Giving away a fortune
From Wellington Cathedral of St Paul
Giving away a fortune…
8 August 2010 The Revd Jenny Wilkens
- Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
- Psalm 50:1-8, 22-23
- Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
- Luke 12:32-40
http://wellingtoncathedral.org.nz/index.php/Sermons
I wonder what you make of the Giving Pledge campaign in the United States, where, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, forty billionaires have pledged to give at least half of their fortunes to charity. Quite apart from trying to get your head around the enormity of the figures mentioned in the billions and NZ trillions, this laudable endeavour raises some questions in my mind. And I raise these, fully aware that while I am not a billionaire, I am not immune from being asked questions about my own stewardship!
Why does philanthropy in our day have to be a sort of competition, a sort of 'outing' of others, or shaming them into giving as much or more than I do? What has happened to the tradition of quiet philanthropy, where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and there was no need to put it all in the papers?
I was interested in a comment that 'rich Americans give away so much of their money in part because it enables them to keep control of it.' Control of how that money is used, though it was encouraging to see most of the billionaires wanting their money to go towards health and education causes, many to help address inequalities at a global level.
Another related and salutary comment was that the top 1% of Americans now receive 15% of the country's total income, with the greatest disparity of wealth there since the 1920s.
Mind you, we need to recall a recent study quoted by Bishop Richard Randerson, telling us that in New Zealand the top 20% of earners earn seven times the income of the bottom 20%. This study found that in countries with high income inequality, there is an ethos of individualistic competition (“keeping up with the Jones”, or “keeping ahead of the Jones”) that has a divisive and stress-producing quality.
It doesn't sound too many worlds away from 8th century BCE Judah, brought up short by the challenge of the prophet Isaiah. Both Isaiah's words and our Psalm today railed against worship that was superficial and ultimately manipulative. The people were trying to keep God happy, while living lives that did not match up to the aspirations of their worship or to the ethical demands of the covenant relationship.
This sort of reading puts us on high alert and rightly so. The remedy is clear and Isaiah couches it in verbs that lay it out urgently before us, so we can't miss the point: cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. It's as easy and difficult as that.
Our Gospel reading too is full of verbs that encourage us to see that our faith, our relationship with God, our trust in God which means we trust God with our future - all this must affect the way we live life now in the present.
Jesus is perhaps a little gentler on us to start with than Isaiah was: 'Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.' (Lk 12:32). Jesus knew the challenges for his first disciples of giving up all to follow him, the challenge of where the next meal would come from, of subsistence living, the challenge still for so many in our world today.
Jesus knows for us, the anxieties about the future, the insecurity of economic times such as ours, which can make us cling on even more firmly to tangible ways of establishing our own security and future. It can make us turn inwards, self-protective, reluctant to look beyond ourselves at the bigger needs in our society and world.
But just here is where Jesus calls us to live in the light of our future, which is ultimately safe in God. Live with the values and priorities of God's Kingdom ever before you. And here come the verbs again: sell your possessions, give alms, be dressed for action, have your lamps lit, be ready, be alert…
But don't give up before you start! So often in our work life these days it feels like we set higher and higher goals for ourselves and then spend our time worrying about whether we will reach them. If we don't reach them, we have failed. If we do reach them, we then go and set still higher goals!
I was encouraged by some words of Barbara Brown Taylor, who visited us here recently. She said this: "I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness."
In an amazing grace-filled way, God takes our discipleship, our service, our life in community - what we are giving out - and makes it part of our growth into wholeness, into fullness of life.
I love the illustration we are given today from the book of Hebrews, of the heroes of the faith. We are taken right back to the story of Abraham and Sarah, patriarch and matriarch of the faith. We learn how God worked in their lives, despite their flaws and failings, their scepticism and subterfuges, which are all laid out before us in the book of Genesis, warts and all. We see them walking on into God's promises, living into God's future even when they did not know the way and could not see the way ahead, And faith was the air they breathed as they made that journey, trusting in God as the architect and builder of their lives and their future.
Sometimes when we're a bit wobbly on our faith journey, it can help to know that we're in it together. A phrase I heard recently about the church has stuck in my mind: the church is an imperfect anticipation of God’s future. And that's ok! It's all right to be imperfect, and not quite there yet, but we are not to lose sight of the vision of being an anticipation of God's future, a visual aid of God's kingdom to the people among whom we live.
And that may change them, and it will certainly change us! I've always found the words of Vincent Donovan challenging. He was a Catholic missionary among the Masai people of East Africa in the 1960s, and his advice after some years spent living alongside them was this:
‘…do not try to call [people] back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are, beautiful as that place may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have been before.’
That is a daunting, yet exciting calling and challenge. But we can be sure that God is there in the interface, as we seek God's kingdom together, as we seek to live into God's future together.
One thing we can be sure about if we seek God's kingdom among us, is that it has some upside down values. Where else would we hear this: 'Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them." (Lk 12:37)
There's a hymn (393) in our hymn book written by a New Zealander called the Servant Song, whose words express well the upside down values of a kingdom where master and servant serve one another:
Brother, sister, let me serve you Let me be as Christ to you, Pray that I may have the grace To let you be my servant too.
As we prepare to go out into the world and put all those good 'verbs' into practice, first of all, come with hands outstretched to communion to receive, come to meet the Christ who serves you, who delights to give you the kingdom. Amen.
