MIRACLE SUNDAY

By Michael Herzog, Lay Speaker

So -- here we are -- Miracle Sunday.  Yes, I know it’s also Mother's Day and I’ll leave it to you all to be on your honor to do the right thing for the mother, grandmothers, and mothering persons in your life.   Mother's Day is very important and mothers have a lot of influence.  They have a strong lobby and I certainly don’t want to offend anyone -- especially mothers -- but my job this morning is to talk about Miracle Sunday.

And you may well ask, why do we have the well-meaning amateur up here preaching on an important day like this when we have highly qualified well trained professional preachers available to us?  I can give you the answer to that in one word -- SENIORITY. 

I am not a highly qualified preacher but I do have a history with this church.  Not a Whitmer family sort of history, or Grace Methven, or Donna LaPoint, or Mavis Caulfield, or Grace Buer, or Millie Collins, or others who I’ve left out and will probably hear about later -- not a long history -- but I do have some history.  I married into this church thirty years ago.  When Mary and I were just getting acquainted she told me that if I wanted to see her on Sundays she’d be here in church and I could see her here.  Well, I did want to see her so I came to church and sat up there in the balcony next to Henry and Helen Moser where I had a good view of the choir loft.  After a while of listening to me sing hymns Helen said I should go join the choir.  I don’t think that was necessarily a favorable comment on my singing voice, which is marginal at best, but just the sort of thing that we do to try to make a newcomer welcome.  Or maybe she wanted to have her pew back -- I don’t know.  But, I joined the choir and found a home there.  The choir -- this choir -- is a perfect example of grace.
I can count pretty well but my attempts at matching pitch are just that -- attempts, and not always successful -- but I am valued and accepted as a part of the choir.  It is an unearned blessing, which is of course the very definition of grace.

Mary and I were married here.  Our kids Peter and Amy were married here.  And with Sara’s birth a few days ago we’ve just added another generation to this church family.  We’ve seen a few thousand worship services, marriages and baptisms and memorial services.  I expect -- at some far future date -- to have kind words spoken over me in memorial.  This place is home.  And there could not be a warmer or more beautiful home any where on Earth.

Given this golden opportunity to speak I had to decide what to do with this message.  It is Miracle Sunday, a fund-raising event.  I could pattern this after a Public Broadcasting pledge break and try to shame you into giving money to the building fund.  We are also celebrating our long history as a congregation meeting on this site -- so I could make this a history lesson.  But, this is in the sermon slot for the worship service, so I could also make it an unfolding of the scriptures to see how they might apply to our lives today.   When in doubt I say compromise, so I’ll try to make this all three and still bring it in under 1500 words.  My writing friend Ruth says I can’t even clear my throat in less than a thousand words -- but, we shall see.

First of all money.  Let’s get it over with.  In our culture we are more likely to talk about XXX -- well, you know, almost anything -- than we are money.  Personal finances are the last taboo.  I don’t know how you make financial decisions in your family but here’s what Mary and I do.  First you have to know we are number people.  Mary keeps the books for half the non-profit organizations in the valley and my formal education is as an engineer. 

We are number people.  So, we follow a decimal system and begin with a tithe (ten-percent) to the church and a tithe to our kids.  Taxes take another couple of tithes.  The fifth tithe goes to balance holes in those first four tenths and leaves us fifty percent of our income to live on.  It seems to work.  This has been our pattern for quite a few years now.  When it came time to decide on our support for the Miracle Sunday building fund we divided the amount of money we’re trying to raise ($150,000) by the number of family and individual pledging units and doubled it because we feel doubly blessed to be part of this community.  Easy.  But we’re number people.  Maybe you have some other technique.  Maybe you dreams or see visions -- seven lean cows and seven fat cows, or something like that.  Whatever you do, it’s good to have a plan.

But even more basic, I hope we’ve explained the reason for this Miracle Sunday fund drive.  In the church as in many well regulated households, there are significant maintenance items that just get deferred.  And we all know that you can only defer so long.  Those are usually the sort of items that are too big to just come out of the ordinary operating budget and so other sources have to be tapped.  At home we’d shake the piggy bank or consider borrowing the money.   The church doesn’t have a piggy bank so we arranged for a line of credit along with some bequest money to pay for a list of items identified by the Board of Trustees last year.  Included in the list were repairs to the parsonage, replacing the church van, upgrading the lighting in several rooms in the Bonner Building, repair to the parking lot surface, sidewalk repairs, etc.  You see what’s happening to our ninety year old stained glass windows.   The line of credit is for $100,000.  We set a $150,000 goal so we could retire the line of credit and create a fund for the Trustees to draw upon for future work.

It was our intention that today’s dedication of Miracle Sunday gifts would be just a one-time event.  There have been questions about how and what and when to donate.  Are pledges over time OK?  Let me say here and now -- THERE IS NO WRONG WAY TO GIVE MONEY TO THE MIRACLE SUNDAY FUND.  Designate your gift -- in whatever form is most pleasing to you -- to Miracle Sunday, and it will go to that intended purpose.

But, so much for money.  Now the history part.  This congregation is 155 years old.  When Methodists first gathered to worship on this site Millard Fillmore was president of the United States.  California had just been admitted as the 31st state of the union.  A dozen years later during the Lincoln administration the  parsonage burned down and a new parsonage and new church were built at a cost of $15,000 and dedicated in 1867.  That church is the one we can see in Woody’s model in the Fellowship Room.  By 1916, at the height of the First World War, the congregation had outgrown the old church.  It was torn down and this building was built and dedicated in 1917.   The cost of this structure was $36,000.  On the day of the dedication, the 10th of June 1917, the presiding bishop, Adna Leonard, required the pastor, Channing Richardson, to give a financial report.  Rev Richardson reported that $31,000 was subscribed leaving the building fund short by $5000.  The bishop said that he could not dedicate the church until the cost was fully underwritten and he declared a collection to be in order and that the congregation would remain in their places until he declared the service to be over.  The bishop wrote the amounts pledged on a blackboard until the remaining $5000 was pledged.  The benediction was spoken and the doors were opened and the congregation was allowed to go home.   That last $5000 was the equivalent of $100,000 today, raised in a short time one afternoon ninety years ago, with the bishop keeping score on a blackboard and standing right here.  It is a wonderful story.  It is our story.   I suppose bishops can get away with that sort of behavior, but I wouldn’t try it. 

When I joined this church in 1977 we were marching with the United Farm Workers.  Church and Society members were standing in the street protesting nuclear weapons work outside the Lawrence Livermore facility.  In the 1960s we stood up for fair housing in Napa.  In the early 1980s this congregation was the organizing force behind the Napa Creek Manor senior housing facility on Jefferson Street.  In the late 1990s we began to pursue making Centennial Hall available to house a homeless drop-in facility, and so the HOPE Center was born.   We are now exploring what it means to be affiliated with the Center for Progressive Christianity.  I can hardly wait to see what happens next.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, had a strong social conscience.  Social justice has been a key element of this denomination’s identity that continues to this day.  What will happen next?  Will we get involved with immigration issues?  Will we use some of our space as an after-school drop-in site for the neighborhood children?  I don’t know either.

A few weeks ago Doug mentioned the philosophy of “The Seventh Generation.”  Decisions made today must take into consideration their impact on the seventh generation to come.  It is an expression of sustainability based on the law of the Iroquois.  We are that seventh generation.  We are the great grandchildren of the great grandchildren of the founders of this church.  What they did 155 years ago impacts our lives today.  A Seventh Generation philosophy is admittedly idealistic.  We know we must secure tomorrow and the next day to be sure -- as sure as we can be -- that there will be a seventh generation to serve.   But we must not lose sight of the very long term as a well.  

I sometimes say that one of our jobs in the church is just to keep the lights on.  Our ancestors who set up shop here at 5th and Randolph 155 years ago may have had the same idea.  But for them keeping the lights on would have meant a candle or an oil lamp.  This congregation celebrated its fiftieth anniversary before there were electric lights in the sanctuary.  It is an amazing legacy and we have a responsibility to future generations to keep the lights on -- to keep this congregation healthy and thriving.

Oh, yes -- what about the scripture passages?  I said I’d talk about them too and I’m running out of time.

King David felt a strong need to build a proper temple.  To the people of his time the temple was not just a place of worship it was literally the house of God, the residence of their deity.   This is a sacred space.  It is for me anyhow.   God is not just here, of course -- God is everywhere -- around us and in us.  I don’t think God lives in an empty house.  We are closest to God when we are in community. 

We celebrate together.  We grieve together.  That rosebud to celebrate our new grandbaby is from Loeta’s garden.  Marian Long has fallen and women from this church are sitting with her until she can be independent again.  We take care of each other.  Do we need a building to be the church?  Of course not -- but this building is part of us too and we need to take care of it as we take care of each other.

David wanted to build a temple.  He supplied the means.  TONS of gold and silver.  We don’t have anyone with pockets as deep as King David’s, but I’m not worried.  All the resources we need to sustain this sacred space are right here in this room right now.  All we need to sustain the spiritual vitality of this congregation is in the hands of the Holy Spirit.  The future looks good to me.