Rev. David Boyd

Have any of you heard of Hedwig? For those of you who are fans of Harry Potter, you will recognize Hedwig as Harry's owl. For others of you who are up on your saints, you will recognize Hedwig as the patron saint of orphans.

Stephanie Paulsell, who teaches the practice of ministry at Harvard Divinity School, has asked the question, "who would be a good patron saint for the deepening recession in which we find ourselves?" She suggests that many people would offer the frugal saints who turned their back on wealth, the likes of St. Francis or St. Clare who wanted to follow the way of St. Francis but ended up in a monastery and who wrote a rule of living that was so austere that the Pope wouldn't let her live by it. This would be a good fit for the Bible readings for today, especially the one from John about pruning the grape vines in order to produce good fruit. It may seem that we all need to cut back, that we need to prune any extravagant actions and be more frugal in our spending. But for Paulsell, St. Hedwig gets the prize as the patron saint of this recession.

St. Hedwig, by all accounts, lived a fairly privileged life. She was, after all, the queen of Silesia having been given in marriage at the age of 12 to Henry I of Silesia. Silesia is located mostly in modern-day Poland but has parts of it in Germany and the Czech Republic. Hedwig was a German who was given to Henry to solidify political alliances, a common practice in the 12th and early 13th centuries when Hedwig and Henry lived. Hedwig bore 7 children and because she was a strong minded person with far reaching ideas, she persuaded Henry to take a vow of chastityÑa rather rare thing in Medieval royal families. Hedwig wanted to use her power, influence and resources to create and sustain communities centred on prayer, learning and service. With Henry's partnership, Hedwig built hospitals in Breslau and Neumarkt and brought Roman Catholic religious orders to Germany and Silesia to provide refuges of prayer and healing. Hedwig's intention was not mere charity. She worked in the hospitals that she built and when Henry died, Hedwig moved in with the Cistercian nuns. Hedwig is named patron saint of this recession for her building programs and her far-sighted sense of community support and life.

Paulsell says this of Hedwig, thinking about her motivation for building hospitals and communities of prayer: "Married at 12, constantly pregnant, for years she kept alive a vision of community in which even women have time for prayer and study; a vision in which work is shared so that leisure can also be shared; a vision in which everyone receives the attention and care he or she needs." Not only could Hedwig be the patron saint of this recession, but she could be the patron saint of stewardship. For stewardship as practiced in the Church is exactly about building communities of prayer and healing, sharing one's resources and life with others in creating life for others. Stewardship is about sharing from our sense of abundance and blessing to build communities of healing and wholeness. Hedwig provides a strong inspiration to do this work.

This recession is really a time for pulling together as communities, a time for sharing our expertise and gifts and a time for sharing from our abundance. Two of the most important values that the Bible has to teach us is the value of community and the value of abundance. Too often we allow the modern concept of scarcity to govern our thinking; if goods and resources are scarce, we have to compete with others and hoard our resources. Scarcity can lead us to a mean-spirited individualism. But the Jewish people and philosophy is about sharing resources and hospitality. The Jubilee and Sabbath values of the Jewish people teach us that there is enough; the folk song Dayenu is all about enough. It would have been enough if God had made us; it would have been enough if God had brought us out of Egypt; it would have been enough if God had given us the land of plenty; you get the picture... it would have been enough... a vision of abundance not scarcity. And Jesus, very much the Jew, believed in this value of abundance and the power of communities to pool resources and live fully.

Scarcity thinking would suggest that this is a bad time for a stewardship campaign. But one of the revelations for me at the workshop last Saturday about the future of our United Church is that there is an abundance of gifts in this congregation. Abundance thinking would suggest that this is precisely THE time to intentionally share our resources, our gifts, and our talents. This isn't some self-centred exercise to shore up the breaches and plug the holes; this is a campaign about sharing the good news of God's gift of life that we experience in Jesus. This is about building communities of prayer and healing so that all people can share in Hedwig's vision of receiving the care and attention he or she needs. This abundant sharing is very much about pruning the vines to produce fruit. A scarcity model would suggest that we never prune, that we need all the branches we can get so that we can get as much fruit as the vine will produce; but we all know where this leads us: fruit that isn't of sufficient quality to produce good wine. And goodness knows we want good wine!

Hedwig's message for us is simple, and maybe she'll fly in and land in our churches much as Harry Potter's owl might, suggests Paulsell. Hedwig's message is that we need to come together to build and sustain communities of prayer and healing so that all can receive the compassionate attention they might require. There is an abundance of love and compassion to share and it is our task to share it with others in this world. We can only do this together and we can only do this from a sense of blessing and abundance.

Thanks be to God. Amen.