Home > Sermons > October 21, 2007

Let’s Have a Cakewalk Friday

First Congregational Church of Evanston
October 21 , 2007 (Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost)
Jeremiah 31:27-34
John 6:1-6

Rev. Dr James E. Roghair, Interim Pastor

Introduction

Deb Shamlin and I have been working on a series of adult forums discussing the issue of Christian stewardship from a perspective you don’t expect. It is a perspective I gained by working with Iñupiaq (Eskimo) village churches in the 1980's and 1990's, which I wrote up as 2000 academic thesis. So, on the day that stewardship packets will be delivered to you at a luncheon, and the day you hear the first of several minutes for stewardship, I am going to begin to challenge you to think about stewardship with a story.

One of the lectionary texts for today is the one about God’s placing a new covenant in our hearts – how God works within us. I believe that God works within us in many ways. One way is when we have the opportunity to look at things from the perspective of another person or culture. Let me tell you a story about stewardship in another culture.

Stewardship as Activity

 

It hit me one afternoon as I sat with the Session of the Kuukpik Presbyterian Church in Nuiqsut, Alaska – it hit me that stewardship is a community activity. It wasn't dramatic like Isaiah’s vision in the Temple. The Iñupiaq elders I sat with didn't notice anything unusual. Nevertheless, in that isolated village, this small group solving a problem through a rather ordinary process confirmed a percolating idea that I had had for awhile, the idea that ‘stewardship’ is deeply related to ‘community.’

Let me set the stage for you. Nuiqsut is more than one hundred miles east of Barrow, Alaska. Of course Barrow is over 700 miles north of Anchorage – 200 miles south of the north pole. Nuiqsut is a tiny Iñupiaq village a little west and south of the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. It's on the shallow Colville River and 40 miles south of the Arctic Ocean. To get there we fly over miles of deserted tundra wasteland – or is it miles of rich traditional fishing and hunting grounds? Waste land or hunting ground? It depends on the eye of the beholder. Your perspective depends on who you are – on which community nurtures and defines you. For the Iñupiat the tundra is home, and their villages define them.

Come to Nuiqsut in the winter. You will see vast expanses of whiteness, and never guess that the snow hides a forest of knee-high willow trees. In summer, you are like Gulliver in Lilliput. The Iñupiat chose this spot as a permanent village because the river offers ample fishing and good summer boating for caribou and moose hunting. In winter the river is an ice highway connecting to roads in the oil fields and to the outside world. But Nuiqsut is an isolated village – hunting and fishing predominate. Boats rest in front of the houses and meat hangs drying everywhere. Come at meal time and share whatever there is: caribou or moose, fish or whale— no vegetarians, please!

Since late in the nineteenth century when the Presbyterian missionaries baptized the Iñupiat, being Christian has also been at the core of their identity. The Presbyterian Church has been predominant in this village of about four hundred, with a small Assembly of God following here, too.

The Presbytery’s mission budget provided a minister for the village for a number of years. But with his departure – after consultation with representatives of all the other Iñupiaq Churches – the strategy changed. For the foreseeable future no resident minister could be provided for Kuukpik Church. It was a hard pill. The village had seen itself as a recipient of mission for a long time.

It was about a year after their minister left that I sat with the elders to consider their church’s future. Of these elected leaders, like your church council, none of them were ordained ministers or even lay ministers, but all the same, they were leading worship services Sunday mornings and evenings. I was appointed to moderate their Session meeting. Occasionally I left my duties in Barrow to spend a weekend there – working with their Session, having communion and baptisms, leading the worship services, counseling. Then I would return to Barrow Monday, "weather permitting."

Since the congregation had grown accustomed to being a dependent mission church, they believed their church could do little themselves. They were at a loss. Only gradually did they accept the idea that no one would rescue them with another full-time minister.

It was time for a new plan. Although the church could not afford a pastor’s salary, if they were willing to take a significant financial part and to get their manse ready, I offered to attempt to place a graduate intern – a student minister – one that I would supervise by telephone and not too frequent visits. I would approach the Presbytery and the Church in Barrow to each take a small part. I said there was no assurance that this idea would work. They were accustomed to being the object of mission, so asked the Session if they would be willing to try to participate by taking on a modest obligation.

The meeting that afternoon was dominated by older Iñupiaq women. My challenge to them was translated into their language by one of the younger women. A vigorous discussion ensued. Native American discussions can take a very long time, as each one in turn speaks her/his mind before another begins to speak. But this one was amazingly short. The answer came back to me in English: "Yes. We will have a cake walk Friday." They would step out on faith and begin immediately to raise the needed funds for the project!

Now, in another context it may have seemed ludicrous, to consider a cake walk first. Bake sales have a reputation of ensuring a very limited result – only things of low priority are funded by cakes! Remember the Viet Nam era slogan: "What if the Pentagon had to have a bake sale to build a bomber?"

But there I sat in a remote village with the leaders of a tiny church, and I was glad they were planning a cake walk. Why? By sponsoring a cake walk, they had entered a new phase in stewardship of the ministry of their church. Their church had been dependent on others. Now the leaders would challenge the village, as a community, to stewardship of the church. Perhaps a light had dawned for the Session – a paradigm shift: They were not helpless. Yes, they were still very small. They didn't have much money. But they could begin to work on their church's needs, by publicly challenging the whole village to help. Their culture predicated that their first consideration would be a community approach – a community cake walk. After all, the continued ministry of the church was the community’s problem. The community counted on the church to be there.

Far more than a mere fund raiser, the cake walk is a community recreational opportunity, a time to socialize. The first requirement is as many cakes, pies, rolls and Eskimo donuts (fry bread) as possible. A crowd gathers. Participants pay a quarter or fifty cents for a chance to walk on the circle of numbers affixed to the floor. When taped gospel music stops, a winning number is drawn.

Many work hard in preparation. The event is popular because the community values socializing. But beyond the socializing, the cake walk is a concrete way for the community to embrace a cause. Hundreds of dollars may be raised in an evening. By sponsoring the event, the church invites its community to stewardship – including people who are not attending worship.

The paradigm shifted that afternoon for the Session. Without studying theology, they were living out a theory that stewardship is an activity of community. (1) The village of Nuiqsut was challenged to care for its own church on its own terms. (2) The stewardship of the Church creates community, because it is a sharing of gifts. (3) The church as a community of stewards rightfully shares the stewardship of the church with the broader community – a community which values the church.

By the way the student who came to Nuiqsut ended up being ordained there and did what is called a tent-making ministry – fulfilling the pastoral role, but also working in the local school. She stayed there nearly a decade.

In Defense of Bazaars

 

In recent years it has been fashionable in mainline churches to discourage church bazaars, pie socials, rummage sales and auctions. The controlling idea is that people who are really committed ought to be stewards of the church individually. So the idea goes, time and effort given to group fund-raising projects is not well-spent.

Although it is difficult to imagine totally funding large budgets by cake walks, even large Churches sometimes provide significant portions of their budgets through fund-raising projects. I believe that fund-raising projects continue to exist in vastly different places for the same reason they do in the village. People enjoy being together and the project provides a means of developing the sense of community. The communal nature of the projects point to a communal nature of stewardship itself. To ignore the communal nature is to miss the point that Christian stewardship is about sharing.

How do we invite stewardship of the church by a broader community? Can a church's neighborhood, as a community, be a steward of the church? Perhaps that depends on how the church as a community becomes a steward of the larger community. I firmly believe that the language of ‘stewardship’ could become a vehicle to understand an inter-relationship of faith and society. ‘Stewardship’ is an approach to life, an alternative to the overwhelming sense of individualism of our time.

Loaves and Fishes

 

I’ve not heard of any bake sales in the New Testament. But all four Gospels record an event of community which bears a look. In the wilderness, when Jesus saw the crowd getting hungry, the issue became what they would eat? The story is told 5 times in the four gospels: Three times (Matthew 14: 13-21, Luke 9:12-17, and Mark 6:30-44) it is the disciples who raise the issue of food. And twice (Matthew 15:32-29 and John 6:1-14) Jesus raises it. Three versions all report Jesus telling the disciples to feed the people, but they were baffled because they had only few loaves and two fish.

John alone depicts a little boy giving up his own food for the sake of the crowd. I assume that he voluntarily offered what he had – a foolish, childish thing, really – a child’s provisions for a multitude! But for Jesus it was just enough. The individual act of stewardship – the act of sharing what the child had received perhaps from his mother – became the catalyst for the only miracle of Jesus attested to by all four gospels.

Was it a miracle of divine physical intervention? A multiplication of the molecules of bread and fish? Or was it divine spiritual intervention and stingy folks who were hiding loaves and fishes under their cloaks – afraid to bring them out because there wasn’t enough – until the little boy showed foolish generosity, and suddenly there was enough? Does it matter?

What I see is that the boy’s stewardship offered a perfect solution: All four gospels are united in attesting that there was a perfect abundance — twelve (or in one case seven) baskets of bread and fish left over, (7 and 12 are perfect numbers for Jews). The perfect result was because of the little boy’s foolish stewardship.

God’s blessing rests on foolish stewardship – sharing out of poverty, sharing in community – and moves toward abundance by the blessing of God. A cake walk to fund a position, some fish and bread for a crowd, individuals beginning a community’s sharing — it is enough for God to begin a blessing.

First Congregational

As you begin a time of thinking about stewardship, I encourage you, First Congregational, to consider the issues community and stewardship. Consider your stewardship in light of its relationship to community – first, to the community that is First Congregational Church, and second, to the broader community in which your church exists. How does what each of you do, contribute to the church as community ? How does the church community contribute to who you are? Then, how do you as church community contribute to the broader community? It is all one fabric.

Think about your sense of community – your rummage sales and other community-making activities. Think about whether your endowment helps or hinders your community. Be open to the possibility that God will change you from within. Be open to the foolishness of stewardship that can change the course of the community, and to the frightening possibility that the broader community may change you.

Amen.

Last Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2008