"Generous Living: A Sermon for Stewardship Sunday"

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Written by Rev. Megan Lynes

“Generous Living: A Sermon for Stewardship Sunday”

by Rev. Megan Lynes

delivered at The First Parish in Bedford

March 20, 2011

A Thought to Ponder at the Beginning:

If you are proud of this church, become its advocate.
If you are concerned for it future, share its message.
If its values resonate deep within you,
give it a measure of your devotion.

This church cannot survive without your faith, your confidence,
your enthusiasm, your generosity.

Its destiny, the larger hope, rests in your hands.

—Michael A. Schuler

My best friend from high school called me this week, panting, while out on a run. “You’re running?” I asked her. “Since when do you run?” This is my friend who despised the mile warm up for soccer, and who still needs the remaining operation for her other flat foot. Well, don’t let your friends stay out of your line of sight for too long, or they go off and do amazing things. It turns out, flat footed or not, Alice has been training for marathons. The reason for her call on Thursday was to ask me last minute if I’d sponsor her for the three hour race she’s in right this very minute. “I’m running for a cause!” she said, laughing between breaths, “I honestly didn’t know I could run. It used to hurt too much. But you’ll never believe it. I quit the job I hated, and luck offered me up a simple new one. I’m happier and finally I can do something for others that makes a life changing difference. I’ve always worked hard,” my friend told me, “but I didn’t know what real motivation feels like.”

“What does it feel like?” I asked her. “Well, last month I ran with a team, we each raised five thousand dollars for AIDS research. While I run I think of the kids who will get good care. It feels like joy,” she said. “It feels like purpose. I had a good life before, but it didn’t have meaning.”

Hearing her answer, made me think of our vision statement here at First Parish. Our goal as a community is to promote lives of joy and meaning. We tap into the very essence of being alive here. We get an idea of what we want our individual or worldly future to be, we add the element of giving service to others, multiply all that by our passion, and we will be led to our mission in life. Vision + Service x Passion = Mission. We can do this on our own, or we can do it together. I come to church to make exponential the possibilities in our shared mission.

Karen Armstrong, the brilliant writer and lecturer about world religions puts it this way: “Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.”

Our religious community is one in which we practice life changing forms of giving. I’ll go out on a limb to say it, because I know there are of a lot of amazing congregations around here, but aren’t some of the most inspiring people you know, right here beside you in the pews? Some of us run marathons, but others of us sing in the choir, or run the Mitten Tree, or organize Bedford Community Table, or teach Coming of Age, or write to the editor, or you are the editor, or the librarian, or you bake for every single memorial service or you picket for peace on the Great Road. Just for a second, think of someone in this room who did something that helped you, or changed you, or guided you, or inspired you. If you don’t yet know people here, invite any face from anywhere, to come to mind. There are a thousand reasons you come to church, and I bet most of them have names. If you think of it in coffee hour, find that person you just thought of, or call them up later, and tell them how they bring you meaning and joy. Follow in their footsteps, but run on your own path, and you will be transformed.

We come here to First Parish to grow our souls. If that’s not how you’d express it exactly, we can say we come here to find our vision and our passion and to figure out over and over who we are called to be. We come here to heal, to play, to serve, to get our hands dirty our conscience examined and our minds invested. We come here to practice being our neighbor’s friend. We come here to be certain we’ve asked ourselves recently: What is a life well lived?

Rabbi Hillel asks this great ethical question best; “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself who am I? If not now, when?”

My marathon running friend, used to live a perfectly respectable life with neither particularly great amounts of joy or meaning. She spent her young adult years in the office twelve or thirteen hours a day. She set her sights on rising to a senior position in a top level accounting firm. I watched my bright eyed companion become listless as she dutifully followed the footsteps and expectations of her very driven father. I could see where his drive came from. He himself had been the only one in his family to go to school. His family herded cattle, and by his wits alone he’d passed impossibly hard exams, won scholarships and awards, and eventually crossed over into the world of the elite. One summer when Alice and I were in college her dad found us internships in his accounting firm in Taipei, where they’re from. Watching her at work, I felt as though I was witnessing cement seal in around my friend’s feet. “This is your destiny,” the heavy sludge conveyed. “You owe your father your life. You will live like this.”

Perhaps it was her father’s diagnosis that gave Alice the courage to at last leave the firm this year. Parkinson’s affects each person differently, and her dad’s sudden degeneration surprised everyone. He had always been capable of everything. He was the monarch. Stern. Formidable. Brilliant. Now he needed people to help him more than he needed to build his dominion, save his legacy, or save face.

So my friend decided to stop trying to please her father, and start trying to turn her admiration for him into action. In June she’ll raise ten thousand dollars for Parkinson’s Disease research, knowing that the research will not reach him fast enough, but knowing that it will help others to suffer less. Her dad wasn’t happy about her leaving the firm, but he says “I worked all my life for you to have a good life. And no one can live your life but you. Your way may be a more generous path than the one I laid for you. Go and be generous. Go and live your life.”

Have you ever had that moment when a little light inside flickers on, and you realize how fragile and fleeting and beautiful life is? Maybe you realize that your elders are no more, and YOU are now the elder? Hillel asks, “If I am not for myself who will be for me?” Or you glimpse a building in smoking ruins and you think how it is not a building, but a hundred or a thousand lives now lost... Hillel asks, “If I am only for myself, who am I?” Or perhaps the building is now a melting nuclear mess, a mess to address for generations to come. Have you wondered, “If not now, when?”

Where is the nightlight within you that glows with generosity and courage? Some of us are born with a pogrom of memories behind us, and we are grateful to be here at all, and for that we rattle the woodwork on behalf of all humanity. Some of us were adopted into a family of love when our first family could not provide, or turned their backs, and for that we open our arms to others. Some of us found a place of safety to run to for comfort during terrible times, and until all people everywhere have such a home, we know we cannot rest.

In the Hebrew Scriptures the prophet Isaiah spoke of his call to service in this way: “God has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to release from prison those who are bound, and to comfort all who mourn...” (61:1-2)

What a year for mourning. Fourteen months ago our brothers and sisters in Haiti were crushed beneath their city and continue to be crushed by the forces that be. In the summer we watched oil gush like an open wound slashed across the maw of mother earth. Wars rage. And last week our hearts broke with the news from Japan.

The Eastern Orthodox Church calls Lent, the season we have just begun, a season of “bright sadness.” That sounds just about right, doesn’t it? The time we are in is indeed a season of lament. As the days lengthen, we refuse easy answers, we cry out in anguish, and we wrestle with what to do. The Christian scriptures proclaim that we are called to be a light to the nations, to let our light shine – but not in a way that stands apart from the world’s sorrows. On the contrary, Matthew writes that we are called to shine in a way that illuminates those sorrows, and that stands with the sorrowful in their grief and their hope.^{^[1]}

In times of bright sadness, and in times of clamoring delight I have witnessed this church growing its soul and living its call. On Stewardship Sunday, it is common to talk about money, and so I will. I am proud that First Parish is a community in which people vow to live generous lives. Most of those who can give in the form of money, do.

In the last year alone, the church contributed $28,805 dollars to social outreach projects. Our Social Responsibility Council awarded $7,056 of that in grants to support the AIDS Memorial Quilt project, an anti racism workshop, Habitat for Humanity, the Lowell Iraqi Families Team, the Peace and Justice film series, gave money to rebuild hand pumps in Haiti, hosted a Shakespeare in Love fundraiser to reduce homelessness, supported UU Mass Action and UU Urban Ministry, brought us the Wish List tree project and supported speakers brought in by the Welcoming Congregation whose vision is to make us a safe and loving church home for gay/... folks. These expenditures show only a portion of the ways our congregation lives our mission. I am certain I have just missed for most of you, that particular project we have here that reaches deep into your battered heart, and pulls you up onto dry land again. Sometimes we give because we can. Sometimes we receive because our own bucket is empty.

Still, how we spend our money matters. A lot. How you spend your money, matters a lot. If you want this congregation to do more, to be more, to survive and flourish, please give generously.

For some of us, this year, it will be hard to contribute what we wish. Some of us are very young or very old, out of work, or out of luck, and there simply is nothing left or nothing yet saved, and there will be little to put in the offering basket when it passes by. It’s ok.

We understand there are more forms of currency than money. Goodwill expended becomes goodwill multiplied. I know it costs Alice nothing to run. Others who can pledge, pledge per mile, and with each step she envisions all those people with her, urging her on like wind at her back. Her steps become her currency. She trades in her energy and inspiration for someone else’s monetary gift. She turns their gift into research, and the research becomes knowledge. And with knowledge and action hope is born.

The race Alice is running right this second is raising money for Diabetes research. She’s doing it for her grandmother, who passed away two years ago. I met A Mah that same hot summer Alice and I were in Taiwan. And on that occasion there was no concrete sealing in anyone’s future, only the same feeling of a soft breeze at our backs.

One day A Mah brought back a fresh fish from the market in a bucket of cool water. She cleaned it at the sink and turned the oil to sizzling in the pan. Ginger and scallions scented the room. The air was heavy with the moisture of the tropics and steamed rice. A Mah’s wrinkled face glanced at me shyly as she flipped the fish. Not a drop of oil splashed. The long wide fish was perfectly browned on both sides. I can still remember how it melted on my tongue. At 85 years old, there was barely a food A Mah could not prepare perfectly every time. We gobbled while A Mah cleaned the countertop, glancing every now and then at us, her eyes dancing. Alice and I to this day know it to be the best meal we’ve ever eaten. It was a meal envisioned as love, created as a pure form of love, and eaten as love transformed.

Before sitting down with us, A Mah disappeared for a while into a back room. The room felt hollow without her low chuckle or wide grin. “Where’d she go?” I asked. “She’s feeding my uncle,” came the reply.

The story followed. Back when A Mah was a young mother with many children, one child, the youngest, a six year old boy, became sick. His fever soared but there was no ice, and they lived far in the countryside. A Mah tried everything she could do to cool him, but to no avail. Doctors were called. The fever reached 106 degrees and the doctors told A Mah that her son would have permanent brain damage if he lived at all. He lived, but as predicted, his mind was gone. A woman of strong Buddhist faith, A Mah understood this life changing event as a form of karma. The effects of her actions in a previous life had determined her destiny of this incarnation. Deep in her bones, A Mah felt certain that she owed her son a great debt because of an unfathomable kindness he must have bestowed upon her in a previous lifetime. She would spend the next fifty or more years caring for him, feeding him, rocking him. It was out of her love and respect for their timeless relationship that she chose to chew each bite of food for him since he could not chew it himself. Diabetic, she tasted but could not swallow practically everything she chewed, even rice. Vegetarian out of religious belief, she chewed her son’s fish because the doctors told her he needed it to stay healthy.

“I am running for A Mah.” Alice tells me simply. “She suffered a lot because of diabetes, and yet she was so joyful all the time. She knew her soul’s purpose was to love. She was never confused about that, and it gave her life meaning. It gave my life meaning too.”

Vision + Service x Passion = Mission. Some of us are runners, some of us are pledgers. Some pledge per mile, some pledge a lump sum. Some stand on the roadside and cheer, others wait at the finish line with warm blankets and a hug. We all have a part to play in this generosity run.

Religion is about doing things that change you. Come to First Parish to be changed. Come to First Parish to be the people the world needs. Will you join me giving the most you can give to our fantastic First Parish Bedford community?

What form of generosity will change your life today?

In all things, go forth in love.

If not now, when?

^{^[1]}http://www.saltproject.org/salt-blog/bright-sadness.html

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