The Rev. Rob Merola

In an excellent article titled Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving, Nicholas Kristof asks the following question.

Which person would you rather be:

Richard is an ambitious 36-year-old white commodities trader in Florida. He’s healthy and drop-dead handsome, lives alone in a house with a pool, and has worked his way through a series of gorgeous women. Richard’s job is stressful, but he spent Christmas in Tahiti. Unencumbered, he also has time to indulge such passions as reading (right now he’s finishing a book called “Half the Sky”), marathon running and writing poetry. In the last few days, he has been composing an elegy about the Haiti earthquake.

Lorna is a 64-year-old black woman in Boston. She’s overweight and unattractive... Lorna is on regular dialysis, but that doesn’t impede her active social life or babysitting her grandchildren. A retired school assistant, she is close to her 67-year-old husband and is much respected in her church for directing the music committee and the semiannual blood drive. Lorna believes in tithing (giving 10 percent of her income to charity or the church) and in the last few days has organized a church drive to raise $10,000 for earthquake relief in Haiti.

Kristof’s point is that while most of us might prefer to trade places with Richard—he’s the one who seems to be living the good life that so many of us are pursuing—all the scientific research available tells us that Lorna is probably happier.  As it turns out, joy comes from sources we might not have expected; it comes from volunteering, giving blood, having good friends, a solid marriage, being generous and having religious faith.  

Dr. Stephen Post of Case Western Reserve School of medicine goes so far as to say, "The remarkable bottom-line of the science of love is that giving protects overall health twice as much as aspirin protects against heart disease. The benefits of compassion to your physical health alone are so strong that if compassion was not free, pharmaceutical companies would herald the discovery of a stupendous new drug called give-back instead of Prozac, and they would run TV ads about the power of compassion to enhance your life."

It’s kind of fun to think about.  Imagine what an ad for giving might look like:

Female: Do you find yourself feeling left out or lonely?  Do you get discouraged or down?  Do you sometimes feel empty inside?  Do you wonder how much your life really matters?  Well now there is a solution. It's called Zo-Love.   It’s all natural and one hundred percent pure, consisting of simple acts of love and kindness.

Male: Now when I go to sleep at night, I know I’ve made a difference.

Female:   I don’t feel like a phony any more.  I feel like I really am helping people.

Male:  Finally, I can help my kids with their homework and not get mad.

Common side effects may include lower blood pressure, fewer regrets, less chronic guilt, elevated

sense of purpose,  lower stress level, increase in friends, warm, fuzzy feelings, and loving your neighbor as yourself.   Ask your pastor about Zo-Love today.

It turns out that Jesus may have been on to something when He said, “Love one another.”   But here is the catch.  Love—real love—isn’t about us at all.  It’s not just one more way to wrestle pleasure out of life, like eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Maple Blondie Ice Cream. 

No, real love is always about others.   In fact, it’s often about giving up our pleasures, our plans, or our possession for the sake of others.  It’s about being dedicated to them rather than being committed only to ourselves and our own selfishness.

That’s how God loves us, giving Himself to us with no thought of Himself.  That’s why He came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ, and why Jesus was willing to go so far as to die for us.  And that’s why when Jesus tells us to love one another, He tells us to do so as God loves us.

This morning, I want to talk about a very specific way of loving God, one another, and those in the community and world around us.  I want to talk about our participation in our Making Space to Share building campaign.

This is not about us, believe me.  I have been reminded in the last two weeks of just how much work building programs are.  It would be far easier, far more comfortable, far less work  just to go on as we are. 

To be completely frank, I find that very, very tempting.   But I know that is not the way of love. 

I know that it is God who is calling us to do this because only in doing so will we be able to continue to fulfill our mission of knowing and sharing God’s love, to do so in ways that we simply can’t do now, and to be able to do so for people  we aren’t reaching right now.

Last night, about a hundred of us of gathered to kick off our Making Space to Share Campaign.  It was a great night, and there was a ton of energy in the room.  But for this campaign to be a success, it’s going to take all of us.  And  since it's going to involve all of us, I want to talk a little bit more about it this morning. 

If you're a visitor here, let me assure you this is an atypical Sunday.  We are not a church that is always pestering people about money.  To the contrary, we care far more about people than we do about dollars.   But this morning I need to talk to our church family about family business. 

And the first thing I want to make clear is that Making Space to Share is NOT a building or fund raising campaign.    IT IS A SPIRITUAL GROWTH CAMPAIGN.    For those of you who know me at all, I hope you know my heart well enough to know that I'm far more interested in building faithful followers of Jesus than building buildings or anything else. 

I've never been into buildings. That’s why we’ve waited ten years to do this.  That’s why we’ve gone to five services on a weekend to provide for the almost 400 people who come here on Sundays instead of taking the easy path and just building a bigger building that seats more.  That’s why we’ve made do with less than desirable circumstances time and time again, asking more of you than we really have a right to ask, to keep as much money as we can going back out into the world in ministry and acts of love and compassion. 

We're not into building buildings.  I'm into building people. We want to build spiritual growth in your life and friends, that and that alone is what floats my boat. Over the next month, here are some of the ways we plan to do this. 

First, next week we are going to start a sermon series called “Built to Last”.  We’re going to look at the fundamentals of a life well lived, a life that leaves a legacy that endures, a life that makes a difference in the lives of others that will live on long after we are gone.  I am tremendously excited about it. 

Another thing I’m tremendously excited about is the Devotional Guide found in our Making Space to Share Packets. We’ll also be posting these devotionals on line so you can read them there.  I believe with all my heart that if you take just a few minutes a day to work through these devotionals—and I hope you will—you will grow spiritually and we will grow as a church.

You’ll also see that we have included discussion questions and on some days children’s activities.   You can think about these questions on your own, perhaps jotting your thoughts down in a notebook, or as a family. And families—I really, really hope you will use this.  I hope you’ll do so not for our benefit, but for yours. I strongly believe that these devotions will help you in your job as a parent. I believe they are a powerful way of teaching our children the values which are so important to us.

Then we're going to challenge people to grow in their giving; to love one another by becoming generous as God is generous, by learning to sacrifice so we can give as Jesus gives to us. You can't become like Christ unless you become a giving, generous person, unless you learn to sacrifice.  The goal of our generosity is not our own benefit, of course,  but helping others, helping the community, helping the poor, helping the people around the world. 

Second, we want to deepen our bonds as a church family.  We want to keep growing into being the kind of community where everybody matters, everybody counts.  

And so we’ve got a variety of things planned for us to grow in our sense of community.   We have stand alone WatCh sessions that begin with a meal and give people a chance to interact in small groups.   If you can only come for one, come for that one.  On May 25, we have a very special WatCh where Richard Leach will share with us about his pilgrimage to Israel and what God did in his heart while he was there.  There is a parenting day where we’ll get away together at a beautiful retreat center about half hour away from here, our church picnic at the end of the month, and more.

Third, we want to help everyone find their place and discover their gifts and abilities.  There are many, many groups, ministries, programs, events that could help you, your family and everybody else and that provide fantastic opportunities to help others. 

And then finally, we are going to encourage us to move boldly into our next phase in our life together.  We always benefit from the sacrifices of others.  Our parents sacrificed for us.  There were teachers who sacrificed for us. There are soldiers who sacrificed for us.  We sit here free today to worship like this because people sacrificed their lives.  We always benefit from the sacrifices of others. 

We’ve benefited from the sacrifices others in this church have made in the past.  Almost twenty-five years ago, St. Matthew’s built this building with only 22 pledging families.  We are so grateful to them.

Now it’s our turn. 

If you're a parent, I want to beg you to get your children involved in this.  It's a great opportunity to teach them to not be selfish.  It's not the amount that matters; it's the attitude.  We're going to have opportunities for our kids to give in Sunday School and in our youth group. 

A few years ago I heard of a church where the children's offering weighed over one ton of pennies, nickels, dimes.  They got a money counting machine that counted 6,000 coins a minute, and it still took 17½ hours to count the children's offering. 

Now obviously this was a big church.  I’m not sharing this story because of the amount, but to show how powerful children can be.  As parents, that is one of our single most important jobs—to help our kids realize the power they do, in fact, have and use it responsibly.  I want to suggest that this is a tremendous way to do that. 

Now again, let me be clear.   Over the next month, we will not pester or pressure anyone to give.  Neither money nor buildings will be our primary focus; loving people as God loves us will be.  What we will do, and do without apology, is show how everyone can give something.   We will ask all of us to sacrifice.  Remember, it’s not the amount that’s important, it’s the state of our heart. 

These are exciting days!  We can expect to grow like never before, to grow deeper in our love of God, one another, and the world.   It will be challenging, friends—but it will also be powerful good.  If last night was any indication, these next several weeks are going to be a time of incredible joy and excitement here at St. Matthews.

In the history of St. Matthews, every single time we've had a challenge—every single time! —by God’s grace and with His help you’ve done more than ever seemed possible. Personally, I simply cannot imagine a more exciting place to be than St. Matthews. As we commit ourselves to growing together over the next month, praying “God, what will You have me do,” I have every confidence that we will be blown away once again by what God will do through ordinary, everyday people like us.  Amen.