So…what do Stevie Wonder, the downtown farmers’ market, the X-Factor (Australian edition),St. Alban’s pledge drive, and the Ten Commandments have in common? I’m going to let you guess for a while.
Today is the kick-off for our annual pledge drive. We’ve been talking about the role of money in our lives in a number of venues in the past few weeks. We’ve been learning the stories of the Bible by means of the Narrative Lectionary, which we are using in worship, and the project we are calling We Love to Tell the Story. There is a new book today and there will be a new book a week for a while for people to take home. The goal of this project is to help us to become so familiar with the stories of the Bible that they play a part in our lives especially as we make decisions as to what we value in our lives and how we choose to allocate our resources.
Many of you all have already heard me quote Lynne Twist, who is a professional fund raiser. Like many of us, earlier in life she held the conviction that money was a very private topic, one that was actually taboo. She changed her mind when she became involved in an organization called the Hunger Project. That was 1977, and God only knows how many thousands of lives have been saved because this one woman got over her hang-ups about asking people to give some of their money away.
She says her eyes were opened when she realized that what she was really doing was nothing more serious than giving them the opportunity to align their resources with their values. She invites them to get in touch with what really matters to them and then to commit their resources, whether it be one dollar or a billion dollars, to what they most passionately care about. Generosity is not a privilege reserved for the wealthy. In fact it is my experience that less wealthy people tend to be more generous in terms of giving from their real heart of hearts. The richest don’t get the most joy.
Our Old Testament story today is from Deuteronomy, the last book of the Torah or Penteteuch,
the first five books of the Bible, which are the essential readings of the Jewish people. Jesus would have considered this to be Holy Scripture. I’m going to back up a bit to set the scene.
You might say it all goes back to the burning bush that Moses saw when he was out on a mountainside tending sheep. He went to Pharaoh in the name of God and eventually the Jewish people were delivered from slavery escaping on dry land through the middle of the Red Sea. They wandered in the desert eating only manna and God called Moses up to Mount Sinai and gave him the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were engraved.
You have them written in the bulletin so I won’t read them. But I wonder whether we stop to notice that before God gets into telling the people what they will and will not be permitted to do, God commits Godself to these people in no uncertain terms. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. They had had a lord: Pharaoh, the lord of death. In the covenant at Sinai they are given a new lord, the Lord of life. And God gives them the list of ten essentials for living as a community that is life-giving.
The speech of Moses that comprises the book of Deuteronomy is given to the new generation, the children of the people to whom that original law was given. These people were born in the wilderness. Forty years they have been wandering in the wilderness. They never knew oppression under Pharaoh. All they knew was a barren landscape and wondering when it was all going to end. Moses is declaring to them that the law given to their parents at Mount Sinai is given to them as well. God has given them the promised land and as they enter into it Moses reiterates the gift of the Law that is the best gift God has to give his beloved at that time. It is the gift of knowing how to care for one another.
I’ve learned a lot about children in my many years as mother, as teacher, and as priest. I’ve learned that happy children are children whose parents, teachers, and caregivers cherish their delightful free spirits within the safe containers of boundaries and expectations. Children’s creativity and individuality flourish with the secure knowledge that the grownups will be grownups for them and will not let them hurt themselves and others. Children know and understand, and yes, they do challenge the rules of the family, the school, their scout troop, their church, but they also know what the family, the school, the scouts, and the church value, and flourish and grow when they are encouraged to share in the joy of giving what they have to give to uphold what is valued.
I’ve talked with some of you recently as I’ve been working with my own ingrained belief that to talk about money is taboo about the word currency. If I ask you what currency is, you’ll probably say it is money, or it is cash. But if we go to the root of the word it is really about flow like the flow of water in a river or the flow of electricity through a wire. Lynne Twist learned early on in her transformation that money is like water in that as long as it is freely flowing it is clear and sweet and life-giving, but that as soon as it is dammed up or hoarded, it becomes stagnant and
is transformed into something murky and sour which will kill anything that tries to live in it or drink it.
Social groups have other kinds of currencies as well. Social currencies are the intangibles people trade among each other. One writer said that whenever he enters a social group be it a university or a club or a church, he remains quiet and listens to the conversations going on around him and very quickly ascertains what is the currency of the group. In one university department he learned that the currency was griping. In another he found that it was humor. I listen to people talking at my gym and there seem to be two currencies, health and fitness and technology. I belong to one Facebook group whose currency is love of food and cooking and another whose currency is love of reading and books.
In the Ten Commandments given by God first to the children of Israel who were new to the wilderness and now to their children who are about to enter into their new homeland God gives them their currency, their boundaries. They are love of God and caring for each other. God says first, I am your God and I will be your Lord, the Lord of life. And then God says, this is how you will care for each other so that you will grow and be a blessing to all the world.
We talk about stewardship, and I’ll bet most of us don’t know the first thing about the original role of the steward. It is an old word. It comes from the words sty, as in pigsty, and ward, as in guard. The styward, or steward, took care of the master’s pigs. It was an important job, and being stewards of what we care about is a big job for us. It is all about caring. Caring in the sense of knowing what matters to our hearts. At the end of the day for me it is not about anything that can be bought or sold even though how I choose to allocate my treasure reflects very clearly what I care about. For me it all boils down to love of people.
Here’s another vocabulary lesson. The Greek for love is philo, the Greek for people is anthropos. Add them together and you get the word philanthropy, a word that is not reserved for the Warren Buffets and Bill Gateses and Michael Dells of the world. They don’t get to have all the joy. We do, too. Even if all we have to express this love is one dollar.
So what do Stevie Wonder, the farmers’ market, the X Factor, St. Alban’s pledge drive and the Ten Commandments have in common? It’s all about gratitude.
Snapshots: Stevie Wonder raised up in a cherry picker to be allowed to feel the features of the face of Martin Luther King, Jr on the new monument that is being dedicated today.
Snapshot: Tables laden with pink and white radishes, baskets of arugula, piles of pumpkins and cartons of eggs, a beautiful Saturday morning and people who love growing the food and people who love eating the food and people who just enjoy walking their dogs and grabbing a taco.
Snapshot: A young man who, with his brother, was adopted out of an Iraqi orphanage, boys with no hands and misshapen legs, loved by the stranger who became their mother, singing John Lennon’s song Imagine straight from his heart.
Snapshot: Commandments that are not strictures of a punitive God but boundaries given by a God who wants to share with us the joy of living in the love out of which we were created.
And St. Alban’s pledge drive? It occurred to me early this week as I came into the silent church
to do the chores I do on Monday morning that this is nothing less than a temple of gratitude. Every stone, every prayer book, every water faucet and light fixture and air conditioning unit and hand puppet and white board and coffee cup was given to us by someone whose heart was overflowing with gratitude. People who knew that Jesus looked at them with love. Many of them are gone now, but they gave to us without knowing our names or our faces. It’s our turn now. And it’s our opportunity to grow in love as they did. And it’s our privilege to learn how to better align our resources with what our hearts value most and to be the builders of the next story of this temple of gratitude. Amen.
