The Fourth Church Pulpit

THE GIVING
December 20, 1992

John M. Buchanan

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, 1. 60611-2094
Phone: 312.787.4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

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Scripture: Luke 2:1-7

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...It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”
Acts 20:35 (NRSV)

If you are very fortunate, someone once taught you how to give gifts. Somewhere in your formation
experience, if you are fortunate, the wonderful anticipation of Christmas morning began to be related to the gifts
you were giving, as well as the gifts you would receive.

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Trecall it well. I was about eleven or twelve, I suppose. My mother had taken my brother and me to do our
Christmas shopping, a fairly simple procedure: big blue work handkerchiefs and razor blades for Dad;
inexpensive scarf or department store perfume for Mother. What Dad really wanted, we all knew, was a new
pocket watch. He was a railroader and a good pocket watch was standard equipment. I have recalled the
memories of that pocket watch, which he used to pull from his vest and wind loudly in church when he
decided the preacher had gone on long enough, to my mother’s horror and my delight.

Mother had found just the right pocket watch. It was ina jewelry store I had never seen before, on the
second floor of a bank building. It was elegant. There was a dark blue carpet all the way up the stairs, and the
owner, Mr. Sellers, a very distinguished man about town, waited on us. He knew my mother’s name. I was
impressed. The object of our search was in the glass case. We looked at it. Mr. Sellers took it out of the case,
placed it on a piece of felt on the counter, showed it to us and carefully opened the back to display the works
which he assured us were fine. It was expensive. Mother told him we’d have to think about it some more. So
down the stairs we went, out onto the sidewalk and she called a conference. “How much money do you have?”
she asked me. I had a paper route so I had a few dollars. “And how much do you have?” she asked my little
brother who produced a handful of loose change from his pocket. “Good,” she said, as she took two or three
dollars from me and some loose change from my brother. “Now we have enough.” Up the blue carpeted stairs
we went. Mr. Sellers was waiting for us and we bought the watch!

What excitement! What anticipation! What an adventure! We could hardly wait for Christmas morning to
give it to him. I have since concluded that Mother orchestrated the whole thing. Of course she didn’t need our
two dollars and change. What a gift she gave us by teaching us a precious lesson about the joy of giving: that

the gifts of Christmas are to be given as well as received. | +o Ag g kr e (95

Langdon Gilkey, recently retired Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago, author of some very
strenuous academic theology focusing on the interface of science and religion, once wrote:

“To be enabled to love is the greatest gift that can be given to us, even more
enhancing of the strengths of the self, of the depth of its joys, and thus of its reality
and its uniqueness than being loved.” [Message & Existence, p. 203]

And among the more stunning things St. Paul once said is this:

“In all this I have given you an example that by such work we must support the
weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, for he himself said, ‘It is more
blessed to give than to receive.” [Acts 20:35]

The sentence, by the way, is in the 20th chapter of Acts of the Apostles. Paul has been in Rome and is now
retracing his steps, traveling east, visiting with the churches he has established, headed for Jerusalem where he
half expects to be arrested. That is exactly what happened. So at each port, each stop, Paul is saying farewell to
old and dear friends. At the port city of Miletus, the leaders from the church in Ephesus come to see him. Paul
had lived for three years in Ephesus. These are good friends and it is at the end of his time with them that he
said: “Remember the words of the Lord Jesus . . . ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

Blessed means simply happy. It was not originally a pious word. Its literal translation is “carefree
wholeness,” or “happiness.” It is happier to give than to receive. It was Paul’s summation of the gospel of Gad.
itis an older man, realizing he will not have an opportunity to be with these dear friends again, wanting to
make every word count and these are the words he chose. “It is happier to give than to receive.” —

At the heart of the experience of Jesus Christ, which had turned Paul’s life around totally, was a notion
which was very different and very new. It was that the essence of God is love, and therefore the purpose of
human life is to know love: to receive love and to give love.

That was a remarkable proposal. The Greeks were convinced that God, or the gods, did not have feelings as
such: the gods transcended the sort of experience human beings call emotion — happiness, anger, love. The
Greeks would have thought it blasphemous to associate God with a human emotion like love. In fact, God,
according to Greek thought, was characterized by apatheia, apathy, unaffected, untouched, “the unmoved
mover,” the god of philosophy is called. Aristotle, at one point, claimed ta have proved that God could not be
affected, touched, moved by anything. And so the highest goal of religion was for human beings to attain that
same apatheia, an intentional detachment from human needs, desires and feelings: a stoic acceptance of
whatever happens — no love, no passion, no happiness, no sadness, no laughter, no tears,

The Hebrew-Christian idea that God cares deeply, loves passionately, was a radical notion. Canadian
theologian Douglas John Hall writes: “There is no interest in our tradition in God alone. God is God only in
relationship. God is means-God loves.” [Imagining God. p. 119] And the corollary: the practical notion that
human beings are created to reflect that same passionate caring was in the first century a revolutionary concept.

It still is. The Judeo-Christian proposal is that haman beings, created in God’s image are created to be lovers
and givers: that it is fundamental to our humanity to love and to give.

We know that human beings need love: need to receive love in order to survive, But that is only half of the.
truth. The other half is that human beings need to give love in order to be human.

The late Reuel Howe put it simply and helpfully:

“We do not find love by looking for it: we find it by giving it. And when we find
love by loving we find God. If someone came to me and asked, ‘How can I find
God?’ I would answer, ‘Go find someone to love and you will find God.’”

[Herein Is Love, p. 45]

What we know now is that the capacity to love is awakened in us as we are loved, by our parents, by
significant others, by our spouses, lovers and friends. How does it happen? Howard Rice wrote:

“The heart of the experience of God is an inner knowing that ‘Iam loved,’ loved
beyond comprehension, beyond my earning or deserving.”

Unfortunately that is not the way it is for many, For many people, particularly church people it seems, the
experience of God is one of judgment, discipline and guilt. The heart of the Christian experience of God is the
inner knowledge that “I am loved” ., . the first half of the equation.

But that experience of love is not an end in itself. It is not given simply for our entertainment or to make us
feel good about ourselves - that the part of the equation celebrated by New Age Spirituality: religion as therapy,
salvation as finally feeling okay about oneself, the phenomenon with which Al Franken and his Stuart Smalley
character have such fun on “Saturday Night Live.” Stuart Smalley says:

—,

“I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And, doggone it, people like me.”

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Howard Rice says we're loved by God because God wants to make lovers out of us. We are given the gift of
God’s love in Jesus Christ to enable us to become gift givers.

He writes:
“God is love, and the experience of God’s love is one that meets our basic need for
love so that we can be free to love others. Spiritual experience is the liberation of
the self from preoccupation with itself. It is the beginning of freedom to care about
others with abandon.” [Reformed Spirituality, p. 164-166}

How relevant is it? I would submit that what we are thinking about is nothing less than the salvation of
your soul and the hope of the world.

Mental health is not salvation, but Karl Menninger did quip once that money giving is a good criterion of a
P

erson’s mental health. How happy are you? A good way to answer that is to calculate not how much you
have, but how much giving you are doing compared to how much receiving. Albert Schweitzer once advised a
group of students who were talking with him about the incredible personal sacrifices he had made to bea
mission doctor. Schweitzer told them it was a matter of happiness actually and that they would never be happy
until they found a cause important enough to claim everything they had and everything they were.

How relevant is it? Is it merely seasonal sentiment in a world that knows better? Well, I can’t think of
anything this world needs more than a religion that teaches love and compassion and giving instead of
righteousness and doctrinal orthodoxy and the intellectual arrogance that accrues to those who are convinced
that they alone have absolute truth. The Sunday Times last week published a devastating editorial, “Savage
Intolerance.” It was precipitated by the destruction of a Moslem Mosque in northern India by Hindu
fundamentalists and the riots which ensued and which claimed more than a thousand lives... “in India,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bhotan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka,” and the article missed Northern Ireland, Palestine,
Sudan ... “the driving force of armies, guerrilla warfare, human rights abuses and government policy is,
increasingly, the power of fundamentalist beliefs. Everywhere reasoned discourse is being replaced by the
intolerance of fundamentalism.” [The New York Times, 12/13/92]

It also happens when Christians are so certain they are in possession of the truth of God that they exclude
one another on the basis of sexual! orientation, for instance, or over the difficult issue of abortion. Our faith is
about love — received and given. Wouldn't the world be more hopeful if religion was devoted io giving gifts of
love and not trying to prove its own version of truth?

How relevant is it? In the aftermath of the riots in south central Los Angeles earlier this year, the National
Council of Churches sent a team to try to act as mediators between the Crips and the Bloods, two of the major
Los Angeles gangs. The team was helpful in arranging a truce which is stil! holding. They also asked gang
leaders what churches could do. Executive Secretary of the Council, The Reverend Joan Campbell, tells, and ifI
didn’t know her personally and heard her tell this I wouldn’t believe it, how they assumed the answer would
be: organize community centers or arrange low cost loans, start banks and savings and loans — and how

stunned the church executives were when the gang leaders said, “Kelp us get along... Teach us how to love
each other.”

How relevant? With a little more than a week left in 1992, this sad year has shown us all too clearly what a
hard place this city is for many of its citizens; a sad and violent city held hostage by a profitable drug trade and
gangs armed with semi- automatic weapons — held hostage by the powerful gun lohby. As this year comes to
an end, we know that there is a spiritual crisis, a crisis of spiritual courage as well as an educational crisis and a
housing crisis and a health care crisis. We know, I think, that people who live here and care about the city are
going to have to get back to some basics, like telling the truth about what we have become and basics like love
for neighbors, like generosity, like compassion, like the willingness to bear one another's burdens.

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I think of all the volunteers who discovered that this year, who have experienced the deep satisfaction of
divine love as they tutored a child, or painted a wall, or visited the sick, or cradled a baby. I think of the church
and the gift-giving that goes on here all year long; of the sick, homeless man who today has aroom and a job
and is in occupational therapy because of this church. I think of last Thursday night when parents of tutoring —-
children, the students and tutors gathered to sing carols and give gifts and to hear the story of God’s gift of love.

And I think of the Somalian orphans lined up, smiling children of six and seven, singing to the American
Marine convoy, “Dearest, you are so welcome.” And I think of God and the gift of God's son born ina rough
stable, in the middle of a political census, in a little town not far from the busy capitol city.

jesus said, “Tt is more blessed to give than to receive.”

Frederick Buechner’s novel, Brendan, is about a 6th century Irish saint, Brendan the Navigator, who spent
much of his life sailing the seas in a curragh made of wicker and leather in search of a terrestrial paradise — the
jand of the blessed which he believed lay out somewhere beyond the horizon.

“He never found it, needless to say, and at the end of his long Hfe, somewhere
around the year 580, wondered if he had not spent all those years on a wild goose

chase when he might better have stayed home and looked for Christ-like ways to
serve.”

Brendan meets up with the revered Welsh monk Gildas and they talk. At the end of the interview Gildas
stands up to dismiss Brendan. A friend of Brendan’s is the narrator.

“For the first time we saw that he wanted one leg. It was gone from the knee down.
He was hopping sideways to reach for his stick in the corner when he lost his

balance. He would have fallen in a heap if Brendan hadn't leapt forward and caught
him. —™,,

“Tm as crippled as the dark world,’ Gildas said.
“Tf it comes to that, which one of us isn't, my dear?’ Brendan said.

“The truth of what Brendan had said stopped all our mouths. We were cripples, all
of us. For a moment or two, there was no sound but the bees.

“To lend each other a hand when we're falling,’ Brendan said, ‘perhaps that’s the
only work that matters in the end.” [see Telling Secrets, p. 87/88]

“It is more blessed to give than to receive,” Jesus said.

If you are among the fortunate, someone taught you that along the way. But we are all blessed by that gift of
love which was given in the birth of Jesus the Christ, the love that awakens our ability to love: that gift which is
given in all the gestures and tokens of affection, given and received in this holy season.

God’s love is given in the birth of Jesus the Christ.

God’s love awakens our ability to love; to give the gifts of love to one another, to our city, to our neighbors,
to our Lord....

Thanks be ta Gad.

We thank yau, God of love, for the priceless gift of your son. Now inspire us to
give the gift of our love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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