As I've listened to all of the stewardship speakers who have preceded me, I've been thinking "OH YEAH!  THAT'S IT!!  THAT'S WHY I PLEDGE!!"  But rather than follow through with that impulse and stand here to say "yeah, what they said," I should probably tell you instead what came to my thought when Robert first asked me to share my reasons for pledging.
Now first, in a confessional vein, I have to share with you that when I was in my twenties, I cringed with discomfort at that point in the service when, after a transcendently beautiful anthem from the choir, we sang the doxology and raised toward the heavens a velvet-lined plate of cold hard cash.  This offended my college-honed knee-jerk liberal sensibilities, calcified religion into materialism, and to me felt like the pride of the Pharisees.
It's worth noting that at this point I DIDN'T pledge - I was a graduate student who struggled to make the rent (so I told myself), I gave my time abundantly to the outreach ministries (so I told myself), what I could spare for the offering plate was enough (so I told myself) and so I trusted "those people with means" to be the supporters and grown-ups.
So my thirties rolled around, and I did pledge.  Why?  For the same reason I support public radio: because it's beautiful, it's important, and it's not free.  I gave, out of a sense of citizenship.
Some things have happened since then:  I've married the love of my life and had children, I've studied and worshipped with a different denomination and then returned to my Episcopal home, I've lost my father and have begun to face my mother's Alzheimer's disease.  And now I pledge because I believe that the way I use my resources provides a map of the desires of my heart.  As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (Matt. 6-21)  In making a pledge I make a declaration to myself of where my heart will be, and by fulfilling that pledge I walk my heart back to that place every time it wanders.
So now I look forward to the point in the service when we raise the offering plate.  We're elevating our commitments, taking notice of our material sacrifices, and asking a blessing on the desires of all our hearts.  We ask that what we give freely be sanctified. 

With love,
Carol Burden
Trinity parishioner

Thank you to everyone who has pledged so far:

• children lead the dismissal at the 9am service, and the process out the transept door and report to their classrooms for Sunday School.
• Rite 13 ( grades 7-8) meet in room G18

• J2A students (grades 9-10) gather in room G09 . 

• Sr. High students (grades 11 - 12) meet in room 111 (aka, the parlor). Please read the story below on the opposite column on our YAC program.
  

The Revised Common Lectionary that we use operates on a three year cycle. For the Feast of All Saints (which falls on a Sunday this year) the lessons are different each year, but the themes remain the same -- the poor and oppressed, the dead, and life after death. In many ways, these are the topics that most Christians find most important. Just what is the Good News that the Gospel promises people who are poor and suffering? Where, if anywhere, are 'those we have loved but see no more'? What will happen to us when we die? In wrestling with these questions it is crucial that we avoid the kind of simpleminded belief that skeptics have often dismissed as 'pie in the sky when you die'.

The lessons help us in this. They teach that the life after death for which we ought to hope is not 'more of the same only better'. From first to last it is life in the Kingdom of God. Such life does not begin with death, and dying is no guarantee of obtaining it. It begins now - if we accept it.  'The Kingdom of God is among you' Jesus says, and the lesson from Revelation tells us that 'the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God'. These are truths that it is easy to ignore, or be indifferent to, even for regular church goers whose hearts can as easily fix on worldly goals as anyone else's.

In the same passage God declares 'I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end'. God gave us our beginning in life. That much we must agree. When it comes to what we make of it -- the ends of life -  He gave us the freedom to look to our own devices, or devote ourselves to a way of life whose ultimate focus is the Glory of God. "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" Jesus asks Mary of Bethesda in today's Gospel passage. That glorious Kingdom, though, is one in which God will 'make all things new' and thereby surpass and surprise by the things that turn out to be important and the things that get left behind. That it is still the best thing both rich and poor can long for, is what the faith of the Saints affirms.

This  Sunday, November 1^st is All Saints' Sunday. On this day we make special remembrance of all those dear souls who have died since All Saints last year, and at the same time we welcome the newest members of the body of Christ through the sacrament of Baptism. (We will have Baptisms at both 9:00 and 11:00am.)

• to be "race marshalls" on the course, email Grant Fraser bgfraser@bellatlantic.net

•  to help distribute the t-shirts, food and water, e-mail Annie Thomas thomasa@trinityprinceton.org
  
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• to distribute posters and flyers, please email Alison Roth