Christopher H. Edmonston

Generous on Every Occasion

2 Corinthians 9: 6 – 15

Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church

11 16 2009

 

            Many years from now, nostalgia will grip me in its embrace and I will miss these years at our home.  Years with young children and their requisite red plastic, easily skinned knees, earnest questions, quick tempers, and animated movies.  Colleen and I have only seen one non-animated film in a movie theater since our oldest child was born.  The rest have all been animated.

            One of the favorites at our house for the last year has been 2007’s, The Bee Movie.  We saw it in the theater, and now we watch it on DVD.  The movie tells the rather ridiculous story of Barry Bee, a misfit in his hive.  Barry discovers that humans are taking the bee’s honey without paying for it and so Barry does what any member of our litigious society would do – Barry sues.  The result:  the Bees get all the honey back.  Every bit.  So much that they no longer work, no longer harvest nectar, no longer pollinate, no longer, well, act like Bees.  Soon the world is in peril and what seems a cute children’s movie soon becomes a morality tale about how we all, no matter how small, no matter how Beeish and overlooked we might feel, must do our part if any of us are to prosper.

            I hope you can see why we like it so much.  There is one more thing I’d like to tell you.  The movie begins with a black screen.  A narrator’s voice begins to speak:  “According to all know laws of aviation, a bee should not be able to fly.  Its body is too fat and its wings are too small to keep it aloft.  The bee of course does not care what humans think and flies anyway.”

            Consider the bee:  it does the impossible.  The extravagant God, who loves color, who loves to make us reconsider our easy considerations, the extravagant God who Dr. Gaylord Lehman so wonderfully told us about last Sunday, allows for the impossible all the time.  Rivers flow north.  Spiders so small they are barely seen, spin webs so intricate they boggle the mind.  Bees fly.  Indeed, a claim suggesting the impossible stands near the center of our faith – Mary protests her pregnancy at the commencement of the gospel of Luke.  Respectfully, I imagine, she asks the angel Gabriel, “how can this be?”  And Gabriel tells her that God sometimes is not interested in what we think is possible – “with God,” the angel tells her, “all things are possible.”  All things.  And Mary does her part.  To everyone around her it must have seemed so small.  It must have seemed so ordinary – just another pregnant girl.  But she does it in spite of the stares and whispers, seeming not to care because she has chosen to believe that all things are possible with God – even what she suspected could not be.

            That is a little bit what the writer of 2nd Corinthians must have endured.  As many of you know, the writer of 2nd Corinthians was the Apostle Paul and in addition to being the most prolific writer of the New Testament, Paul was a man who lived two lives.  In the second he was this writer of letters and proclaimer of the faith.  In the first he was a prosecuter, executioner, and persecutor hunting down the members of the early church, trying to stamp out the very faith that Jesus came to teach.  I am sure that if you would have told him in his first life as a prosecutor that he would one day be a proclaimer of the very thing he despised – it would be like Dean Smith suddenly cheering for Duke – I am sure that if you would have told him that this would be his life he would have said, “impossible.”          But our faith consistently gives examples of the impossible turned over.  Daniel in the Lion’s den.  Joseph left for dead become the ruler of Egypt.  Jeremiah is pariah and he becomes prophet.  It is not that God does not care what we think.  It is that God is neither constrained nor limited by our expectations.

            Take this church, for example.  It was founded by three women, all named Anna, in a time when women were not ordained as either elders or ministers.  The Christian church begins with a crucified messiah, a murdered prophet whose 11 closest followers take refuge from Rome, the most powerful government in the world, fleeing for their lives.  They did not raise an army.  They did not sell stock.  And yet we are here.  The church should not be here, and yet it is.  For 2000 years in various and sundry forms, in more languages, denominations, and worship styles than we can count, the church continues on.  In spite of the many challenges, of the studies that say old institutions with long memories and historic buildings cannot make it, we continue on.  God is, after all, not limited by our expectations.

            And today we find ourselves making every effort to raise a budget and fund a ministry in spite of the economic times and market decline which shape headlines.  Just this week we have gotten at our house communications from Davidson College and the University of Virginia explaining the size of economic losses and their cost cutting measures.  As a business model goes the church is an amazing endeavor.  We don’t raise our prices to cover expenses.  Our business model is all overhead – meaning that our expenses are fixed and we don’t charge for services.  The family which pledges 500 a month receives the same newsletter, the same pastor, the same pew cushion, the same hospital visit as does the family which gives 10 dollars a month.  There is no first class membership package nor is there an upgrade option for lunch today.  This may be a first-class sermon today, it also might be a third-class one, but we are all hearing it together. 

            Practically you need to know that for 2009 we have cut cost about 13%.  Practically you need to know that the largest chunks of our budget go to pay salaries, benefits, for our facilities, and for mission giving here in Tarboro, in our region, and through our denomination, around the world.  We have prepared an annual report for your review which describes all this work for 2008 and 2009.  Lastly I will share that we are monitoring our expenses as closely as we ever have during these last 7 weeks of the year.  To be sure when the year began we did not expect market collapse and the challenges we, and all religious, educational, and charitable institutions face.  And so we have responded soberly and responsibly by watching cost and cutting budgets.  And we plan, with  God’s help, to continue our cycle of growth in fellowship, membership, and faith, by doing more with less.  After all, God is not limited by our struggles, challenges, or fears about the tough times ahead.

            It is the brilliant preacher, Peter Gomes, who recently wrote, “Any fool can live in paradise.  It ought to be easy.  No right or wrong.  No sin.  No error.  No mixed motives.  No compromising opportunities.  But [our world] is not paradise, and we fools are called to make our way here, making the most out of less than the best” (Sermons, 183).  Or to paint this in a slightly different light:  today I want to suggest that we dare not allow our ministry, our church, our expectations to be preordained by the expectations of hardship all around us.  To be sure the year to come may be of the most difficult sort.  Logic might say to expect this.  But in the realm of faith, as we have proved, logic breaks down because God often enacts the unexpected.  For my part, I do not think that God is done is with our church and I am praying for, and working for greater days ahead.  Or to point back to the beginning of my sermon today, a bee isn’t supposed to be able to fly, but it does.  A church isn’t supposed to grow during a recession, but with God’s help, ours will.

            It was for the growth of the church that Paul, the writer of 2 Corinthians wrote this major portion of his letter to the church at Corinth.  As we talked about two weeks ago, Paul here is writing to the group of believers in Corinth to get them to give money to support the church in Jerusalem.  No to spend on themselves or to pay for their building – but to give it away to a group of people they would never meet and never see.  Paul is asking them, in other words, to give without tax deduction, without regard for return on the investment.  To give for generosities’ sake alone.  To give because it is what they were called to do by a God who expects us to be willing to give, even if they were not expecting to be asked.  To do their part, no matter how small, to support their brothers and sisters in the creation of the church itself.

            The most common questions I get as your pastor most years are questions about tithing.  Is a tithe a net gift or a gross gift?  Before or after taxes?  It is money or is it time and if it is one or the other how do I determine how much my time is worth?  All are good and fair questions.

            But I don’t think that is what 2nd Corinthians is driving at, nor is it the focus which I would call us to consider today.  Paul first calls us to share our love back in chapter 5.  Then he calls us to share our testimony and our excellence – to be generous with what we are and what we say and not just what we have.  And by the time we arrive at the 11th verse we get to the admonition to be “generous on every occasion.”  How often are we called to be generous?  According to the word of God here in 2 Corinthians, we are called to be generous all the time.  I have often heard that we should give until it hurts.  I never have liked that, because when I give I never reach that point.  In fact the opposite occurs – it feels good.  Haywood Holderness, son of this church, and long time pastor in our Presbytery says that when we give we feel aligned with God because our hearts are doing what they were created to do in the first place.  So giving until it hurts is a bad moniker – 2 Corinthians is setting up an alternative economy, one in which it hurts us not to give.

            Now, none of this is to suggest that a tithe is a bad thing or a false marker.  It is, however, not the only marker.  In a paragraph that I think about as often as any other, New Testament scholar, Ernest Best writes (page 89), “[According to Paul], giving should be in accordance with what we have.  For someone in the upper income brackets to say, ‘I have tithed, I have given enough,’ would be untrue.  Legalism and generosity make ill companions.  When indeed Paul presented a ‘reasonable’ case for giving, he ended by shattering it with penetrating theological insight.  No rule can govern God’s love for us, and none should govern the love we offer in return.”

            No rule should govern God’s love for us, and none should govern the love we offer in return.  In book after book, in article after article, there are people documented who live like this who give their time, their prayers, their money, their love, their support, their work, their advice, their compassion, their trust, their expertise, and on and on and on and on.  These people, unlike those who share little and shut out the world, are the ones among us who are most fulfilled and spiritually whole.  Created in the image of God we humans are not born alone, we do not learn to walk, talk, read, write, or anything else of merit alone.  We have learned all these things because others were generous in their time, their lessons, their support while we learned and grew.  It strikes me that this system of growth only works where there is sharing and sharing is contingent upon generosity.  The church, it follows, only works when each of us does our part through sharing, and being generous, to the best of our ability.  It is a little like bees making honey, and pollinating fields, and building a hive.  If anyone of them quits, there is trouble.  If anyone of us in the church stops sharing then the whole will be hurting – for our very character is defined by our capacity for generous behavior.

            As your pastor I am caught between many poles each year during stewardship time – one pole is the need to raise a budget and keep the lights on.  To have a church we have real financial needs.  But, and this is the second pole I am caught between, I am much less interested in funding a budget than I am committed that our church would be a generous place because it is made up of generous disciples.  We will make a budget and we can have a church.  The tougher question might be – can we be generous on every occasion?  The headlines may suggest that it is going to become harder to be generous.  I think God is calling us to consider that we don’t have a choice of whether or not to be generous – for if we are to be in relationship with God, then we will have to be a generous people.

            In a strange way, this brings us back to bees, which is where we began.  I am quite sure that there are several of you who remember that this past spring we had a rather large colony of bees make residence in our bell tower.  Did you know that you cannot simply kill bees?  It is illegal.  They are simply too important.  Everything they do is a gift to all of us – from the honey they make to their support and supply in agriculture and the growing season.  All they do is give.  It is their nature.  And they are true to their nature.  But they also do the unexpected, and though they look alike, no two are the same and they many different jobs as they are possessive of many different skills.  They each do their part and share what they can and something wonderful is made.

            Bees give and give and give – even in the face of the size of the job and physical limitations that suggest they cannot fly.  They support a common cause and enact their mission as one.  May we be generous on every occasion in order that something similar would be said of each of us.