Rev. Jon Smoot
"That's Just Not Fair!"
October 15, 2006
Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot
Consecration Sunday is set for two weeks from now, October 29th, at 11:00 – there will be only the one worship service with a guest preacher that day, followed by a celebration luncheon. Alvin Stenzel will have some things to say about this later in this service. And what will we be consecrating? Our gifts of ourselves to God – and one vital expression of that gift is our commitment to God’s work in the world through the sharing of our money and possessions. So, today’s sermon is about stewardship.
And isn’t this story from Acts just the perfect text for stewardship? One with some real teeth to it? None of this “God loves a cheerful giver or ...Where your treasure is, there is your heart” stuff. This is hard-core stewardship: If you don’t give to God what God is due, you’re dead! It’s really a shame that I can’t use it in this way, because that’s not what the text is saying. I will use it to illustrate the vast difference between the attitude of fairness versus a heart for generosity.
Picture if you will this scenario: A long car trip, three young children, and just one tiny Fun-Pack of M&Ms – recipe for disaster. The two others carefully count the M&Ms as they spill out into the third’s grubby little hand. Woe to the parent who gives just one less to one of the children. “That’s Just Not Fair!” Then, a parent’s fantasy response in our heads: “You’re right – it isn’t fair. But then I love her more than I love you...” Something we’ve all wanted to say, but don’t for fear of the irony being lost on the child and sending them into psychoanalysis for the rest of their lives.
Not just children operate on, “That’s not fair!” We adults do it, too. “Why do I have to do all the cooking and cleaning around here?” Why is it that every time we make love – I have to start it?” “How come I do all the work around here and she gets the promotion?” “It’s just not fair that we are bearing the brunt of the debt for Covenant Hall and the Gathering Space.” “That’s just not fair that Kenneth Lay gets to die before he gets what he deserves for destroying thousands of people’s retirement savings.”
We like fairness. There is something very American, very egalitarian about it – something very Newt Gringrich-like about it. What’s fair and what’s not is wired into every corpuscle of our being. We Americans are the one who came up with: “We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men are created equal.” Oh really? Then what’s wrong with a flat tax or universal health care and coverage? Ah, there’s the rub – we construct fairness scales that decidedly tip in our favor, and redefine what’s fair for others. Welcome to the fallen human race. What surprises me is how easily we put this trip of so-called fairness onto God. God is, all things being equal, a being that would have all things equal.
Everyone gets meted out the same goodies and the same difficulties, right? You know that this is just not true. Tell that to the child in Darfur who risks rape as she gets up the courage to look for water for herself and her family. We have all seen or maybe experienced enough irrational suffering to put that idea of fairness to rest. But darn it, if the world is not in fact fair, it should be! Surely that’s the way God intended life to be – and where it’s not, that’s a violation of God’s cosmic order, and it’s up to us to fix it – and so what do we do? We start counting the M&M’s God pours into other people’s hands, and turn a blind eye to those overflowing in our own hands. Again, welcome to the fallen human race.
Which brings us to our chilling story in Acts – the story of Ananias and Sapphira. By all accounts, a nice young couple highly thought of in the community. Touched by Peter’s powerful preaching, they are baptized, plugged in to the life of the church, and probably on the fast track to be deacons or elders.
But they were new to all of this stuff. The whole idea of being truly generous was completely foreign to them. When you gave, you sure as heck held most of it back, never showing all of your cards. That wasn’t cheating, that’s just the way you made a fair deal in those days (and these days). But, they wanted to appear really caring and thoughtful and generous, do what they could for the cause, etc.
They came up with the scheme to sell off some property, but keep back 50% of the proceeds, and make a big deal about putting a big fat check in the offering plate in front of everyone. Well, the plate went around, the doxology was sung, and Peter called Ananias up front and said, “Now, my friend, is that the whole proceeds of the sale?” Ananias looked him right in the eye and said, “Oh yes, indeed.” Peter looks him right back and said, “Liar”, at which point, Luke tells us, the shock was so great, that Ananias fell over dead.
The point is not that if you lie in church, God strikes you dead. If so, we’d all be dead. This story is about the dark shadow of fairness which was creeping into even this, the earliest church. This story is the protest of the earliest Christian community against the idea of fairness – the notion that if everyone just chipped in their fair share as measured against what others gave and got – God would smile and the church would prosper. That was the lie then and is still a lie. Ananias and Sapphira weren’t required to sell their land – no one was holding a gun against their heads. And if they did sell, they certainly didn’t need to give all the proceeds to the church. The biblical standard was the tithe – 10% - that’s all anyone had a right to expect from them. They gave 5 times the minimum, and there isn’t a church treasurer or pastor alive today who wouldn’t give their canine teeth to have people like that in their church.
So what was the problem? Just this - They couldn’t bring themselves to be generous – generous of heart. Their gift was calculated, rather than free and unrestrained. They wrote their check with one eye on their bank account and the other on those around them, rather than basing their gift on relationship with God. Real generosity, an outpouring of a grateful spirit, was beyond their understanding. The bottom line: the commitment to stewardship is not fundamentally a financial matter – it’s a spiritual one. Stewardship is a commitment to grow in grace, compassion, and largeness of soul.
I was reading in the Post this past week that those Americans living at or below the poverty line and who are closer to other’s pain, are the most generous givers to others of all income classes in our society. That is no accident. It is also no accident that the more spiritually awake, alive and aware we are, the more we want to give back to God of ourselves in our time, talents, and money. As we grow in grace we learn that the Good News of God is simply this: All that we have, and all that we do, is a gift from God. Jesus says it’s all a gift: sun and rain, seed time and harvest, good times, bad times. Loving others and being loved – a gift. So, what are we going to do about this fact?
The first thing is that we need to be converted from the attitude of “fairness.” If there’s nothing else we understand about Calvary and the empty tomb three days later, understand this: By those events, everything in our lives and in the life of the world fundamentally changed. The bean-counting and M&M counting and quid pro quo and tit-for-tat standard of fairness was eviscerated. We did not craft, nor do we deserve God’s outrageously lavish grace that changes everything and enables a whole new way of living with ourselves and with one another. This new world has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with generosity and grace.
And so, if we insist on measuring our response to God’s gift by what’s fair (in other words, what’s in it for me) we have completely missed the point of the Christian gospel of grace. When we allow ourselves to believe that life is still governed by standards of fairness, we set ourselves up for the kind of shock that can be fatal. God never asks us to be fair in our living or in our giving, whether that is in matters of the heart, the day-timer, or of the check book. God calls us in the name of Jesus Christ to be flat-out generous, in every way.
Thinking about generosity, I think about Muhammed Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who just won the Nobel Peace Prize: Through his generous vision and largeness of heart he has raised untold thousands upon thousands of people out of poverty and despair. I think about his fabulously huge smile and the glee with which he talks about the opportunity he has had to give and give again.
I think about Albert Schweitzer, who, at the end of his life, said this: “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to give and how to serve.” Freely you have received, freely give. Christian living has nothing to do with fairness, but everything to do with gratitude and grace – a grace to be received, to be lived, and a grace to be shared.
Amen.
