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Sunday, October 11, 2009

Ordering Our Lives After the Example of Christ
3rd in the Series Rethinking Church and Rethinking Life

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

II Corinthians 9:16-11 New Revised Standard Version

⁶ The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. ⁷ Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. ⁸ And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work. ⁹ As it is written, "He scatters abroad, he gives to the poor; his righteousness endures forever." ¹⁰ He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. ¹¹ You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us;

I was having our monthly business lunch meeting with my clergy colleagues, Cindy Bates and Jerry Herships, last Thursday at the Pei Wei restaurant close by.  They had both ordered healthy salads and I ordered Thai blazing noodles with broccoli which is so wonderfully spicy it usually makes my nose run, but I love it.  The server brought their salads a couple of minutes before my food was ready, but I suggested that one of them go ahead and offer our prayer while their food was there.

As we started to pray, Jerry noted the empty space on the table in front of me where there was no food and joked that I apparently did not have much to be thankful for!  I told them after the blessing that of course I do have a great deal to be thankful for, that the next day after the lunch, was the one year anniversary of the very successful removal of a small tumor from between the two frontal lobes of my brain. That operation was completely successful and I can still walk and chew gum at the same time. I am back up to my physical routine of 75 pushups and 22 dips on the parallel bars, actually that is more than I could do before the surgery, and, thanks be to God and a good surgeon and the prayers and support of this faith family in those weeks after the surgery a year ago, I feel very blessed and very thankful.

I have a lot to be thankful for.  I feel that gratitude daily.

I want us to begin with that theme of gratitude and thankfulness this morning. St. Paul does not mention the theme of thanksgiving in the verses we heard but he does talk about thankfulness right in the next verse. He is writing to the small congregation he has established in the Greek city of Corinth. Corinth was the largest city in Greece at this time and was a hotbed of seductive temptations. In that first century equivalent of Las Vegas, Paul spent a year and a half and established one of the first congregations in all of Europe. It is to the Corinthians that Paul wrote some of his most famous words about the nature of love. It is to this congregation that he used the picture of the church as a body with different limbs and parts that function differently but are all one body.

One of our St. Andrew families was on a cruise to Greece and Turkey in the past couple of months and wrote me a note about how their experience, being in and walking in the ruins of Corinth, meant so much to them last month when they thought about all the spiritual roots that we have in that ancient Greek city.

When Paul wrote the verses we hear, he had left the city and was writing from afar about some questions and issues he heard about. In this chapter he is asking for them to help the poorer Christians in Jerusalem, and he is reminding them about the same things we talk about here at St. Andrew every October. He is telling them how blessed they are, he is asking for their help, and he is promising them that their generosity will mean some very good results in their own lives. We remind ourselves of those truths each October at St. Andrew Church.

And we often begin with talking about giving to God and others out of our gratitude and feelings of being very thankful; the topic that our clergy lunch conversation began with three days ago.

It may be that the very best motivation for giving to others and giving back to God is because we are grateful for how blessed we feel, for the gift of being alive, being able to love and be loved, for the chance to make a difference with the blessings we have been given.

We are doing even more than that this October. We are asking each other to rethink church and to rethink life together, to center down deeper on what is most important, to reprioritize in a time when our resources may have radically changed, and in the words of the sermon topic, to order our lives more fully after the example of Christ. That reordering of life, readjusting our priorities, is what we promise to do every time new persons join this community of faith. We say that we want to continue to order our lives after the example of Christ so that these new people, as well as those of us who have been here for a while, will continue in the journey of abundant life, continue in following the way of Christ.

Paul mentions three truths about giving to God and others in this short passage to the Corinthians Christians and to the St. Andrew Christians. Let me start with his last verse that is a promise to us. You will be enriched in every way by your generosity.

Does that make sense to you? You will be enriched in every way when you practice generosity. Have you felt that when you moved beyond just your needs and your family’s needs to share with God and others?

Let’s say it differently. When we share what we have been blessed with, something good happens to us, something good happens in us.

You will be enriched in every way for your generosity. Let’s test that. What is the most satisfaction you have ever received for an act of sharing, an act of generosity? When have you felt the best about giving to others and to God?

When I hear about the difference we make together in the lives of youth and children through this church, I feel really good about supporting those changed lives. I hear that through our children’s ministry, we are making a difference right now, through our Rainbows program for grieving children. We are helping 49 children, most from our community, 12 of them grieving the death of a parent recently. In our youth ministry, when we send middle school children or high school students on mission trips to learn, experientially, the truth in Jesus’ words that we are not put here to be served but we are put here to serve, Judy and I feel very blessed to be able to support that spiritual growth and character formation.

When have you felt the most satisfaction in giving to others and to God? There are all sorts of good and diverse answers. Some people giving to our building fund right now might say that they feel great satisfaction that their gift means that we will have to pay less interest on our bank loan and thus live up to the admonition in Leviticus 37, that paying a lot of interest is an abomination to God. There’s that infamous Leviticus 37 again!

You will be enriched by your generosity. Paul understands something else here: that you and I need to give in order to be whole and healthy. We talk with each other about the spiritual discipline of generosity because it is really about character formation. Persons all wrapped up in themselves make a very small package. The opposite of generosity is not very pretty, says Bishop Schnase whose book many of you have studied these past few months. The opposite of being a generous person is being a greedy person, a self absorbed person, an ingrown person, and a person who is self centered and ingrown, just like an ingrown toenail, is not a very pretty sight.

Schnase says something else about generosity as part of our character. “Generosity is our way of being in the world as Christians.”

By giving to God and others, your life will be enriched. That is the promise of St. Paul.

The second thing Paul says, in this letter to the folks in Corinth, is also important. By the way, most of these Corinthian church members were not very affluent. A few of them were but most were not. They were like many of us, struggling to get by, but they had already become known for their generosity and sacrifice.  

The second thing Paul says is that whenever we give, we are to do so, not out of duty or compulsion, but gladly and joyfully because God loves persons who give cheerfully, gladly, joyfully. The Greek word for cheerful is interesting because it has the same root word as our word for “hilarious”! God loves people who give with hilarity, with joy and happiness!

We are fortunate to be able to share and to give. It is a privilege. Herb Miller, author of twenty or twenty five books on church life, tells of an opera singer who had given an afternoon matinee performance in a stunning version of the opera. He was being greeted afterward backstage by some friends. One of the friends expressed his admiration of the performer’s part and then said to him in awe; “Now you have to do this same performance again tonight!!”

The singer said something interesting. “No, I don’t have to do this again tonight.” The friend was confused. “Isn’t there an evening performance of this opera and aren’t you singing this same role again tonight?”

“Yes, the singer said, “there is an evening performance and I am scheduled to sing again, but I don’t have to sing again tonight. I get to sing again tonight!”

He felt privileged about his role. He sang joyfully and gladly and it was not a duty, a burden, or a “have-to.”

God loves us when we give to others with that same attitude, not as something we have to do out of duty or burden, but something we are privileged to do, something we get to do, so we do it gladly and cheerfully.

There is one more insight from dear old Paul that we can use in these verses, actually, just a bit later in the same passage. Our giving to God is an act of worship. Giving a portion of ourselves and our lives is a way of worshiping God, a way of doing what Jesus asks us to do in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a way of putting God first, putting God at the center and letting all the other things fall into place around God. With God at the center, Jesus says, all the other things we worry about will fall into place.

We have made some new plans with our commitment cards that we will turn in on October 25. We have many people who have signed up for the monthly automatic bank withdrawal. It is a good practice because it is easy to make that a regular discipline and it helps with stability of income for your church, especially over the summer. The new plans include providing people who signed up for automatic payments a small card to put in the offering plate each month that simply states that the person’s offering is being done in a monthly bank withdrawal. The purpose of that card is to let that family participate in an act of worship because that is what the offering is each Sunday—it is part of our worship.

When we pass the plate each week, it is NOT a collection plate for a token dollar bill or so. It is NOT a collection plate—it is an offering plate, a chance for us, after we have heard the scripture read and heard the scripture explained, to make an offering to God of our lives and our hearts. When we have promised and given to God our lives and our hearts, our money and our time will follow. It is inevitable. And, if we are still at a very nominal place in our generosity, that may not say as much about what we have as it says about where we are in the commitment of our lives and hearts to Christ and to the work of Christ. All of us begin at the place of being a recipient and consumer and that is OK for a while, but we miss something important if that is as far as we get. That is what St. Paul is telling us.

In two weeks we will have another chance to take the next step in becoming grateful and joyful givers to God and others. We will bring our commitment cards to the altar table as we sing one of our favorite hymns, Here I Am Lord. It is another chance to practice the spiritual discipline of generosity, the discipline that St. Paul promises will really do as much or more for us as it does to the ones we support.

And, every Sunday, as we are about to see, we have the opportunity to offer our hearts and lives as servants of Christ in what we remember is not a collection, but is instead an offering.

Paul’s words are a good ending. The one who sows sparingly will reap sparingly and the one who sows bountifully will reap bountifully. It is just a description of how life works.