On Serving Our Awesome God

Our Gospel passage picks up with two of the close apostles of Christ – Ss James and John, sons of Zebedee, sons of thunder—asking our Lord to sit one at His right hand and one at His left in His glory. This is their processing of the Transfiguration of Jesus, which they, along with S. Peter, witnessed. They were in awe of Christ’s Transfiguration, and wanted to emulate the two they saw with Jesus at that moment: Moses and Elijah, and Christ’s right and left hand. They wanted to emulate Moses and Elijah out of their yearning for intimacy with Jesus, of Whom they were utterly in awe. And their awe, along with the awe of the whole of the Upper Room Church of Jerusalem grew when they read passages out of the prophet Isaiah as we hear today—that this Jesus, the eternal Son and Word of the Father, begotten before all worlds, King of kinds, Lord of lord, this Jesus has bourne our griefs and carried our sorrows; that this Jesus was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. And their humility grew when they realized they too were the sheep that had gone astray, that they too had turned every one to his own way, away from Him who poured out His soul to death, bearing the sins of us all.

Awe and humility—I believe both are tied in to stewardship, as I will seek to illustrate.

This is the second of my sermons on stewardship. I am offering sermons on this topic because stewardship summarizes our entire attitude to the Church, which includes the local expression of the One Church our parish. In my first sermon I spoke of stewardship as seeing ourselves, members of this congregation, as gardeners. Understanding the stewardship of this parish means seeing ourselves, seeing this congregation, as gardeners.

I went into last Sunday what this means. God has brought each and every one of us here, to this Parish, to be gardeners of His new creation. God wants us to help Him bring about the increase of the harvest. God has called each of us forth to do in this Parish what gardeners do in their garden: help it grow. That is what our tithe of time, talent, and treasure is for: the means for growth. If we want this parish to grow, then let us do the hard work of giving our time in attending the Liturgy and praying at home, let us give our talent in support of the ministries ongoing in this parish, and let us give generously of our treasure, to allow the parish to operate within the financial realities of the world today.

I also spoke last Sunday about having an inspiring image in our minds, as we take up the work of offering our threefold tithe. We need such an image because the work is often arduous, difficult, and in the immediate sense, it can be not very rewarding. A gardener would have in his mind the image of the harvest, and this image inspires hard work in the present. For us, I offered up the image of an adoring and merciful congregation in a beautiful church with a strong desire to know God. Adoring: in that with reverence we adore God Who transcends all conditions of time and space; merciful: in that we perform acts of mercy to help those in need; all with a strong desire to know God: in that we are a congregation with inquiring minds, discerning hearts, a courageous spirit that perseveres to know and love God, with the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works, and in God Himself, as He is known in the power of the Holy Spirit through His Son Jesus Christ our Lord. This image, this portrait, is both who we are now, and who we seek to become more intensely, more thoroughly. We seek here nothing less than participation in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, not as a superficial social club as is sadly too common in today’s American Christianity, but as a holy organism, in holy fellowship, filled with the Holy Ghost.

Another aspect of stewardship is humility. If we are gardeners in the garden of Christ, then we must be humble. As Saint Paul te