I bring you greetings from Bishop Susan Wolf Hassinger, from our District Superintendent, Rev. Ron Wilson, from your former pastor, the Rev. Gary Shaw, now District Superintendent of Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts, and the other 550 churches of the New England Annual Conference. This is the first time in my experience that I have returned from our Annual Conference session on Saturday night and had an opportunity to preach the very next day on Sunday morning.

In our Methodist church structure, your pastor’s relationship to the local church is different from other denominations, especially the congregational structure. After my ordination eighteen years ago, I realized that I was no longer a member of a local church. My membership in the church rests in the New England Annual Conference. The clergy and laity that gather as whole and as districts at various times throughout the year are my church.

Furthermore in a sense they are also your church. Yes, it’s true that you do not have the same kind of intimate friendships with the membership of all 550 United Methodist churches throughout New England, yet they are all your church family. So, in addition to bringing a message of good news from the gospel, I also want to share some of the actions of our session. You will also read more about this event in an article that your representative Peter Smyton is preparing for our next Advocate.

First, after several weeks of working with lay and clergy from around New England we were able to adopt two resolutions that should help us to address some of our financial concerns. These, two resolutions, we hope will lead to a more fair way of funding our Annual Conference programs and expenses. I hope that as a result our local share will decrease as more churches accept their obligations.

Second, we adopted a capital campaign that will benefit our church camps Wanakee, Aldersgate, Mechuwana, and the retreat center at Rolling Ridge. We also want to make an investment in church growth and revitalization, as well as the health care needs of our retired pastors. Recognizing that many congregations have capital or ministry needs of their own, it was decided that each local church would also be a recipient of the funds raised in this campaign.

In addition, we also amended the original proposal to tithe the proceeds of the campaign to our two covenant relationships with Iglesia de Christo de Nicaragua and the United Methodist Church of West Angola. If we meet our Conference wide goal of ten million dollars (I know that sounds like a lot of money and impossible, yet faith makes all things possible) we will give $500,000 to our sister churches in Nicaragua and $500,000 to the churches of West Angola.

This was a step of faith for an organization that has had to cut back significantly on our programs and resources. For us, it would be like cutting our staff in half and then having the faith to believe that we could embark on raising $500,000 for a new building. It was a leap of faith and believe it our not, brings us to the good news of our gospel lesson!

What struck me about this passage several weeks ago when we started planning for this day and what continues to lie on my heart is the question of debts and debtors.

Who’s carrying more credit card debt than they would like to?

Forgiven Debt; another oxymoron of faith.

As with any church, when the Annual Conference meets there is always some heavy

preaching. Now that preaching does always happen in the same way that we see, as a set time within an hour worship service. Actually, we intentionally set the whole three-day session in the context of worship. So you might say that Peter and I have been worshipping for the last three days, so if our service this morning is two hours or more, you’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost track of time!

Well, one of our preachers was Douglass Meeks who led Bible studies on Stewardship as an economy of grace. You know they always call it Bible study, which sounds pretty safe, yet the leaders always seem to end up preaching. One of the comments I heard in this preaching that rang true for me is that the human heart is such that we always want more. And those little plastic cards that we all carry in our wallets make it so easy to get more. Are credit cards all we mean when we say debt? What about mortgages and car payments and everything else that we buy on time? We live in a debt culture that encourages a consumer mentality. Debt is so prevalent in our culture that some are figuratively, if not literally enslaved by it.

So where’s the good news in that? Give me a moment.

A debt culture survives in a scarcity context. A few years ago, I read about three young children who had been adopted out of very difficult circumstances where they never had enough to eat. They were on their way to starving to death when they came to this country and saw the abundance of our grocery stores. Yet, it took several years before these children could stop taking food into their bedrooms to store up - just in case. They had been so conditioned by the scarcity of food in their early lives, that they could not adjust to the idea that there would be enough.

Now I can understand the need of these young children to hoard, yet why do we who have always had more than enough continue to believe that God will not provide?

One of my mentors in the faith has been author and Christian extraordinaire, Dorothy Clarke Wilson. Many years ago, at the beginning of our relationship I asked Dorothy what it was about her life that made her want to share all the she had with others. She told me that she thought that it was growing up during the depression and seeing the struggle of families to survive.

Yet, as I shared with her, I know many other people who grew up in the depression and do not have the same relationship with the rest of the world. I think the difference was that Dorothy believed in a God of abundance. Do we believe in a God of abundance or a god of scarcity?

Let me remind you of two phrases from Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. My cup overflows. Biblical theology begins with a theology of abundance.

Yet, it’s hard to believe in that God when it comes to our money.

What about when it comes to forgiveness of sin? Do we want a god of scarcity or a God of abundance when it comes to forgiving our sin?

We can’t have it both ways. That’s why giving away our wealth is a spiritual discipline. If we give away what God has given from the beginning then we express a faith in God’s abundance. Debt and sin are very much related. In today’s gospel lesson Jesus makes that connection very clear. He uses a story about debt to teach Simon and us about forgiveness of sin.

I wonder about strange ideas sometimes and today I am wondering if there will ever come a time in the future when an individual’s debt might be written on their foreheads very much like the scarlet letter? We are becoming so used to those plastic cards that now we use them instead of checks. If I were a science fiction author I might suggest that those credit cards be imbedded into the backs of our hands to make them more convenient. Some on our Finance Committee have even suggested that we start making our offering with a debit card. What is a debit card, but another way to pay our debt.

Paul tells us in the letter to the Galatians that he was not a Gentile sinner but a Jew by birth. It seems that for Paul it was very easy to know who was a sinner and who was not. Can you imagine knowing who was a sinner just by how a person looked? Some times I think that we come a long way from the judgment of others reflected in the scripture and then sometimes I think that we have not.

A few years ago, the bishop of the Episcopal church of Rhode Island took a sabbatical and decided to spend some time living on the streets of Rhode Island with the homeless. She dressed as a homeless person and lived on the streets to try to learn more about the people who no longer have stable homes, yet she may have learned more about her churches and our churches. She found that when she visited churches, she was not recognized and she was not welcomed.

Do we accept or reject others because we see them as less whole? In today’s gospel, Jesus calls Simon and us to truly look at this woman. Imagine the scene as the disciples lay at the table sharing a meal. This was a time before our genteel sitting at the dining room table. Jesus’ table was low to the floor, even lower than our coffee tables. He lay on the floor with his legs stretched out in back and to the side. The woman was behind him washing his feet. Jesus says look at her and see her humanity.

What does Jesus say to this woman? Your faith has made you whole. To be made whole means to be saved. In other words, your faith has saved you. Nothing else but faith is needed. Salvation is about being made whole and that wholeness has to do with letting our human hearts be transformed to divine hearts that acknowledge the abundance of God

The most abundant act of God and the reason that I know a God of abundance is that God offers life itself that we might be forgiven and reunited with God. We say that God offers his son, yet we also believe that the Son is God. Jesus tells us that he and the father are one, so another way to speak of this supreme sacrifice is to say that God offers his future life, that we might be reconciled to God.

Reconciliation is perhaps one of the ingredients missing in our church and culture today. We have become a people willing to allow one issue to separate us one from another and that issue is the place or role of homosexuals in our church and culture. It was an issue that was in the background of the Annual Conference session, it was an issue that was a significant topic of discussion at a social gathering I attended last night, and it has been and will continue to be an issue for the state of Massachusetts over the next two years. It is an issue that I have not wanted to preach about because of its divisiveness, yet have wanted to discuss with you for the last few months.

For some this is an issue of morality; they read strong scriptural basis for labeling homosexual behavior as immoral. For others, it is an issue of social justice; they believe that all people are loved by God and that many homosexuals are in long-term, committed relationships. For me as your pastor right now, it’s an issue of reconciliation. The differences that separate us are keeping us from being reconciled and really moving out with God’s good news message. If we cannot be reconciled to each other, how can we be reconciled to God?

Grace is what allows us to be reconciled to God. Forgiveness may be God’s greatest gift and I do not necessarily mean forgiveness from God but the gift from God that allows us to forgive other people. Is there a way that we can have different views on this one subject and still be reconciled to each other and with God?

There are so many places where we need to bring the good news. One of the places lifted up for us through our annual conference in the coming year will be the question of our health care system and health insurance for all our people. We have millions of people in our country without health insurance and we have a very expensive care system when compared to other countries. Health insurance is a major issue for our young people graduating from college as they look for a job. They will be forced to move off their parent’s health insurance policy and many will not be able to find work that offers support through health insurance.

In addition, we need to share the good news with all by working in the area of economic justice. When Jesus offered his first sermon after his baptism and call, what did he say? "I come to preach good news to the poor, recovering of sight to the blind to set free the prisoner and declare the acceptable year of the Lord." That acceptable year is the jubilee year of Hebrew scripture and it means the forgiveness of all debt.

Yes, this is about forgiveness of debt. It’s a financial and a spiritual matter that Jesus brings to us today. The good news is that we our God is a God of abundance who forgives all debt. Amen.