This is a very short story from a book called This Migrant Earth, which is a novel that's the basis of the Chicano literary movement. This story doesn't have a title. It reads:

“That schoolteacher didn't know what to do, what to think, what to say ... Here they all were, by the classroom bulletin board, when all of a sudden, this Mexican kid pops a button from his shirt and hands it to her. Here. Take it.

Sure, the class needed something to set off the town's button factory, but ... And it was probably his only shirt, too. Had to be.

Questions. But who's to answer whywhywhy? Did he, did he mean to help? Be part of the group? Did he do it for her?

Why? He did it because he had to, he wanted to. She felt this. A desire, that's what it must have been. An overwhelming urge, the intensity of it all. She sensed this. Felt it. The intense feeling of wanting to give, of giving. But she couldn't explain it; not to anyone; not to herself.”

The schoolteacher in that story is struggling with the same kind of challenge that we're faced with today. I could say that the thing she couldn't explain to anyone or even to herself was stewardship. But that doesn't help us much. It doesn't help us much because we're left wondering, "OK. Well, what is stewardship?

You may have noticed that I seldom have a title for my sermons in the bulletins. So, I thought that today might be a good a time as any to come up with one. I mean, hey, if we're going to try to understand what stewardship is, then maybe the stewardship sermon should start by having a title! It might give us a little clarity.

Well, we’ve been doing this stewardship drive together for a few weeks now, so I’ve been looking for a sermon title during that time. And I found one in a random place – and random places are where God so often drops pearls of wisdom. I came across a refrigerator magnet that offered this potential stewardship sermon title: “Jesus paid for my sins, so what’s with all these bills?”

We all have bills. Water bills. Gas bills. Electricity bills. Cable bills. Phone bills. Doctor bills. Dental bills. Vet bills. Hospital bills. And rent. Car payments. Prescription payments. Tuition payments. Mortgage payments. Insurance payments. And don’t forget the IRS.

But with all of those bills, we know how much we owe and why we owe it. And if we find some discrepancy with a bill, we can make a phone call and inquire as to why we’ve been overcharged. Basically, with all our bills comes control. We’re paying for specific services with our money. When we mail off a check or hit ‘enter’ on our keyboard, we know what we’re paying for.

But isn’t it funny how, despite all that control we have over those services we receive, those services really control us? Those services determine how we spend our money. And since our bills determine by and large how we will spend our money from month to month, I think it’s fair to say that our bills determine how we live, where we go, and even with whom we associate.

Well, what about the bill we pay to the church? What’s that one all about, and why should we care?

I paid that bill from any early age. When I was a boy, I’d go to church almost every Sunday. But before we walked out the door, my parents and I would get an envelope out of a drawer in the kitchen. Dad would give me anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar, and I’d put that money in the envelope that had my name on it, the date and a blank for me to fill in the amount enclosed. It was my tithe. Based on however much money I’d earned that week from doing my chores (which my mom kept track of by a construction paper chart on the fridge), I’d put a tithe in the little envelope and take it with me to church. That was my church bill. It was my offering.

I learned pretty early in life how to tithe. Every time I earned any amount of money, I set aside ten percent of it to give to the church. And after a while the lesson sunk in so that I looked at that ten percent as money that didn’t really belong to me. I kind of looked at my tithe as money that had been entrusted to me to give to the church. It was like that money had somehow been misplaced from the church, and it was my responsibility to make sure it got back to its rightful owner. And I was pleased to have the remaining 90 percent of my money to spend on Star Wars figures and comic books.

So, I learned how to tithe, but I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t know why that ten percent needed to get to the church, but I gave it nonetheless. And, of course, I forgot that childhood lesson when I got to be about 18 or so. I started paying bills that were really all my own, so the money I earned, I viewed as my money and no one else’s.

I’m thankful that I didn’t keep that outlook for very long. But in retrospect I can now make another funny observation: Isn’t it funny how one of the first things we learn to do in life is to share, and as we get older, it’s also one of the first things we forget?

Many years ago there was a tribe in Africa. One night the chief called the village together for a celebration. One of the village’s customs for community celebrations was that each family would bring a jug of wine. But in one disgruntled house, a man voiced his discontent. He said, “Why should I bring a jug of wine to a celebration that the chief suddenly decides to announce? I’m not going to pay for something I don’t want to buy, so I’ll just bring a jug of water. No one will know the difference.” The jugs were earthen pottery containers, so he certainly could get by with filling his jug with water. So, this man and his family brought their clever offering of water disguised as wine to the celebration that night.

And then it was time for the next celebration custom. Everyone would bring their jugs of wine forward and pour them into a communal vat at the head of the table where the chief sat. Once everyone’s jug was empty, the people came forward with cups, dipped their cup in the communal vat and returned to their seats. Then the chief said, “Now, let us drink!” and they did. And everyone in the village gasped because they realized that they were all drinking water.

Friends Congregational Church is very much like a village, and not unlike this particular village. Our village is founded on the talents offered by faithful stewards of the church who never watered down the wine that everyone has enjoyed since 1977.

We’re listening for how God is speaking to us through the Scripture from Matthew today, where Jesus tells the parable of the talents. I strayed from the usual lectionary in selecting that text for worship today, but I think God was in the details of that, too. Last night I drove down South College Street and I passed by Faith Church in Bryan. Faith Church is the United Church of Christ congregation that helped start this church as a mission effort to the College Station community. Most weeks I’ll drive by that church at some point, and their marquee out front always has a sermon title that reflects the lectionary. Faith Church never strays from that formula. But this week they did. The marquee in front of Faith Church said this last night: Sermon: Our Talents.

Now, I didn’t know exactly why I gave money to the church when I was a kid, or toward what that money was going when I dropped it in the offering plate. But what I did know – and what still amazes me to this day – was that the church exists because of people’s offerings. That’s it.

So, here’s the money talk that’s essential to any stewardship sermon: The church has bills just like any of us do. The church has to pay those bills to make sure the lights stay on, the AC keeps running, the toilets keep flushing. But the money that pays those bills is not anyone’s to control but God’s. The money that pays the church’s bills doesn’t belong to you, or me or even to the church itself. Our role in bringing that money forward is to make sure that it gets back to where it belongs so that God can do what God needs to do with it. And the best part about it is that our money is like the village wine. We bring our offerings together not just to pay off some looming bill, but so that the communal vat can be filled to the brim with rich, real wine. And then all of us celebrate together by sharing that wine, hoisting our cups in the air with a thankful “amen;” our cups that truly runneth over.

But here’s an even better part. The wine that this village brings forward isn’t just money. The parable we hear today uses the example of money, but Jesus is talking about all of our talents: our time, our energy, our creativity, our ideas, our hobbies, our resources, our gifts. If we let those talents collect dust on a shelf, then our lives end up being controlled by those things that really aren’t “us,” and God’s kingdom becomes a mansion with nothing inside of it.

Are you beginning to see what stewardship is? We’ve heard from so many wonderful speakers in our congregation on what stewardship means over the last three weeks. Those speakers brought their jug of wine front and center in this sanctuary and poured it out for all of us to enjoy. And as I’ve sipped on that gracious offering during our stewardship drive, I’ve come to understand that stewardship can’t be explained in one sentence or defined adequately in the dictionary. And that’s because stewardship is about you and me and the God that we love.

Stewardship is about flowers placed on this altar, birthday cakes on the fellowship table, hot thermoses of coffee and plenty of mugs for everyone to get their java. It’s about chairs in this sanctuary being moved aside for a garage sale or a meeting or a potluck feast, and then being meticulously moved back into place, but not before the vacuum cleaner makes its noise. And it’s about potlucks where the diversity of this congregation is symbolized by offerings of bread and hummus, salads and meats, cookies and casseroles, and those little wienies wrapped in bacon and dipped in that brown sugar glaze. That’s good stewardship. Stewardship is about sinks being replaced, playgrounds being built, Sunday School classrooms being furnished and decorated, and weeds being pulled. It’s about our children offering their coins to help another child named Tenzin whom they’ve never met and probably never will; and it’s about their inspiration and new life that they bring to this place every week. It’s about a circle of friends camping out under a rainy sky, pitching a tarp over a long BBQ pit and tending 20 briskets all night long so that even more friends might be able to eat together the next day at our annual BBQ. And it’s about one of those friends sharing the different flavored fruits of their labor out of a refrigerator with four taps.

And it’s about an email I received from a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago where she said, “Stewardship takes prayer, but it takes more than prayer. Stewardship takes gifts, but it takes more than gifts. Stewardship takes times, but it takes more than time. And stewardship takes money, but it takes more than money.” I’d add one more component to that list and say that stewardship takes devotion, too.

I’ve got Walter Bertsch’s permission to share this with you. Walter, as you may know, was in the hospital this week suffering from some serious stomach discomfort. And when I knew he was awake and back to his normal self, I ducked my head into his hospital room and I joked with him and said, “Walter, my brother, I came to visit you to make sure that you’d be out of this hospital in time to be at church on Sunday. It’s Stewardship Sunday, you know, and we expect you to be there.” And Walter didn’t miss a beat. He looked at me with a straight face and said, “Oh, I’m going to be there. And I’m going to bring my pledge card, too.”

Friends, today we share our pledges with each other. Our pledge cards are outward reminders of what God has done and how we, in UCC terms, are “loving God back.”

And our pledges are a faithful way for us to look at our bills with a straight face and say, “You’re just bills. You don’t control me. The Lord is my Shepherd. I have everything I need.”

Today, let us gather around the Mexican kid in the story. The boy was probably the son of migrant workers, and he gave all he could, the button off his shirt, to satisfy his urge for stewardship. And that act of giving got his peers and the schoolteacher talking: “Why’d he do that? What possessed him to offer that button?” Well, I’d say that the boy is the Christ-like figure in that story, and so we gather around this humble one who symbolizes Christ and how Jesus behaves – and we see what Jesus does. And all the while we’re asking, “Why’d he do that?” maybe our question should be, “Why aren’t we doing that, too?”

The world wants to give. It’s a God-given feeling in everyone’s gut that some times we just forget. The world wants to serve. The world wants to love. But the world has forgotten how to put that urge into action. God’s children have fallen asleep. Maybe a drink of fresh wine from our communal vat might wake them up! It’s Stewardship Sunday, friends. Let’s celebrate! Amen.