"The Grace of Giving"
We were meant to fly
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Text: Deuteronomy 26:1-5
A couple of years ago, during one of several visits I have made to a Florida church as a guest speaker, I attended a reception after the Sunday morning services at the minister's home. Many members of the church came, and we had a wonderful lunch together. While we were having lunch, one particular individual took me aside to talk about giving. We discussed how different churches planned their giving in different ways, and different congregations respond through different means, and he told me a true story of something that happened in Miami some years before. He meant it as an example of how not to give, rather than how to give, but the message came across loud and clear.
A group of young hooligans decided to do some damage. On this major street, Flagler Street, there were six beautiful royal palm trees. These hooligans, these vandals came along and they cut some down and tore some up from their roots so they could not be replanted. This was a tragedy!
These trees had been enjoyed by local residents for a long time, but Dade County decided that it was too expensive to replace royal palms, and so they decided not to do so. However, when a particular corporation heard about this tragedy, it decided to donate the money for the trees. The trees that had been cut down were 15 feet high, and right above them, there was a great, big sign that said “Fly Delta.” The replacement trees were 35 feet high, and completely obscured the sign. The donor: Eastern Airlines! (This is a true story.)
People give for all manner of reasons; not all of them are charitable. Not all of them are borne out of a heart full of love. Not out of beneficence, but rather sometimes out of self-interest and expedience. Not all giving is equal, because not all giving comes from the right motivation.
This morning, I want to show you a better way, a way that talks about giving from the heart with proper motivation and good reason. I choose as my source for this the text from the Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 26. This passage is considered to be, according to the biblical theologian Gerhard von Rugge, one of the oldest and earliest expressions of Israel's theology. And, if you look in your Bible, you will notice that some of it is indented like poetry; these verses were recited very early on by the people of Israel as a statement of their faith and their convictions.
Following this early statement of faith, this early declaration of what Israel believed, there is a call, an invitation, even a command, intended to establish a means whereby the people of Israel could respond to their God and give from their hearts. And so, after this classic passage that tells of God's great work of liberation and freedom, there follows an example of how to give and why to give, and the proper motivation behind that giving. What it spells out for us is that true giving is actually a response to the gift of grace.
If you look closely at the passage, you will realize that it says right at the very beginning, “When you go into the land.” In other words, when Israel prepares itself to go into the land, it must follow the example that is being set in this text. Then, it goes on to say that you will establish a rite or a ritual that will involve the priests and Levites as an expression of your faith.
Following that, there is this incredible passage about what I have been talking about the last few weeks, how God set Israel free from its bondage to Pharaoh. Israel had been in Egypt, but had been set free and liberated and redeemed, all the things I talked about last week, and had been enabled to come out of Egypt into the wilderness. Now they are in the wilderness, and the writer of Deuteronomy is giving an account of what happened before, so the people never forget the grace and the liberating power of God.
It is a powerful passage, an incredible statement of faith. It allows the people of Israel to respond to what God has done in setting them free. It is a reminder to them that once they were not a people, but now they are a people. Once they had no land, now they have a land. Once they had slavery, now they have freedom. And then, the giving ritual is described. The ritual says that every household will give one-tenth of what it has earned to God every year. Every year, that one-tenth will be given to the Levites and to the poor. It will be a source of outreach to the community and the most needy. And so, a ritual is established, a rite, a means for the people of Israel to recognize that God is the source of their good fortune and their freedom and their liberation.
In many ways, it is a very private act that is called for. No one should know precisely how much you give and through that, if it is a tenth, what you have earned. What you give, you give privately. What you give is between you and God, who has given you everything in the beginning.
I believe that is the way it should be with our giving. I believe that no one should know what you have, and no one should know what a tenth of your income is, and no one should know what you are to give. That is between you and the Almighty. It is a private act. It is a sacred act. It is part of the relationship you have with the living God.
And yet, it is also a public act. The amount might be private, but the very act of giving is a public thing. When you give, it is not as a statement of how much you have or how much you are giving or the fact that you are giving at all. What you are doing in a public act of giving is recognizing it as a profound statement of your faith. When they were told to go into the house of the Lord and present their gifts to God through the priests and the Levites, it wasn't so they could say, “Look, I am righteous; look what I have done.” That is the debauchery of many of the priests in the New Testament that Jesus couldn't stand: they wanted to show that they were giving, and how much they were giving, and how wonderful they were. No! Originally, in the Book of Deuteronomy, you are to give, not as a statement about your own importance, but as your declaration of the supremacy of God who has given you everything.
When I was in South Africa, people used to come from miles around to our church. Many of them would have to walk miles on foot to get there. In the heat of the South African summer, they would walk miles to come to church. When the cold winds blew off the Cape, they would come to church. They came from great distances, and they made sacrifices to come. One in particular, stands out in my memory. There was a lady who sometimes sang in the choir, as rock-solid as you can imagine, who didn't appear in church on time one Sunday. It turned out she had hurt herself, and she finally arrived in church just as the offertory was being taken up, like we do at the end of the service here. She was in time for only the offertory, the final hymn and the Benediction.
At the end of the service, I went to her and asked, “What happened to you? You weren't here for most of the service? You missed the best part, the sermon!”
And she replied, “The sermon isn't the best part!” That hurt! The sermon isn't the best part? She said, “I was here for the thing that mattered.”
I said, “But you only made it for the offertory and the final hymn.”
And she looked at me with disbelief and a little disdain, like she was looking through me, and she said, “But the offertory is the most important thing. Everything else, you do. Everything else, all the other people do. But offertory, this is what I do for God. I was here for the most important thing.” And I was humbled!
When you give to God, it is an act of faith. It is a statement of what you believe. It is a recognition of God's grace. It is a response to God's love. It is a powerful thing! But it is not only a response to God's grace. Giving is also an act of grace itself. In many ways, our faith is a very practical thing. If we do not respond to the needs of others around us, then our faith is but vanity, it is but words. Many people I know give for very different reasons, and sometimes it is harder or easier to get particular gifts out of people.
I like this analogy: There are people who are like flints, and there are people who are like sponges, and there are people who are like honeycombs. The flints are people you have to bang and chip away at to get something out of them. You get a lot of sparks, and at the end, you have only knocked a little bit off the end. The flints are the hard work. Then, there are the sponges. They are those who need to be squeezed. The more you squeeze them, the more you eventually get out of them. They, too, are hard work.
And then there are the honeycombs. They just drip forth whatever beautiful thing comes from them that is sweet. What do you think God wants us to be but honeycombs?
It is not just for God's sake that he wants us to become honeycombs, but also for our own sakes. Eric Fromme, the great psychoanalyst, once said that giving is the highest expression of potency, the greatest sign of our strength. It is when we are at our most vibrant. It is when we are most alive. It is when we are at our most God-like. Giving is the highest expression of potency. That is why, when we give, there is a tangible benefit for us, ourselves, the givers. One of the reasons that I believe the Church is so important, not only to proclaim the word of God but also to make a statement of culture as a whole, is that the Church's ritual makes giving ordinary as opposed to extraordinary.
Oh, there will always be those who are extraordinary givers. If something touches their heart, they will give to it. If it is something that makes an impact upon their lives, they will give to it. If it is something that they feel their muscles chipped or squeezed into, they will give to it, but that is extraordinary giving. Ordinary giving is the recognition that we are the recipients of everything the hand of a gracious God, and that what we give ordinarily, as a matter of course, is a sign of our recognition of God's goodness. Don't misunderstand: I am in no way pouring scorn on the extraordinary gift. It is needed, it is applauded and it is wonderful. However, the ordinariness of giving in the ritual sense is a statement that our whole life is a gift, and that we are profoundly grateful to God.
The great poet John Greenleaf Whittier contrasted what he called “Christmas givers” with “real givers.” This is what he said, and it is profound:
Somehow, not only for Christmas,
but all the long year through,
the joy that you give to others
is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more that you spend in blessing
the poor and the lonely and the sad,
the more of your heart's possessing
returns to make you glad.
In other words, the real beneficiary of your giving is in fact yourself, the giver. In many ways this ritual that Israel established was designed so the people would remember what God had given them in setting them free from their bondage to tyranny, and so that in this Promised Land, they would be thankful and joyful, and would make it abundantly known.
There is one last element in these instructions for giving: There are real priorities set. Whenever something is repeated in Hebrew, you know that it is important, and on several different occasions, running like a trajectory throughout the Bible, you hear this same reference over and over again: The people of Israel are to give to the Levites, the sojourners, the widows and the orphans. Again, it says, you give to the Levites, you give to the stranger, you give to the widow and you give to the orphan.
Why these four? Why in this order? Well, you give to the Levite first. The Levites were the priestly class who, particularly when the Israelites were in the wilderness, were responsible for the religious affairs of the people. Because you give first to the Levite, it doesn't mean that first you give to the priests. You don't give to the minister first, and then everybody else (although, feel free to do that, if you want). No! The Levite, the priest represents God to the people. When you give to the priest and the Levite, you are giving to the communal worship of God. That is what this is about. In other words, Israel needs to recognize that first, you give to God. That is why the first of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall love the Lord your God.” That is the first thing, not the residual thing; the first thing. The Levites were to receive these gifts as the representatives of God's Word.
Now look at the second group - the sojourners, the strangers, the homeless. It is no coincidence that this incredible passage in the middle of Deuteronomy starts by saying, “My family, my parents were wandering Aramaens.” The CEV says they were homeless Aramaens. First, then, you give to the stranger; first you give to the sojourner; first you give to the homeless. Israel must never forget that it was once a people who had no land. Israel must never forget that it once was people who wandered in the wilderness. Even in the Promised Land, they must never forget the stranger in their midst, the sojourner in their midst, the homeless in their midst, the person who has nothing. So it was that Israel would establish that pattern of giving to God by giving to the stranger, and then to the widow and the orphan.
The orphan, because if you were a child and you were living in the wilderness, and your father died, your household income would dry up. You would have nothing. If your husband had died, chances are that you would not have access to the means of production, and so you were dependent on his family. The two most vulnerable groups in the whole of society were the widows and the orphans. You see that message being repeated over and over again. When Israel was in exile, they cared for the widows and the orphans. When they rebuilt the temple, they cared for the widows and the orphans.
Jesus repeatedly reminds his listeners of the widows and orphans. Paul talks about the widows and the orphans. It is engraved in the heart that you should care for the most vulnerable. Your tithe, then, is a gift with an order to it: to God, to the stranger, to the weakest. It was the way in which the people of Israel could express from their hearts what they truly believed. It was no good for them to say, “Oh, look at the mighty God who has set us free from Egypt,” if once they got into the Promised Land they didn't take care of the weakest among them. So it is with us. It is no good saying, “Oh, God has been good to me,” if we don't recognize that with that goodness comes the call to care for others. When you do, you soar.
In his wonderful book, Running with Horses, Eugene Petersen gives the illustration of three baby swallows, sitting on the limb of a tree. None of them had ever flown before, and so their parents wanted to teach them how. They put them on a branch above a lake and took the first one, who was at the end of the branch, and give her a little shove. As she started to fall down to the water, she suddenly realized she had wings, and she started to put them out and fly. She fluttered her wings, and she gently alighted on the water and was happy and contented. The second one, her brother, went to the end of the branch and got a similar push, this time from the mother. A little push, a little nip from the beak, and sure enough, the brother went falling down. But he was even a little braver, he has seen his sister fly, so he put out his wings, and he started to soar a little bit, and he swooped down and just caressed the water, and he realized he can fly and he is happy that he has arrived.
However, the third one was one tight son of a monkey. He didn't want to move at all. He said, “Look, I've got talons that God gave me to hang onto this branch, and I have a beak and I can hold on, so I am going to do so.” Stubborn little sucker! He just sat there. The father tried to push him and the mother tried to push him, but he just wouldn't let go: “I don't need to. I've got talons, I've got a beak, and I am going to hang on for dear life.”
Finally, the father had had enough, and he gave him a hard shove. The only problem was that he plonked upside down on the underside of the branch, looking upwards and holding his talons up, grabbing hold with his beak, and saying, “I've got talons, and I've got a beak, and I can still hold on. I don't need to fly. I am going to hold on.”
So, finally, the mother and the father had really had enough, and they stomped on his talons, and down he went backwards, heading towards the water. Then, all of a sudden, he stretched out his wings and flipped over, and realized what his brother and his sister had realized - that he could actually fly! But he didn't just land on the water. Oh, no! He went for a flight, and he soared, and he swooped, and he said, “Look at me! I am marvellous! I can fly! I was meant to have wings! Not only talons, not only a beak, I have wings! I was meant to fly!”
Many of us are like that bird. We have our talons, and we hang onto things. We have our beaks, and we grab on. And when tough times come, we just flip upside down, but we still hold on tightly. If we never let go, we never know we have wings, and we never learn to fly, and we never soar. When you give, you fly! When you give, you soar! Israel was told to give its firstfruits to God: one-tenth of the firstfruits, and then they were led into a land that was full of milk and honey, blessings that were theirs when they learned to fly. For giving is the gift of grace. Thanks be to God! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.