October 28, 2007
The Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 25, Year C)
Sirach 35:12-17; Psalm 84:1-6; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14
Now, of course, the pictures and the celebration of who we are and what we do and would like to offer our parishioners is only part of the story at the cottage meetings. The other part is about money – a theme not unexpected in the fall of each year in each parish, but certainly not unique to the twenty-first century either. Listen to the readings this morning; they were about money too!
Sirach says, “Give to the Lord most High as he has given to you!” Further, Sirach instructs, “ Do not offer God a bribe, for he will not accept it.”
Sometimes I think when we hear of the needs of the church and ask people to give generously from the bounty of their lives, to be good stewards, we encounter in all of us, me, you, the others in our pews, a subconscious sense that we ought to get what we pay for, or we try to “bribe God with our gifts“– so to speak. Sometimes I think we all are hoping that what we give will be noticed by God, by whomever, priest, committee, or “them,” whomever them is, and thus earn for ourselves brownie points of some sort as if we were building up a bank account to draw from, a bank account of good deeds and well done actions. And I also think we encounter some of the same sense that the Pharisee expressed in the gospel lesson: “I am giving my fair share. So am I not entitled to more grace or more of God’s approval than those who are unable to give as much as me?” – whatever the reason.
I cannot point a finger and say who has these sorts of attitudes. I really don’t know and don’t care for I see it as a human problem, a timeless human problem, not specific to a real person or people in this parish, rather the collective sense of all of us. And I so speak of it in terms of our community because we are, in truth, an extension of the communities that heard these lessons when they were first spoken two to three thousand years ago, and sadly I do not think we have come very far from the human nature that entrapped them. We are entrapped also. So what I can say is that I can tell from the conversations that have come about at some of the cottage meetings, that there is at best a discomfort about talking about money, and a whole lot of justification for what each gives. And the justification resembles these warning lessons we hear this morning.
I know It is easier to point a finger at someone else than to examine our own conscience about money matters. It’s much easier to justify our own generosity (or lack thereof) than to exalt someone else’s. That is why it is so hard to stand up here and preach this sermon, why these lessons make me squirm, and I know how they may make you squirm also. I am not the example to set here. Instead I am one among you who struggles with these human failings also.
But the thing I have come to know about generosity is that if we have to think about it too hard, justify it, or point it out to others, we are missing the underlying truth that scripture has been trying to teach for over three thousand years. I think what we are to get through our thick sculls is: “Give because God has given to you.” It’s so simple to hear and so hard to live.
In this month’s Shepherd Staff I have spoken a bit about my trip to Africa and the people I met there, the Hatsabi family who welcomed us into their home, a structure of mud and sticks with a thatched roof, sleeping quarters for all the women and children on cowhides – no padding of course, where I met wife number one, number two, and number three. When I asked their names I was told “Wife Number One,” “Number Two” and “Number Three.” Number Three was about fourteen and had been “married for about a week.”
The grandmother showed us how she ground the corn to feed the family, for about two hours daily.
I also met and saw the homes of other families, Massai, Tatog, Bushmen. I wish that I could tell you that they were amazingly happy despite their poverty. But the truth is I do not know because our visits were so orchestrated, and they so dependent upon our purchase of the trinkets they had made that I do not really know the realities of their lives. I can surmise, but I cannot speak of the state of their psyches or souls. However, what I came away knowing is how much I have, and how blessed I am to have not only a lovely home in which to live, but also work I love, with people I love, and beyond that, good health care and education, and even beyond that, resources that the people I visited can only imagine, or probably can’t even imagine. I came away feeling perhaps a bit like the Pharisee in today’s gospel, “Thank God I can go home!”
But I would say this: They, like we, had community, community with rules and traditions that we find uncomfortable and oppressive, but rules and traditions that make it possible to survive. We too have rules and traditions, most of which, being stubborn Yankees, we at least question if not outright ignore, but there is a certain order to our being community that we all honor and trust. That is something to be thankful for, and this community is something that God has entrusted to us, called us to be stewards of. And how we support this community financially, as well as with our time and with our abilities, says the most about how we all understand generosity. It says the most about how much we attribute to God the blessedness of our lives, and how much we think we have done all on our own.
God has guided us as we have built up this community over the years, and God continues to call us to serve each other and many more who have not yet come across our threshold. But if we are thinking we have given enough, or others are the ones who should give more, or we try to bribe God with our gift, then, as Sirach says, we are relying on dishonest sacrifice. What needs changing is not our lives, we do not need to sell our homes and live as the Hatsabi or Massai or Bushmen, our things are not our moral frame. Nor do we have to live like the tribes in Tanzania to be humble.
Rather we need only to be able to examine our motivations and our hearts, and probably almost all of us will need at the least a “tune up,” if not a true change of heart, about giving out of the bountiful blessedness of our lives, and giving for the right reason and that reason is generosity, plain and simple. Give because God has given us so much; be generous as God is generous.
Simple but, as we are all aware, not easy. Not easy at all, but certainly if the Power Point is any indication of what we are and can continue to be, it is worth doing. Live generously, my friends, live generously.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd