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Sunday, November 20 - Christ the King Sunday
"Prudence and Hillary: Sowing Sisters" (Part 2)
George Mason
Senior Pastor
 Proverbs 3:9-10, 11:24-26; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15 November 20, 2005 - Among the many things I miss about our late pastor, Bruce McIver, one thing always stands out. Bruce was a master storyteller. There was that moment when he was telling a story—a story he might have told a hundred times before, when he would get close to the punch line. He would start to get tickled himself, knowing as he did what was coming. It would start down in his belly, I think, and work its way up until his shoulders would wiggle and his lip would quiver and he would almost hold his breath for an instant before exhaling the climax of the story. Sometimes I would get more of a laugh out of watching him tell the story than the story itself. I think he was happiest when he knew he was about to make someone else happy with his story.
And that’s the secret we all need to learn this morning and keep sharing for the rest of our lives. If you want to be happy, truly happy, you have to learn where happiness is found. And it is not found in the expected place.
Respondents to a recent survey settled on $10,000 as the amount of money that would solve their problems. No doubt about it, said survey commentator Roy Waddle: if I were handed $10,000 of happiness, life would turn rosy. For about ten minutes. That’s how long it would take for me to spend it all—for a new roof, a Greek isle cruise, a handful of charities, and the retirement kitty. (I don’t think he’s checked the price of Greek cruises lately!) Waddle continues: Then it would be gone. And I’d return to daydreaming about the next $10,000. [Against the Grain, Upper Room Books, cited in The Christian Century (November 15, 2005): 7.]
See, this is the big lie we all buy: all we need is a windfall to make us happy. But have you ever seen a lottery winner who turned out happy because of hitting the big one? They often end up more miserable than before. And part of that is the disappointment that comes from thinking that happiness is found in what you get rather than in what you give.
Jonathan Sacks is the chief rabbi of . In his new book, To Heal a Fractured World [Schocken Books], he claims that happiness, as opposed to pleasure, is a life well lived, one that honors the important, not just the urgent. He notes that in study after study, given 20 factors of things that make people happy, financial success is consistently rejected as a crucial component. Instead, generosity is the one ingredient that is vital for happiness.
We could have known this if we had paid attention to the Bible. The Bible consistently tells us that God is love, that God gives liberally to the world, and that we who are created in the image of God can experience the divine image only by being like the generous and loving God we are made to be like. God scatters seed abroad,
St. Paul
says in our text today. God broadcasts seed like a reckless sower moving across a field, flinging seed about with generous abandon.
Look at the photo reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Sower that we have placed in your order of service today. What do you notice? Do you see his face? He isn’t looking down; he isn’t trying to hit a small target with his seed; he isn’t down on his knees trying to fit the seed into a small row, either. He is confident that if he casts his seed about liberally, it will come up abundantly in the harvest.
Now this might seem at first to contradict what I said last week in this two-part series on stewardship. Last week I preached on prudence in financial affairs. I told you to use your head to get your house in order. Get out of debt right away. Stop overspending. Develop discipline in your decision-making about what you need and have to have. Delay gratification. Plan a budget and stick to it. Learn to save. Begin to give.
I said last week that I operate under a basic assumption about you: You would give more if you had more. I told you that with a little more prudence, you would have more to give.
All
right, then, you’ve had a week—how’s it going? It’s time to see some results in the offering plate! How much time do you need?
Prudence applies to giving as well as spending and saving, don’t you know?! Here’s my personal proposed practice of prudence that integrates all three areas: Give 10 percent, save 10 percent, and live off 80 percent. It ought to be a good goal for everyone. Some of you can hardly imagine how to get there right now, and in truth it might take you years. But it will happen more quickly if you begin today.
The prudent way of giving is to make the first check you write be to the Lord. Your tithe—that is, 10 percent of your gross income—belongs to the Lord. This is the seed you sow from the abundance of God’s provision to you. You sow it into the field of the Lord and watch how it blesses you and others with a harvest of provision and sometimes even prosperity. But the point is not that you will have more to hold if you give, but that you will have more to give. God increases what you have to sow, and gives you a harvest of spiritual abundance—a new and more satisfying way of looking at the world.
The second 10 percent goes to savings. In this economy you have to plan more than ever for unexpected volatility. No one’s job is safe and sound anymore. You should have at least three months’ worth of living expenses saved up as your baseline balance that you won’t touch until you face an emergency. Do it little by little, and you will get there in no time.
Then you are free to live on the other 80 percent. That will be plenty if you manage it well. But don’t spend beyond what you need because you will miss out on one critical component of happiness. You have to develop a personality of hilarity. Generosity is hilarity’s secret ingredient.
God loves a cheerful giver, Paul says. The word for cheerful in the Greek is hilaron, from which we get our noun hilarity, our adjective hilarious, and our proper name Hilary. And the reason God loves a cheerful giver is that God has a good self-image. God is a cheerful giver. And so God loves it when God sees in us—those whom God created to mirror God’s own life and character—a reflection of God’s own cheerfulness. And for that to be the case, we have to be giving cheerfully.
Prudence won’t get you there by itself. Prudence is only a door that leads you out of misery and puts you in a room of contentment where you can see for the first time that you have more than enough. Prudence allows you to let go of that sad scarcity mentality in which you are always worried that you don’t have enough. It allows you to open your hands and your hearts, because you begin to see the abundance of life that is yours. But if you want to know true happiness, there’s another door you have to go through—you have to practice hilarity in your giving.
Hilary is Prudence’s sowing sister in the field of God. She works side by side with Prudence, but she refuses to allow Prudence to take herself too seriously. Prudence keeps Hilary from losing her head, but Hilary keeps Prudence from losing her heart.
Here’s what Hilary knows about giving that makes her so cheerful. She knows you can’t outgive God. She knows that if you give until you feel it, you have to give not until it hurts but until you can laugh. She knows that waiters are usually struggling to make the rent each month, and she doesn’t get out her calculator to figure a tip. She doubles the tax at least and rounds up the difference, or she doubles the whole bill and divides by ten. Hilary thinks ahead about birthdays and special occasions. She wants to choose a gift based on what will make the receiver happiest, not on the basis of how much it costs—whether a lot or a little doesn’t matter—or on the feeling of obligation to give. Hilary responds to emotional appeals for things such as hurricane or tsunami relief or special missions offerings. She would rather live on less than 80 percent if it means she gets a kick out of giving to something that will cause God joy at her cheer. Hilary looks for ways to pass out compliments instead of chipping away at people because of their personalities being a little offbeat. Well, whose personality isn’t a little offbeat? And isn’t that what makes a personality unique and fun? And who’s setting the beat anyway?
We have a very rare moment right now for Prudence and Hilary to combine their efforts creatively. Do you know that between now and the end of this calendar year, Congress has opened a window for you to give hilariously and prudently at the same time? Not everyone will be able to do this, but if you have lots of money in stored away in stocks and receive an annual income that is a much less, you can think about this. And if you have lots of money in a 401K or Keogh or 403B retirement plan, you can actually give out of that fund for this brief time without undue penalty. Normally, you get to deduct all your charitable contributions in a given year up to only 50 percent of your adjusted gross income. But until the end of this year, you can give whatever you want and as much as you want. This year you can deduct 100 percent of your income, and if you give more than that, you can carry over the contributions deduction to next year. It took an act of God to get an act of Congress. If it takes an act of Congress to get an act of hilarity out of you, so be it!
We just learned that the Lilly Endowment has given Wilshire a renewal grant of $850,000 for the next five years to fund our pastoral residency program. But the foundation wants us to show that we are making progress in funding it ourselves beyond that time. This is a good time to give hilariously to such a thing. Or to any such thing that God moves you to give to that would bless the world.
You know, happiness is an elusive thing. But what we know is that you get it more by giving than by receiving. Happiness is a gift that generosity gives to the giver, and it cannot be discovered any other way. The modern monk Thomas Merton rightly said: A happiness sought for ourselves alone can never be found, for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy.
Do you remember those little sugar cubes filled with life in the 1950s? Because of four billion dimes collected by the March of Dimes and the research that came from it, a vaccine for polio was discovered and made available free to everyone. Dr. Jonas Salk discovered this vaccine. When asked if he was going to patent it, which would have made him one of the richest men on the planet while making it cost-prohibitive for many of our citizens, he replied, Sunshine is not mine to patent and neither is this. [Thanks to
Bob Browning
for this, “Who Owns the Sun,” sermon, 13 Nov. 2005,
Smoke
Rise
Baptist
Church
,
Stone Mountain, Ga.
]
And just before he said that, I think you could have seen God getting tickled. It probably started in his belly and worked its way up to his shoulders and finally to his quivering lips, until a big smile broke out on his face, because God loves a cheerful giver.
Can you imagine anything you could do that would cause God that much pleasure?
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