CELEBRATING OUR GENEROSITY
April 6, 2007 Summit UU Fellowship
Rev. Kathleen A. Green
There were two men shipwrecked on an island. The minute they got on to the island one of them started screaming and yelling, "We're going to die! We're going to die! There's no food! No water! We're going to die!" The second man was propped up against a palm tree and acting so calmly it drove the first man crazy. "Don't you understand?!? We're going to die!!" The second man replied, "You don't understand, I make $100,000 a week….we'll get found soon" The first man looked at him quite dumbfounded and asked, "What difference does that make?!? We're on an island with no food and no water! We're going to DIE!!!" The second man answered, "You just don't get it, do you: I make $100,000 a week, and I tithe ten percent of that $100,000 each week to my church----I give $10,000 each week to my church." The First Man, still dumbfounded said, " I still don't understand!" The Second Man said: "Listen, I said to relax, I TITHE $10,000 a week to my church, BELIEVE ME, they’ll find me!"
Good morning fellow stewards! And I’m not just greeting the table hosts or co-chairs of our stewardship team when I say that! We are all stewards of something or many things in our lives. In this place, we are stewards of Summit – caretakers, managers, responsible for this beloved community – for its financial health and strength, among other things. To be a good steward, or to have good stewardship means that we are responsible by being diligent. Diligent with our generosity.
For those of you who are members and friends of Summit, I don’t have to tell you that this is a generous community. It was your generosity that purchased this facility just over a year ago. It has been your generosity that’s given time and talent for nearly two decades, from the community’s founding to today. It has been and continues to be your generosity that steps up when someone is in need of support. It is your generosity that teaches our children, greets the visitors, provides music and art, and prepares the potlucks. Your generosity is required to bring the vision of this community to fruition.
This is the time of year when many congregations are holding their pledge drives, poring over the upcoming year’s budget, and holding their collective breath to see that all comes round right. Someone told me, “A friend of mine refers to the annual pledge drive in his church as “a congregational root canal”. I hope that is not how it feels here. It is a privilege and pleasure to be able to offer our gifts of generosity to a religious community that seeks to be mindful not only of its mission and vision, but of all its possibilities.
How about a show of hands of those of you who give to charities and organization other than the church? Secular organizations that raise money attempt to instill trust in donors and confidence that money won’t be spent carelessly. Each year their budgets are increased and their “pledge drives” ask for more in order to do more. The more you give, the greater the organization, the greater your personal fulfillment. Their banners do not read, “Give to us, so we can do about the same as last year.” So it is with Summit. So it is with the call of our vision statement.
How many of you have read Summit’s vision statement lately? Let us read it now, this morning: “Summit Unitarian Universalist Fellowship is a growing, caring, intergenerational congregation of diverse backgrounds, embracing the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. We are committed to promoting spiritual and personal growth, social justice, environmental awareness, and participation in the greater community.”
Our vision requires tremendous and diligent generosity.
Charitable giving in a religious context is not merely a financial matter. It is an emotional and spiritual commitment that helps define our relationship with the Divine, with God, with whatever it is and however we would name that which feeds our spirit over the course of our lives. Sharing our treasure is how we accomplish what we are called to do in this time and place.
Charitable giving should change your life in some way. Being people of faith, whatever our personal theology, and being diligent, generous stewards should change our lives – forever.
What keeps us from being generous, or as generous as we would like to be, is usually a fear of scarcity. Rev. Linda Hansen from our sister congregation in Connecticut once explained that we’re often afraid of generosity because it’s cast in a mood of loss, even of pain. No wonder many pledge drives are changing their slogans from “Give until it hurts” to “Give until it feels good.” She goes on to share that she tends to think of generous people as big people – not big in physical stature but big in spirit – an idea of size from theologian Bernard Loomer: “By size I mean the stature of a person’s soul, the range and depth of love and the capacity for relationships.” Scarcity keeps us from being as big as we would like to be.
I consider generosity and financial stewardship a spiritual practice, not a payment for services rendered but rather an act of free will; an act of love; a celebration, accompanied by an attitude of generosity.
Next Sunday, we will welcome new members as they formally join our community. Another day with great reason to celebrate. As I reflected this week on financial stewardship and new members, I recalled and adapted these words from UU minister John Wolf:
"There is only one reason for joining a UU congregation and that is to support it. You want to support it because it stands against superstition and fear. Because this faith community points to what is noblest and best in human life.
You want to support a Unitarian Universalist congregation because it is a place where children come without being saddled with guilt or terrified of some celestial Peeping Tom, where they can learn that religion is for joy, for comfort, for gratitude, for love.
You want to support it because it is a place where walls between people are torn down rather than built up. Because it is a place for the religious displaced persons of our times, those from mixed marriages, the
free thinkers and those who insist against orthodoxy that they must work out their own beliefs.
You want to support a Unitarian Universalist Congregation because it is more concerned with human beings than with dogmas. Because it searches for the holy, rather than dwells on the depraved.
You want to support a Unitarian Universalist congregation because it can laugh. You want to support it because it calls you to worship what is truly worthy of your sacrifice.
Yes- there is only one reason for joining a Unitarian Universalist Congregation. To support it. “ Support by way of generosity. Of time, of talent, but also of financial resources. We are a self-supporting and self-governing organization. And Amen to that. We, as stewards, decide where our priorities lie, how generous we will be. We, as stewards, govern and support this faith community that nurtures and sustains us; gives us purpose.
I have one more lesson to share. One more challenge in generosity that that I hope you will take with you when you leave here, remember it, and consider it in the coming years at Summit.
All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma is one of the largest of our denomination with over 1,500 members. They were featured in the Tulsa World newspaper a few years ago for some unusual behavior of generosity. A year or so prior to the story, their minister proposed the idea to give away every dollar put in the collection plate that was not marked as money that members had pledged in the stewardship drive. Yes, there were some fears that the congregation might suffer financially. There was an initial attitude of scarcity. But the opposite occurred.
In 2004, before the new idea took hold, $18,000 in undesignated money came in. By Oct. 2005, just nine months after embracing the concept, more than $100,000 had come in and the fall stewardship drive to fund the next year was running ahead of normal. By year’s end, the church gave away more than $120,000 in undesignated offerings. Among the organizations that have benefited are the Disabled American Veterans, Boys and Girls Clubs, local homeless shelters and schools, and victims of Hurricane Katrina. Rev. Lavanhar said his congregation has responded to the program with energy and joyfulness. Some members have told him it has changed their lives. An attorney who is a long-time member of the congregation said the program has changed his attitude about giving and that it’s making him have an attitude of being more generous in everything he does.
Each and every faith community has its own charitable identity. An identity based on the generosity of its members. May this be a community of generosity that is forward thinking; that looks to help one another and the larger world with diligence. Whatever the numbers, may Summit grow bigger and bigger in spiritual “size”. For generous people know that in the end, we possess nothing except what we’ve chosen to share or give away.
As it is so deeply needed in our own lives and in the many lives yet to find us, may our light shine brightly!
So may it be.
READING: by Victoria Safford
Our desires and our decisions may be boundless, but our needs, if we’re honest, are really pretty basic. We need shelter and food and clothing. And beyond this, we need friendship. We need comrades in the struggle.
We need art. We need a way to hear music often.
We need noble work, paid or unpaid, in the home or out of it; we need, each of us, a calling. We need trees and grass and water fairly close by.
We need religious grounding. Come of us need a mature and sustaining experience of God. Some need prayer. Some need glimpses of the transcendent, a sense of something larger than themselves. Some of us need ethical clarity. We need religious grounding. We need solitude.
We need community.
We find the sources of these things we need, and then w4e choose to sustain them, to nurture them, not by willpower, not by some sense of duty or obligation, but because we care passionately about them and find them central to our lives.
