Regardless of your political preferences or affiliations, it is hard to miss the fact that this week, something shifted in America.  As it happens, over the last two weeks of the 2008 presidential election campaign, I have been reading Tom Brokaw’s fine book about the 1960s.  Entitled Boom, it both describes and seeks to interpret the great upheaval in American culture that occurred in the years between 1963 and 1968.  I couldn’t help but think; as I watched the events of Tuesday night unfold on television, that we had somehow, finally, after 40 years emerged from that time.

We always remember something about where we were individually and personally as the great events of history unfold.  I suspect many of us will remember where we were on election night, 2008, when the United States, a country uniquely shaped by its history of slavery and institutionalized racism, elected a man of African and American descent to occupy the singular highest representation of our institutionalized life, the Presidency of the United States.

Because I’ve been reading Brokaw’s book – I couldn’t help but think of the difference between Grant Park, 1968, and Grant Park, 2008, as I watched on Tuesday evening.

So, in August of 1968, I was moved from my friends, my school and my extended family when my family relocated to Chicago from west central Indiana.  While I was trying to figure out what it meant to be in Chicago, I watched the television in the living room of my new suburban home as chaos broke out in Grant Park.  This was just a 20 minute train ride away.  This was not in Dallas, or Memphis.  This was close enough that I could be there if I wanted to.  At fifteen years old, I didn’t understand much of what was happening, but I could see that in what was otherwise a beautiful city park, kids not much older than me were getting beat up on by police officers.  The words on the side of the police cars I had grown up with said, “to serve and protect.”  This looked like neither service nor protection.

And I could hear my Dad, in the same living room with me, damning those kids, who seemed to me to be not very different from me.  We were already at odds, he and I, about the Vietnam war.  We would come to blows over the question of his beloved Wabash College choosing to admit women or not.  America was not just coming apart on television.  The institutions on which we had all depended were coming apart in living rooms, too.

And so, for me, there was a kind of poetic beauty to Grant Park becoming the setting for Tuesday night’s events.  Those gathered to greet and hear the President Elect of the United States were not just jubilant – there was also an air of reverence.  There was Jesse Jackson, now an elder statesman of the movement, tears streaming down his face.  A lot of what unraveled 40 years ago seemed, on a balmy November night in Chicago, to have been put back together in a way that is much truer to our highest aspirations as citizens of America and of the global community.

Not everyone is happy about this transformation, to be sure.  I was reminded of that a week or so ago, when the telephone rang in my office early in the evening.  A woman who I do not know wanted to inquire of me what had happened to the Methodist Church.  Her first inquiry was about the decision of some churches, including this one, to insist on equal treatment and full inclusion of gay people.  I took a fair amount of time explaining to her the ways in which churches differ on the issue, and the grounds for each point of view.  My attempt at patient explanation did not satisfy her, and she quickly moved to her assertion that it was absolutely wrong for, as she phrased it, “our wonderful Methodist Church on East North Broadway”  to be in the hands of a woman.  It should be a man in charge, and women should not be ministers, or for that matter, President.  She reminded me of the eternal consequences of my sinful career choice and hung up on me before we considered whether a black man should be President, but I think I know where she was going.

So what does this all have to do with stewardship Sunday?  The events of the week reminded me of how much I value the institutional church.  Yes, I stand here as a child of the 60s to confess my appreciation for the institutional church, and to ask you, in an age where it has been widely maligned as out of touch and ineffective and irrelevant, to invest in it.

Because I believe the institutional church calls us to something beyond our own self interest, even beyond our own nationalistic tendencies, and allows us to experience personal transformation even while we are actively involved in transforming the world.  Those who choose to participate in this thing called church are participating in a household that transcends your own place and your own time – all the time.

In my life in the institutional church, I have found people who marched in Selma, and registered voters in Mississippi, and got on trains and boats right after graduation and went to the other side of the world to work as missionaries, or Peace Corp volunteers.  In my life in the church, I have found women who made a career out of giving their time away to serve others, managing complex projects that contributed a wealth of resources to their communities.  In my life in the church, I have found men who sacrificed their own career goals to give a young woman an opportunity to succeed.  In my life in the church I have found men, and a few women who got on a boat or an airplane right after graduation, and went to the other side of the world to serve their country, obedient to the orders given by their commanders, brave and loyal soldiers, who understand better than most what service to a cause greater than yourself demands.

Because I encountered these people in church, I encountered them not as images on a television screen, or characters in the great American drama, but as my flesh and blood neighbors.  And while we might have differed, and probably still differ, on many of our values, our membership in the institutional church gave us a place to become what the apostle Paul calls “oikos,”  a household.  We sing the same hymns.  We pray the same prayers.  There is an institutional structure that gives shape to a part of our lives so that it is, week after week, a shared life.

The institutional church still transforms lives.  Participation in the institutional church has healed and transformed me.

I came through the 1960s with questions about how to live my life.  And the church has given me answers.  The church institutionalized some wrong things.  No question.  We institutionalized racism and sexism just as much as the culture did.  We gave the culture their rationale, in fact.  We are still confronting how the church’s institutional values continue to support cultural biases that are counter to the call of the gospel.

To the woman who called me on the phone, the church is an institution represented by the building that stands on East North Broadway.  Its unchanging character is her highest value.  But we who are inside the building regularly know that we are not an institution that is unmovable.  We are an institution that is inspired by God’s spirit.  We can be “in-spirited.”  We can have our Grant Park moments.  And the practice we have of pooling our resources to maintain our institutional life and our transformative presence in the world is a remarkable thing.

The Time magazine that came yesterday includes an interesting story about giving circles.  Giving circles are voluntary associations where people come together to pool their money so that the impact of their giving is greater.  Time thinks this is news.

Friends, that’s not news.  The apostle Paul started a giving circle in Macedonia and Corinth and surrounding areas 2000 years ago.  And he said, among other things, that giving to the church is a necessary way of recognizing the grace of God at work in our own lives.  He has so inspired the act of giving in order to become part of the household of faith that is in Jerusalem, that the Macedonian church has begged him for the opportunity to give.  Giving contributed to the equality that Paul proclaims in the church – all are one in Christ Jesus.

Sure – we’re an institution.  And we have to pay the utility bills, and mow the lawn and plow the snow and provide insurance and salaries and repair the roof.  But it is the constancy of the institution that has mediated the grace of God to generations.  And our presence is needed more than ever right now in our community.  All those problems facing the new Administration in Washington are also local problem.  And we can make a difference.  We can contribute to reforming public education at a time when that is a critical need in our country.  We can feed our neighbors through the ministries of CRC and the family shelter and perhaps in this very building and in our own kitchens.  We can make sure that no family here who loses a job or faces foreclosure goes without the help of this household of faith.

I stand here today to invite you to join a giving circle.  The dues in this giving circle are not the same for everyone.  Paul says we should give in proportion – so that those who have much don’t have too much and those who have little don’t give too little.  The tithe is sort of the training wheels of giving.  Most of us can move toward that.

But today, I want to talk not about the amount you give, though that is significant.  I want to talk about what it means to participate.  Participation and regularity.

This is a giving circle only to the extent that those who participate in the life of the church join it.  When some of us give regularly, and others don’t it places a burden on those who give.  We all need to do a share.  And we need to give regularly; every week, or every two weeks or every month.

Because I want you to belong – to be a part of the circle – to share in the life of this church in such a way that you are invested in doing the work that we do.  And we’re going to take a little more than 10% of our annual budget, and we’re going to join a couple of other giving circles.  We’re going to join the West Ohio Conference, who is going to join on our behalf, the Global ministries outreach and ecumenical organizations and missionary endeavors of a global church.

The apostle Paul’s guidelines suggest that giving needs to be regular and thoughtful – I’ve just asked you for that.

It needs to be sacrificial – only you can judge what that means for you.

Finally, Paul reminds us that we give because of what we have received.  We stoop and give ourselves away in love, because Jesus stooped and gave himself away in love.

I firmly believe that there is no reason in the world why we can’t fully fund the budget of this congregation – institutional and missional with our giving.  I believe that God has placed in our hands – yours and mine – enough to do it.  Everything needed in terms of money, time, talent – has already been given.  It’s in our pockets and our bank accounts and our paychecks.

The question for us all is this:  What do we want to pursue with our one life?

We can pursue God’s justice, meaning, purpose, relationship with neighbors, or we can pursue those things which are not of eternal value, and which it turns out have a particularly dangerous an addictive appeal.

What an amazing witness we could make, if in this year, when everyone is afraid of the economic crisis – we supported the life of this church fully and with extravagant generosity.

We’d never forget it.