July 5, 2006 - This generous undertaking
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
2 July 2006
Psalm 9.9-20; 2 Corinthians 8.7-15
This generous undertaking
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Democracy excelled as a form of governance upon the founding of our nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. For once, a regional populace believed in its ability to govern itself without a monarchy, and independent of any outside government. The populace decided that individual human beings have an inalienable claim to certain rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the populace actually became independent, it wrote a constitution, agreeing that individual human beings could make the decisions needed to govern themselves. They decided to do it by voting for their own leaders who would make and enforce the laws they’d live by, and that’s what we’re still doing, today.
Now, maybe some of the people who created a nation from that constitution thought they had the perfect plan for our nation, but I don’t know who they’d have been. To judge from all the arguing at the constitutional conventions, you’d have to conclude that everyone ended up with at least something in the plan for the nation that looked imperfect to them. The Bill of Rights, our Constitution’s first ten improvements, are glaring evidence that the founders considered its inadequacies serious enough to require at least ten amendments in order for it to work. We’ve been improving on it ever since.
One kind of ongoing improvement has had to do with who counts as a real person—who, in other words, counts as enough of a person to be allowed to vote. At first, it only seemed fair that all white males who owned land should be able to vote. But then in 1841, a Rhode Island legislator named Thomas Dorr asked, “Hey, what does owning land have to do with it?” And after a while, almost all the white males over 21 could vote.
Then in 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got some women together in Seneca Falls, NY, and asked, “Hey, what does being male have to do with it?” And after a long, long while—not until the 19th amendment in 1920—almost all white people over 21 could vote.
Then, after Abraham Lincoln declared African-Americans free, someone said, “Hey, what does being white have to do with it?” African-Americans didn’t have to wait as long as women, and in 1868 and 1870, we got the 14th and 15th amendments, which gave them the vote.
Personally, while I agree that the founders of our nation excelled in their founding of it, what I really believe is great about our nation is that, over the generations, we have found ways to excel beyond the imaginations of those founders. Imagine if we’d never grown in these and many other ways. Our nation would stand out as among the most backwards, intolerant countries of the world. All but two Arab democracies would see us and say, “Look at America, they don’t even let women vote.” [Kuwaiti women voted for the first time just last Thursday.]
Imagine that. But women can vote in America, along with African-Americans and people who don’t own any land. All citizens who haven’t committed felonies get to vote. We’ve grown as a nation and changed. Growth and change have given all those people the right to vote, along with many other rights and privileges that belong to all of us, because the growth and change of our government and society have made expanded rights possible.
So does the church, the apostle Paul reminds us, grow and change. “Now as you excel in everything,” he says to the Corinthian church, “so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.” The particular undertaking was apparently to provide material assistance to some churches living in straitened circumstances. It seems to me that everything the church does for the sake of others on behalf of God is a generous undertaking. If it isn’t, I can’t imagine it could be on God’s behalf. Everything we have from God is for our abundant life of grace. That is God’s generosity, and it’s why faith is generous, too.
So Paul exhorts the Corinthians: “I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others.” That’s pressure, comparing the genuineness of your love to other people’s earnestness. Who is Paul to make such judgments?
But Paul thinks it’s his job to pressure people, whether they like it or not. The Corinthians, it would seem, already didn’t like it. In the beginning of this second letter from Paul, he spends a lot of column space ruminating on his strained relationship with the church in Corinth. Oh, he starts off with all the usual “grace and peace to you” niceties that make us warm all over to read, but by the end of the chapter he’s acknowledging his rather overbearing style by trying to convince the Corinthians he’s not really trying to “lord it over” them. He explains in the second chapter that he decided not to pay them an announced visit because of the pain his presence would cause. There’s a lot of tension in the church already, just a generation after the cross, and yet all Paul can think of to do is push through the tension, awkwardness, pain and discouragement of divisions in which he seems so often to be embroiled.
So the body of the faithful has always been startled by sparks of contention, just as America’s political life has always been ignited by sparks of controversy. Maybe that’s why fireworks are the one reliable feature of every July 4th celebration. We just like it better when the fireworks don’t go off in our hands.
That’s the thing, though, about church life, when it’s vital, on the move, growing and changing: Sometimes the fireworks do go off in your hands. For in the church, fireworks come in the form of ideas—ideas about who God is, what justice means, what love requires and how faithful action looks to people. High-powered and quality ideas are the skyrockets that will blaze in the night for all to see, which means that they are by nature dangerous to handle. Paul wrote letters. He lit the fuses of spiritual ideas with his stationery, and those ideas are still singeing the tips of our fingers whenever we hold one of his letters long enough to understand the power of what they really mean.
Some of us sat around last week after church and talked about ideas we have and ideas we hear and ideas we keep a lid on, for fear of their explosive power. We started having these meetings last year. People in these meetings set their ideas out for others to inspect, and sometimes you can see that if one idea was going to be launched into the sky it means that another idea would have to be put back in the box. You can’t send up both ideas in the same hour of worship, or even the same kind of church. So that’s different—people talking about ideas they have about the church, ideas that don’t necessarily go together, and figuring that saying their ideas out loud was better than not saying them, no matter what happens next, even if what happens next goes boom.
It’s easy by now to see what advice Paul would give at this point: “In this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something—now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it.” Finish the conversation. Complete the circle.
Take the conversation from the starting point of mutually exclusive ideas and work those ideas around to their logical conclusion. One idea that came up last week is that the fate of our planet is a responsibility for Christians and should be addressed to them. Another idea is that Christian responsibility should not be addressed to Christians by their leaders, and so the fate of the planet should be left either to the change that Christians will either spontaneously assume responsibility or simply leave others to be responsible. A third idea is for Christian leaders to lead by describing the problem and the options but not lead by teaching what they believe is right. These three options cannot be done at the same time, and our Christian community has begun a conversation about the relative value of each option. The congregation has begun this conversation. All Paul would say is, “Now finish doing it.”
Now, I realize that to many people of the sort that come to our Presbyterian churches this sounds like not very much fun. It sounds downright unpleasant. It sounds like an invitation to endless bickering and the kind of irresoluble set of differences that have beset the denomination for decades—like the issues of sexuality that keep festering, the more we try to settle them. But I promise you, this working on the difficult questions of the life of the church truly is the sort of thing Paul describes as a “generous undertaking.”
Really, we already know this. We’ve long been dealing faithfully with controversial issues, and to great effect. You already know this. Housing for the poor and disadvantaged is a controversial issue in our society. Just look at the raging debate surrounding the restoration of public housing in New Orleans. But the membership of First Presbyterian Church has taken a clear an unequivocal a stand that inadequate housing for low-income households is morally wrong. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of Habitat for Humanity, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves a decent house to live in—and not just Americans, and not just Christians, but every person on this planet.
What else? Health care. The current health care system in America provides for treatment of those wealthy enough to have insurance or to pay their own medical bills. Under the leadership of Margie Porter, First Presbyterian Church has spoken. This situation is morally wrong, and we have taken an unequivocal stand. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of the Good Shepherd Health Clinic for those excluded by the American health care system, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves adequate health care.
These are generous undertakings. They are not only generous because they depend on our wealth and sweat and time; they are generous because they depend on our moral courage, our credibility as Christians, our sincerity and our earnestness. If Paul were testing “the genuineness of [our] love against the earnestness of others,” we’d pass with flying colors.
This generous undertaking that First Presbyterian Church is about—the undertaking to support and sustain the unnoticed and underserved, the vulnerable and sometimes even the vilified—this generous undertaking our church is about both draws more energy and gives more energy to us than just about any other spiritual motivation the Bible talks about, though between the prophets and the teaching of Jesus, it’s hard to think of anything the Bible talks about more.
Now, that’s a congregation that has been willing to grow and change, and its growth and change overflow in generous undertakings that extend works of love and grace to people who long for the abundance God longs to give them. The wide mission of this congregation envisions the generous undertaking of work for the sake of those God sees but the world ignores, those God knows but the world forgets, those God loves but the world despises. You start ministries of that character in a church, and you sometimes get fireworks. If you don’t, you should, because the worldly side of us wants to fight when the godly side of us acts with revolutionary faith.
This is who we are. This who we’re going to be, if we’re going to be faithful to what God made us to be—faithful to the heart that has been beating within this congregation for generations, now. Our community regularly looks toward us for the kind of moral courage that we keep showing, and can keep showing, if only we can continue to believe in being the people God has already made us to be.
Every now and then we sort of go to sleep and get comfortable with all the revolutionary things we’ve been doing, having domesticated them, but every now and then, out of the depths of some soul among us, someone wakes up and says, “Oh, no. No, our soul is not free; there is an injustice in the world. There is a beloved of God somewhere going unloved by us.” And it is our duty to say out loud that something’s wrong and needs to be changed. Then, just as the founders of our nation did, every now and then one of us and then a few of us and then the rest of us will rise up and say, “This is what has to happen now, and this is what we’re going to do about it.
And the revolution continues. Amen.
2 July 2006
Psalm 9.9-20; 2 Corinthians 8.7-15
This generous undertaking
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
Democracy excelled as a form of governance upon the founding of our nation, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. For once, a regional populace believed in its ability to govern itself without a monarchy, and independent of any outside government. The populace decided that individual human beings have an inalienable claim to certain rights, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When the populace actually became independent, it wrote a constitution, agreeing that individual human beings could make the decisions needed to govern themselves. They decided to do it by voting for their own leaders who would make and enforce the laws they’d live by, and that’s what we’re still doing, today.
Now, maybe some of the people who created a nation from that constitution thought they had the perfect plan for our nation, but I don’t know who they’d have been. To judge from all the arguing at the constitutional conventions, you’d have to conclude that everyone ended up with at least something in the plan for the nation that looked imperfect to them. The Bill of Rights, our Constitution’s first ten improvements, are glaring evidence that the founders considered its inadequacies serious enough to require at least ten amendments in order for it to work. We’ve been improving on it ever since.
One kind of ongoing improvement has had to do with who counts as a real person—who, in other words, counts as enough of a person to be allowed to vote. At first, it only seemed fair that all white males who owned land should be able to vote. But then in 1841, a Rhode Island legislator named Thomas Dorr asked, “Hey, what does owning land have to do with it?” And after a while, almost all the white males over 21 could vote.
Then in 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton got some women together in Seneca Falls, NY, and asked, “Hey, what does being male have to do with it?” And after a long, long while—not until the 19th amendment in 1920—almost all white people over 21 could vote.
Then, after Abraham Lincoln declared African-Americans free, someone said, “Hey, what does being white have to do with it?” African-Americans didn’t have to wait as long as women, and in 1868 and 1870, we got the 14th and 15th amendments, which gave them the vote.
Personally, while I agree that the founders of our nation excelled in their founding of it, what I really believe is great about our nation is that, over the generations, we have found ways to excel beyond the imaginations of those founders. Imagine if we’d never grown in these and many other ways. Our nation would stand out as among the most backwards, intolerant countries of the world. All but two Arab democracies would see us and say, “Look at America, they don’t even let women vote.” [Kuwaiti women voted for the first time just last Thursday.]
Imagine that. But women can vote in America, along with African-Americans and people who don’t own any land. All citizens who haven’t committed felonies get to vote. We’ve grown as a nation and changed. Growth and change have given all those people the right to vote, along with many other rights and privileges that belong to all of us, because the growth and change of our government and society have made expanded rights possible.
So does the church, the apostle Paul reminds us, grow and change. “Now as you excel in everything,” he says to the Corinthian church, “so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.” The particular undertaking was apparently to provide material assistance to some churches living in straitened circumstances. It seems to me that everything the church does for the sake of others on behalf of God is a generous undertaking. If it isn’t, I can’t imagine it could be on God’s behalf. Everything we have from God is for our abundant life of grace. That is God’s generosity, and it’s why faith is generous, too.
So Paul exhorts the Corinthians: “I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others.” That’s pressure, comparing the genuineness of your love to other people’s earnestness. Who is Paul to make such judgments?
But Paul thinks it’s his job to pressure people, whether they like it or not. The Corinthians, it would seem, already didn’t like it. In the beginning of this second letter from Paul, he spends a lot of column space ruminating on his strained relationship with the church in Corinth. Oh, he starts off with all the usual “grace and peace to you” niceties that make us warm all over to read, but by the end of the chapter he’s acknowledging his rather overbearing style by trying to convince the Corinthians he’s not really trying to “lord it over” them. He explains in the second chapter that he decided not to pay them an announced visit because of the pain his presence would cause. There’s a lot of tension in the church already, just a generation after the cross, and yet all Paul can think of to do is push through the tension, awkwardness, pain and discouragement of divisions in which he seems so often to be embroiled.
So the body of the faithful has always been startled by sparks of contention, just as America’s political life has always been ignited by sparks of controversy. Maybe that’s why fireworks are the one reliable feature of every July 4th celebration. We just like it better when the fireworks don’t go off in our hands.
That’s the thing, though, about church life, when it’s vital, on the move, growing and changing: Sometimes the fireworks do go off in your hands. For in the church, fireworks come in the form of ideas—ideas about who God is, what justice means, what love requires and how faithful action looks to people. High-powered and quality ideas are the skyrockets that will blaze in the night for all to see, which means that they are by nature dangerous to handle. Paul wrote letters. He lit the fuses of spiritual ideas with his stationery, and those ideas are still singeing the tips of our fingers whenever we hold one of his letters long enough to understand the power of what they really mean.
Some of us sat around last week after church and talked about ideas we have and ideas we hear and ideas we keep a lid on, for fear of their explosive power. We started having these meetings last year. People in these meetings set their ideas out for others to inspect, and sometimes you can see that if one idea was going to be launched into the sky it means that another idea would have to be put back in the box. You can’t send up both ideas in the same hour of worship, or even the same kind of church. So that’s different—people talking about ideas they have about the church, ideas that don’t necessarily go together, and figuring that saying their ideas out loud was better than not saying them, no matter what happens next, even if what happens next goes boom.
It’s easy by now to see what advice Paul would give at this point: “In this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something—now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it.” Finish the conversation. Complete the circle.
Take the conversation from the starting point of mutually exclusive ideas and work those ideas around to their logical conclusion. One idea that came up last week is that the fate of our planet is a responsibility for Christians and should be addressed to them. Another idea is that Christian responsibility should not be addressed to Christians by their leaders, and so the fate of the planet should be left either to the change that Christians will either spontaneously assume responsibility or simply leave others to be responsible. A third idea is for Christian leaders to lead by describing the problem and the options but not lead by teaching what they believe is right. These three options cannot be done at the same time, and our Christian community has begun a conversation about the relative value of each option. The congregation has begun this conversation. All Paul would say is, “Now finish doing it.”
Now, I realize that to many people of the sort that come to our Presbyterian churches this sounds like not very much fun. It sounds downright unpleasant. It sounds like an invitation to endless bickering and the kind of irresoluble set of differences that have beset the denomination for decades—like the issues of sexuality that keep festering, the more we try to settle them. But I promise you, this working on the difficult questions of the life of the church truly is the sort of thing Paul describes as a “generous undertaking.”
Really, we already know this. We’ve long been dealing faithfully with controversial issues, and to great effect. You already know this. Housing for the poor and disadvantaged is a controversial issue in our society. Just look at the raging debate surrounding the restoration of public housing in New Orleans. But the membership of First Presbyterian Church has taken a clear an unequivocal a stand that inadequate housing for low-income households is morally wrong. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of Habitat for Humanity, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves a decent house to live in—and not just Americans, and not just Christians, but every person on this planet.
What else? Health care. The current health care system in America provides for treatment of those wealthy enough to have insurance or to pay their own medical bills. Under the leadership of Margie Porter, First Presbyterian Church has spoken. This situation is morally wrong, and we have taken an unequivocal stand. We devote our money, our time, our resources and our voice to the work of the Good Shepherd Health Clinic for those excluded by the American health care system, and we don’t care who knows it, because our Christian political position is that everybody deserves adequate health care.
These are generous undertakings. They are not only generous because they depend on our wealth and sweat and time; they are generous because they depend on our moral courage, our credibility as Christians, our sincerity and our earnestness. If Paul were testing “the genuineness of [our] love against the earnestness of others,” we’d pass with flying colors.
This generous undertaking that First Presbyterian Church is about—the undertaking to support and sustain the unnoticed and underserved, the vulnerable and sometimes even the vilified—this generous undertaking our church is about both draws more energy and gives more energy to us than just about any other spiritual motivation the Bible talks about, though between the prophets and the teaching of Jesus, it’s hard to think of anything the Bible talks about more.
Now, that’s a congregation that has been willing to grow and change, and its growth and change overflow in generous undertakings that extend works of love and grace to people who long for the abundance God longs to give them. The wide mission of this congregation envisions the generous undertaking of work for the sake of those God sees but the world ignores, those God knows but the world forgets, those God loves but the world despises. You start ministries of that character in a church, and you sometimes get fireworks. If you don’t, you should, because the worldly side of us wants to fight when the godly side of us acts with revolutionary faith.
This is who we are. This who we’re going to be, if we’re going to be faithful to what God made us to be—faithful to the heart that has been beating within this congregation for generations, now. Our community regularly looks toward us for the kind of moral courage that we keep showing, and can keep showing, if only we can continue to believe in being the people God has already made us to be.
Every now and then we sort of go to sleep and get comfortable with all the revolutionary things we’ve been doing, having domesticated them, but every now and then, out of the depths of some soul among us, someone wakes up and says, “Oh, no. No, our soul is not free; there is an injustice in the world. There is a beloved of God somewhere going unloved by us.” And it is our duty to say out loud that something’s wrong and needs to be changed. Then, just as the founders of our nation did, every now and then one of us and then a few of us and then the rest of us will rise up and say, “This is what has to happen now, and this is what we’re going to do about it.
And the revolution continues. Amen.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
2:35 PM
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