LIVING GENEROUSLY IN ANANXIOUS WORLD  

Luke 6:32-38, James 1:17-18

 

I'm so glad to be with you on this Consecration Sunday, sharing in your rich worship and your warm hospitality. 

It has been exciting to work with your leadership these past weeks as we moved toward this day. They decided to take a bold step this year:  they decided to change the subject in the traditional fund-raising season. Instead of focusing on planning and selling a budget, they decided together to address different questions, deeper questions--in fact, potentially life-changing questions:

--What does it mean, in the 21st century, to live as children of a generous God?  What would it look like to practice a spirituality of generosity here at the Presbyterian Church of Lawrenceville?
--With those questions in mind, I want to talk about what kind of God we believe in, what kind of world we hope for, and about the freedom we Christians have to live generously in an anxious world.

There is in the world today a widespread belief that the world we live in is basically a world of scarcity. Call it the scarcity paradigm. According to the scarcity paradigm, there is simply no way that the world can produce what it takes for all human beings on earth to live and thrive. If that's true--use whatever leverage you have to grab your share and more and defend it. The scarcity paradigm makes human beings competitors. It pits the haves against the have-nots.

Yet some environmental scientists suggest that the scarcity paradigm is basically a human creation. True, belief in fundamental scarcity of desirable goods drives market economies.  But is a slant toward scarcity really the nature of the ecosystem of earth as a whole?
A cadre of environmental scientists say no.  The globe is capable, these researchers tell us, of producing enough food to sustain earth's population.  The problem is distribution--and obviously the distribution part is up to us, earth's inhabitants. Our problem is not a production problem, it's a distribution problem. We have not yet really wrapped our heads and hearts around the problem before us: to spread the earth's abundance widely enough to meet human need. 
           
Scripture, too, suggests that we should question the scarcity paradigm.

The Scriptures, in both testaments, testify beginning to end to a God who is generous. In the reading from Luke, Jesus tells us that our heavenly parent gives generously, without judgment. We are children, says Jesus, of a generous God--a merciful God who gives without trying to make a profit, and without judgment. The epistle of James points us to God as the source of every good and perfect gift--the generous heart at the core of the cosmos.

British theologian George Newlands, in his book, The Generosity of God and the Christian Future , finds generosity at the very heart of God, and at the heart, too, of what makes us truly human.  If the world we live in is the creation of a God who is fundamentally and by nature generous, then this world is set up at its core to thrive not when its inhabitants hoard, but when they are generous to each other. If we are made in the image of a generous God, then it is not contrary to our nature to be generous, but most natural.
           
In fact, Newlands argues, a viable global human future for ourselves and our children, and for the peoples of the world and their children, depends on our acting as we were made to act---in other words, generously. God's fundamental strategy for bringing about the healing and the well-being of the world is generosity on the part of its inhabitants.  It's up to us, the children of a God who is by nature generous, to be generous in turn. When we prioritize giving instead of getting, we participate in the generosity of God. We let the generosity of God flow through us, the generosity on which the global future depends.
           
If Newlands is right, then to be generous is to live out our true, God-given nature--it is to recognize that the world lives and breathes by the generosity of God, expressed at least in part through human beings who choose to bear the divine image by being generous with each other.

Remember that bumper sticker: "Practice random acts of kindness"?  A lot of us have seen it; maybe some of you owned it, or still do.

I'm guessing that most of us have no trouble with random acts of generosity--the impulsive twenty-dollar bill here, the hastily written check there.  But the Session and Stewardship Committee of this church are asking this community to press beyond random generosity. As children of a generous God, what would it mean for us to practice deliberate acts of generosity?  What would it look like to practice a spirituality of generosity that prompts us deliberately and habitually to live generously in an anxious world?"  In other words, what would it look like to become characteristically generous, as individuals and as a community--making generosity the outward expression of our inward conviction, the seven-day-a-week expression of our worship? 

Filling out an Estimate of Giving card, as you will have the opportunity to do today, is a way--not the only way, but a significant way--of declaring what you believe: what you believe about God, what kind of world you hope for.  An ordinary act, even mundane.  But as we learn every time we gather at the communion table, the mundane, taken into God's hands, becomes holy--bread and wine, figures written on a card: these become the ordinary elements that consecrate us to God, body and soul.
            For some, today's choice will be to designate a concrete percentage of income to be given to the church and its outreach for the first time.  It will be an act of simply moving from random acts of generosity to deliberately generous living. For others, increasing the percentage, maybe moving toward the tithe is the challenge. The tithe, or ten percent, is not a magic number; but the practice of tithing is rooted deep in the Jewish and Christian tradition as an outward expression of an inward, spiritual commitment. Others here may have been tithing for years; maybe your challenge in living a spirituality of generosity is to move beyond that.

One of the leaders of Koinonia Farms, an organization for social justice that was in a sense a forerunner of Habitat for Humanity, reached a point in his life when he was actually giving away far more of his income than he kept to live on. Asked how he had reached a point in his life where he was practicing incredible generosity, his answer was simple:
"You don't think your way into a new way of living; you live your way into a new way of thinking."
           
Once you embrace the practice of generosity as a core practice of your spiritual life, stewardship is no longer dues-paying to a church. First, when a community like Lawrenceville Presbyterian Church begins to live by a spirituality of generosity, gathering a common resource becomes joy, not an onerous obligation.  Second, you realize you are not so much giving to the church as giving through it to make a lot of things possible in a wisely discerning way.
Yes, it will be essential to keep the worshiping, learning, celebrating life of the church going. Unless the Christian story of God's generosity is told and celebrated, the generosity fueled by that story dies out. But there will be enough for that and more. Enough to take new initiatives, open doors, change lives, near at hand or far away. The excitement of deciding how to deploy the fruits of a community's generosity is contagious, exhilarating!

We live in anxious and demanding times. Yet precisely in these anxious and demanding times, the Spirit of God seems to be calling Christian individuals and communities to take bolder steps toward generosity as a way of life.
We have a choice, of course: We can choose to believe and live by the scarcity paradigm. Or we can choose to believe and live by a different story, the story of a generous God.
           
A preacher friend of mine tells about her grandmother, known in her community as "Big Mama." Now "Big Mama" was not a reference to her size, necessarily; "Big Mama" in her African-American community was a term of utmost respect in my friend's community, reserved for the family matriarch, the woman among them they counted on for wisdom in good times and hard times.  Big Mama was a devout Christian, and she would gather the grandchildren around her and tell them the story about when Jesus fed the multitude. She'd get to the part where they started passing out the bread, and passing out the bread. And then she'd say, "No one thought there would be enough," she said.  "They just had to start giving, like Jesus said.  And in the end, there was enough, and to spare. The first step is just to give." And that, Big Mama said, why there was always room at the supper table for one more; that was why no one who was hungry, whoever they were, would ever be turned away; because Jesus just said, "give." And when you give, there will be enough.
           
Big Mama was generous, not because she had a lot, not because she had worked out how much she would need next week, but because for her, the most real world of all was the world of the multitude fed, the world of God's generosity.

I don't know what God is calling you to do.  You must think and pray and discern that yourself. But I know this: as you decide to live boldly and generously, as individuals and as a community, you will be setting extra places at God's banquet table.

You will be setting extra places at the banquet table of worship and spiritual life, so that children and adults can discover a deep, sustaining connection with God. Broken relationships can be mended, men and women can find freedom from addictive life patterns; those who are searching can discover here a chance to start over again.

You will set extra places at the banquet of learning, so that children and adults can see this world, despite all the negative messages they are getting elsewhere, through the lens of God's generous love for all.

You will set extra places at the banquet of justice, giving hope to people who feel voiceless and hopeless, locked into cycles of poverty and underemployment.

"Give, and it will be given to you," said Jesus---and then he backed it up with his own life, went the distance for us, held nothing back to make us whole.

Today is the day, and now is the time, for us to live our way into a new way of thinking. 

Today is the day, and now is the time, to practice a bold and deliberate generosity as a testimony to the God we love and worship.

As we do, the very generosity of God will flow through our hearts and through our hands, to heal and to bless the world.

Thanks be to God.

  George Newlands.  The Generosity of God and the Christian Future. Trowbridge, 1997.

 

Consecration Sunday, October 14 , 2007

The Reverend Dr. Sally A. Brown

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