THE GIFT
by Forrest Church
December 7, 2003
Something happened to me last week that has never happened in my life before. I delivered an entire sermon–an absolutely brilliant sermon–at three o’clock in the morning. Dressed in full regalia, preaching extemporaneously and with felt passion to a full, remarkably attentive congregation, I preached the sermon of my life. I stepped down from the pulpit, flush with almost otherworldly eloquence. And then I woke up.
I relate this story with hesitation. Some of you are already thinking that you could sleep through the night quite easily, if your dreams too consisted of sermons. And when you hear what the sermon was about, others of you will think I made the story up, which I didn’t. Last Sunday night, I actually dreamt an entire sermon–a brilliant, heart-stopping sermon–on the subject of annual giving! That’s right: "The Sermon on the Amount."
The psychological detectives among you will already have sleuthed out that I found myself dreaming about this particular subject because our annual giving deadline is at hand, with nearly half a million dollars to go. That being the case, my dream might easily have been a nightmare–the ultimate anxiety dream–which it wasn’t. It was exhilarating. I’m still exhilarated by it, and, strangely, because of it and all that has followed, also less anxious than I was before about meeting our goal.
Dreams, by the way, are not mere pastiches of past experience. The sermon of my dreams I preached on a subject I have never broached before in a sermon, namely the moral and spiritual foundations for a charitable heart.
This said, I am going to disappoint (or perhaps relieve) those of you who are now waiting to judge for yourselves exactly how brilliant the sermon of my dreams actually was. Here I call on your empathetic imagination. Ask yourself this question. What would you do if the Holy Spirit was knocking on your brain at three in the morning? You would try to remember her message, right? Every word of it. Believe me, I tried. I lay there in bed and reprised the sermon I had just heard myself preach almost word for word. I fixed it in memory. Then I drifted back to sleep.
My first piece of useful advice this morning is: if the Holy Spirit visits you in a dream, get up and actually write down what she had to say, so you will have it for future reference. Unfortunately, you’re going to have to take my word for how brilliant this morning’s sermon might have been. It would have helped somewhat, if I had been able to repeat all I could remember first thing the next morning, but Carolyn has a steadfast rule: no dreams until after breakfast. So all I was left with was is this–"Go thou, dear coward, and preach about money." Which I shall now do.
First a question. I pose it primarily to myself. Why is it that, over twenty-five years, I have never addressed an entire sermon to the subject of stewardship? Part of the answer is that I don’t like asking for money. I prefer the money we need to support our congregation and its ministries to appear almost unbidden, which–because of your generosity and my reluctance to ask–it often does. When we need to make a final push, we do it during announcements. That way money doesn’t intrude into worship, lest worship somehow be sullied.
In fact, what this means is that giving is not elevated to the sacrament it should be. There is no spiritual context for our financial support. This may not diminish the size of our gifts to All Souls, but it certainly detracts from their meaning.
You may have noticed a book review in Wednesday’s Times on Julie Salamon’s new book, Rambam’s Ladder. When I saw this review, I remembered seeing a book by this strange name on Carolyn’s bedside table and meaning to ask her what it was about. I dug it out from the pile, Rambam’s Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity and Why It is Necessary to Give. Salamon begins with a quotation from the late Stephen Jay Gould, written shortly after 9/11. "The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people," he writes. "Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus," Gould concludes, "in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority."
Inspired by this insight, Salamon goes back one thousand years to the writings of the great Jewish philosopher, Maimonides (known fondly as Rambam) who, when pondering questions of righteousness and obligation, fashioned a timeless Ladder of Charity. It runs from begrudging gifts at the bottom rung to anonymous, transformational gifts at the top, but all forms of charity, in Maimonides’ view, reform and redeem the human spirit. Salamon does a good job pointing out how most of us are tangled in our own contradictions–each of us in his or her own way both generous and selfish, yet almost all of us basically good. Her most important observation is that, even as empathy can’t be mandated, charity should not be seen as a sacrifice but as an investment in the growth of our souls. "In the end," she writes, "we are not measured by what we have, but by what we give to one another."
So I read this little book, nodding my head in agreement, but a nagging question remained. Why is this true? What is it about giving that establishes and extends the measure of life’s meaning? Searching for an answer, I opened, somewhat more successfully, another book, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, which has been waiting, unread, on my shelves for so long that I had almost forgotten I had it. "Unlike the sale of a commodity," he writes, "the giving of a gift tends to establish a relationship between the parties involved." Aha. Think about that. Gifts are a currency of relationship; they attach us to one another.
A poet himself, Hyde speaks poetically about "the gift economy." He draws from ethnographic studies that describe "the gift economy" as "a total social phenomenon" marked by three associated obligations: "the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate." Gifts don’t distinguish us from one another; they connect us to one another.
By this definition, All Souls operates under a gift economy–one based on generosity of spirit and mutual reciprocity binding us together in a network of service and meaning. "We are measured not by what we have but by what we give to one another," as Salamon puts it. But the way this measurement works is almost metaphysical. By our gifts we attach and elevate ourselves at one and the same time.
Not only do gifts connect us. Gifts also move. Once we set them free, they move, creating the possibility for new connections. Gifts begin with the individual but, by connecting us, they quickly become transpersonal and therefore, in a sense, redemptive. In Hyde’s words, "A circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, the race, or the gods. Furthermore, although these wider spirits are a part of us, they are not ‘ours;’ they are endowments bestowed upon us. To feed them by giving away the increase they have brought us is to accept that our participation in them brings with it an obligation to preserve their vitality." I love that. "To feed them by giving away the increase they have brought us." Gifts are food, holy food. Hyde sums up his thesis by reminding us that: "Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers."
Jesus cast this same truth both more simply and more memorably. "Give and thou shalt receive," he said. With a little help from my new friends, I think I now know why that is. By giving we expand the circle of our being, affections, and attachments, even as, by withholding, we diminish it. That’s the way the gift economy works.
At this time of year, during the announcements and in letter and phone calls we customarily ask you to give and to give more, if you possibly can, because we need it to balance our budget. We should all give as much as we can, because we do need it, but we is us–we all need it. The giver and receiver here are one. We all need to connect; we all need to build the gift economy, and not only here, but in our homes and neighborhoods and world. We need our gifts to connect us and to move beyond us and then to return to us in a sacred circle, a holy commerce.
This morning we will accept all contributions, including those offered out of a guilty conscience. At this point we are not in a position to turn down any largesse, whatever its motivation. But sacrifice is not what I am asking for this morning. The gift economy doesn’t turn on sacrifice. It turns on generosity, attachment, and reciprocity. We should never give until it hurts; we should give until we feel good about our gift. For our gifts truly to move, they have to move us first, because, unless they move us, they do not attach us to one another, not really. They don’t power the gift economy, being little more than another kind of commodity exchange. When you purchase a watch, you are not attached to its vendor. Only by giving until we feel good will our gifts bring us the kind of attachment that connects us to sources beyond the personal.
Few of us give until it hurts anyway. We tend instead to give right until we begin to feel its pinch and then stop. That’s true about so many things in our lives. We stop just before the spirit in which we give might attach us to its object.
So how much should you give? If everyone here gave until they felt good about their gift, no guidelines would be necessary. I can tell you that many of the most generous gifts we receive are small ones. It is not the size of the gift but its heart that makes the connection. With about 1000 families (one third, couples, and two thirds, individuals) we need to average $1200 dollars per family to make our goal. To accomplish this, for every few people who are being very generous in making a $100 or $250 contribution, we need another to make a gift of $10,000 dollars or more. In a gift economy, by the way, each of these gifts is equally important. They create equal attachment. They move the giver in each case and then move through the community and beyond. In each instance–positing equal generosity, with everyone giving until it feels good–the saving circle of gift, receipt, and reciprocity is opened and extended.
I therefore ask all who consider yourselves a part of this community to make a gift of record between now and New Years. And I ask everyone who has already participated in Annual Giving this year to add whatever you can to your gift. Since no gift is too small if instructed by generosity and heart, there is no one here today who cannot either give or give more, including those in the worst of straits. Give your mite with open heart, and then come in to one of the ministers and ask for help. We will find some way to help you. That too is part of the circle that we open and extend and complete by our giving, receiving, and reciprocity.
One day not too long ago, right after Wally’s postlude, I overheard someone behind me in the back pew as I was greeting people following the service say to a friend–"Week after week, you get some of the best music in New York City and its absolutely free." I cringed at the time, but she is right. And we want it to remain free. What she is missing is this. "Take and thou shalt receive" literally is true, but what we receive by taking we remain alone with.
Freedom that doesn’t attach us is freedom from, not freedom for. What we receive by giving, we share. We are measured by what we give to one another, because we are measured by our attachments. As for this church, complex systems, as Gould notes, are built out of thousands of acts of kindness, one gift at a time.
It’s not a matter of making our goal or balancing the budget. If our hearts are in the right place, that is not why we give. We give to attach ourselves to one other in a community of love and service. We give to watch our gifts move and return to us in unexpected ways when we need them most and otherwise don’t know where to turn. We give until it feels good, because we like to feel good. We give, when we remember to give, because taking and receiving are not enough in the same way that being alone with all we take and receive freely from this life is not enough. We give to ensure that the accumulated wealth of our spirit may continue "to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers."
So fill the baskets to overflowing as you leave the sanctuary this morning. Not to balance the budget, but to balance a more important set of scales. Maimonides called them the scales of righteousness and obligation. Hyde measured there the wealth of our spirit. And Jesus taught us to balance the receipt of true value on the one side with gifts of generosity on the other. But what it all comes down to is this. At our deepest and finest, we are gifts to one another. That’s what we are and who we are. Gifts attach us, and when we connect, we prosper. All of us do. And that is why we are here. It really is.
Amen. I love you. Happy Holidays. And may God bless us all.