Well, good morning. My name is Jeff Evans and I serve as Canon to the Ordinary here
in the Diocese of Alabama, which is the title that no one understands. It's okay. Just means
I'm the bishop's right-hand man as she executes or leads us in our execution of the vision for
her episcopate, which is leadership development, congregational vitality, and racial healing.
Congregational development or parish growth is really my area of focus. I help congregations
with issues large and small, including recently I helped a congregation deal with a wild boar
issue. It's quite an education. And in that respect, I'm so glad to be here today because,
and I hope you guys know this about yourselves. You guys are a thriving and leading congregation
in the Diocese of Alabama. This congregation has a larger Sunday attendance, larger pledge base,
and a larger budget than it did before the pandemic. I hope you understand what a beautiful
thing the Lord is doing here in your midst. You are one of the few churches in North America,
which is larger with more momentum after the pandemic than before the pandemic. And I cannot
wait to see what happens with you in the next years. I think the Lord has mighty things prepared
that are already at work in this congregation. So in many respects, I'm here to learn,
to replicate what the Lord is doing here in other places, and to celebrate what God is doing in our
midst. I'm also the stewardship speaker. It's a grand tradition of stewardship to bring in an
outside speaker to ask your congregation to give toward the mission and ministry of the church.
So I am that. I love Stewardship Sunday. Particularly, I was wondering like why people
come to church during the stewardship season. It's only because people don't know it's stewardship
season until the sermon starts, and then it's like too awkward to leave.
No, I know that you're here because you know it's important. And I want to talk about stewardship,
but to do that, I want to explain a little bit more about my story. Jack and I have been the best
of friends for the better part of a couple decades now. We went to seminary together. We're raising
kids together. We're doing life together. Our families are very close, and it's so great to see
what's happening here and the way you guys are supporting his leadership. You guys know you'll
have a fantastic rector and a fantastic pastor. He knows he has a fantastic church, and that's a
beautiful thing. And now you add an incredibly talented Emily onto your staff, and I think now
you've got a pastoral duo that is as strong as any in the diocese. So well done, and thanks be to God
on that. Also, I've known about y'all and been connected to y'all for a long time. I was the first
person to live in the Allen house. 14 years ago, I lived in the Allen house for a summer during
seminary. Jim Busbin came in and helped get things set up. I remember it very well. That was a big
help to me, and I'm grateful for that. This morning, I want to talk about the lesson that you heard
from Paul's letter to the Philippians, and I want to tag that text and our time together with this
idea. Your pledge of love. Your pledge of love. Now to explain that, we got to do a little
background. What's going on with Paul and the Philippians? So Paul planted a church in Philippi,
which is in the region of Macedonia in the northern part of Greece. And Paul planted a
church in the region of Macedonia in the northern part of Greece. And when Paul got to Philippi,
it was a wild story. He came there with a clergy team, and when he got there, he started doing
things, preaching the gospel, building churches, casting out demons. In fact, he cast out one demon
of a slave girl who used to tell people's fortunes somehow connected to her demon, and he cast out
the demon, and then the person who owned this poor girl was so angry with him that he had him thrown
in prison. Paul's in prison. God sends an earthquake, opens up the prison. A jailer almost
kills himself, but then converts to Christianity, and then the town leadership realizes that they
have beaten up and imprisoned a Roman citizen, and they come to Paul and they say, would you please
leave our town? That's how this church got started. Don't you love that? It becomes Paul's most
strong and vibrant and supporting church. The church in Philippi funded a lot of the mission
that Paul would later do into other parts of the Mediterranean basin, and at this point in the story,
Paul is languishing in a Roman prison. And the Philippians have just found out that Paul is in
prison, and so they send a financial gift to him to sustain and to support him, and taken there by
a man named Epaphroditus, who was a pastor and a co-worker of Paul's. Epaphroditus comes to Paul
and is with him and prays with him and gives him the financial gift, and in thanksgiving for that,
Paul writes down a letter and Epaphroditus takes that back to Philippi, and that's Paul's letter
to the Philippians that we have in our Bible. And actually, I want to focus down on a part of
Philippians that you didn't actually hear. I have a love-hate relationship with the lectionary,
sometimes I add to it. What you have in your order of service is from the first half of chapter four
of Paul's letter to the Philippians. I want to focus a little bit on what you didn't hear in the
second half of chapter four. I want you to listen to this just for a moment.
Paul says, I rejoice in the Lord greatly that now at last you Philippians have revived your
concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned for me but had no opportunity to show it.
Not that I am referring to being in need, for I have learned to be content with whatever I have.
I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances,
I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in
need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. In any case, it was kind of you to share my
distress. That's fascinating. Paul is saying, thanks for sending me the money, but just to be
clear, I could have got along without it. Now that's rude, except it's not. And the reason it's
not rude is because Paul is not a 21st century North American like we are. Paul is a person of
the Greco-Roman world and that world understood friendship really differently than we do. In
order to understand what Paul is up to, we have to understand a little bit about that world.
You see, for you and I, friendship is based on proximity and compatibility. We make friends at
school or at work or in church or on the sideline of soccer games. And then if we have a nice
chit chat, we have some compatibility, we might hang out some more. And if that goes well, we might
continue to hang out more. It's all based, like I said, in proximity and compatibility. Now in the
Greco-Roman world, it was also based on proximity. You were friends with the people who were around
you, but actually instead of compatibility, it was based on mutuality and reciprocity, meaning
that very early in the friend making process, there was the giving and receiving of gifts.
At the very beginning and throughout friendship that would blossom into financial support of one
another in more difficult economic times. It's interesting, Asian cultures are more similar to
the Greco-Roman world than our world is. In seminary, I got to go to Burma for the better
part of a month and everywhere we went in Burma, we would give gifts and we would receive gifts.
Right? In a way, from a Western person, kind of feels a little bit tiresome, but it was the
culture of the interaction, except one time we went to meet with the archbishop of Burma
and we didn't receive a gift. And it was very clear something was going on and are not receiving
a gift. Turns out we were being hosted on our trip by another bishop who came in second in the election
for the archbishop in Burma. The gift giving meant something. Now, we retain some of this
in our own culture, right? I married a wonderful woman from Jackson, Mississippi. I'm from North
Alabama, the New South, and so the old South ways of Jackson to me are sometimes very confusing,
but always charming. And one of the rules and customs in Jackson, Mississippi is that if you
are invited into someone's home for the first, second, maybe even third time, you must bring
something with you when you go to that home. Some kind of gift. But it's not called a gift.
That would be embarrassingly direct. It's referred to as a happy or a little happy.
It's almost always a little happy when it's described. I'm not sure why that is. You just
bring a little happy. And the little happy is a nice kind of something. Bonus points if it's from
a local artist. Extra credit if that local artist is your own cousin who is living in self-imposed
poverty in the depths of the Mississippi Delta. In fact, if you go to someone's home and you
don't have a little happy, you have to apologize for not having a little happy and then the host
has to say, oh, don't worry about it. You didn't need to bring a thing. Which is true, but they
have registered that you didn't bring a happy. It might tell somebody else that you neglected
to bring a happy. But here's the thing. Again, I'm from the New South. I find it a little strange
but deeply charming. And the charming part about it is that little happy says,
I'm honored to be in your home. I'm honored to be in your home. And it also recognizes
the sometimes not insignificant sacrifice that you make to have people over, be it the cooking
or the vacuum cleaning or the cleaning of floorboards or throwing toys into a closet.
It acknowledges that you've sacrificed some of your time and your effort to include us in your
life. That's actually a really lovely thing. And it's a little bit of a shame that you're
not able to do this thing. That's a little bit what was going on in the Greco-Roman world.
So what's fascinating to me is that what St. Paul is saying is that he is playing within the
cultural scheme of his day. He's acknowledging the gift as part and parcel of the friendship,
but he's pushing beyond it because Paul is in the world, but the gospel leads him beyond the world.
And he's saying thank you for your gift, but you know what? The most important thing to me is what
your gift represents, which is that you love me and that you care for me and that you're in my
distress, that you are suffering with me. It's a beautiful acknowledgement of the love that their
gift represents. It's interesting to me, I write a lot of thank you notes. We do a lot of thank you
notes as pastors. We become PhDs in thank you notes. And often when I write a thank you note,
I say thank you for your gift. Here's how I'm going to use it to support the ministry of Calvary
and Aniana or St. Luke's in Scottsboro or Trinity in Demopolis or whatever it is. And that's good.
And also according to the practices of nonprofit management. But if I like St. Paul, we're going
to embrace my culture, but let the gospel take me to a higher sense, to beyond my culture. What I
would say is thank you for your love for me and your love for this church and your love for our
Lord Jesus Christ. Doesn't that sound a little bit too intimate for a thank you note? A little bit
too vulnerable? That's a good sign that we've now moved into Jesus' territory. We've moved into
the heart. We followed the gospel into actually what deeply and most profoundly matters.
So this morning, I want you to think about your giving to your church, your pledge
to Church of the Ascension. I want it to be a fragrant offering unto God.
And I want you to think about your gift as an expression of your love. Your pledge is
deeply important to the life of this church. It is important on so many levels, but one of those
levels is that it is an expression of your love. It's an expression of your love for this church.
It's an expression of your love for this community who sees this place as a beacon of hope of all
order of friendship of love in the world. It's an expression of love to your pastors
and to your staff. It's an expression of love to your fellow parishioners and it's an expression
of love to the God who has given us every blessing that we enjoy in our lives.
My wife Emily and I have been on a long journey when it comes to our giving. We've been at 1%.
We've been up to 10%. We've been back down, working our way again to 10%. But by God's grace,
we've always had a sense that our giving is deeply important to our spiritual lives.
It's an anchor in the chaos and the worries and the difficulties of our financial lives, yours and mine.
It's a way of expressing our deep commitments to each other, to God, and to our community.
So I hope everybody in this church makes a pledge this year and I hope you think about it prayerfully.
Go ahead and turn it in before the deadline day. Wouldn't that be amazing?
Think about it in terms of your love and what it expresses. Let me leave you with this.
When I was pastoring Holy Trinity in Auburn, I was talking to a guy in my church
and he told me about a time when he had a business fail right out from under him.
A business completely fail. His life was painful and chaotic and he told me with tears in his eyes,
Jeff, but we honored our pledge. We went without, but we honored our pledge.
He didn't say it with anger. He didn't say it with regret. He said it with godly pride
because in a dehumanizing, painful, anxiety-ridden season in his life,
his gift to his church was a port in the storm. It was an instance of humanity
and it was his expression of love. So beloved, this year as you consider your gift,
think about all that God has given you and all that God is working through you
as you make your pledge of love. Thanks be to God.