single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 11
Sep 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
Our Saviour
in the Town of Secaucus, New Jersey
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What is good
giving?
Reflections on the
lessons for the 13th Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
Isaiah 35:4-7a / Psalm 146:4-9
James 1:17-27 / Mark
7:31-37
This week the media reviewers had a ball with Debra Ginsberg's Waiting: The True Confessions of a Veteran Waitress. Writing after 20 years of restaurant work, her earthy anecdotes confirm my granny's worst fears about what goes on back in the kitchen -- baked potatoes rolling all over the floor and scooped back onto plates. And it reminds us all that eating out is more or less a leap of faith.
The part that grabbed me the most was her thoughts on tipping. I was a waiter once, for a little while. Years ago in graduate school. I remember how a good tip made up for a lot of troublemaking. And how a bad tip left me wondering what I did wrong. But Ginsberg ran with a different breed of waiter. She tells of irate servers chasing small tippers out to their cars and throwing the change at them. Others, when the bar tabs got big enough to cause a little carelessness, would pad them out even bigger to beef up the tip. She finally gave up waitressing. Not because of the hours, or the sore feet, but because of the tipping. It's a bad system, she said, a bad kind of giving with a tendency to make the receiver feel demeaned and the giver feel a false superiority.
And that's a pretty good explanation of why Christians do not tip God. Never mind that virtually nobody gives to the work of the church anything approaching the 15 to 20% they leave waiters. (Even the Bible sets a 10% cap on religious support and says that anything more ought to be deployed somewhere else.) Giving to the church's ministry on God's behalf to the people of God is just a different thing from tipping. There's bad giving and there's good giving. And we are called to do more than ante up to make the congregation run in the black. We are called to find a way to give well, not least of all for our own sake, for our own growth and development.
Stewardship is one name we give to good giving. Among other things. Because financial support of the church is only a very small part of the big stewardship picture. Giving to the church is a subset of giving to all good works, which in turn is a subset of all you do with all you have all the time. Stewardship is the yardstick by which everything in life is measured: Every moment of our time wasted or not, every word we speak, every strength and talent we are granted, every grain of rice on our plates.
You are a steward -- good or bad -- of everything you hold in trust from God. You can't avoid it. You can't evade it. Being a poor steward can be either no more than an opportunity missed or, at worst, a destructive and spiritually corrosive way of living. But, becoming a better and better steward of God's gifts until you finally are a pretty good one can be a vehicle to a new life where you and the world you see through the lens of stewardship are transformed into something new and good. Light out of darkness. Life out of death. So, we do well to think about stewardship all the time, not just in the few hours a year we focus on how we decide to give some part of our cash resources to support the physical operations and outreach of this congregation.
In the case of giving, there are some things that we do know about good giving. For one, good giving needs to be full of freewill and gladness. The old Salvation Army phrase "Give until it hurts" just doesn't sit well with me. Maybe something more like "Give until it feels good". In any case, if you're interested in good stewardship giving, no begrudging is allowed. And no strings may be attached. What you're doing is giving up control -- in a planned way and in an intentional direction -- and then trusting the recipient you've chosen to carry on the work you can't do on your own. One important result of that: Such complete giving helps expose to you the structure of some of the traps you may be caught in. Practicing letting go of things gradually makes people better at doing just that, better at not clinging to things. And when your hands aren't so busy clutching at the bars around you, they are freed up to start taking your cages apart.
Good giving, likewise, absolutely must be seen in a proportional way. All giving in fact is proportional. If you drop a dollar bill in the alms basin every Easter Day -- that is inevitably some percentage of what you have to give. To be moving toward a godly stewardship of your life, you need to know what percentage that is. Only then can you know how the significance of your gift compares with the importance of the church and its work to you. And that applies across the whole financial spectrum of life. It really is not the amount of any gift that matters most, but its significance to the giver. When a gift is precious to the giver, it is precious to everyone who knows even the least bit about good giving.
Knowing how your whole economic picture fits together is very, very telling. Often it tells more than we want to know. Plenty of people can rattle off how much of their paycheck goes for housing. Fewer, I'll bet, have right on the tip of their tongue the percentage of their annual income that goes for cigarettes, or lottery tickets, or whatever indulgence you're not especially eager to analyze. To know that figure would probably make most people squirm and feel a push to reevaluate. When it comes to running churches, I just don't think that God is all that interested in funding budgets or traditional staffing. We tend to get wrapped up in that. But I believe God gets wrapped up in what happens to the heart and soul and mind of a good giver. And a church seasoned with even a few transformed people like that can change the world around it.
An Aside on Proportional
Giving:
One of this year's Vice-presidential nominees was in the
news this week with his tax returns. In one particularly
flush year he earned well over $20 million. That on top of a
string of similar years. Of that sum -- far beyond what
could be needed for the comfort and luxury of any human
being -- he gave 1% to charity. Now that's a lot of money.
Almost a quarter of a million dollars. But I'll wager that
its importance to the giver was insignificant. And its
rewards commensurately small.
What are the rewards of good giving? What do you get? Some TV preachers will hint that you might get back your giving with a tidy return on your investment. Some might suggest that if you give enough your children will be nicer or you might get some VIP treatment from God. I don't go there. But I can say a few things about what I get (and what I am "getting" [in a cognitive sense] a little better every year) from trying to be a credible steward of God's stuff.
For one thing, I get a sense of plenty. I know that I can live on less than I have to live on. It's an indisputable fact. I've done it. And that makes me feel a little stronger than I might otherwise. Maybe, over the years, I have sacrificed some things to give beyond my own borders. But if I have I don't remember what they were and so I suppose I am also learning something about not needing things in the long run as much as I think I do at the moment. Since I don't feel poor or deprived at all I doubt that I would have felt any lasting enrichment from whatever it was that I never got or did.
I also find that giving -- this is pretty obvious -- gives me some sense that I have been in some personal way a relief to the world's problems and an enabler of its dreams. I give to several things besides church. So, when the public radio station says, "thank you" after its pledge drive, I really like thinking "you're welcome". When I list the things that our congregation has supported and the things that we have made available to our community and to communities around the world, I feel a little better about myself than I might. I don't think I'd look back on a year's worth of visits to Plaza Pizza with any comparable sense of pride.
Very importantly, I get a sense of standing back from the edge. It's not quite the same thing as the sense of plenty I mentioned. It's about empowerment and calmness. The feet-on-the-ground feeling of knowing that I can live just fine on 90% of my income is the mirror opposite of the anxiety of feeling like I need 110% of my income just to get by. Giving away a noticeable proportion of what I have - even though the amount isn't impressive on its own -- proves to me that I'm not living on the brink.
The years I have spent practicing (and sometimes playing) at being a good steward -- and a good giver -- have worked a miracle in my life. And I have been transformed into a kind of person I once didn't even know about. (This gives me hope that the same thing will keep on happening to me again and again.) But even now, I see the world in a way I'm grateful to have discovered. Really, it's no less than a miracle. Not a flashy miracle like a voice from heaven or a bolt of lightning, more like the blind receiving sight, the deaf being made to hear.
-- Mark Lewis
Links for further reading:
Waiting: The True Confessions of
a Waitress
By Debra Ginsberg
By loan through BCCLS and the Secaucus Public Library
By purchase from Amazon.com
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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