My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray. Eternal God of our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts always be acceptable in Your sight.  Our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

Today’s text is a reminder of how we need to properly read the Bible if we expect to understand what it says.  We often get so focused on a few verses, or maybe just a couple of words in a few verses, that we forget what has brought us to that point.  The Bible often sets up broad themes and scenes in terms of people, geography, or Jesus talking in lessons or parables or discourses that can confuse us as much as clarify things.  So if we’re ever at a point where we kind of wrinkle our noses at the text in an outward sign of misunderstanding, and especially if it’s accompanied by the word, “huh?”, then we need to do this one thing.

And, by the way, it’s NOT Google the text to tell us what it’s about. That’s not something that gets us over the challenge of understanding stuff.  Read what comes just before and after the verses of the day.  Maybe the whole chapter before and after.  Then the context comes clearer in our minds.  Today is one of those texts.

Taken by itself this sounds like salvation Jesus who will take us to heaven if…and only if…well, a whole bunch of stuff, including the assumption that we’re at the end of time and the Yom Yahweh, the Day of the Lord, has come to destroy the earth.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not a day I look forward to.  I’m kinda having fun down here in the day-to-day struggle of God’s wonderful world and people trying to figure out how to live purposefully, peacefully, and gracefully.  If we read the text around these verses we come away with a couple of themes for our lives and for building the Kingdom of God right here, right now, in this holy place with these holy people.  (That’s all y’all, in case you didn’t know).

So themes of suddenness and preparedness are throughout these chapters spoken on the Mount of Olives, known as the Olivet discourse.  In the verses before our text today in chapter 24, responsibility is emphasized.  Our immediate text says we have to be ready.  The next verses say we have to be productive, not just sit and wait for stuff to happen.  And last, we are accountable for our actions to be just, merciful, and loving toward everyone, particularly those we typically overlook who are not part of our crowd or church group.

This is a daunting list.  It’s hard to know where to start preparing, isn’t it?  And the thing is, Paul then tells us that we won’t know how God’s watching, it’s just gonna happen, and we have to be ready to have it continue or end at any moment.

Wow. Mind-blowing.  Soooo, how do we do this, Pastor Mark, how do we prepare for the Kingdom of God?  Well, the good news is, if you live in the love of God each day as if God has already come again, then the anxiety of timing isn’t there anymore.  But that’s a sermon for another day, but it’s real.  Let’s say that’s true, that we don’t have an hour or a thousand years to prepare, but we are called to be responsible, ready, productive, and accountable right here, right now.

And if that were true, it would make us take inventory of ourselves according to what God has given and what we have given back, doesn’t it?  What have we been given?  Life, health, mind, body, spirit, sure.  And we take that into the world and the world values that through relationships and monetizing things we do and train for.  And we have our lives, and settle into nice little towns like Greenland and form churches for the express purpose of saying thanks to God for this and wanting to give back everything that is extra that we don’t need to be shared with others so that all might live according to their need.  It’s biblical.  It’s in Acts.  I’ll help you look it up, but it’s there.  We should return our lives, minds, hearts and spirit’s works to God, and yes, the money that the world gives us for those gifts of God needs to be returned to God.

Not waiting until God comes back to get it.  That’s the beauty of living as if the Kingdom has come, we can share that now, because God wants us to do that NOW.

We don’t wait for it’s coming, we don’t see it in the rearview mirror, our time is now for sharing our stuff, our skills, and our monies so that we can spread God’s good news, of outward living and helping others, right here.

And I can hear some of us out there saying, okay, yeah, another year, another Stewardship sermon…but I’ve got rent and retirement and I give and I’m good.

God never says don’t pay the rent, or have money not to feed your family.  He does say there’s a point where we need to say we do have enough.  We aren’t living scarcely anymore.  That’s why we are given DAILY bread, not 100 loaves to last a lifetime and somehow figure out how much to eat.  You know what we’d do?  We’d eat too much, too soon, too fast, and then go around to our neighbors wanting their stuff too and eat too much, too soon, too fast. God knows this.  But we have never learned it.

The best way, my brothers and sisters and friends, to live in God’s sight is to give our money, time, and skills right now.  Don’t save up for the day we think might come because we don’t live on God’s timeline, and ours is certainly too screwed up to be reliable.  Give now while we can, and while we can feed the need of our church’s calling—missions, teaching, learning, growth, and turning all this God understanding to over to a new generation of Greenlanders that will carry this in through the next 300 years.

I’ll leave you with this final thought. There’s lots of ways we can think about stewardship, but moving from will to volition is the hardest part for most of us.  The folks at Nike struggled with how to sell shoes for years until they came up with their famous swoosh.  And even then it was a few more years until they put that into action in their company to become the world brand they are today.  Do you remember what the words are that accompany that swoosh?

Yup.  Just DO IT.  That, my friends, is what we need.  And for making our hearts ones of action more than longing and ready to act today, thanks be to God, Amen.