George A. Mason Fourth Sunday of Easter/ Mother s Day Wilshire Baptist Church 11 May 2014 Second in the series Three Calls for the Sake of One Vision Dallas, Texas A Call to Generosity for the Sake of Freedom Mal. 3:8-12; Luke 6:37-38 Most of you are honoring your mothers today, or if your mother is no longer among the living, you are remembering her fondly unless your mother was like the woman whose children memorialized her with an epitaph on her headstone in a Sedona, Arizona, cemetery. A friend of mine who walks her dog there can t stop wondering about this family: To Our Mother, Mona Herold Vanni, October 14, 1912 to April 11, 1996. You spent your life expressing animosity for nearly every person you encountered, including your children. Within hours of his death, you even managed to declare your husband of fifty-seven years unsuited to being either a spouse or a father. Hopefully, you are now insulated from all the dissatisfaction you found in human relationships. Buddy, Jackie and Mike. It may seem bad form to start a sermon on Mother s Day with such a downer, but hang in there with me. This tombstone story illustrates a few important things for us to consider today as we move into the second of three sermons that I have called Three Calls for the Sake of One Vision. Last week we considered A Call to Conversion for the Sake of Love. Today we focus on A Call to Generosity for the Sake of Freedom. After about 600 conversations and numerous all-day planning events, the pew has spoken for a change, and the pulpit has listened. We have come up with a seven-year plan called Vision 20/20 that is audacious enough to challenge us and bold enough to compel us. The gist of it is this: we are building a church beyond brick-and-mortar buildings. We are building a church that is a community of faith more than a place to meet. And we want that church to be a force for God and for good in and beyond our membership, our neighborhood, and our Baptist movement, which desperately needs good leadership. But generating any of these outcomes will require generosity at least equal to what we have already proven we are capable of doing when we have been building the church of brick and mortar.
What we celebrate about good mothers and mourn about those who fail us comes down to generosity. The very word is rooted in the word gene, and the nucleic acids contained in our genes are the building blocks of life itself. Birth is generation. But generativity is more than just birth; it is a way of life that makes more of life. A woman who has a child immediately embarks upon a life of self-sacrifice for the sake of the child s well-being. She gives of herself in innumerable ways so that her child will be more. But every good mother learns that giving like this comes back to her in a mysterious way: she makes herself less so that her child becomes more, and she finds that she becomes more herself by her giving. Generosity breeds generosity. Before we go further, we ought to stop for a moment and consider the converse: the lack of generosity breeds contempt. Look at what Mona Vanni s children said about her. Mona s life generated contempt in others, especially those closest to her. She cared more for herself than for giving of herself, and her life generated a cycle of karma that immortalized her in the worst possible way. In the Inferno, Dante and his guide, the poet Virgil, come upon a forest of strange trees in the seventh circle of the second ring of hell. They discover that the trees are really human beings who destroyed their bodies by taking their own lives. People who commit suicide, it was taught by the church in those days, reap in the afterlife what they sowed in this one: turning in on themselves, they are destined to remain imprisoned in tombs of their own making. Now, listen carefully to me here: I do not subscribe to that theology of suicide, no matter how horrible it may be. One suicide is not like every other. And God knows how to judge more mercifully than we. But here s Dante s larger point all through the Inferno: we become what we do. The two questions they want to know of the trees in the wood are 1) how does a suicide victim become a tree and 2) can one ever be freed? You see, freedom is the consequence of generosity, just as imprisonment to self is the consequence of its absence. We become what we do. This is what Jesus tells us in 2
Luke s Gospel. Don t judge or you will be judged. Don t condemn or you will be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. And the kicker give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put in your lap; for the measure you give will be measure you get back. In other words, generosity doesn t end up costing you anything only the lack of it does. And the reason for that is that God is an active agent in the world, too. The way God has set things up is to order everything on the basis of God s own generosity. God birthed the world like a mother births a child. And forever thereafter God gives to the world out of selfsacrificing love like what we saw on the cross of Christ. The resurrection of Jesus tells us that even giving up your life out of love for another doesn t end it. Generosity is not only generative; it is regenerative. God is able to give you much more than you can imagine. But you hold the power to free God to bless you in that way. If you insist on blessing yourself, you restrain God s capacity to bless you, because God is determined to respect your decisions. This gets us to what is happening in Malachi when the prophet chides the people for withholding their tithes and offerings from the temple. He puts it plainly: if you are not giving tithes and offerings, you are robbing God. Pretty harsh, but let s get behind this point to see why. God knows that the world is never going to be a just and equitable place on its own. It will require people of God who have known the blessing of God to cooperate with God in redressing hunger and poverty. The tithe is designed to do that. The tithe is 10 percent of all we make off the top not after taxes and expenses, although priests and preachers debated that for centuries and because we are all under the same obligation. We would all like to keep a little more for ourselves, don t you know?!, even if it means twisting the plain sense of Scripture to our own advantage. But this would hurt even us priests, since we receive a portion of all tithes for ourselves as compensation for not being in the workforce. Once again, lack of generosity is cutting off your nose to spite your face. 3
But it s more than that: to say that failing to give generously as God demands is robbing God raises other questions. Why does God need our money? And what exactly does this rob God of? In creating the world, God limited God s self for the sake of our freedom. God committed to working with us and for us by working through us and not around us. So if God is going to repair the world, it will have to be from the inside, not the outside. This is the big reveal of why God become one of us in Jesus of Nazareth: God demonstrated this commitment to human freedom by acting in and through Christ, and even suffering and dying in generous love. So if the world is going to become more just and if people are to flourish, it will be because we have not robbed God of God s plan. But also, we will not have robbed God of the freedom to act on our behalf at the same time. God wants to bless us to open the windows of heaven and pour down overflowing blessings. If we open our hearts by opening our hands in generous giving, God is freed to outgive us in unimaginable ways. So let s be practical about what this means. How should you give? There are certain things that I can say I believe are ways that all of us should give out of a sense of duty and obedience to God. But generosity is a spirit that we should develop that comes from love more than duty. So I m going to tell how I give, and then you can take it from there. Kim and I give ten percent of our gross income to the church. We think of it as the distribution warehouse from which many good mission objectives are achieved. We don t have time or expertise to vet each of them ourselves, but we trust our church. With our new Unified Budget approach, it works even better because the more we give through that channel, the more we are able to fund. The tithe is a starting point for us. It may be a target for you now, but I would urge you not to see it as a finish line. What I have learned from generous people like my parents, like some of you who have less than I do and some who have more, is that you start out by ordering your life in a certain way. Tithing helps you do that. In fact, a simple guideline is this: give ten percent first, save ten percent next, and live on the rest after that. We get 4
in trouble the moment we live on a hundred percent as if there s no tomorrow. And worse than that, some live on way more than they take in. Debt is not freedom; it s slavery. And God wills you freedom. But I have learned that doing your duty doesn t change you or the world. Generosity that comes from love changes everything. And so I give to capital campaigns and other special offerings inside the church and outside it over and above the tithe. This is where the real progress is made, because this is where you start feeling it. Sometimes I give willingly, and sometimes I give more because of the need of someone I love, even if I would rather not. Next, I give to institutions that have nurtured me, if there is any way I can believe in their current mission. I give to my high school, my college, and the divinity schools of my choice. I also give to any organizations whose boards I serve on. ask you for money all the time, so I think it only fair. But it s more about wanting to be the kind of person who gives generously. I have regretted many things I have spent money on in my life, but I have never regretted anything I gave. The question I would ask you today is this: what kind of person do you want to become? If you want to become a generous person, you have to give generously. I don t think any of us will end up with an epitaph like Mona Vanni, whose children got their revenge in the end. But what would you like your tombstone to say? There s nothing more God-like or godly than Here lies a generous soul. But why wait until you re gone to know that blessing? Start now. Finally, I give to anyone who asks me to, even if only a little. If you ask me to give to your cause for curing whooping cough in squirrels, I might have to think about it, but I will try to say yes. I 5