Becoming Generous

I’m Sharon Cumberland, a member of our vestry, and it’s in that capacity that I’m standing here before you to say something about stewardship as we enter into our annual pledge campaign.

In connection with this, I’ve been thinking about my parents a lot lately, because in four days my father will turn 88 years old. My mother passed away in 1997, but my Dad still has all his marbles so I feel fortunate that, at my relatively late stage in life, I still have a parent who can talk to me, remind me of family stories, and offer me advice. I’m glad he’s still around to see how things have turned out, to be proud of me when I accomplish something, or commiserate with me when things go badly, and to rejoice with me when things go well.

I’ve also been thinking about my parents lately because over the past few weeks, as I’ve been pondering on what to say this morning, my mind keeps returning to an interesting question concerning them, which is this—How did my Mom and Dad ever manage to teach me—and my brother and sister—to become generous?

Stewardship can be seen as many things—taking care of the environment, taking responsibility for God’s gifts or for God’s needy people—but at the heart of what we call stewardship is a willingness to part with some—not all!— of your hard-earned money and time. And, since we live in a time-space continuum, stewardship is also to promise, or pledge, that you will part with some of your resources in the future. In many faith traditions this is called “doing your part”—figuring out your role in carrying out the community’s responsibilities to those who depend upon them. You don’t have to do more than your part—and certainly we need to learn how not to do less than our part. But if we do our part and do it faithfully, we’ve been good stewards, as Job was in our lesson today—Job, who suffered every loss, but whose faithfulness was rewarded.

So, somehow my parents succeeded in teaching this quality to their children. All three of us—my brother, sister, and I—work in serving professions. All of us are open-handed with money and time and hospitality. My parents had three very selfish little babies and yet they managed to raise three very generous adults. How did they pull that off? How did they teach me to do my part?

We’re not born generous, that’s for sure—anyone with kids knows that. We come into this world entirely selfish and self-absorbed. Babies, for instance, assume everything in the world belongs to them. It’s a survival technique, of course—little children are entirely dependent upon the mercy of their parents for their survival. And it’s a paradox that the weakest and most needy people in our world are those who act as though they were the most powerful—a child in a high chair wielding a spoon is the absolute monarch of the universe. And so how do parents get these little kings and queens to grow up to become generous adults? How do the most selfish creatures in the world learn to do their share of the heavy lifting in a community?

As I think back on how my parents did it, I know they had a lot of help from the church. I was raised Episcopalian—born late in the month of November and baptized in early February—so I only had ten weeks as a pagan before being brought into the fold. My parents took us to church just about every Sunday of my life, so I grew up hearing all the Bible stories, and the psalms, and the hymns and the services from the Book of Common Prayer that Episcopalians love so well—absorbing little by little, the familiar stories of those who learned to do their part for the Lord and for their communities.

We were a government family and we moved around a lot, so I saw many churches both high and low as I was growing up, but in all of them the plate was passed and we watched our parents put in their envelopes each Sunday. My folks didn’t have much money when I was a kid—my mother cried over the checkbook every month and we never ate out or bought anything that wasn’t on a shopping list—but we kids did get an allowance for doing our chores, and we were expected to put some of it in our own child-sized church envelopes just like our parents’ big ones. Every week we had to decide how much to put in it—a dime or a nickel, or even a penny—our parents didn’t dictate that to us. We actually had to decide, as very small children, how much of our allowance was “our part.” It took us a while to learn this. I think my brother put a slug in once, and I remember a time when the plate was going by when my sister took some money out—but mostly we got into the habit of giving some of our money to the church each Sunday, just as our parents did. We even looked forward to remembering our envelope and licking the flap, and carrying it in our pockets to put in the plate like a grown up. It was a ritual that we enjoyed along with all the other rituals of going to church.

Another discipline of giving we learned from going to church was using a mite box during Lent. We were given small cardboard forms that folded into a little bank, and we were to try to fill it with coins during the forty days of Lent. So in addition to giving something up for Lent—like TV, or desert, or whining about bedtime—we tried to earn extra money by doing odd jobs for relatives to put in the mite box. I wasn’t sure what a mite was—I thought it was some kind of bug because our cat had ear mites. But my sister explained it to me: she said it meant she might put money in the box or she might not. But at the end of Lent all the children would bring their boxes up to the altar where there was a hollow cross just wide enough for the boxes and we would fill the cross with our donations. Once again, the feeling of satisfaction I had from giving my donations to the church was substantial.

As I remember these experiences I’m certain that my satisfaction had nothing to do with the destination of my pennies and nickels. There were pictures in Sunday School of needy children in foreign girls lands, but none of that had any reality for me. The hymn that conveyed the most to me about the purpose of giving, in those days, was the hymn # 262 in the old hymnal:

Remember all the people/ who live in far off lands
In strange and lonely cities/ or roam the desert sands,
Or farm the mountain pastures/ or till the endless plains,
Where children wade through rice fields/ and watch the camel trains.

I loved thinking about those children in rice fields and camel trains—and the second verse started off even better:

Some work in sultry forests/ where apes swing to and fro…

As a little girl I think I was more interested in supporting the apes than the children in the rice fields! I knew I was supposed to eat all my dinner so that those children wouldn’t starve—which didn’t make much sense to me—it was one of those mysteries of childhood. But what I felt, even as a child, giving my money to the church was a sense of doing something right, that by doing my part—my little part that was in proportion to my resources—I became part of the larger community that our family belonged to.

And herein lies the mystery of giving—that by giving freely—by performing the virtues of generosity, by figuring out what you part of the community responsibility is—you receive something substantial and essential—a sense of satisfaction in the appropriateness of your behavior, a sense of belonging in the larger community that supports you, and a sense of engagement with the Holy Spirit in some ineffable way that theologians describe in abstract terms and metaphors, but that manifests itself in feeling good, feeling in tune with the universe—because it’s a form of love.

Love always feels good, no matter what direction it’s traveling in. Giving for your own sake—so that you feel good, so that your character is developed, so that you feel embraced by your community—is a worthy motivation for giving.  You know that anything you give to the church or to the institutions you support—or even to the homeless guy at the Metropolitan Market—is good for them and will cause other good things to happen, but giving for your own good, for your own spiritual health, by doing your part, brings your life into balance, reminds you of your blessings, and is a very worthy cause.

I like the psalm for today, Psalm 126, where the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion. Sometimes we’re the needy people in the Psalm, sowing with tears and going out weeping—we need for the Lord to restore our fortunes and for our community to come to our aid. Sometimes we’re the happy people in the psalm, reaping with songs of joy, and shouldering our sheaves.

By practicing the virtue and the discipline of generosity—by doing our part, and giving open-handedly, even on a small scale, appropriate to our small resources—we create an open space that can be filled with all those feelings of love and satisfaction that the psalmist tells us about: that the people’s mouths are filled with laughter, and their tongues with shouts of joy.

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