St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Strathroy, Ontario

When God Blesses Our Little Bit

Based on a Reflection written by Rev. Dr. Herb Gale, Karen Plater and Janelle Yanishewski

 

I want to start this morning with a follow-up to one of the things I said last week, which  was that God does not prepare all of us, or even all that many of us, for what one might call “Hall of Fame careers” in our Christian walk.  Some, however, he does seem to equip and gift mightily.  I received my weekly Worship Ideas newsletter on Monday, and one of the articles it contained had to do with, not mega-churches but what they are now calling giga-churches, which are churches that have over ten thousand people at worship on a Sunday morning.  The largest congregation in America is Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, with senior pastor Joel Osteen – in 2005, his congregation moved from (and you have to picture this) a building the size of the John Labatt Centre to the arena where the Houston Rockets used to play!  The main church building holds almost seventeen thousand people, and between the four English-speaking and two Spanish-speaking services held there each week, the average weekly attendance is 43,500 – in other words, Lakewood’s average weekly attendance is more than forty percent of the entire declared population of the Presbyterian Church in Canada!

Now, before you ask, no, I would never want to work in a church like that!  The senior pastor is more like the mayor of a good-sized city, and the staffing model is more administration and production than connection and relationship.  It’s also very easy to drift in your theology, in your understanding of God – for instance, I know that several of them (including Pastor Joel’s congregation) preach what is called a “Word of Faith” doctrine, which can be a rather materialistic view of the world that God has given us.  When the focus is on how God is going to bless you with wealth and prosperity and the acquisition of “things,” even things like full health (which some of these preachers call a ‘divine right’ that Satan is attempting to cheat us out of through illness), you lose, I think, what the gospel is actually about.  For a moment, I was jealous of the fact that he has about four thousand “leaders” in his congregation – the “cell groups” where one actually finds connection and relationship only include 8-12 people each – but then I realized that one of the main jobs of those leaders would be to pass on, if not the teachings of God, then certainly the teachings of Pastor Joel!  My ego isn’t big enough for me to think that you’d all want to pass along my thoughts to your friends;  and even what you do pass on, if they’re of any value, they’re not necessarily my thoughts, but rather what God gives me to say.

We aren’t a giga-church;  we’re not a mega-church;  we don’t even count as a big congregation, in a lot of ways.  But that doesn’t matter if our hearts are right and our minds are right and our spirits are right, because then we know that it’s not about the big things;  it’s about the little things that will become big things, and when I’m talking ‘big things’ I’m talking in the eyes of God, not in the eyes of man.  It’s about “seeds” – blessings and knowledge and understandings that are planted now, to be fully harvested in eternity.

Faith doesn’t need much to start with.

In the reading we heard from Mark’s gospel, Jesus refers to the Kingdom of God as being like a tiny mustard seed, one of the smallest of all the seeds, but which, when planted, becomes a shrub so large that birds come and make nests in its shade.  Jesus paints a beautiful image that shows us how God can take a little bit and turn it into a lot – a whole lot!  Throughout the Bible, we see how God does this again and again and again:  taking what we consider insignificant – a mere “drop in the bucket” – and blessing that little bit so that miracles can grow and multiply out of those meagre beginnings.

Our other reading, from 1 Kings, tells of what happened when the prophet Elijah to the region of Zarephath during a great drought.  He came to the house of a widow, and when he met her all she had was a handful of meal in a jar and a little oil in a jug – that’s all the food she had, and she told the prophet that she was going to make one last small loaf of bread for herself and her son before they died of starvation.  But Elijah told her to make him some bread from what she had, and after she showed the courtesy and generosity that were due a guest, he told her to make something for herself and her son, and promised her that her jar of flour would not be used up and her jug of oil would not run dry until the day God sent rain to water the land again.  She had to summon her faith and courage to give what she had, and in the end she had enough to provide for all three of them for the entire time Elijah stayed with her.

In 2 Kings 4, you can read a similar story that happened to Elijah’s successor, Elisha, who also encountered a widow (and remember:  in those days, widows had no social safety net of any kind – if their husbands died and no one would take them in, they had to fend for themselves).  This widow had incurred so much debt that she was on the verge of having to sell her children to pay them off!  All she had was a small jar with a little bit of oil in it, and so Elisha told her to gather as many jars as she could beg or borrow from her neighbours, and she began to pour out into them from her original jar;  and so much came out, flowing and flowing and flowing from her original small jar, that she was able to sell it and didn’t just pay off her debts but also had enough to look after her children in the days, months and even years ahead.

We’re told that Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves of barley bread and two fish, with enough pieces left over for the twelve disciples to each fill a basket.  And Jesus used those twelve men to turn the whole world upside-down!

When Jesus went to the cross, the world saw only one man die, one man who put his ‘little bit’ into God’s hands, and that ‘little bit’ proved to be the salvation of the world!  As He said in John’s gospel, “Unless the seed falls into the earth and dies, it bears no fruit.  But if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Hopefully you can see here how, from beginning to end, the Bible is the story of how God takes our little bit and blesses it so that it becomes enough – enough to fill jars with oil, enough to feed a multitude, enough to change the world!  And that’s the way God still works today.

 

In the Presbyterian Church in Canada, we have “small” congregations doing big things.  For instance, take St. Andrew’s Church in Virden, Manitoba.  The congregation has plans to subdivide some of its property to provide land for Habitat for Humanity in a community where housing prices are going through the roof due to workers coming in to serve in the growing oil business.

Or how about First Church in Brandon, Manitoba, and their Prayer Shawl ministry.  Women in the congregation make shawls, knitting their prayers and love into every stitch, and then give them to people in hospital, newcomers to the community or shut-ins! In the past six years, the people of First Church have given away over 300 prayer shawls!

In our own congregation, we support the Salvation Army food bank with our annual food-and-fund-raiser, which is happening next Saturday at Giant Tiger;  we have our Comfort Food ministry, our annual Seniors’ Luncheon, our Vacation Bible School in the summer, and we join in with other large efforts such as Operation Christmas Child and the Christmas Hamper drive for the Salvation Army, not to mention the mission endeavours that come out of our WMS and which many of us find ourselves helping with, even though we’re not officially members of the group!  Our efforts are local, regional, national and, yes, even international, and on top of it all we participate in the work that is done through Presbyterians Sharing.

Presbyterians Sharing, for those who don’t know or don’t remember, is the nation-wide funding structure that every member congregation or the Presbyterian Church in Canada pays into as they are willing or able to do so.  Our resources allow us to budget $15,000 a year to be sent to Presbyterians Sharing, which itself budgets for over $8 million dollars, the great portion of which comes from congregations.  With what we give, we support people, we support programs, and we support the gospel going out into the world in ever-widening circles.  God multiplies our gifts and we can see them grow!

I love it when I realize that something that my family has put into the plate has helped to touch a life on the far side of the world.  I mean, our International Ministries office is working with mission partners to share the good news of the gospel in a minimum of twenty-nine countries around the world, depending on how the borders are drawn today. Twenty-seven full-time mission staff and spouses and several short-term volunteers support and accompany mission partners from the nations where we work. More than fifty different grants support church partners in Christian education, Bible translation, evangelism, leadership development and theological education. These are trees growing out of seeds that have been sown with our gifts.

Now, one of my favourite “trees” is one with literally thousands of branches – Bible translation!  Over the years that I’ve been here, we’ve had two families come and speak to us about work that they have been doing with Wycliffe Bible Translators – one family, the Allisons, worked with the Kotoko people in northern Cameroon, while the Brassingtons were partnered with a group in Malaysia, where they are currently living in order to work directly with the people they are labouring for.  There are more than two thousand languages in the world, and Wycliffe’s stated goal is to have work started in all of them within the next twenty to thirty years.

The first translator I recall meeting, though, was a fellow by the name of Paul McLean.  He was at Knox College while I was there, but doing advanced studies in Greek and Hebrew which would allow him to then start translating the Scriptures into a Taiwanese dialect known as Hakka.  It can be a challenge for translators to capture the nuances, imagery and poetry of the Bible stories and to keep the text faithful to the original Hebrew and Greek.  There are four million Hakka speakers on Taiwan, but only about fifteen thousand of them are Christian.  Armed with the Scriptures in their own language, though, they would be able to reach out to others around them with a word that connects to them directly.  Paul has been working on this for years, but 2012 has been set as the planned release date for the full translation of the Scriptures into Hakka, as The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan is celebrating “The Year of Hakka Mission”, leading up to the 150th anniversary celebration of the arrival of the Gospel in southern Taiwan in 1865. Paul says “That puts lots of pressure on us to get the job done in a timely yet ever faithful and accurate fashion. Since this is all God’s work, we pray that the Lord will help us achieve this very worthy goal.” Once finished, the Bible will be a guiding light for Hakka Christians to reach out to Taiwan’s four million Hakka people, 99.7% of whom are not Christians. Through the dedicated work of a few, God blesses many.

In the same way, we have people working to translate the Scriptures into, as I say, Kotoko in the Cameroon, Izii, Ikwo, Ezaa and Mgbolizhia in Nigeria; and Mauritian Creole in Mauritius.  God’s word is for all people, but it will take a lot of work to get it to them, each in their own language!

 

In Eastern Europe, much of the concern is simply to provide education of any kind – the communist regimes that ruled after the Second World War mistrusted intellectuals of pretty much any stripe, and entire school systems as a whole suffered greatly in that part of the world.  Even though it has been almost twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union that was at the heart of it all, education is still a tattered and broken patchwork system.  The Reformed Churches in places like the Ukraine are still working hard to repair rebuild the infrastructure and provide school supplies to educate the next generation.  Our donations to Presbyterians Sharing support the work of people like David Pándy-Szekeres as he paves the way for a brighter future for many children, helping Roma children access regular schools and overseeing Christian high schools for the Hungarian youth who live in southern Ukraine. In recent years, the Christian high schools have been under tremendous pressure, as the Ukrainian government has decided that they would no longer provide the state subsidy to support the schools’ operating budgets.  Legislation was passed to prevent the schools from instructing students of ethnic minorities in their native languages. (Sound familiar?)  But the schools are persevering, planting seeds of hope in their youth and giving them the skills they need to be leaders in their communities. God is blessing their faithfulness, and new Christian leaders are coming out of these schools.

Of course, while overseas mission work has a kind of ‘glamour’ to it (though that’s not really the proper word), we need to be aware that we are also planting seeds right here in Canada through Presbyterians Sharing.  In 2011, grants from Canadian Ministries/The Vine have helped to create 15 new ministries, to renew 4 ministries that had been closed for one reason or other, to sustain 11 ministries that can’t quite stand on their own two feet, and to support 32 specialized ministries, such as inner city missions, college and university chaplaincies, work with refugee and those with a special native focus.

One of the new congregations that we are helping to spread the gospel message is Parkland First Presbyterian in Spruce Grove, Alberta.  Parkland began as a Bible Study group in the mid-1990’s and officially became a congregation in 1997. In 2005, with support from Presbyterians Sharing, they called their first minister, the Rev. Mark Chiang, a recent graduate from Knox College (who was also supported by Presbyterians Sharing through grants to our theological colleges!). From their beginnings in Stony Plain they moved to Spruce Grove where they have been serving families, young people, seniors and more in this growing community. The seeds from this church plant continue to grow as members of the church follow Christ in their daily lives and reach out to the wider community in word and action.  This past year Parkland was given a $700,000 grant from Presbyterians Sharing to purchase land and a building in a rapidly growing area. They took possession April 1, 2011 and are beginning renovations and looking forward to continued growth.

One of the specialized ministries that our church supports is Action Réfugiés Montréal – for whatever reason, Montreal seems to be where a great number of refugees end up, possibly because many of the war zones in Africa were former French colonies.  Glynis Williams, director of the ministry, has shared how the small actions of people can help change the lives of refugees.  She tells the story of Farrah, who came to Canada as a refugee claimant. She had such a compelling story of injustice that, after completing her testimony, she was immediately accepted by the refugee board. This is rare indeed — usually a letter of acceptance or refusal arrives weeks later. Farrah knew no-one in Canada, but, her lawyer had done a field placement with Action Réfugiés as a law student and knew Farrah could benefit from their matching program. So he referred her to them. Through this program, Farrah was matched with Lora, an International Development student at McGill University. They immediately clicked, and Farrah was accepted into Lora’s family, providing her with a circle of belonging.

Réfugiés staff helped change one woman’s life story from one of despair to hope — but the story doesn’t stop there.  Farrah says “This experience makes me want to study human rights law because I really want to give back to society.” And so the seeds of hope keep on growing.

 

The stories could fill a book every year if they were written out in full, talking about how each little gift can make an impact or a difference in someone’s life.  Each of us in our own way can make a difference. When we put our little bit in God’s hands for God to bless, God can and does do remarkable things, transforming a mustard seed into the largest of all shrubs with branches large enough to provide nesting places for many birds.

In the children’s story today we looked at seeds, and told the little children that they were holding POTENTIAL. They do — and so do we!

As I was saying as I started today:  sometimes we think we are a small church and wonder what we can do.  But God looks at who is here and what we each have to offer. From God’s point of view there are more than enough people here to change the world. After all, Jesus did it once already with just twelve apostles.

Why can’t he do it again?

Jesus is right. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. I wonder what God can do with our little bit?