CHRISTIANITY 101: GOD IS GENEROUS
I recently read an article written by a minister named MaryAnn Dana in a publication called Journal for Preachers. When Rev. Dana was in seminary, she and a number of her seminary classmates had gone overseas to take a special class when they encountered something they found to be very peculiar. This is how she described it:
Several years ago I attended a study trip with seminary classmates at the World Council of Churches. We spent a few days in Munich before arriving in Geneva for the course. The museum there had a display of Christmas-related artifacts, and we were fascinated by a bearded goat-like creature that appeared to be preying on small children. Without a working knowledge of German to read the accompanying placards, we could only assume that the goatman was Santa’s evil twin.
Rev. Dana and her classmates were not far off. What they saw was a beast-like creature known as Krampus. Local folklore taught that during the Christmas season, Santa Claus came and rewarded good children with gifts. Yet at the same time, an evil beast called Krampus came and gave bad children a lump of coal. If a child was particularly bad, Krampus might actually stuff the child in his sack and carry him off to his lair. And you were afraid you were teaching your children things that might land them on a psychiatrist’s couch one day! What this represents is what we might call a performance-based narrative. Do good, and you’ll be rewarded with good. Do bad, and you’ll be recompensed with bad. Keep that thought in mind as we move on.
Several weeks ago, we talked about the contrast between our tendency to gratify the desires of the flesh and the Apostle Paul’s call for us to live by the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit. We noted how human will power lacks the capacity to change much of anything within us. Change happens when something else is modified. What is it that needs to be modified? What needs to be modified is our personal narrative of who and what God is. We need to have the proper story in our minds as to who and what God is, if we’re ever going to change what and what we are, because everything about us stems from our own internal narrative.
As Jesus is God incarnate, we determined to let Jesus establish our new internal narrative. We noted how many people see God as an angry judge. Citing a passage from the gospel of John, Jesus and his disciples encountered a man who was blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” In their minds it had to be one or the other. Blindness was believed to be punishment from an angry God. Jesus set out to establish a new narrative within them. He quickly replied, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. He was born blind that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” In other words, “God is good; God wills the good…and the glory of God will ultimately be revealed in him.” Then Jesus healed the man born blind. The point is that God wills what’s best for us. The problem is that we don’t see the big picture as God sees the big picture. Yet the narrative Jesus clearly sets out to establish within us is that God is good.
We considered how much of our experience might lead us to believe that God cannot be trusted. Why, even Jesus was not spared the agony of the cross when he begged God to do so. Thus, what we did was embark upon the process of conducting a spiritual inventory. In other words, we took the time to count our blessings. What we discovered is that while our troubles are real, they are really quite small compared to God’s widespread mercy. The more we are able to comprehend how many blessings we really have – freely given and freely received – the more we come to realize that God truly wills what’s best for us. And when that moment of revelation occurs, we can’t help but discover that God is indeed trustworthy.
Today our aim is to establish within us the narrative that God is also generous. Yet what we experience in the world today might lead us to believe otherwise. In the opening illustration, we examined what we called a performance-based narrative. Good children received gifts from Santa, while bad children received lumps of coal from Krampus…or worse. From a very young age we learn that our parents’ approval is dependent upon good behavior; that school grades are given on the basis of performance; that popularity or affection is offered due to attractiveness; and that rejection, loneliness, despair and isolation are the consequences of failure. And when every person in every situation in every day of our lives treats us on the basis of how we look, or how we act, or how we perform, it is difficult not to project that onto God.
My uncle Daryl was about a year-and-a-half younger than my father. They grew up on a farm in western Iowa and attended a one-room schoolhouse when they were young. My father always told me that his nickname was “Muscles,” and Daryl’s nickname was “Pickles,” but my uncle Daryl always told me it was the other way around. In any case, both grew up to be farmers, although my father sold out and went off to college to become an electrical engineer when he was about thirty-two. Daryl continued to farm and was quite successful at it…that is, until the farm crisis hit in the early 1980s.
Here’s what happened. Daryl was a very successful farmer and was thinking about putting up a large pole building. He spoke to his local banker about it one time, but he was hesitant. The banker insisted, “Go ahead and do it. Times are good. What could possibly go wrong?” So Daryl borrowed $40,000.00 and erected a pole building. He put up a 240 acre farm he’d inherited as collateral. Farmland in Iowa was going for about $2000.00 an acre at the time. I’ll let you do the math yourselves.
Daryl paid on his loan and had worked it down to about $10,000.00. In the meantime, the local bank had sold Daryl’s loan to a faceless corporation in Des Moines. Then the farm crisis hit and Daryl – like a lot of other farmers in the Midwest – couldn’t pay back his loan. So that faceless corporation came and took his 240 acre farm. That $10,000.00 debt essentially cost him about $480,000.00. And it was all perfectly legal.
Daryl, as you might suspect, was a little upset by this. He came to my father to borrow $10,000.00 but in 1982, $10,000.00 was a lot of money, and my father simply could not bail him out. In the end, Daryl said to my father, “I can’t believe this is happening. What did I do to make God turn his back on me?” And there you have it: a performance-based narrative about God.
You don’t have to look very far in the pages of Scripture to prove such a narrative about God. Consider the rather unsettling passage we read from the book of Acts. In the first century Christian community, all things were held in common. That’s a nice way of saying socialism. Nobody possessed abundance, yet nobody lacked for anything either.
A married couple by the name of Ananias and Sapphira belonged to that first century Christian community. Then one day, they sold a piece of land. What they were supposed to do was bring all of the proceeds and lay them at the feet of the apostles. Yet Ananias and Sapphira plotted to keep some of the money for themselves. When Ananias lied to the apostles about how much money he’d received, he dropped dead on the spot. When Sapphira came later and backed up her husband’s story, she dropped dead, as well. They lied before God, and they were struck down for it. That, my friends, is a performance-based narrative about God. And it seems as though the Bible backs it up.
Yet perhaps saying that sin has its consequences is different than saying that God rejects us entirely because of our sin. After all, isn’t the larger theme of the Bible the steadfast love of God that culminates in the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ on behalf of a wayward world? Thus, perhaps we should interpret the entire Bible and some of its more troubling stories in light of Jesus Christ. Because truth be told, I think Jesus gives us a vastly different narrative.
Consider the passage I read a moment ago from the gospel according to Matthew. Two thousand years ago, there may have been as many as 18,000 men milling about the streets of Jerusalem on any given day, looking for work. As the story goes, a landowner came to town at about 6:00 a.m. to hire laborers for his vineyard. He agreed with the laborers for the usual day’s wage, then sent them into his vineyard to work. About three hours later, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace, and sent them into his vineyard to work. He did the same thing at noon; he did the same thing at three; and he did the same thing again at 5:00 p.m.
At the end of the day, his business manager called the laborers together to pay them. The laborers who began work at five – the laborers who probably worked for only about an hour – received a full day’s pay. So did the laborers who worked for three hours, so did the laborers who worked for six hours, and so did the laborers who worked for nine hours. The laborers who had worked for twelve hours thought they were due a little more. When they received no more than what they had agreed upon initially, they grumbled against the landowner. The landowner replied, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”
Now we can all probably relate to the laborers’ disgruntlement. That’s because we tend to put ourselves in the place of the laborers; we tend to look at this story from the laborers’ perspective. Instead, let’s try to look at this story from the landowner’s perspective. The landowner paid most of those laborers far, far more than he had to. The theme of this story thus becomes the landowner’s generosity, not the shorting of a few disgruntled laborers. And if the landowner is meant to represent God in this story, the narrative that Jesus describes of God…is one of a God who is abundantly generous.
Our problem is that we operate out of what might be called the myth of scarcity. We have this irrational fear that there may not be enough to go around. Jesus breaks the myth of scarcity by revealing a God of generosity. If you don’t believe me, then just consider a few human attributes that come from God. One human attribute is love. The more we love, the more our capacity for love grows. Another human attribute is forgiveness. The more we forgive, the more our capacity for forgiveness grows. Attributes expand and grow…it’s commodities that decrease. Yet perhaps Jesus is even trying to assure us here that our commodities will never run out if we trust in God and share them in Jesus’ name. Jesus reveals a God who is generous. And when we come to sense the incredible generosity of God, we can’t help but become generous ourselves. And maybe that’s the point.
I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel the other day called Wild Russia. A mother Snowy Owl had captured a lemming and brought it back to her two young owlets. The bigger of the two snatched the lemming and began to devour it. The smaller of the two was too weak to fight for it, and the mother owl was aware of that. So she took the lemming from the bigger owlet and gave it to the smaller owlet, but the bigger one took it right back. The smaller owlet was on the brink of starvation, and eventually died, because it could not compete with its sibling for food. The narrator of the show simply called it “survival of the fittest.”
Maybe that’s the message Jesus is trying to drive home in us. The way of the world is survival of the fittest. The way of God is generosity to a fault. And if God is abundantly generous…then maybe we should be too. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment