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July 2, 2006 - The Fourth Sunday After PentecostI wonder if Warren and Bill and Melinda have been reading their Bible. If they were, they might have been motivated by today’s readings. From Deuteronomy: Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor; give liberally and ungrudgingly; open your hand to the poor and the Lord will bless you. From the Psalm: Give freely to the poor, and your righteousness will stand fast forever. From 2nd Corinthians: As you excel in faith and love, I want you to excel in generous giving to the saints in need, creating a fair balance between your abundance and their need. And in the gospel, Jesus generously gives of himself, the only thing he has to offer, in raising a little girl from the dead.
At the heart of these readings – and of every religious teaching about giving - is a spiritual matter. Because when we give generously, several very important spiritual things take place at once:
· first, and most important, those who are less fortunate are lifted up, thereby creating a fair balance between all of God’s children, as St. Paul encouraged; this is a matter of God’s intended justice. As Paul also says The one who has much should not have too much, and the one who has little should not have too little.
· second, when we give of ourselves and our money, we learn something about letting go. By releasing it from our control we become less attached and less fearful about our material needs; and
· third, we learn that love is what really matters in this life.
I’m not telling you anything that you haven’t heard many times before. But what always interests me about God’s call to us to be generous – or for that matter, God’s call to do anything: to pray, to be faithful, to forgive – is why we don’t heed it. We pretty much know how we’re called to live; but there is always some form of resistance that we raise.
What is our resistance to generosity? Two kinds stand out in our reading today. The first of them is indifference. In the reading from Deuteronomy, the author seems to be writing to a pretty callous audience. For he has to say Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted towards your needy neighbor. Be careful that you do not entertain a mean thought.
He goes on to say that some won’t lend to the poor because they know that the Torah mandates that all debts are forgiven every 7 years – that’s right, you heard me, all debts were wiped clean every 7 years. Why loan money on the 6th year when you know you won’t get more than 1 year’s payments back? This sounds like good common-sense business practice to us; but the Bible calls it mean-spirited.
There are hard-hearted people in this world, and most of them are not poor. I was told once by a wealthy man that he didn’t believe in being taxed for public education. Why should I pay for the children of others? he said. Let each family earn its own money and pay for its own education.
By contrast, at General Convention recently, I attended a hearing about funding for the Millennium Development Goals, which seeks to alleviate suffering among the extreme poor in this world. One priest told a story of going to Kenya on a mission trip, and arriving as a guest in a small and very poor village. He said that they served him – and no one else - boiled eggs, which he didn’t think anything of, until he was told that this was the most extravagant food that they had.
The priest said They who had nothing gave me the best of their table; are we prepared to give to the poor of this world the best of our table, or just the scraps that are left over? His story is very familiar to anyone who has spent any time with those who are poor. They tend to be the most generous among us.
Tight-fistedness and generosity are spiritual issues. This is true for individuals, but it is also true of nations: this is something to reflect on, during this Independence Day holiday. Tight-fistedness dries us up and isolates us; generosity sets us free and connects us to the human community.
To those who are ungenerous and claim to be religious, I can only say that perhaps it is time to wake up. Our Bible reminds us today that if you view your needy neighbor with hostility and give nothing, your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt. Jesus also teaches us that we are truly blessed, happy, free, only when we give. We suffer when we are hard-hearted.
The second form of resistance to generous giving is scarcity thinking: I don’t have enough. Perhaps this is what was behind the story in the church in Corinth, whom Paul addressed in the second reading today. He gently shames them by comparing them to the church in Macedonia, whose giving to the needs of the saints overflowed in a wealth of generosity, precisely at a time when they were suffering a severe ordeal – probably persecution, in which some of them were arrested and lost their jobs, if not their lives. Paul reports that the Macedonians gave beyond their means, begging earnestly for the privilege of sharing with those in need.
What this little story reveals is that the church in Corinth was convinced that they were not in a position to be generous. Perhaps they were in an economic recession; their income was unpredictable; their rent, education, and entertainment expenses made everything just too tight for generosity. Corinth, after all, was a bustling, cosmopolitan place with plenty of opportunities for stretching oneself thin economically. Sound familiar?
Many of us feel stretched so thin that we feel we have nothing left to give. We’re just too busy, too financially committed already, too overwhelmed with responsibility to even think about giving more of ourselves or our resources. There are no reserves to draw from. We’re tapped out.
This modern malaise is described in detail in a book I was recently introduced to, called Margin. The author points to the obvious – we have managed to fill in our lives so fully that there is no margin left at the edges. We work too long and too hard, we’re always rushing around, we’re in debt, we’re not sleeping enough, we don’t take care of our bodies. We have no extra time, money, or energy. It’s all we can do to just keep up.
This is a spiritual problem, of course. And the solution is not simple. It doesn’t help to add guilt to an already overburdened life: I know you’re stretched too thin, but you really should be giving more of yourself to others, because the Bible says so. Instead, we’ve got to address the spiritual problem at the root of it.
This begins when we recognize that we don’t want to live margin-less lives. It begins when we start looking for ways of protecting unscheduled time, getting out of debt, spending less on unnecessary things, saying no to new commitments, and letting go of some of the old ones.
Reclaiming margins in our life is critical, because it is in those margins that we have the mental, emotional, and physical space to be creative, to take initiative, to wonder, to pray, to appreciate the moment, to just be with others in an unhurried way. Reclaiming our emotional, spiritual, and financial reserves, we then feel as if we have the time and capacity to give.
This is why often the poorer, more traditional and rural people of the world are as generous as they are. They’ve got nothing but margins, in fact, too many. They may not have a credit card to take you out to a fancy restaurant, but they have an egg or two, and enough room in a loving heart to give it away. They may not have a job, but they have time to spend with you, to sing, to play, to tell stories.
So reclaim those margins, that you might have the reserves that are necessary to live more creatively, spontaneously, generously. And then give of yourself and your resources. We are all wealthy here, in comparison to most of the world. Help create God’s justice in this world, a fair balance, as God intends. Join in the great privilege of sharing, whether you think you have enough or not. For God will always bless those who open wide their hands.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church