Generosity Begets Generosity
Generosity Begets Generosity
Luke 6:37-38
Last week, we heard Jesus’ summary of the law: love God and love your neighbors. The point isn’t to be a perfect person. The point is to be a loving person. If we choose to live faithfully then we will live differently. We don’t get to be like everyone else.
Welcome to the last two Sundays before Advent. Let me share a glimpse of my world. You can divide my year in two. The first half of the year begins with Advent, anticipating Christ’s birth. Once he’s born, we’re off and running: here’s what we know about his childhood; here’s what we know about his early ministry; here’s what we know about his trek toward Jerusalem; here are the strange, mind-boggling, life changing stories of his death and resurrection. Having covered all that ground, I look at the rest of the year and think, “Now what?” Half of my year as a preacher is following the plot line. The other half is plotting where to go in what the church calendar calls, “Ordinary time.” Maybe it’s time for a sermon series. Maybe it’s time to address some pertinent issues.
I now have two Sundays left in ordinary time. I want to make the most of them and talk—in ordinary time—about what an extraordinary time this is. I want to be honest. I want to be helpful. And, in the end, I want to make the case that no matter how challenging these days might be, our job is to resist the temptation to be like everyone else and choose, instead, to be loving.
From the start, I want to remind you that Jesus insisted whoever is standing right in front of you is your neighbor. Every person is a child of God. Every person should be loved. If we don’t start there, then any effort we make to live our faith will fail. Either everyone’s in or we’re just loving the people we like. That won’t fly
Why is it so difficult—right now in our world— to love our neighbors? Truth be told, on a good day, when life is relatively uncomplicated, loving every person who crosses my path is a challenge. Am I ready to love the person who has 22 items in the express 12 items or less aisle? Am I ready to love the person who just turned left, straight in front of me, when everyone knows that I had the right of way? Am I ready to love the person who votes differently than me, and who—a year later—still has the other candidate’s sign in their yard? On a good day, when I’m at my best, maybe I rise to these challenges. On a regular day, though, when I’ve already used up my patience? Well, things may get ugly.
Here’s the thing… We’re not even talking about loving these people. We’re talking about trying hard to not fly off the handle. Jesus didn’t say that if you are going to follow me then you need to not attack people. He told us to love people, especially the ones who wouldn’t be our first choice to love, especially the ones we don’t even really like. Even on our best day, loving others is a huge challenge (and who, may I ask, has had their best day lately?)
If you think about it, so much depends on what we’re thinking. “Maybe the person with the 22 items thinks they are better than me or they think the rules don’t apply to them.” “Maybe I’m just a chump for following the rules at all.” “Maybe it’s not unreasonable to be reactive when someone pulls out in front of me in their car,” especially when I have a moment to convince myself that they must be out of their minds!
Or, (and here’s the “being different” part) maybe the person with the 22 items was on the way home from taking their husband to chemo. Maybe the person who pulled out in front of me was just distracted with worry over how their kid is getting bullied at school. Maybe people actually deserve the benefit of the doubt…
I get to think whatever I want to think—that’s the problem. Chances are, I will never find out what’s true. Instead, I can project whatever I want on to them, based on almost no known facts. They drive this car or dress this way or look like me or look different than me. I pretend such things are enough “evidence” for me to forget that I really don’t have a clue…
What we really have is a giant ink blot test. You know about ink blots, right? I remember learning to do these tests with people in graduate school. Here’s a blob of a shape on a piece of paper: “What do you see?” Then, people proceed to tell you that they see the craziest things! I always wanted to turn the paper around right in the middle of the test and say, “Where the heck do you see that?” It’s a useful test though because you get to peek into that person’s internal world. You get a glimpse of the kind of things they walk through life expecting to see. You see someone’s projections.
Of course, we all walk through our days expecting to see certain things. Those expectations become a filter for what we actually notice. Consciously or unconsciously, we keep looking for evidence of what we already believe. Not surprisingly, we keep accumulating evidence of what a terrific “handle” we have on life. Life becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy.
This all works well until we meet someone who is different or until we experience something that fundamentally challenges our “filing system” or we are thrown into a crisis or survival situation. Such things jar us out of the “sleep walking” we’ve been doing through life (which sure would seem like a good thing.) After all, who doesn’t want to try something new or learn something or just have an early warning that we should prepare for what’s next, right?
The answer, I’m afraid, is that very few people really want to try something new or learn something or be warned of some impending threat. When the moment that might just make us new comes or way, we whine and say, “Why are you waking me up?” It’s hard work to change. It takes a lot of energy to understand and appreciate and account for someone else’s differences. It’s a challenge to own the fact that I may have been wrong.
Instead of growing more open, when a new idea or a unique person comes our way, we feel uncomfortable. Almost as soon as we feel uncomfortable, we want to get rid of that feeling. So, we conclude: the problem isn’t me; the problem is the inconvenient truth or the strange person who made me feel this way. If I can just silence the idea or ignore the person, I’ll be comfortable again!
Don’t ask me to think! Don’t ask me to expand my sense of who people are and what really matters! Don’t expect me to alter my understanding of the world and how it works just because that understanding doesn’t account for you! How dare you?
Of course, such conclusions are confirmed when I find like-minded people who are equally committed to maintaining expectations like mine. These people just have “common sense.” Thank God these people are like us and not like them! This “common sense” conclusion is reinforced by our television channel and our music and our politicians. In the end, it seems like the whole world agrees! However, the world just gets more divided. Even worse, we will never know the joy of loving someone who is genuinely different and yet, remarkably lovable, too!
Honestly, when it comes to how human beings internalize things, we tend to be a little lazy. We aren’t all that interested in doing the hard work that it takes to really understand complex people in a complicated world. We are far more drawn to the simple, sometimes hateful, “explanations.”
Now, add in a few of today’s issues. Add in social media, a dopamine-fueled addictive force. The operating principle of this force is to foster division at every turn—to herd people into like-minded groups that leave our divisions written in stone. Add in the news media, which has gone from being a public service to being a revenue and ratings driven, billion dollar business. Outlets across the political spectrum repeatedly tell their carefully cultivated audiences exactly what they tuned in to hear. These two forces alone are enough to make people conclude that anyone who disagrees with them is both un-hinged and un-American.
What am I forgetting here? Oh ya…add in a global pandemic. The strategies which have kept us safe have left us more isolated than ever. This isolation has led to a national mental health crisis. In our fear and isolation, we lean even more heavily on what we hear on Facebook, or on what we hear on our trusted news channel, or on what we hear our favorite politician say. As a result, our biased expectations and our tendency to prejudge the world grow exponentially worse. Before we know it, some people are punching one another on planes or screaming at each other in the Walgreens or treating everyone they meet not as neighbors but as suspects. And the rest of us? We’re worn down and worn out. We can barely remember what our neighbors look like without a mask, much less that we are supposed to be loving them.
That’s why it feels important to listen to an old text in a different translation. The old translation of this text begins, “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Our translation this morning says, “Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults, unless, of course, you want the same treatment.” The point of this text is not that God is going to get you if you judge people. The point is that if you pick on people and point out everyone else’s faults, people are going to do the same thing back to you and life will be less livable. God has already chosen not to judge us. Why would we think we are here to judge everyone else? What if we’re not here to pass judgement but to pass on some peace or some grace or some compassion?
Our job is to be generous. Wherever we go, whoever’s life we touch, we should be giving them everything we’ve got. We should give comfort to the person who is afraid or to the person who is struggling with their child at the store and fearing the judgment of every other shopper. We should redeem the present moment for the person who is afraid by daring to make eye contact over the top of our mask and inviting them to share a laugh with us. We should confess to that parent with the whiney kid in the shopping cart that we’ve been there and done that, too. We should be going out of our way to make the stranger feel at home. We should find the concrete, human ways to signal the guys who are raking our leaves that they are, in fact, our fellow human beings. Now, more than ever, even in challenging days, the world we live in will be a better place when we find concrete ways to add a little love to the mix.
We have a new week before us, just waiting to be lived. Each of these days will be filled with encounters with our fellow human beings, some of whom will be like us, some of whom will do strange things and think strange things and…well, just seem pretty strange. So what? Who knows what they are carrying in life? Who knows what they are working hard to face? Set the judgement aside and imagine how different these moments would be if our first thought wasn’t, “What’s wrong with them?” Imagine if our first thoughts were, “So, here is a child of God, just like me. This is my chance! What is the one concrete, simple thing that I can do to let them know I care?” Imagine the power of a generous faith like that! Your actions might just change the world—their world and yours!