Scripture: Read Isaiah 55

Text: “Come” --- “everyone who thirsts .....”

People watch the progress of our new building with interest and some excitement. More and more of our fellow-townsmen are commenting upon it --- usually with favor and some delight. Some say “It is beautiful.” Some say, “How spacious and roomy it appears to be.” Some are impressed with its convenience. Some anticipate its atmosphere, conducive to worship in sanctuary and chapel. A visitor, coming here this week from out of the city, who belongs to another denomination than ours and who has traveled all over this nation over much of the whole world for her own church, looked into our new sanctuary. She was delighted with it! She seemed to feel that its design promises a warmth, and a possibility for mutual concern in the worshipping congregation, that well be particularly satisfying. She was enthusiastic!

Some observers are happy that children and young people, and older folk as well, are to have such attractive surroundings for classes and activities. I hope that all will find this church inviting. Perhaps our building can be as inviting as the Psalmist: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters --- come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” [Isaiah 55: 1]. Surely our congregation --- we ourselves -- can be as inviting as the Psalmist with our attitude of invitation. “Everyone who thirsts, come.” “Incline your ear and come --- hear, that your soul may live.” [Isaiah 55: 3]. “Seek the Lord [here] while he may be found.” [Isaiah 55: 6].

If it brings happiness to others just in anticipation, let us be joyful about our church, grateful for the extraordinary generosity of certain people who made parts of the building possible; appreciative of all who have subscribed finances, time, study, suggestions and enthusiasm. Let us see it through to completion and then make ourselves and others at home with us here. Let no one find justification for staying aloof for fear that this is a rich church for only the few; a “snooty” church where ordinary folk could not be at ease; an exclusive church for only the favored. Let us bend our best efforts to cause all people to feel that this is a church for all sorts of men and women and youth who are sincere, who are willing to work and worship with others, who will give of their means and their time and their effort to make it, continually, the church; where all may hope to grow in wisdom, in grace, in knowledge, in favor with God and mankind.

To accomplish what we want to build and to become, we Christian people must be good stewards of the life and substance entrusted to us. The church must have the interest and services of those who will teach in the church school (both Sunday School and vacation school); usher at services; serve as enlistment solicitors; chaperone and advise youth gatherings; act on the many boards and committees of the church organization and program (Deacons; deaconesses; trustees; board of religious education; music committee) sing in the choir; sometimes do manual work; take part in men’s and women’s activities; help with Scouting; serve as greeters and help with calling; assist at secretarial jobs; check on flowers; assist with newsletter; serve on denominational boards and committees; assist with church-time nursery care; help with coffee hour and occasional dinner functions at the church; provide transportation for youth rallies and conventions, for those who can not walk to and from services nor drive themselves ---- the list includes almost every kind of useful, friendly service.

To accomplish what we want to build and become, we will not only give personal service; we will give of our resources as we are able and as we have prospered. This church has tried to avoid frequency of appeals for money for worthy causes. We do concentrate on at least one major effort at Christian enlistment time, when every family --- indeed every church member and each friend of the church --- is invited to pledge support to the program of the church for the following year. Today we are all asked to indicate our intention to support the work of this church for 1966. This is not any time for begging; for apologetics, for appeal. It is a time for generous interest; for responsible stewardship in sharing; for generous pride in what we are and what we can do; for active gratitude to God.

We want to be informed givers. And so our Christian Enlistment chairman, Mr. Delbert Rowland, has sent us a letter which came to most of our homes a couple of days ago. He reminded us of the power latent in the people of this congregation. He reminded us of the propriety of proportional giving. Especially those of us who anticipate salaries or wages or any form of constant income can usually determine some proportion, or percentage, or fair and generous share, of our livelihood we will set aside from our personal and business expenses for giving, in and through our church.

The chairman called attention to the responsibility of each family --- better yet, each person --- to give in this united cause. He tells us that he made one error in the paragraph on “Your Gift.” He spoke of our 756 members as 231 pledgers or giving units. This last figure, he says, should be reported as 327 pledgers or giving units.

Along with his letter, Mr. Rowland enclosed a yellow sheet of figures representing a tentative budget for our church’s work in 1966. The figures suggested there are not final. Final budgeting should be approved by us at the annual meeting of the church on the second Thursday of January.

The tentative budget estimates what our church ought to provide as a minimum of support for the parish ministry in 1966. He says that individual items should later be adjusted (by annual meeting time). Our first job is to understand and subscribe the cost.

The second general heading on the tentative budget sheet has to do with maintenance of our properties. Our fine plant will be new. But its spacious rooms and nice furnishings and equipment must be adequately cared for. We shall surely need more fuel and utilities to keep us comfortable and efficient. We must have more housekeeping care than hitherto. We must keep ourselves reasonably protected with insurance, just as we do as individual householders. Our house of worship and study, our parking spaces, our parsonage or manse, our boy scout camp --- all must be maintained in respectable and serviceable condition.

And then, we must provide ourselves with the means of carrying on an adequate program of activity and service. The services of church secretary and office expenditures should be expanded to make the ministry more effective. Church Sunday School and Vacation School can not be provided with children’s offerings alone. They must be undergirded with additional interest and support of the whole congregation. The music of our church is centrally important to our worship. These, and other facets of our life together, are part of the program we underwrite by our subscribed support. We are at home here and surely we want to make it a better and better home.

The prophet, Isaiah, had written with poetic understanding, “Instead of (a) thorn shall come up (a) cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle.” “You shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Here let us live and work with joy --- not only getting fellowship and assurance but in glad giving of self and service and sustaining support. This is our Christian mission to self and neighborhood, right here at home.

But the spirit of Christ can not be contained at home. Jesus did call disciples to a better way of life. But he was not concerned alone with helping them to right living. He sent them out to others --- many others --- in fact to all the others whom they could reach with the message and attitude that redeems the life of mankind.

There is much sober concern that, in the period of adjustment and shake-down in our life as we become the United Church of Christ, the giving of our denomination for the support of the world mission beyond our local parishes has not measured up to the need. And important work has had to be cut back for lack of support in conviction and prayers and finance. There are signs that the trend may improve. Let us be a part of any such improved trend!

Here in our state of Wisconsin we can do our part in underwriting the work of our church associations and conference. We have a concern for Christian camps for youth and family and adult groups. We continue our support of training for the ministry by giving to at least one of our United Church seminaries. We approve the cooperative work of interdenominational councils of churches in Wisconsin, in our nation and over the world.

Do you know what our dollars can do, and do accomplish through the mission of the church? Much of the world (most of the world) does not have the resources and the financial means that we enjoy in this country. Many people in some countries are hungry for food and friendship. They die in great numbers from simple starvation. They live and serve and worship out of what we would consider dire want. Here is a brief account of the Christian spirit at work among Indians in Ecuador. A worker in Christian mission makes this observation: “When one sees an Indian give out of his poverty, we who have so much are put to shame. Often,” he says, “I have seen that a woman is getting ready to go to Sunday School. Just before leaving the hut which serves as her home, she looks under the crude bed to see if there are eggs in the hen’s nest. At least two eggs must be placed on the offering plate in the church. That means so much less for her to eat, but it is her happy offering for what the Lord has done.” The least we can do, in standing beside such a humble fellow Christian, is to send the missionary who is wanted, and who will help with the learning and living of Christian “good news” that brings joy to desperate living.

Let me share with you a portion of a general letter sent by one who has spent most of his productive life in India. He is a doctor, living and working in a significant medical mission. To some degree native Indians may help with the work begun there in his lifetime. But help from here is still greatly needed. He himself is nearing the time when he must retire. And he is trying hard to make the arrangements, and to find the personnel, to carry on the ministry of mercy to people who can not “make a go of it” by themselves. Getting another doctor for the station appeared nearly impossible, because of the painful fact that there was no money to provide a house for another doctor. But faithful search and ingenuity and sacrifice, have found an answer to the problem. A retired government medical officer is willing to give years of service. He is housed, for the moment, in very make-shift quarters. The missionary doctor and his wife have hit on this plan for the new staff housing: they will find a way to build a complex of low-cost verandahs around a one-room house in a coconut grove. They will move into these quarters and turn over their mission house to the new staff doctor. After they retire, the “verandah house” can be broken up into housing for humble members of the native staff. Are efforts like that worth our support? Ought not the support of our churches to be a lot better than it is?

Now will you let me read a part of his letter for an account of the kind of service that can be accomplished by a dedicated missionary of our Christian mission.

“The patients still keep coming,” he writes,” and some of them at least seem to show evidence that their having been here was a good thing for them. You feel that you have been rewarded for a year of work and struggle by a little thing like a smile of triumph we saw on the face of a young girl when she successfully walked for the first time the two miles to clinic. She was a female Tiny Tim with one withered leg, and leprosy foot-drop on the other side. She used to walk by bending over and bracing the knee of her withered leg with her hand to keep it from buckling with every step. But the good foot couldn’t stand the strain and developed an ulcer. And the withered foot developed an ankle infection that made it hopeless to expect that she would ever be able to bear weight on it again. The tradition in such cases is to amputate the useless leg. But no proper artificial leg is available; only a big clumsy wooden stump; and she had no muscles to swing the leg with the weight of the stump. I knew in general what kind of braces and orthopedic devices were necessary for her, but they were completely unavailable in India. She was faced with a lifetime of being unable to walk, which was particularly hard for her because she was an 18 year-old widow who is already condemned and despised by society and can never re-marry.

Finally we hit on the solution of fitting her leprosy foot with protective foot-drop shoes, made at our hospital shoe shop, and then putting her on crutches. Her withered leg need never touch the ground. An ingenious carpenter made her western-type crutches, and fortunately her hands, though partially paralyzed by leprosy, still had enough strength to grip the crutches. We had an awful time trying to talk her out of her despondency and make up her mind to learn to use the shoe, crutches and all. But she finally got the knack of it and we sent her home. Two weeks later, when she arrived at the roadside clinic to get her usual leprosy medicines, having made the two mile trip from her village successfully on her crutches, the smile of triumph on her face was something to warm the cockles of your heart.

The important thing in my mind was that time was needed to achieve all this. It couldn’t be done overnight. I was reading the other day an analysis of various kinds of American foreign aid in the medical field. The report said that Christian medical missions, still the biggest in scope of all on the list, could be criticized for their relative neglect of the job of training native personnel to take over from the Americans. But, it went on, in addition to the well known strong point of the mission program’s extra concern for the individual, was the fact that the missionary was there for years or for life, and the mission program was a long term one, not just a two or five year fly-by-night sort of thing, as are so many of the government and secular voluntary programs. These other shorter programs have their usefulness, of course. But there are certain things that you simply can’t solve overnight, and I believe that leprosy is one of them, and TB another. Both for the treatment of the individual sufferer, and for the control of the disease from the public health viewpoint, plenty of time is necessary. (Incidentally it also takes time to build character in an individual and to help a community or social group develop and rebuild itself.)

To all of you who agree with us that this long sustained effort is necessary and show it by your long continued support through prayers, letters, and gifts, we send our special thanks.”

That is a message from one of the American Board missionaries of Our Christian World Mission. It is signed “Ed Riggs.”

Our United Church Board for World Ministries has approximately 490 lifetime and shorter term missionaries giving Christian help in over 30 countries abroad at teaching, medicine, social service, agricultural assistance, preaching and pastoral service --- all in the name of Christ and in His spirit. Surely we want to undergird their support through the organized Board which selects and backs them in the work.

Look for a moment at Christian service here in our own nation. It finds expression in work among native American Indians, in assistance to migrant workers, in search for effective ways to minister to the inner city of great metropolitan populations. Our churches have, for a century and a half, been concerned for the Negroes who were being captured and brought to these shores as slaves, and whose descendants are still struggling to make their rightful place in this land. In the early part of the past century (the 19th century) a number of distinguished Americans were anti-slavery in their sentiments (not anti-people, but against the institution of slavery). They helped, in 1839 to 41, to fight through the courts the famous case of a whole shipload [the Amistad] of Africans intended for sale as slaves but finally freed and returned to Africa. These anti-slavery people, and those who were deeply concerned for the well-being and training of Negro people freed from slavery after the Civil War, finally formed the American Missionary Association. That Association eventually founded more than 500 schools in the south. At first the schools were for both Negroes and illiterate white folk who almost equaled the Negroes in number. Then the Southern pattern of separation negated this feature of the schools.

As communities became able to support their own schools in succeeding years, the AMA deeded practically all of its schools over to these communities; and they were absorbed into the developing public school system. This transfer of schools, amounting to a mammoth giveaway, eventually included all of the AMA schools with the exception of six colleges. These six colleges were retained by the American Missionary Association because of its strong opposition to a prevailing American attitude that the learning ability of the Negro was limited!

Today, almost 100 years after their founding, six colleges are still the primary concern of the AMA. (1) Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana; (2) Fish University in Nashville, Tennessee; (3) Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas; (4) Le Mozar College in Memphis, Tennessee; (5) Talladega College in Talladega, Alabama; and (6) Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi. Every one of the six has a charter “open” to both Negro and white students. Their faculties have always been integrated. They look ahead to more interracial service. The American Missionary Association is a part of the work of our United Church Board for Homeland Ministries. There is a lot more that goes on in this nation in the name and spirit of Christ because we believe in, and support, the work of that Board.

“Behold,” said the prophet Isaiah, “you shall call nations that you know not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the Lord your God ....”

Let’s undergird this work of Christ’s spirit right here in this church and community, reaching out over our beloved nation and in love to all the nations of the world. Let’s support it more enthusiastically and generously than ever before in our lives!

Someone says, “Why don’t we have a fellowship of tithers?” -- people who want to give a tenth of their income to church and related services. Believe me, some will. There could even be those who would wish to give more than that! Others among us will feel that their commitments to family responsibility will not warrant it yet, but will give a truly substantial part of their income -- some worthy portion or percentage that makes sacrifice a real joy. And such giving is a real joy!

I am not asking you to do what I will not do myself. It is by no means bragging, but it is a continued witness that I feel impelled to give at least 5% of my salary to our church’s budgeted program. At least another 5% is to go to our building fund pledge and to other charitable enterprises of the community and country. We have not always felt that we could do this. But we feel assured that we can and want to do it now. Perhaps many of you will want to give in more generous proportion than ever before. You will give and receive joy if you do! And don’t be backward about telling others of this joy. “See,” said the prophet, “I made him a witness to the peoples.”

Let’s be earnest about it. Make it a matter of prayerful concern and dedication as you fill out on a card and lay upon an offering plate your pledge to the support of this church for 1966.

[Cards available for those who have none. Ushers will pass them to any who did not bring them along. Borrow a pen or pencil.

Fill cards.

Letters and budget sheets available, in case you have not yet seen them.]

[Presentation and dedication of pledges] Prayer. Hymn?

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 14, 1965.