Scripture:  Mark 4:1-9, 21-25

Sometimes Jesus gave horrible advice.  Especially in the area of agri-business, sometimes Jesus gave just awful advice.  Do you have a problem with weeds in your wheat crop?  Let the wheat and the weeds just grow together, said Jesus.  Did you lose one of your sheep?  Leave the other ninety-nine to fend for themselves while you spend God-knows-how-long searching high and low for the one that was lost.  Had a few of the disciples formed an agricultural advisory board, they might have cautioned Jesus about such teachings.  “You’re a carpenter, Jesus, not a farmer, so from now on, maybe you can run the harvesting analogies by us,” they could have told him.

 In our passage from Mark’s gospel, Jesus describes a sower.  And this sower looks like he’s taken a page from Jesus’ book of farming tips.  The sower goes out with a sack full of seed, and maybe the sack has a gaping hole in it or he just isn’t being careful, because the seed is falling everywhere.  On the path where he’s walking, on the rocky ground, in and among the thorns…  Fortunately for the sower, some seed does fall into good soil where it does yield a crop, but the rest gets eaten by the birds, scorched by the sun, or choked among the thorns. 

In most Bibles, the heading over this section in Mark’s gospel is something like, “The Parable of the Sower,” but it could just as well say, “Carelessness in the Field,” or “How to Waste 75% of your Crop.”  But, of course, what we have to remember is that this is not the Farmer’s Almanac; it’s the Good News of Jesus Christ, which we could probably say cares very little for things like practicality or waste.  Rather, the Good News tells the story of God who is like a crazy, generous famer.  Not concerned about where the seed falls, this Famer plants everywhere—the path, the weeds, the thorns, the soil… there’s not a spot on the farm that doesn’t get a handful of seed from this Extravagant Farmer.

Now, if this were a predictable, fill-in-the-blank sermon, here’s what we’d do.  I would continue to talk about God as an extravagant famer and lead us all to the obvious conclusion.  God has been extravagant with us, giving us love and grace and compassion and all sorts of things.  We, therefore, should give something back and be generous in our giving, just as God has been generous with us.  Amen.  Today is Stewardship Sunday, so this would seem like a natural place to take a sermon like this.  But here’s the thing:  I can’t stand sermons like that.  I hate them.  I really do.

Do you know what kind of sermon I’m talking about? 

• God’s been so generous with you; now it’s your turn to show some generosity.  
• God’s given you everything; now it’s time to return something. 
• God has blessed you with so many gifts; now it’s time to give a portion back.

I know these “give a portion back” messages have “Stewardship Sunday” written all over them, but they bug me, and here’s why.

First, I don’t think that God’s amazing generosity should be used in an argument to balance a church’s budget.  I’m not sure that’s why God was generous in the first place.  I highly doubt that God created us, loved us, lived for us, died for us, and rose again for us with the hopes that we’d all give 10% of our annual household income to support our local congregations.  I really, really doubt that’s what God had in mind.  I think what God may have had in mind was love!  Pure, all-consuming love for us, given freely with no strings attached.  Now let me inject here that I believe that there are good reasons to tithe our money to the church, or Karla and I would not be doing it ourselves, and I will share those reasons with you shortly, but I do not maintain the illusion that my financial pledge to the church was what God had in mind when Jesus was born into this world.  As if God looked down on that lowly manger and thought, “I sure hope Ben Johnston-Krase will see this and make a generous contribution!”  No, it was about love.

The second problem with “give a portion back” on Stewardship Sunday is that it fools us into thinking that the rest is ours to keep.  If I just give a portion back to God or to the church, then the rest is mine.  As a Christian, I really just have to give up a portion—a portion of my money—10%, 5%, or hey, even 15%—that’s yours, God, and the rest, well, you don’t need to concern yourself with the rest, because it belongs to me.  One day a week, God, that’s yours—I’ll be with you on Sundays, but the rest is mine.  And maybe one weekend a month, God—I’ll volunteer over at the shelter, tutor some kids at the middles school, but the rest of my time, mine.  The problem with “give a portion back” is that it distracts us from the reality that God wants it all.  God doesn’t just want a portion of your life.  God didn’t love a portion of you and God didn’t save just a portion of you.  God doesn’t want you to be faithful with a portion of your money, or with a portion of your time, or with a portion of your energy.  God wants you to be faithful with all of it.

Now with that in mind, let me share with you a plain truth about this church.  We have an annual budget.  This year it was about $338,000, and next year, with some radical changes, it could be $0.  With no building and no staff, this church could continue to live out the gospel of Jesus Christ.  But over time we’ve found that this facility is a powerful tool for ministry, and so we’ve committed our resources to using it wisely.  And over time we’ve found that having pastoral staff, music staff, and support staff helps us in profound ways in our ministries to one another and to the world around us.  And we’ve discovered that our worship here and our programs here and in our community serve as powerful and life-shaping witnesses to the love of God, and so they continue.  And so as folks gathered in this family of faith, we all shoulder responsibility for the ongoing heartbeat of this church as we have created it with God’s help.  We pledge financial support for this church because we believe that it is a vibrant extension of God’s love in our lives and in the world and we want to invest ourselves in its health and vitality. 

And so we all designate a portion of our income, a portion of our time, and a portion of our energy to keep First Presbyterian Church alive and kicking hard, but let’s separate that from the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is that an extravagant God has loved us and given us life and breath and love—that everything we have is from God and that there is no portion large enough to account for God’s extravagance. 

A stewardship message that tries to convince you that faithful stewardship is anything less than everything is a watered down version of the gospel bent on raising money and reducing an end-of-the-year deficit.  God does not call you to be faithful with a portion of your life, a portion of your time, a portion of your money—God calls you to be faithful with all of it.  That’s extravagant!   

Of course, we could rewrite the parable of the sower, and in our more manageable version, the sower could go out into the field with his seed double-Ziploc-bagged to make sure that none spills.  Our sower could only plant seeds in one small spot where the soil is perfect and the sun is just right.  And he’d only plant a portion of his seed, and would rather saved unplanted seeds for next year than waste them on rocky ground or questionable soil.  But that sower would not be our extravagant God, who sows with reckless abandon and calls us to do the same with our own extravagant lives.  Thanks be to God!