United Church of Pittsford

As Christians, we are called to be faithful in a variety of ways. One way of summarizing the various aspects of Christian calling is the Methodist concept of the Four Pillars. When I first joined a Methodist church, I was asked to promise to support the church with my prayers, presence, gifts, and service. Each of these Four Pillars can be seen as a way of expressing Christian faith, and each has played a role in my personal faith journey. Prayer is a complex topic that Pastor Jim is addressing in the Thursday evening Lenten series. All of you here today are supporting the church with your presence. During budget season, we hear a lot about what our gifts mean. Today I'd like to talk a bit about the pillar that has given me the most trouble in my faith journey--Christian service.

For many years, I've sung in the choir and played handbells. This has enhanced my experience of the worship service, and I hope I've also had a positive impact on the worship experience of the congregation as well. I've also participated in service to the church in variety of other ways, and I've never had a problem doing so. But service to the church is not the only kind of service that is expected of Christians. We also hear a lot about how we should be of service to the world or to the community. That's the part of faithful Christian service that I have wrestled with.

The subject of Christian service has come up in various adult Sunday school classes and Bible studies I've participated in from time to time. For a long time--literally for decades--this was a stumbling block for me. There was conflicting advice. Every Christian has a calling. We aren't all called to do the same thing. Serving the church is good, but we also need to do Christ's work in the world. The problem I had was, the calling wasn't real to me. Yes, I could go to Asbury as an adult with Agape and work in the kitchen to help feed the homeless; but aside from the fellowship, it didn't speak to me. How valuable was my time? Was what I was doing worth minimum wage? Would I do as much good, or maybe more, by just writing a check for $50 or $100? The fact that I *wasn't* writing such a check did nothing to stop this line of thought. In prayer studies, I wrestled with this. Was I simply not called to service in the world, or was I failing to listen to the call?

When the call came, it took me a while to listen. In November 2004, Dick Krager stood up at the pulpit and asked for volunteers to help with a program called CASH--Creating Assets, Savings, and Hope. This was a fairly new program that provided free income tax filing to low income people. It also provided referrals to services that the clients might be able to use, and tried to encourage the clients to save part of their refund. The goal is to help people pull themselves out of poverty. I thought, tax preparation is something I could do. But I didn't do anything about it.

In November 2005, Dick stood up again and made a similar appeal. Again, I didn't do anything about it. But it stuck in my mind, and I asked Dick about it in late December. I sent in my volunteer form in the last week of December, went through training in January, and started out as a newbie tax preparer with the goal of keeping people out of Refund Anticipation loans.

A couple weeks into the 2005 tax season, I had a defining experience with the CASH program. A young lady sat down at my tax prep station and told me she had done her own taxes, and she thought she was going to get $900 back. But because this program was free, she figured it wouldn't hurt anything to let us take a look. It took me 20 minutes to prepare her return. She was getting $2300 back.

Wow. Less than an hour's work, and I made a $1400 difference in someone's life. Here was something I could do where my labor was indisputably worth more than any check I could write to support the program. I was hooked, and I've been back every year since then.

During tax season, I volunteer 8 hours a week with CASH. I still do some tax returns, but now I'm more often doing quality review and coaching new tax preparers. Committing one evening a week plus four hours on Saturday forces me to cut back on my other activities. It means I miss choir practice, and that means I won't be singing with the choir unless they're doing an anthem I already know. It requires me to be disciplined about bedtime to get enough sleep. Inevitably, there are weeks when my discipline isn't as good as might be hoped and I end up being quite tired by Saturday. When I'm tired, it's possible to lose track of why I'm doing this.

Saturday, February 6 didn't start out well. It was one of those mornings that the sheets didn't want to let go. I was tired and unmotivated, and somewhat regretful of committing that many hours to CASH, or at least of committing to Saturday *morning* instead of afternoon. But I'd made a promise, so I hauled myself out of bed, got a load of laundry started, and went off to do the tax thing.

The site was busy. When I go there, the site manager had already put up the "Sorry, No More Walk-Ins" sign. Coffee is provided, so I managed to be awake and functional when I needed to be. I cruised through the first three hours in decent shape and fairly efficiently. Then one of those random events happened that made me appreciate all over again why I was there.

It started off as a standard quality review of a return prepared by a first-year preparer. The return looked like a lot of other returns I've seen, a single mother with one child and income in the range where the Earned Income Credit will make a substantial difference to her. One of the standard QR checklist items is to verify that no one else can claim the child for EIC. Now, the rules as to who can claim a child for EIC have a lot of pieces, and we were busy. So I asked my standard first question, "Does anyone else live with you and your son?" Most of the time, the answer will be no, which means no one else could claim the child and I don't have to get into the fine point details. This time, the answer was, "Just my other son, but my ex-husband claims him under the terms of the divorce decree."

This is the classroom example of EIC. She can give away the dependency for tax purposes, but the EIC stays with the custodial parent. I explained this to her and showed the preparer how to handle a non-dependent qualifying child on the tax return. It got her about $1400 more in refunds from the IRS and New York. Turns out she had simply thought she couldn't use that child for anything, so she had never put him down on the intake sheet in past years. She can come back in March, and we can prepare amended returns for her going back to 2006.

The way I asked that question, and the facts that it brought out, got her an additional $1400. It seems likely that amending her prior year returns will get her a substantial additional amount. That's going to make a big difference to someone with two kids to support and well under half my income. And it only happened because I dragged myself out of bed when I didn't feel like it, and went to honor a commitment I'd made.

Yes, this was a random event. But sometimes God uses random events to send messages. That $1400--matching the amount I found for the young lady four years ago--was a message for me that I'm still called to this service. It's important that I remain faithful to this calling.