Quilts, Stewardship, and Hearing the Tears. Sermon for Oct 7th, 2018

Sermon:

Text: Mark 10

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who mends and stitches us together.

We’ll be talking about Stewardship this month. Which means for many of you the word money just popped into your head. Well, that’s not what stewardship is primarily about.

To begin our talk about stewardship, I want to talk about quilts. You should all have a quilt near you, look at it. What do you notice? There’s patterns, different kinds of fabric. Most of the fabric on these quilts is used, from old sheets or unwanted fabric, which is how most quilts were made, they were made using left over fabric from making clothes, or from old clothes or bedding that had worn out in places. Many years ago when it wasn’t as easy to just go buy new sheets or clothes, you used all that you had. So quilts were made with the leftover bits, unwanted bits.

Which I think really speaks to stewardship, using all that God gives us. But, what actually is stewardship? Stewardship is care of relationship.

The concept of stewardship comes from Genesis. Even before our text from today, Genesis 1 God creates humankind, male and female, God creates them. To have dominion.

I did a summer working at a youth Leadership school while at Seminary, and we talked about this text, they came up with a little skit. One boy came out and went …..

What are you doing! I’m having dominion. That’s not what it means! It means taking care of things on God’s behalf!

That’s stewardship, taking care of God’s creation on God’s behalf. Being stewards of all that God has created. Which means us! Our Gospel lesson for today, despite all the talk about divorce, marriage and adultery, the meaning behind it is care for relationship. Don’t be reckless with divorce, don’t be reckless with marriage, don’t be reckless with relationships.

This text has become one of the nasty texts in a lot of ways. Used as a clobber device against people, mainly women, to stay in abusive relationships. Jesus is not saying don’t ever, ever divorce. In fact in Jesus’ time, the woman couldn’t be the one to initiate the divorce anyways, it was only the man who could, and to write that certificate it could be for the littlest of things. Jesus is saying, don’t throw treat the bringing together of two people by God as such a small thing. In an ideal world, the relationship brought together by God should last forever.

But, we don’t live in an ideal world do we?  Look at your quilts again. They’re all nice squares. To get a real good example for how the world really works, I want to show you another kind of quilt.

This is a crazy quilt. This one here is one that Sarah’s great-grandfather made, yes, I said great-grandfather, not grandmother. The story is that she was making quilts, but he didn’t think she was cutting the squares straight enough. Sarah’s great-grandma and mom told him, so you do it then! And he did. Even got his carpenters square out. We got ours for our wedding from an uncle who had the last one he made before he died. It’s crazy, because it’s not just squares, it’s odd shapes, tears and other things. If you look on the screen you’ll see an even crazier one.

Stewardship is making quilts in God’s creation. Not quilt quilts, but life quilts. Stitching together the people that God made so that relationships are made. And the thing about life is that it’s not ideal. It’s not stitching perfect squares. It’s realizing that at times things like divorce happen, and squares are torn apart, and our job, as Christians called to go out and be doers, is to mend the tears. This is not to bring that marriage back together, but to bring the people involved back into God’s family, and into relationship. IT’s also to see that while the divorce may cause rifts, the abuse and anger that may be the heart of the divorce caused so much more. Because of human pride, greed, lust, this results in imperfect pieces, people torn different ways. Because of our sinful, imperfect, self centered ways, this results in tears within pieces. I think of all the stories finally being told recently, primarily from women, of times of sexual assault and rape. Stories they never dare tell, from fear, shame, trauma. Those are tears. Rips. Rends within a piece. There are people in this room who fit this situation.

When people come bearing their souls, and in tears they show forth their tears. Our job as Christians is to be stewards, creating, mending, and fixing God’s quilt. We are not to say, your tear does not exist. We are to welcome, and begin the process of mending.

The quilts we make in life, our pieces and the pieces of others we connect to in relationship, are crazy quilts. They have tears. They have stitches. They are uneven and odd shapes. And yet, through God’s love they are beautiful.

Stewardship starts there. Everything we talk about in connection to stewardship, how much time we give to God, how much money we give, how much whatever we give, it’s all to make the quilt. IT’s all to see for ourselves, and to show to others that Christ is the thread, the stitching that holds us together, that sews close our tears. It’s not to keep a building open, or to run dinners or services, those things are all tools used to make the quilt.

This building doesn’t matter, what matters is how we use this building to make the church.

We sing Blest be the tie that binds as our hymn of the day today, it’s often used at weddings, but today we also sing it listening to how it speaks to us in all our relationships. May Christ be the tie that binds us together, mends us, and helps us love each other. Amen.