Scripture: 

Many of you went through these classes. In fact, some parents tell of the many passages of scripture that you were required to memorize. It is the equivalent of walking five miles one way, uphill, in a snowstorm, to get to school.  Most religious educators suggest that rote memorization doesn’t encourage faith development; however, you’ll be happy to know that we do require a little memory work, like the 23^rd Psalm and John 3:16. We meet on Sunday afternoons and I randomly ask students to stand in place and recite their memory verses.

 

I considered doing this today in worship. I thought about randomly asking a few of you to stand and recite our memory verse for Connecting Promises. But I didn’t want to embarrass anyone. So, for the fourth week together, read or recite with me our theme verse for Connecting Promises. You can find it at the top of your bulletin.  “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him." (Acts 2: 39)

 

Each week, for the past three weeks, we’ve focused on one of the groups for whom the promise is offered. The first: the promise is for us. We know this because we can feel the Spirit renewing on congregation. Throughout these past three weeks, I’ve heard over and over again from you, the excitement you feel.  Someone emailed me and said “I’m fascinated by this process; it is really causing us to check our faith and commitment.” Another said to me Friday, “This is really impressive. I can see why the leaders feel that this is what God is calling us to do. It is a kairos moment.” The promise is for us.                  

 

There are just as many comments about the promise being for children. “I’m so excited that our children are involved in this amazing moment in our church’s life. Our kids can’t stop talking about what the church is doing for them.” Still another said, “My kids are gone. But I can’t think of anything more important than connecting the promise of Jesus Christ to the children in Geist and Fishers.” The promise is for our children.  

 

Last week we focused on the promise being for others. Many of you found the clapping exercise helpful. You could literally hear how God blessed us with growth over the past two decades. Someone wrote a note saying, “I never thought about those people who faithfully built a church so that I would have a place to worship. When the bell sounds, count me in. I just got on board.”  The promise is for others.

 

I want to express my appreciation to those of you who have been faithful to the process. Because you have communicated with me, I know you are praying, studying, asking yourself the study questions so that you can prepare to respond faithfully and sacrificially. I know most of you aren’t making hasty decisions. I also know that a big group of you are ready for me to talk about what we are building. I’m going to do that today using a scripture that gets us ahead of the story.

 

We are ahead of the story in that it places the disciples and Jesus in Jerusalem. Our lesson takes place, according to Mark, on Tuesday of Holy Week. On Sunday Jesus rides into Jerusalem to the shouts of Hosanna. On Monday, he cleanses the Temple of the moneychangers, disrupting their legitimate service. On Tuesday, they return and observe that the moneychangers are back in business. People are lined up to drop their Temple coins into thirteen offering receptacles around the Court of Women. The receptacles were shaped like trumpets. Nine of them were for required offerings. Four were for voluntary gifts. Two receptacles received the required Temple tax. Every Passover male was required to present a half shekel coin for building the Temple.[i] King Herod dramatically expanded the size of the Temple Mount, making it one of the largest and most impressive buildings in the first century. Herod egotistically believed that what he built would remain as a timeless testimony to his reign. This may be the first time the disciples saw this new construction project because when they look around, they exclaim:  "Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!" (Mark 13: 1b)

 

You heard how Jesus answers. “Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” (Mark 13:2) I am sure that no one believed that in a matter of decades, this prediction would come true. But it did. War broke out in 66 A.D and four years later, the Temple was destroyed. The only thing that is left of it today is the Wailing Wall, one holy wall where pilgrims from around the world join Jews to pray and into which prayers are wedged on pieces of paper.

 

I know that I have frustrated some of you because I have not talked about we will build here and at the north campus. I’ve said each week that Connecting Promises is not about a building, it is about ministry. Given this passage of scripture, I believe that if Jesus was here, he’d say, “Following me isn’t about building a building. Buildings don’t last.” In a city that dynamited Market Square Arena for Conseco Field House, we should know this. In a community that is about to blow away the RCA Dome for Lucas Oil Stadium, it should make sense. In a post-9/11 culture, we should know that buildings don’t last. But we are building something that will last. We are building faithful lives.

 

A few days ago, I talked to an individual about his commitment to Connecting Promises. He said, “Randy, I remember when we built the sanctuary. I made the biggest pledge of my life. I’ll be honest. I did it out of pride. I felt I’d be embarrassed if I wrote down a lower figure. I’m not even sure I was going to give what I wrote down. But I did and what happened to me was amazing. I invested into this incredible ministry and watched all the lives we touched. I can’t believe how much I’ve grown as a Christian.”  

 

Connecting Promises is about building faithful lives. The ministries that will take place on this campus and at the north campus will changes the lives of thousands of people over the next forty or fifty years. But more than this, your faithful, sacrificial response will change you. Your investment in Connecting Promises, not just financially, but spiritually and physically, will change you. I can give testimony to this. I can’t tell you how much I’ve grown spiritually over the past 22 years. I’ve been your pastor, helping you build lives of faith and the byproduct is I’ve built a more faithful life. I’m not the same man who started this church and for this I’ll always be grateful.

 

We are building faithful lives and we are building community. I wish I could take every one of you into a time machine, take you back to the day when I first drove into this community 22 years ago.  You’d get a tiny glimpse of it when you look at the video. There wasn’t much here. Slowly but surely, housing popped up, people started moving in, and Geist started to develop a character and personality that wasn’t a part of the marketing hype of the Shorewood Corporation. We began to serve people in a way that at first, I really didn’t understand. The “aha” came in an unexpected way. 

 

A few months before my dad died, I was visiting my folks in Dallas. They had a little dog that needed to be walked and since Mom and Dad were both sick, I put the leash on him and took him out in the neighborhood where I grew up. I wasn’t fifty feet out of the house when I bumped into a neighbor who lived behind my folks’ home. To this day, I think Mr. Krause looked out of his kitchen window, saw me and decided to walk with me to offer support.  What he did was amazing. He was a minister and a headmaster of a Lutheran school that had a huge influence on our neighborhood. He started talking about his ministry over three decades and the way he did it was to point out homes. “The Zefrenillis lived in that house,” he’d say. “Their daughter struggled with reading. She was dyslexic but we got her through it. She’s an attorney now. The Marshes still live here. He drank too much and one night was arrested. I met him coming out of our AA meeting. They go to the Baptist Church. This was the Campbell’s home. We baptized their entire family. Next door, the Jeffersons lost a baby to SIDS. Such a tragedy.”  Almost every house, on and on, he offered a comment.  Finally, I said to him, “Almost everyone in the neighborhood went to your church.” “No,” he said. “But between the school and the church and the programs we’ve offered, we’ve touched almost all of them.” Then, he added, “they built homes; we built community.”

 

We can walk neighborhoods now. People built homes; we built community. We’ve shaped lives and influenced children and adults through our worship, our programs and our weekday ministry program. Connecting Promises is about building community, about shaping northeast Indianapolis in two counties.

 

If we build faithful lives and build community, we will build the only thing that really lasts. We’ll build a legacy.  We are building a legacy.

 

I know you have been listening for 15 minutes thinking, he’s doing it again. He’s going to preach the entire sermon without talking about a physical building. You are right because building a legacy isn’t about physical structures. We are building faithful lives and shaping community that will create a great legacy which will last for generations. What we do today will affect our youngest children in this church and they will carry the impact of our generosity into the 22^nd century.  In fact, this is exactly the legacy of Third Christian Church. It started in the 19^th century. The faithfulness of men and women built a strong congregation. Two years ago, their assets were pledged to make our north campus a reality. Their legacy is helping us connect the promise to people nearly 200 years after they first began their church.

 

Our faithful response builds our legacy. At Geist Christian Church we do so many wonderful and extraordinary things that I'm afraid the depth and power of our ongoing ministry can be lost.  When we look at this beautiful sanctuary, when we imagine expanding it in the next year, when we see the ALTARed worship center that we just built, when we look at the pictures of the of north campus, what we do gets lost in the wow factor of buildings.  What we do, day in and day out, is change and enrich lives. What we do, year after year, is connecting people to the promise of Jesus Christ. This is a real legacy. It isn’t about buildings.

 

A legacy is something that outlasts us. A legacy ensures that the things we care about now will continue into the future. My father-in-law used to say that legacy is personal insurance. Legacy is your permanent stewardship that ensures your values will last well past your life on earth.

 

This is ultimately the truth that is found in the story of the widow’s offering. I said earlier that there was a required Temple tax for every male at Passover. It paid for the building. As a woman and as a widow, she wasn’t required to pay the Temple tax. She wasn’t required to give anything and clearly, she didn’t have anything to give. She was poor.  But somehow, her faith was so great that she made a sacrificial gift and placed it the “voluntary trumpet receptacle.”  The size of the gift didn’t create the legacy. It is the size of sacrifice that causes her to be remembered, nearly 2,000 years after Jesus and his disciples observed her generosity. She built a legacy.

 

This is where we are in our Connecting Promises campaign. Each of you has a voluntary decision to make about whether you want to build faithful lives and community and thereby build a legacy.  The three previous weeks, I asked you to be patient, to pray about your decisions, to decide what kind of legacy you will leave. But some have been eager to decide. I have to tell you, I’m encouraged by how some are thinking sacrificially in their giving.  One family told me that they thought they could give only a few dollars extra a week. But they realized that their car is paid off this summer. They decided to forego replacing that car for one year and pledge the monthly payment to Connecting Promises. Another family said they are giving a tithe of their mother’s estate plus make a monthly pledge.  Still another said, “I tithe off my income. But I don’t tithe off the growth of my savings. I’m going to make a tithe off my investment growth for the next three years.” One other family got me thinking.  “Randy, we eat out two or three times a week. If we cut back by one night a week, we can make a huge pledge.” It caused me to do a little math exercise. The average Geist family spends about 13% of their income on food and 53% of that on dining out.[ii]  Using average household income in our community, I came up with an interesting figure.  If we took the total number of households in the church and had them give what they spend dining out one night a week, we’d fund the building project. This family calculated that they spend $65 on average on a meal out. This is the danger of averages. If you dine at Sullivan’s Steakhouse, you think, “Wow, that’s a deal.” If you eat out at Subway or Pizza Hut, you think, “Wow, that’s a lot.”  Averages are dangerous. We all have different financial circumstances. None of our gifts will look alike. Hopefully Connecting Promises will inspire us to consider equal sacrifices as a congregation. 

 

This is the point that Jesus makes about the offerings he observed. The size of the gift isn’t the issue. It is the sacrifice that matters to Jesus. There were some making gifts that appeared large but didn’t demonstrate sacrifice or commitment. Then there was the woman, who was building a legacy. We should focus on the same.

 

We sent out pledge cards and envelopes this week. If you haven’t already received it, you will early next week. Now is the time for you to decide and I hope you’ll use the stories of some of your fellow members to think creatively about what you can do. I also hope you will use the story of the widow’s generosity to inspire you to make a sacrificial pledge that builds a legacy.  Each week I’ve sent you home with three questions. This week, I have just two.

 

The first is this:  What am I building in my life?

The second:  What am I willing to invest in Connecting Promises?

 

I promise to pray for you this week as you make your decision. I hope you will be present next weekend to consecrate your pledge. If you can’t be here, I hope you will send your card in or pledge online. Then, wherever you are next weekend, I invite you to join your congregation in prayer at your regular worship time.

 

To get you started in this prayerful process, let me pray with you now.

 

Generous God, you have given us so much, the gift of abundant lives and the gift of salvation through your son Jesus. This week, I pray that each member of our congregation faithfully considers your promise for them. I ask you to help them connect it to their lives. I pray that your Holy Spirit will lead them to a sacrificial commitment so that this promise they received in their lives will be given away to our children and to all whom you send us. Amen.  

 

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