The Wise Woman’s Stone
II Corinthians 8:1-7
A wise woman who was travelling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next
day, she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food.
The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without
hesitation.
The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him
security for a lifetime.
But a few days later, he came back to return the stone to the wise woman. “I’ve been thinking,”
he said. “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something
even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone.”
Now, that’s stewardship.
Stewardship is NOT a budget. Or pledge commitments. It is NOT what you put in the offering
plates, or have your banks send to us. It’s NOT all those extra envelopes for Deacons and Capital Fund
and Tree of Life. It isn’t even the reports given to Session by Steve Elliott and Dick Daugherty and the
discussions we have about those reports.
Stewardship is what was within the wise woman that enabled her to give the hungry traveler
not food, but that precious stone.
And you know, I wish the anonymous author of this brief story had told us just what response
the wise woman gave to the hungry traveler. What did she tell him? That would have made this sermon
so much easier.
But as I started working on this sermon, I thought to myself – perhaps the author did not give us
the wise woman’s response, because we all have to find within us our response to a question such as
that of the hungry traveler.
What, after all, do we have within us that enables us to be good stewards? And, to be perfectly
honest, has anything that we should have, gone missing?
I can’t answer those questions for you. I can only answer them for myself.
Which I will try to do, in the hopes that you will find the answers for yourselves.
And it all starts with trust. It has to start with trust.
Now I will honestly tell you that a serving of trust, the kind of radical trust necessary to be a
good steward, did not automatically come with my seminary degree. It wasn’t included in my ordination
certificate, and if the Pastor Nominating Committee had asked me over thirty years ago if I lived in
absolute trust, I would have had to answer: ‘No.’
That level of trust is hard to come by. I have wavered back and forth over my life between trust
and the ‘what ifs’ that rear their ugly heads and try to undermine the trust I do have. And recently those
ugly heads have been rearing a lot. I’ll be sixty-five next March, which means that the Medicare folks –
at least those trying to convince me to get Part B through them - have been calling and/or sending me
mail that assures me they are the best source for good old Part B, as well as Part C and D and any other
parts Medicare might eventually have. Recently, I’ve had several people ask me if I’m thinking about
retirement (I guess that goes along with reaching that sixty-five plateau). And well, yes, I have, at least in
terms of ‘will my pension and Social Security be enough to retire comfortably?’ (By the way, John D.
Rockefeller was once asked how much money was enough and his answer was: ‘Just a little bit more.’) I
get that attitude – probably more than I should.
And I do have moments (and if you’ll look toward Dottie, you will see that she is most assuredly
shaking her head), when I fret over the fact that there is too much month left over at the end of the
paycheck.
Trust in God to provide for our basic needs, and even some that are not so basic, is what I need
to get by in this life, and I don’t have as much as I should. Most of us don’t, I fear. Because it isn’t easy to
develop, nurture, and bring to fruition.
But, just as frequently as the questions about retirement, I have had several incidents in which
God is showing me that radical trust is not that difficult to come by; that His provisions are not as rare as
I sometimes think they are; that He can be counted on to give what needs to be given, and in
abundance. Ways in which God is being quite obvious that not only can He be trusted, but that trusting
in Him is the answer to the question: what is the meaning of life? And my expectation (not wish or hope)
is that those incidents will continue.
Trusting in God doesn’t mean I’ll go out and buy a Porsche and expect Him to make the
payments – I’m still driving my fifteen year old Saturn with over 165,000 miles on it, and I’m not
counting on a huge upswing in the stock market at the hand of God so my 403B will shoot up in value.
What I am counting on – and Dottie will remind me if I don’t, because I probably will – that if I
radically trust God, I will have enough to fulfill the pledge we will put in the offering plate in a few
minutes, and have plenty left over to take care of the things we need; maybe even a little bit more.
And Session members – a word to all of us – we need to rely on that same radical trust to help
us get the frustrating reports we get from Steve and Dick. If I don’t trust and you don’t trust, no one else
will!
Something else I’ve learned – and I’ll admit that it has taken a LONG time to learn it – and
sometimes, over the years, I have unlearned it, much to my chagrin, is that living for God, with God, by
God, is vey much about living with others, for others, by others.
Ann Melanson, a member of my home church, felt the call to be a missionary when she was a
young woman. I never knew the process, but she ended up working in a leper colony in Thailand. I
remember her coming back to our church to talk about her work there (I was about eight years old). I
was so impressed by her stories that when I prayed at night, I always said: “Dear God, please be with all
the lepers in Thailand.” That was a big prayer, but then I think God loves big prayers – it shows trust
(hey, I guess I did have some!)
But the other thing that was impressed me was that Ann was a part of something bigger than
herself. And I realized that I wanted to be a part of something bigger than, too. But that’s not why I
became a minister. True, being a minister enables me to be a part of something bigger than me, but
there was more. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than me, and that’s why I joined the church,
why I became a Christian, why I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Because by doing that, I
really became a part of something bigger than me, and allowed God to use me as He saw fit. Oh,
sometimes, I fail to make that fit; sometimes, I shrink from that bigger than me opportunity; sometimes
I give God a hard time about doing what He wants me to do.
But to be bigger than just the little circle I draw around myself sometimes – THAT’s why I give to
the work of the church – not just OUR church, but THE church – the church that God has called to go out
into the world. Yes, I could do other things with the money I give to the church, plenty of other things.
But when I support the work God is doing in and though us, all of us, that little circle keeps getting
bigger. And that includes the can of tuna or box of cereal Dottie and I buy for the food pantry, or the
underwear we bought for Bill and Brenda, or the food we contributed for Family Promise or the K-Mart
and Payless gift cards we got for Covenant House. I know, I’ve heard a few people comment that by
asking all of us to participate in those mission opportunities, ‘we are being asked too much,’ but how do
you tell God He’s asking too much? How much is too much to God?
Which leads to the third, most important, way I would answer the hungry traveler’s question.
A colleague of mine mentioned to me that one year, in a stewardship sermon, she spoke about
sacrifice. After the service, a member of her church commented to her: “Well, sacrifice is OK for you;
after all, you’re a minister.” The idea being that sacrifice was not what the laity is called to (or at least
this lay person). My colleague didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Because a sacrificial spirit, like a
radical level of trust, does not come along with a diploma from a seminary. As a matter of fact, I don’t
think I remember too many classes in seminary when we did talk about sacrifice. Except maybe for the
one orchestrated by a New Testament professor. He had a student pretend to collapse on the steps to
Stuart Hall, the main classroom building, and fake a seizure as students were coming in to class. Virtually
every student walked right by on their way to their New Testament class in which the lesson was
on….the Good Samaritan.
Sacrifice – it isn’t easy – whether we are talking about the sacrifice of getting involved or giving
to the church – which is being involved. Sacrifice is what the Christian life is all about. And when I
sacrifice, it’s not just because I’m a minister – there are days when I wish I didn’t have to sacrifice – it’s
because I know that it makes a difference. Because I’m not giving out of duty or even responsibility, but
because somewhere deep in my soul, I know that the sacrificial lifestyle is what I am called to live, clergy
or not. After all, look how much God sacrificed for me. For all of us. The one per cent increase the
Stewardship and Finance Commission asked of all members –Dottie and I could have done something
else with it. But that wouldn’t have been a sacrifice.
What the wise woman had within her that enabled her to give up that precious stone was a part
of her own spiritual journey, her personal discovery of what it means to give. I have been on that same
journey my whole life, and it hasn’t always been an easy one. I’ve had ups and downs and I’ve held on
too tightly at times to what I had. But I know that unless I give my precious stone, whatever it is, my
journey will mean very little. And I want my journey, when I come to the end of it, to count for
something, something important.
I can’t – won’t - tell all of you how to define your journey or how you will answer the hungry
traveler’s question. I can only ask you to think about your journey and what it will amount to. What will
you do with your precious stone?