"My Day Planner's Booked"

"My Day Planner's Booked"
Acts 3:1-10
Sermon Series: Disciples Under Pressure
Rev. Betsy Singleton, Senior Pastor, Quapaw Quarter UMC
November 5, 2006
(Go to www.qqumc.org to subscribe to sermons)

Introduction

This is our final sermon in our stewardship series, "Disciples Under Pressure." In the first sermon we talked about our relationship commitments, and the pressures we face in making time for our families, friends, co-workers and church family. Last week we talked about our financial commitments and money pressures. Today, we're tallying up our hours to look at all the other time commitments that claim our busy lives. Let us pray.

The Overbooked Day Planner

Recently I'd volunteered to do a cake for a Friday night auction for a local March of Dimes fund-raiser. They asked you to do a theme cake, something that reflects your own interests. I'd thought of hiring this one out, but I have this wonderful decorative bundt pan called a cathedral cake. It's quite appropriate for a pastor. So, Thursday night after the baby was down, I cranked up my standby recipe for pound cake from Liza Ashley's "Thirty Years at the Mansion," to which I always add some almond. By about 10 p.m. it was ready to come out of the mold. I congratulated myself on being way ahead of the game. Ha!

I flipped the pan over, tapped it, and tapped it again, until I finally had to man-handle it. Eventually it came out, most of the cathedral spires sticking to the pan. I stood there at my kitchen counter stunned, the slow moaning began to resound from the kitchen to the den where my husband asked what was wrong. I had to confess I didn't grease and flour the pan. I'd used a non-stick coating spray, which proved indefensible against the nooks and crannies of a cathedral bundt. I went to bed exhausted and dispirited. My husband promised he'd go get more ingredients the next morning while I was nursing the baby. Gee thanks!

Early Friday I was able to put a second cake in the oven with instructions to Miss Jo, our baby sitter, on when to remove it. I had survived the ordeal! Around noon, I got a call from Jo. She said she wasn't sure whether to call, but the cake looked like it had collapsed from in the middle. I was astonished. I laughed, somewhat hysterically, I imagine. Well, I thought, maybe I can do something with it.

When I got home, sure enough, some kind of air bubble had popped, and the cake had pulled away from the sides toward the bottom. I tried to remove the cake, the bottom fell out. Next I tapped it to see if I could get the top out. Fortunately, it came out intact, although some of the nice brown coating still seemed to stick. Now, my cathedral cake looked like a miniature crown. It was a small cake, but maybe I could get by with it. If I sprinkled it with powdered sugar and called it "The Little Prince" cake, maybe it would work. There was a part of me that said to my self, "This is war." I looked at the clock. It was 3 p.m. and the cake had to be there by 6 p.m. The cake won.

One evening last spring Donna, our child birth instructor, asked us to draw a large circle on a sheet of paper. She asked us to divide our day into all our activities, chores and responsibilities, using the circle to represent 24 hours. After I'd divided up my little pie into all my life commitments, I was disturbed to see there was no way that I would have time for a baby. At eight months pregnant, I was unable to process how I could take care of a baby with only about 3 hours left in my waking day! Yikes!

Since returning to work, I'm still trying to figure that out, especially at peak times for baby, job and volunteer efforts. We all have peak times of busyness. You may have a peak time each week, trying to accomplish activities or work that must meet a deadline. We have a number of deadlines here at church, including planning and producing our worship service and everything that goes with that, including bulletins, powerpoint, music and sermon. I email about 25 – 30 people each week regarding the production of our Sunday service. Contrary to the cynical line that pastors only work on Sundays—it actually takes us six days to get prepared for the Sabbath!

Where Does the Day Go?

Where does the day go? Statistics tell us that we spend 9.1 hours per day on personal care, including sleeping. We spend 1.2 hours on eating and drinking; 1.5 on household activities, 0.8 hours on shopping; 1.8 hours caring for others; 5.3 hours working; 0.1 hours on education; 3.7 hours on leisure and sports including 1.8 hours of TV. Each day, on average, people spend 0.1 hours on religious activities and 0.1 hours on volunteering.

What's Time Worth?

You might be surprised that in Arkansas, we are ranked 43rd in the nation for volunteering. Only 26% of us volunteer, but interestingly, we are 11th in terms of hours volunteered, giving 52 hours per year. Those who commit, really commit!

That's good news for non-profits like our church. It means those of you who are regularly here in worship, about 170 people are our most active and participating volunteers. That means at our church, if we assume that we give at least half of our 52 volunteer hours to our church, 26 hours, we'd see 4420 hours of ministry time. And, if we put at least a minimum wage price on those volunteer hours, we'd have an annual salary of $22,542 attached to that time. One article noted that non-profits should use Independent Sector's estimate of $18.04 an hour as the standard measurement for the value of a volunteer's time, which, if we attached the 4420 hours of ministry time to that wage, we'd pay the equivalent of $79, 736.80 for ministry hours.

One of the problems we all have with increasing our volunteer hours is similar to the problem we have with financial giving: not every one has the same time resources to give. In addition, some do not know how important their time, be it a little or lot, would be to our church. We have not yet communicated how vitally important it is for each of us to find a ministry calling through our church, whether it is through a mission like our food pantry, just by taking time to bring brown paper sacks to church, serving on a leadership team, or finding one of the 69 ministry opportunities listed on this year's pledge brochure. We are a $350,000 plus organization with a historic building valued at over 5 million, and the only way we can manage these resources is through a relatively small staff and many more lay ministers like you.

My Day Planner's Burned Out

The last few weeks, our family has been glued to the news as the mid-term elections approach. Candidates are often interviewed with their supporters and volunteers in the background. With that in mind, I watched another animated Peanuts special, one I'd forgotten about titled, "You're Not Elected, Charlie Brown."

Linus Van Pelt is running for student body president and has taken a commanding lead until he stops talking about the issues and starts talking about The Great Pumpkin (DVD clip from 21.17 – 22.21. This season shows Lucy complaining about her candidate and how exhausting volunteering is). In this season, I'm sure Lucy's sentiment is shared by volunteers everywhere.

Clearly, there are barriers to giving time. Instead of having more leisure time in this age of the computer, we seem to have less. Most people I talk with just don't think they have enough time. Add to that people's frustration with other volunteers or an organization or plain old burnout.

In a time use survey, The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides insights into why people stop volunteering. 2% site burnout; 15% health, and the number one reason people stopped giving their time: 46% said they had no time to give! Other reasons include family or childcare, which is a barrier for 9%; 3% weren't asked; 2% were no longer members; 4% had no interest; and 3% had moved. If we look at burnout, family and childcare duties and no time, then we might conclude that 2 out of 3 people stopped volunteering because they were overbooked.

A Story about Giving Time

This morning's scripture reading comes from one of the first chapters in the Acts of the Apostles where we find the early church organizing itself for ministry not long after Jesus' resurrection.

Peter and John interrupt the activities of their growing movement to go up to the temple to pray one afternoon. It's kind of nice to think about stopping to pray each afternoon, isn't it? To stop being busy and just spend a few minutes centering one's self on our relation to God and neighbor.

Anyway, Peter and John encountered a man who was lame. Each day people carry this man to the gate of the temple so he can ask for money from those who go into the gate. I bet a lot of us don't always think about how churches get asked for money, but we do. We get asked to help with rent, prescriptions, gas money and all kinds of things people need, and some they don't.

So this man who was somehow paralyzed, sitting at the gate, asked Peter and John for money. Then Peter asked the man to look at him. I don't know why he asked him to look at him, but maybe he just wanted the man to really see him. The man was so accustomed to his surroundings and the people who came to pray every day, that he may not even have seen Peter and John, not really looked at them. You know, we get into habits and life is so busy that we don't really see what's going on. And so rather than throw some money in his cup, Peter stopped and looked at him, and asked him to look at them. The man looked at them, expecting to receive some money.

Then Peter said, "I don't have any silver or gold, but what I have I give to you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk." The next thing you know, the man took Peter's hand and got up. Amazingly, the man jumped up and began to walk and even went into the temple to praise God, just like everyone else.

I don't think this is a biblical story that tells us that money is unimportant or that we don't need it. There are plenty of stories that tell us to give our money, including a story just two chapters away, about how awful it is when we hold back our financial resources from God. In that story Ananias and his wife Saphhira sell a piece of property and rather than give it to the common holdings of the church, they don't tell anyone and when it's discovered, fall down dead. My reading of that story is that selfishness can destroy us (See Acts 5).

But what about today's story? Perhaps one way to read this story is to take note about how important it is to help people who are paralyzed in some way not only to survive, but thrive. The charity the lame man got at the gate of the temple helped him survive, but was he thriving? Notice Peter doesn't offer money, even says he doesn't have any. I wonder if that's because Peter, along with Jesus' other followers, had already decided to pool their resources together. In any case, the man is already getting money from other passersby. The thing the man doesn't have is hope and community. And if you notice, the story isn't just about the lame man. It's about the religious folks who were coming and going from the temple. They noticed he was poor and couldn't make a living, but they didn't see his spiritual needs. They didn't notice him. It takes money to feed and clothe. It takes time to lift somebody out of poverty and despair.

Disciples Aren't Volunteers. Disciples Are Ministers.

So our story from Acts reminds us that disciples aren't just volunteers; we are ministers of the Gospel. We call on the name of Christ to bring hope and healing. It's a calling that takes time and money.

At this time, I'd like our ushers to come forward and distribute copies of our pledge brochure. Some of you may have gotten one last week, if you did, just give it to someone who didn't. Even those of you who are visiting today, I'd like you to see the variety of areas of service here at our growing church.

It is so tempting for some of us to say that we can't give money to our church, so we try to make up for it by sharing our time. It is also tempting for some to say that we don't have any time, so we'll just give money. Each of these approaches misses the point. All of us need to give. God wants 100 percent of our lives, and that means not only what we give within our church, but out in the world. Last week we looked at our check books to examine our priorities. This week we must ask ourselves, What's in our day planner?

This week was really, really hectic with our stewardship campaign going on, my husband's election coming up, lots of paperwork for our annual church meeting, that local fund-raiser, care for our baby, and then my mom's hospitalization. But, you know what? I was thinking to myself, What if I didn't have you or this place? What if church wasn't in my day planner?

Perhaps some of you heard that First United Methodist Church in Memphis burned last month. The church was the city's first organized congregation back in 1826 and recently had celebrated 180 years of ministry in Memphis.

As I was reading about the fire, I came across an article about a man named Earl Wilkinson. He has born in 1909 and has been a member of the Memphis church since he was 3; he holds the congregation's longest membership. He remembers when the church counted nearly 4,000 members and balconies were filled. He remained as attendance declined and the need for repairs on the aging building increased. He also volunteered for numerous programs and committees. In recent years he sold commemorative plates of the church to help fund-raise. When the fire hit, Earl said, "It was like having your best friend die. It just hit me so hard. It hurts, but I believe it will come back. It has to."

Today, we observe our 80th anniversary of this building and remember all the saints who have made ministry in this place possible. We also come to the table of remembrance where Jesus met his friends who were about to face losing him. He asked them to break bread together and to fellowship with one another at his table. He knew their loss would be worse than losing your best friend. It would hit them hard. So he asked them to take time to remember him every time they gathered. Take time to remember Jesus and your commitment to him. If you have to, put it in your day planner.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.








Copyright 2006 Rev. Betsy Singleton. All rights reserved.