Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 16, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-6; Romans 5:6-11; Matthew 9:35-36, 10:1-10, 16-20 You received without payment; give without payment.
-Matthew 10:8
If your assignment was to distill the Christian life down to one crisp sentence of seven words or less, you could not do any better than that: You received without payment; give without payment. God's people live by an ethic of abundance. We are wonderfully gifted; therefore, giving is what we are about.
This is not a commandment or a demand. It's not an exhortation. It's not a guilt trip. It's a simple statement of fact about the way things are. It's the organizing principle of life. We receive, continually and generously and with absolutely no regard to our efforts or our merits; so we cannot help channeling that abundance into our surroundings. If you fill a cup to the brim and keep on pouring, it will run over. We are givers because we are receivers. The receiving always comes first, and the giving always follows it. Cause and effect.
And if our actual experience and behavior don't reflect this truth - if we are stingy or meager or anxious in our dealings with comrades and strangers and the world in general - that unfortunate condition cannot be surmounted by appealing to our conscience and telling us how we ought to behave. It won't work. Instead, the deficiency has to be addressed at its source, which is that God's overwhelming generosity to us is just not real to us. We do not sense that our cup is running over at all. We do not realize that we are receivers, and for that reason we are simply unable to be givers.
From what I've said so far you might suppose that the most giving people are those who have received the most of the standard blessings: wealth, health, long life, liberty, enlightenment, companionship; and those who are least generous are those who are poor, sick, oppressed, uneducated or isolated. But we have all observed from personal experience that this is not the case at all, and sometimes it's even the other way around, that the least lucky are the most generous.
I'm not talking about deductible charitable giving here, or how much we pledge to our church or whatever, although I suppose those could be symptomatic of something larger. But I mean to be talking about that something larger: One's whole posture towards God, neighbor, and the world.
And I think it is just astonishing, the degree to which we run-of-the-mill citizens of the richest and most fortunate nation in the history of the universe are living out our lives from an assumption of scarcity, not of abundance, and we actually suppose that we are just barely getting by.
I don't mean to dismiss the actual hardships and outrages suffered by single moms, or Medicare recipients trying to pay for prescriptions, or Enron employees, or Catholic altar boys, or schizophrenics, or any other class of people who are clearly not getting what they need. But I am saying that it's remarkable how few of us really feel like we have enough, or that there is really enough to go around. I know so many people who have more than enough money, talent, charm, vigor, security, dignity, choices, and loyal companions but simply do not believe it, and sometimes it even occurs to me that I am one of these people.
This is a spiritual and a theological issue before it ever becomes a socioeconomic or political or psychological one. It has everything to do with how we perceive God and God's relationship to us. And the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures have a great deal of insight to offer us about it. This week those Scriptures speak to us in the voices of Sarah and Abraham, Paul and Jesus.
Abraham is 99 years old when those three strangers arrive uninvited at his tent with the dust of the road on them. It is twenty-four years since God told him, at the age of 75, to leave his homeland and his kinfolk and go off into the unknown so that God could do great things for him and with him and his descendants, according to God's promise. All that time he has wandered around the Middle East, rootless and landless and childless. God has reminded him of the promise any number of times, but there has not been a sign of its being fulfilled. Yet the moment three strangers appear, Abraham drops everything to welcome them, and devotes all the resources at his command to hospitality.
It turns out, as the story develops, that this is a visitation from God, but Abraham doesn't wait for that to emerge. His hospitality doesn't depend on the status of the guest. Evidently Abraham thinks of himself as one whose cup runneth over, even though he has little to base it on but naked promises - campaign promises, we might be inclined to call them. - for which he has traded a quarter of his life and received nothing to show for it but some peculiar and tantalizing conversations with the ruler of the universe.
What's going on here? What's wrong with this guy? His behavior is not rational.
Well, I don't think it's Abraham's rational brain that is in control here. I think his response to the situation comes from the belly, like laughter or the hiccups. At some visceral level he is living from abundance, regardless of his circumstances.
And that brings us to Sarah, who laughed. (Actually, there's a place where Abraham laughed pretty much the same way she does here, only more so: He fell on the floor laughing. But this time it's Sarah.) Notice that she laughs twice: The first time it's because she doesn't believe what she's hearing and she thinks the whole idea of getting pregnant at the age of 90 is ridiculous, which it is. The second time it's because she has just had a baby! The first time it's the ironic, even bitter laughter of a woman who is pitied and laughed at, it's laughing to keep from crying. The second time, she knows that everyone who hears will laugh with her.
Two kinds of laughing, very different from each other, but both of them burst forth without calculation, without intention, without guile. Each of them comes from the belly and reveals the actual inner state of the one who laughs.
God chose Abraham and Sarah out of all the people on earth and made a unique covenant with them, a unique promise to them, to bless them and the whole Creation through them. It wasn't because of any special virtue or merit of theirs; it was done, in Paul's words, while they were yet weak, while they were yet sinners, just because God loved them and took delight in them. God didn't care whether it made sense. And in the series of stories about them in Genesis, we see that incredible truth gradually sinking into them and penetrating their whole way of being alive.
Jesus sees the crowds, harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, and he has compassion for them, says this Gospel. But something has been lost in translation. The Greek word here is one that refers, believe it or not, to the bowels. The entrails. The guts. The viscera. I think you can even sense this from the way the verb is pronounced, which is: splangchnitzomai ! It even sounds visceral.
One of the learned commentators wrote, trying to put it as delicately as possible, "The word is rather strong, and means a deep commotion of the entrails, a visceral commotion." And the same writer went on to say that this is what God's love is, "the inexplicable love which God has for us in all our violence and our scandals."
I know this is all Greek to you (except to Homer, of course), but we are Abraham's and Sarah's children, who made them laugh, and we are the sheep without a shepherd over whom Jesus had a visceral commotion. We are each and all of us the objects of God's totally unexpected love and delight. And we are the ones whom Jesus sends out to be his ministers, loving as we are loved, taking delight as God delights in us, giving freely as we have freely received. It makes no sense, yet it's the central reality of our existence: You received without payment; give without payment.
Amen