You get to know who your friends are pretty quickly in my line of work.  Last week, as you know, we had a guest preacher for the United Methodist Women Thank Offering service, and she was very good, and I was here as one of the worship leaders.  And I have to tell you that I love preaching, I especially love preaching from this pulpit, and I missed it last week, but I also love being here in worship when I don’t have the responsibility of preaching.  The service last week was just so lovely and so moving.  And I was talking with someone after the service about this, and I said, “You know, I love being in worship here when I’m not the one really in charge; I love being in worship when I’m not preaching.”  And this person said to me, “Yes Duane, we all feel the same way.”  As Rodney Dangerfield used to say, “It’s not easy being me.” 

And it’s not always easy being me or being any preacher when the sermon topic is stewardship.  Sometimes a little humor helps.  I heard about two men who survived after their plane crash on a small, desert island out in the South Pacific.  One man quickly explored the island and returned very agitated.  He said, “This island is totally uninhabited!  There is no food and no water!  We’re going to die!”  “No we’re not,” the other man said calmly.  “I make over ten million dollars a year.”  “Are you crazy?” the first man said.  “Didn’t you hear me?  There’s no food, no water.  It doesn’t matter how much money you make.  We’re going to die.”           

But still unruffled by all this, the other man said, “Calm down.  Calm down.  Listen, I make over ten million dollars a year, and I tithe ten percent of it to the church.  Believe me, my friend, the senior minister of my church is going to find us.”           

It’s not easy being me when it comes to preaching on stewardship sometimes, but how important of a message it is to be preached: to be good stewards of our time and of our talents, to be good stewards of our lives, to be good stewards, to be faithful with all we have and all we possess and all we are; to understand that our lives do not consist in the abundance of our possessions. 

How difficult of a message this is to get through though, when everything else in our lives almost, everything else in our culture is telling us the exact opposite, that the good life consists in pursuing wealth and power, pursuing all these things that we can possess.  “The person who dies with the most toys wins,” I’ve seen that on some bumper stickers.  And these are just the bumper stickers I’ve seen out here in the parking lot at Christ Church. 

One of my favorite preachers is a man by the name of Fred Craddock, and he uses a wonderful blend of humor and stories and images that make for some very exciting preaching in my opinion.  And I remember in one of his sermons he came up with this fanciful image of himself talking to a dog, a greyhound, a dog that has spent it’s life racing around one of those tracks, racing after those mechanical rabbits around a track.  And in his sermon, he has this fanciful, made up, conversation with this dog.  “Are you racing any more?”  Fred Craddock asks the dog.  And the dog says, “No, no, I don’t race any more.”  So Craddock asks, “Do you miss it?  Do you miss the excitement and glitter of the track?”  And the dog says, “No, no, I really don’t miss it.”  “Well why did you quit?  Did you get too old?”  “No,” the dog said, “I still had a lot of race left in me.”  “Well did you not win?  Did you lose all the time?”  “No, I won over five million dollars for my owner.  I was still winning when I quit.”  “Well did they treat you bad?”  “Oh no, they actually treated us royally when we were racing.”  “Then what?  Did you break your leg?”  “No,” the dog said, “I didn’t break my leg.”  “Then what?”           

And the dog said, “I quit.”  “You quit?”  “That’s right, I quit.”  “Well why’d you quit?”  And the dog said, “I quit because I discovered that that rabbit they had us chasing all around that track, that rabbit, it wasn’t really a rabbit at all.  It was made of wood or something.  When I think about it today, all that running and running and running, and what I was chasing wasn’t even real.  All that time, and it wasn’t even real.”  I wonder sometimes what it is that I might be chasing in my life, what you might be chasing, what we might be spending our lives chasing, the best years of our lives running after, pursuing, only to wake up some day and discover, maybe when it’s too late, that what we’ve been chasing isn’t even real, in any ultimate sense, in any sense that is eternal and lasting, it isn’t even real.           

I heard someone say, “It’s not how much you own; it’s how much owns you.”  We can become enslaved to the very things we thought would set us free.           

Jesus paints a very vivid portrait of this man who has spent a lifetime pursuing, accumulating, vast material possessions.  And in the words that Jesus uses we can see the total self-centeredness of this man, “He thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’  Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods.  And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’”  And even before Jesus calls this man the fool that he is, the first hearers of this would have understood, and you and I reading it today understand, the complete poverty of this soul, in the midst of all these possessions, the emptiness of this man, the total waste of this life.           

The man in this parable had this gift, he held this amazing gift, he held it in his hands, and he squandered it, he squandered it, he wasted it.  But for a moment, for a brief moment, he held this gift in his hands, this gift of giving, this gift of sharing, sharing what God had given him, not hoarding it all for himself; he held this gift of using what he had to make a difference.  We all of us hold this gift of giving in our hands, this gift of sharing God’s amazing grace.           

I’ve been mentioning William Wilberforce here and there in these days leading up to Consecration Weekend.  There is a new movie out that was in the theaters last winter, and is due out on DVD in November that tells about the life of William Wilberforce.  The name of the movie is “Amazing Grace”.  Wilberforce was the one primarily responsible for ending the evil practice of slavery in England, years before it was ended here in the United States.  So he is surely one who was willing to share God’s amazing grace with others.  But it was all the result of this: one day God woke him up and, these are his words, God woke him up and “he saw the full horror of himself”, as one who had so selfishly wasted and squandered his time and his money and his possessions.  But no more.  From then on, once he saw this, he determined that he would use all that he had, he would use all that he was, to share this amazing grace.           

I heard about a little girl named Jenny who was five years old who was with her mother one day at a dollar store and she saw the most beautiful fake pearl necklace.  And she just fell in love with it, and begged her mother for it.  Well the mother saw that it was only two dollars, so she said that if she really wanted it she could have it, but she would have to do some extra chores around the house and earn this necklace.  So Jenny got her pearls, her fake pearls, and when she got home she went right to her piggy bank and counted out how much she had already saved, 17 cents.  So she gave that to her mother, and slowly earned the rest of the two dollars by doing her chores around the house and doing extra chores.  But she had her pearls, and she loved her pearls.  They made her feel dressed up and grown up.  She wore them everywhere, Sunday school, kindergarten, even to bed.           

Well Jenny had a very loving father too, and every night when she was ready for bed, he would stop whatever he was doing and come upstairs to read her a story.  One night as he finished the story, he asked Jenny, “Do you love me?”  And Jenny said, “Oh yes, Daddy.  You know I love you.”  And so her father asked, “Then would you give me your pearls?”  And Jenny said, “Oh Daddy, not my pearls.  I love my pearls.  But you can have Princess, the white horse from my collection, the one with the pink tail.  She’s my favorite.”  “That’s okay honey,” he said.  “Daddy loves you.  Good night.”  And he brushed her cheek with a kiss.           

About a week later, after story time, Jenny’s father asked again, “Do you love me?”  “Daddy, you know I love you,” she said.  “Then would you give me your pearls?”  And Jenny said, “Oh Daddy, not my pearls.  I love my pearls.  But you can have my baby doll.  The brand new one I got for my birthday.  She’s beautiful and you can have the yellow blanket that matches her sleeper.”  But Jenny’s father said, “That’s okay honey.  Sleep well.  God bless you, little one.  Daddy loves you.”  And as always he brushed her cheek with a gentle kiss.           

A few nights later when her father came in, Jenny was sitting on her bed, and he noticed that her chin was trembling, and one silent tear was rolling down her cheek.  “What is it Jenny?” he asked.  “What’s the matter?”  Jenny didn’t say anything, she just lifted her little hand up to her father.  And when she opened it, there was her little fake pearl necklace.  With a little quiver, she finally said, “Here Daddy, this is for you.  I love you.”  With tears gathering in his own eyes, Jenny’s father reached out with one hand to take the dollar store necklace, and with the other hand he reached into his pocket and pulled out a blue velvet case with a strand of genuine pearls, and gave them to Jenny.  He had had them all the time.  He was just waiting for her to give up the fake stuff so he could give her the genuine treasure.           

Now I’m not a parent, I don’t know whether this is the way for a father to approach his five-year-old daughter.  But I do know this, that we work and work and work for what will not satisfy, only to discover, hopefully before it’s too late, that what is truly lasting is what we receive from God, from our heavenly Father, what is truly lasting is what we give away.           

It was Martin Luther who said, “I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all.  The only thing I have kept is what I have given away.”