By Rev. Christian Schmidt
“Show Me The MONEY!” The famous line from the movie Jerry Maguire (which is now 25 years old, if you can believe that) seems appropriate for stewardship time.
Our culture often has harmful ideas about money: that if you’re not rich, you should be trying to become so, or that lacking money is somehow a moral failure. Or the idea in many families that money is something we shouldn’t talk about.
I’m here today to smash those ideas, and present you with something new: we have everything we need in order to be happy, successful, and to have lives of meaning. But only if we work together. We do this every year.
And especially in stewardship season, we have the chance to make our money, however much or little of it, support something we believe in: the power of community. A community that can hold us, that can support us in tough times, and that we can support. Our money helps make things possible: our new building, our work in the larger community supporting our neighbors and ourselves, our work supporting anti-racist learning and combating oppressions of all kinds, and the good work our staff does to make this community possible.
This month, I hope we will all show the money – but more importantly, show what our money, and our love and time and skills and work, can accomplish in this world. I invite all of us to be generous, to the degree we are able, to this congregation as we boldly move into a new era, a new building, and a new future!
In faith,
Rev. Christian