fantastic prize to the first one to pledge of the Virgin Mary night light. Through all our pledges we help bring Christ’s light to Isla Vista and Goleta.
Yours in Christ,
Madeline Blickley
Sarah Cline
Tim Cooley, Bishop's Warden
Mark Juergensmeyer
Dan Lowrey
The Stewardship Team
~~~
What Stewardship Means To Me...
"Where is God?" our then two-year old daughter Sona asked me one evening, as she splashed in the bathtub. It's one of those questions that almost all parents must face from their children, but I had thought and hoped that it would come a little later, perhaps after Sona was toilet trained. Perhaps then I might be able to explain to her the doctrine of the Trinity. But it seems that our child and God always have different schedules than the one that Julie and I rigorously try to plan.
A big gulp. "You know when someone does something nice for you, or when you are nice to someone? How does it feel?" I point to her soapy chest.
"Good."
"Right. That's where God is." Inwardly, I pat myself on the back for this succinct statement of the immanence and transcendence of the divine.
"Oh." Long pause. "Is God also where I feel sad?"
Leave it to God to reveal God's self to a toddler, in order to teach her parents what the faith we practice is all about. God isn't a heavenly benefactor who dispenses good things to the good people by taking away blessings from those whom we consider undeserving of our-and therefore God's-love. God's presence isn't a zero-sum game for whose attention we compete. God is where we feel good and where we feel sad: what Sona taught me that evening is that God is not God in our image, but rather we are the image of God.
What this means for us is that God is most obviously present to us when we feel the wonder and beauty of the God's creation: the sight and smell of wildflowers along the freeway, the family that gathers around a delicious meal, the hand on the shoulder at the communion rail, the chaotic vibrancy of a first kiss. But God is also where we are sad, when things fall apart, when the world around us collapses because of sickness, death, dissolution, calamity. God is most present when we experience the radical discontinuity of sadness and grief, the despairing loneliness at the heart of the human condition, what Alphonse de Lamartine best encapsulated when he wrote, "Sometimes, when a person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated."
But Lamartine also wrote this: "Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys." It is where and when we are sad that God reveals God's true self to us. For as much as our lives are a constant search for God's will in our lives, the converse is also true. The great civil rights activists and theologian, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, called this "God in search of man"; it is the story that we retell over and over when we recite Scripture in church and in our daily lives, that God makes a pastoral call to God's people whenever God's people are down on their luck. And it is the story of the cross that we look to, to the person executed because he wanted to remind us that at the moment we felt absolutely alone in this world, God looked for us in the example of a Palestinian Jewish peasant whose destiny was to take the world's sadness and say, God is where you are sad.
Stewardship for me means that we honor God's standing with us in our most vulnerable moments by standing with each other, holding one another aloft in both our despair and joy, reminding ourselves over and over that God is where we are happy and where we are sad. Stewardship is our response to God's persistent story of being in search of God's creation, in constant care to the places and people where God's people hurt most in the world, by becoming God's colleagues in turning the earth into God's kingdom. Most of all, stewardship invites those of who call ourselves followers of God through Christ to show ourselves as agents and examples of God's liberating demolition of isolation, alienation, and loneliness by giving of ourselves all the gifts that God gives to us to the rest of God's world, so that our work might be part of God's great plan to transform the human race into the human family.
Jim Lee, an enthusiastic pledger and supporter of campus ministry, teaches in the Asian American Studies Department at UCSB. Jim makes his spiritual home at St. Paul’s, Ventura.
