David E. Gray
“Generosity”
Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
June 28, 2009
II Corinthians 8: 1-15
This past week I have been thinking a lot about special days on the calendar. First, there was Father’s Day. That is an increasingly important day for me with the two small boys. This afternoon I will be speaking at Ingleside Retirement Community where my son, Andrew, took his very first steps on a pastoral care visit there two years ago to the delight of the residents there. This Fathers day, I was with both my father and my son. I received a book of wisdom for fathers and one of the pieces of advice was “treat your dad well because your son will be watching how you treat him.” That is good advice and makes me think about what it means to act generously towards others.
Secondly, this week is full of birthdays for my family. This week my wife, my mother and my son, Andrew, all have birthdays. With all these birthdays, I have been giving a lot of gifts this week. So I have been thinking a lot about what it means to give generously to others.
There is no part of the New Testament that covers the importance of acting and giving generously more directly than the 8th chapter of Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth. Paul wrote to Corinth about generosity as he that was trying to convince them to participate in an offering Paul was collecting for some of the poor in Jerusalem. Paul told them stories of how others, particularly in Macedonia, had shown generosity in order to inspire them. You might reflect on the meaning of generosity in your own life through the stories shared today beginning with our second lesson.
When the scene of our second lesson opens, the Apostle Paul is trying to communicate to the church at Corinth why they should participate in a collection he was raising to benefit Jewish believers in Jerusalem who were poor. These people were forbearers in the faith for the Gentile churches, like Corinth, and Paul thought they should be supportive.
Paul had been planning this collection for more than a year and some churches were more generous than others. The Philippians and the Thessalonians gave generously while the Galatians did not. The Corinthians had promised at one time to participate generously, but were appearing to back away from that commitment so Paul wrote to them about being generous in giving to the poor in Jerusalem.
Paul’s primary argument for why they should give is that the churches in Macedonia, that is the Philippians and Thessalonians in what is now northern Greece, were giving generously even though they were poor and afflicted. In fact, Paul suggests that they were giving more than the other churches and were asking to participate, perhaps because they were poor too and could relate to those in need.
There was a story that the Washington Post and other publications picked up last month about Jody Richards, who saw a homeless man begging outside a downtown McDonald's in DC, so Richards bought the man a cheeseburger. There's nothing unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the 99-cent cheeseburger was a big chunk of the $9.00 he'd earned that day from panhandling.
Some have argued that the poorest people in Biblical times and today are often the most generous. According to Virginia Hodgkinson of Independent Sector, an association of major non profits in D.C., America’s poor donate more, in percentage terms, than do higher-income people. She writes that year after year "The lowest-income fifth of the population give at more than their capacity," the next two-fifths in income give at capacity, and those above give less than they are capable of giving." The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' found that in 2007, the poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charities. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent. And their generosity declines less in percentage terms during hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.
Certainly these are hard times that we live in. The economy of the country that we face is trying for many of us. Here at Bradley Hills, our Session has just completed our budget analysis with the hope of giving more to the mission year. We are on track to make budget, but we are not able to give the extra funds that we would like. We had a situation this morning, just a half hour ago, where a man came into the church, clearly looking for help but having a great deal of anger at the world. Several of us stood trying to figure out how to help, but given the anger and context not sure how to be helpful. It is one of those very uncomfortable situations that confront us in our time with the challenge Paul issued to the Corinthians to consider an attitude of generosity.
Giving of time, talents and treasure should be a goal. Paul appealed to the competitive instincts of the Corinthians. He suggests that the Corinthians’ desire to get ahead, their desire to excel, was making them reluctant to part with their funds. So he encouraged them to think of their generosity as a goal in which to excel. To make it a goal to connect with those who were poor. To become poor in spirit. To discover that is was better to give than to receive.
We are called to view life from the standpoint of those in need. Hugo Assmann, a theologian from Brazil, coined the term, “epistemological privilege of the poor,” Epistemology is the study of how we come to know things. According to John Wimberly, Assmann has argued that poor people see things from a unique, even privileged perspective, because they see things that the non poor do not see. Your former associate pastor here, John Wimberly, introduced me to this idea. He argues that the poor look at the world and see problems that need fixing that those who are not poor assume are ok. They are more in touch with where the actual needs are.
There were no doubt many people in Corinth who were facing financial challenges, just as in our church and in our surrounding community there is financial hardship. There is real pain in our midst and we take seriously our opportunities to help. If we have suffered a financial loss and have had to rethink of present, our future and our priorities, we should know that God cares about us and will be with us through it all. We also may have gained some new knowledge along the way. We may be able to relate to others and perhaps life a bit differently and we can bring a broader, some empathetic, perhaps more complete character to our view of the world. For that is what God models. Now you may say, wait a minute David, “I have been working my whole life so I can avoid being poor.” But we were not created to avoid caring about the poor.
For God cares about us in our relative poverty. Paul believed that the Corinthians needed an attitude of generosity that came from God. Generosity that comes from God’s being generous to us. As Paul put it, “our Lord Jesus Christ was rich, but for our sakes he became poor. So that we in our poverty could become rich.”
Jim Wallis once said, that “no one gets into Heaven without a recommendation from the poor.” I think he meant both the materially poor and our Lord and mediator who identified and sympathized with those who were poor. In becoming one of us and giving up personal advantage to enter the pain of the world and spiritual impoverishment of being separated from God, Jesus took on the epistemological privilege of humanity. And then modeled generosity by giving of himself, all of himself, for all of us.
The goal of generosity, as Paul understood it, is not becoming poor per se. It is about becoming like Christ. It is about seeking to relate to others who are hurting, trying to help and then perhaps working to change the conditions of the world, but it is first about our changing our character and prioritizes so that pure self interest is replaced by concern for others.
One constant of all religions is that they make us think outside ourselves. On Wednesday, I had coffee with a former Peace Corps volunteer, a Roman Catholic from birth who became a Buddhist monk in Thailand in the late 1970s. He talked about how he saw how these faiths were similar in helping him see beyond himself. He said, “we all start life looking at ourselves, we start with the “I” and religion helps us turn our mindset outwards to those around us. Faith helps turn the “I” on its side.”
If we believe that selfishness is one of the great problems with the world, particularly the political and business scandals of the past year, than developing a spirit of generosity is important.
There is a truth that when God demands something of us God usually gives it to us first. What God demands in action, God usually gives first to us in abundance. God demanded that the Israelites become faithful and so made a covenant with God’s people. God wanted them to rest so God gave them rest by setting the Sabbath day apart. God wants us to be consistent so God gives us a Trinitarian revelation that is internally consistent. God wants us to love, so as we read in 1 John, God loves us first. God wants us to be generous with each other so God in Christ is generous to us.
I am speaking about being generous with money because that is what Paul wrote about in our lectionary lesson in trying to take a financial collection from the Corinthians. And we are to be generous with our financial resources. Yet the generous spirit is about much more.
On Fathers’ Day and all days of rest, like Sunday, we think about our calling to be generous with our time. To spend time with our family. Even Don Corleone in the Godfather says that “a man who doesn’t spend time with his family is not much of a man.” Men, that is a strong endorsement.
We are to be generous with our gifts and share our talents in activities that help others and glorify God. I had a wonderful counseling session with a young man this week who I have known for many years who is now contemplating going to seminary. He wasn’t sure what the future holds, but he is committed to using God’s gifts generously to help others.
Next week at 4th of July parades we will honor our nation’s men and women in uniform who give of their very lives. I was struck by a USAToday article about a series of altruistic kidney donations. Matt Jones for Michigan decided to donate one of his kidneys to Barb Bunnel, a woman in Phoenix he has never met and has no connection to, simply because she would die without one, there is a national shortage of kidneys, and Jones knew he could help. Then Barb’s husband, Ron, responded by paying the gift forward by donating one of his kidneys to a woman in Toledo he didn’t know to help her. Our physical ailments can lead to our relating to others better and to new avenues to help others heal.
I was reading through Bill Clinton’s 2007 book, Giving, recently, and came across the story of Osceola McCarty. She was a cleaning lady in Mississippi who cleaned houses her whole life and in 1995, at the age of 85; she gave her whole life savings, which was substantial, to the University of Southern Mississippi for a scholarship fund for poor African Americans. She received the Presidential Citizen Metal from President Clinton as a result.
When I was at the end of my first year of law school in 1995, I was coming up on exams. That year was a long year of study. I didn’t cut my hair or shave the entire year. I had a pony tail and beard if you can believe it. After my final exam I was so exhausted that I walked over to a Chicago coffee shop and dropped into a seat there. The waiter came over to me. He said, “You seem like you need help. Hey, I’ve been there, I know what its like. Let me buy you lunch.” I don’t know where the “there” was that he had been, but something resonated with him. The waiter’s offer to buy me lunch was an act of generosity. He knew what it was like because he had been there. Like the Macedonians who could relate to the poverty of Jerusalem because they had been there. Like some of the Corinthians and people all over, perhaps some in this room, who find opportunities within their afflictions because they enhance their relating to others. And like our God who cares about us, generously pours out God’s spirit upon us, and calls us to live a life of generosity towards each other for Christ’s sake, and for our own. Thanks be to God. Amen.
