Articles in this section are from the past 6 to 12 months,
Jesus says that when alms are given they should be given privately, that we should not call attention to an act of kindness, that the left hand should not know what the right hand is doing (Matthew 6.1ff). We can understand the wisdom of this. The image he uses of the uninformed left hand communicates, I believe, something more than secrecy. I believe it communicates a letting go of the information within ourselves – that WE do not dwell long on the act within ourselves. This would certainly prevent internal pride as well as external pomp. Also, such privacy respects the dignity of the one being helped.
This is important. We decided long ago that our food pantry would be open whenever anyone was here to serve. Some congregations only open their food pantries at a few given times during the week. They involve lots of volunteers from the congregation, and everyone feels great as lines of hungry people are given food. There are advantages to doing things this way. It involves more members in service. It allows people to see the good that is being done by the congregation. It makes everyone serving feel good about the good being done. There are advantages to doing things this way – all of them about us, not about the hungry. I always felt that it was better to help people when they need it – that it was not necessary to force them into a breadline outside church on a Wednesday evening. I always felt that if we allow folks come when they have a need, without being put on display, we respect their privacy and dignity. But maybe I’m being old-fashioned. Most acts of generosity nowadays are accompanied not only with trumpets, but with confetti, cameramen, and checks the size of ping pong tables.
The reason for privacy Jesus emphasizes in Matthew 6.1ff is that the giving of alms is a loving act between us and God – it is, by its nature, a private act. Any time a private expression of love is put on public display it is soiled. Something done for show becomes a show and nothing else.
And yet Jesus, in the very same sermon, says “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven,” (Matthew 5.16). These two notions may be harmonized when we think of the different intention and the different context of each passage. My intention in this piece, however, is not to harmonize the two passages from the Sermon on the Mount, but to assert that sometimes it is important that we know what the right hand is doing.
I want you to know, if you are a member of our family here, at the Manassas Church of Christ, that the right hand is very active. As generous as you are we have a hard time keeping our pantry stocked, we are helping so many families. Your Benevolence deacon is perhaps the hardest working man in our family. Much of the help he administers stays here within the family.
I am telling you these things so that you will know your free-will offerings are being used to help, in the name of, and for the glory of God. I am telling you these things so that you will know to come to the family when you need help – do not be ashamed to ask, you will not be the first to ever have such a need, nor the last. Our right hand is strong, and active, and ready to help. I just thought you ought to know.
In 1917, while the 102nd Infantry’s 26th Yankee Division was training at Yale University, they adopted a mutt they named Stubby, and whom they trained to salute by lifting his right front paw to his brow. When they shipped out for France they smuggled him along. Stubby was discovered by their commanding officer on the boat over, but before he could be disposed of he saluted. Impressed, their CO named Stubby the unit’s official mascot, and made him a private.*
Stubby was a great asset to the unit. He became sensitive to chemical agents, and would run through the trenches barking his warning, giving his comrades ample time to don their gas masks. He regularly crawled with medics into no-man’s land to help pull wounded soldiers off the field. Once a German spy infiltrated the Allied trenches, but Stubby identified him immediately and kept him pinned until he could be apprehended. By War’s end Stubby had served in 17 battles in 18 months, was promoted to Sergeant, and received two purple hearts. After the War he met President Wilson, and became the official mascot of Georgetown University.
We humans love these kinds of stories about our best friends. And there seems to be an endless supply. Dogs seem to be uniquely engineered to help humans. We may not need them to hunt and herd much anymore but where would we be without rescue dogs, seizure dogs, drug dogs, therapy dogs, etc, etc….? A recent episode of the PBS series NOVA, titled “Dogs Decoded” demonstrated that dogs have a unique ability to understand human communication. Young puppies will follow your finger as you point at something, or even the direction of your eyes. They do this naturally, and other animals can’t even be trained to do it. A dog is never happier than when working with its master at something. This is how God made them – to serve us in ways we are only beginning to imagine.
God made us to serve each other (see Ephesians 4.7-16; Romans 12.3-8, I Peter 4.10). True happiness is found in serving our Master by serving each other. When we keep the resources with which God has so richly blessed us we cheat each other, we cheat God, and we will be judged. This is clearly the theme of the Parable of the Rich Farmer, whose only idea about what to do with his windfall harvest is to hoard and enjoy (Luke 12.16-21). It is also the theme of the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25.14-30).
That second parable makes a further point. When we use the blessings of God, as He intends, we don’t lose anything - we gain. “For to everyone who has more will be given, and he shall have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25.29).
This verse, in which the 5 talent man gets a sixth, is easily misunderstood out of context. Billie Holliday wrote a haunting, poignant song, “God Bless the Child,” based upon it – and she got the meaning all wrong. She understood it to mean “If you got money you got lots of friends…” The moral to the parable really means something akin to the motto of the Stepping Stones: “All I have is what I give away; what I keep I lose forever.” The writer of Ecclesiastes puts it this way: Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days (Ecclesiastes 11.1) .Jesus says: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but who loses his life for my sake, he is the one who will save it.”
We only experience true abundance when we cooperate with God’s design of things and share the blessings He abundantly provides. To refuse to share is to cut ourselves off from who we really are – it is to lose our identity and our resources.
Just as dogs were designed to serve us, we are designed to serve each other. Selfishness in a human is as unbecoming as a dog that meows.
* “Mental Floss,” July/August 2013, p.14
I have found David, the son of Jesse, a man after My own heart, who will do all my will. Acts 13.22
When a powerful man forces his attentions on the wife of a dear friend, then has that friend killed when the wife becomes pregnant, anything else that man has done, or will do becomes colored by these actions. It is our nature to color the past and the future this way. Any kindness Adolph Hitler showed to his mother Klara, or his dog Blondie seems perverse, no matter how pure the impulse at the time.
What if the past of such a man intersects your past? What if Hitler was in your wedding photos, or Joseph Stalin attended your thirteenth birthday party? Would you lose those memories wholesale? Would you destroy the photographs, or perhaps wince every time you looked at them despite the happiness of each moment when you were experiencing it?
When a man, or woman, betrays the trust of those close to them – through abuse, violence, infidelity, addiction, desertion…..there is an enormous field of wreckage that remains, even after repentance is made and grace received. Grace clears the sin away, not the wreckage. Some of the wreckage may never be cleared.
Years ago I spoke with a woman (now gone) about her husband (also gone) whom she discovered - years after the children were grown – had sexually abused their adopted daughter. She destroyed all her photo albums – all the pictures of her children growing up. He had taken them from her. She felt her entire past from her wedding onward had been taken from her. As a very young man I wondered, “Is she right? Can one man’s sin take away so much? Does it have to be this way?”
The man mentioned above, who forced his attentions upon the wife of a dear friend, and then had that friend killed when the wife became pregnant is, of course, David. When confronted with his sin he repented and was forgiven, but the debris field his sin created would last the rest of his life (II Samuel 12.13-14). We know all this because God tells us in detail. And in the New Testament Jesus quotes David more than any other Old Testament writer – quotes him from the cross (Matthew 27.46). When Peter preaches at Pentecost he quotes David twice, calls him a “patriarch,” a “prophet,” whose throne is eternal (Acts 2.24-35). When Paul preaches his first recorded sermon he reminds us that David is the man after God’s own heart (see quote above). The Bible doesn’t jettison David’s legacy because of his sin.
Devon Island, Canada, is the only known polar island with a large crater. This makes it ideal for training astronauts who will explore Mars in the future. It is as close as we get to Mars on Earth. NASA has already used the surface of Devon Island to test the rovers it sends to Mars. NASA is good at finding ways to simulate on Earth the conditions astronauts will encounter in space. Astronauts simulate space-walks in under-water exercises, and experience weightlessness in jet airplanes that make steep dives and create a zero gravity environment for a few seconds at a time.
Congregational worship is like that – only more so. It is as close as we get to Heaven on Earth. What we know of heaven from passages like Isaiah 6, or Revelation 5 is that the presence of God is a place of worship. The host of heaven – the living beings, the 24 elders, and the angels sing God’s praise. Revelation 5 tells us that all creation joins in the song together. Whenever we praise God we join a song that is already being sung. When we sing together we experience something of heaven’s eternal corporate worship. This is no simulation, but a momentary connection with what is happening in heaven – which is where we are headed, but not where we are.
…Which is why we should hold these moments sacred. To sing with “the spirit and the understanding” (I Corinthians 14.15), I believe, is to fully respect the worship moment - to invest all we are, mind and soul, into it. The Corinthians were turning the worship service into a rowdy church pot-luck with an open bar (see I Corinthians 11). They were not respecting the moment of praise, nor the moment of communion around God’s table. And thus they received Paul’s rebuke and warning. There was clearly a mean-spiritedness to their excesses (1 Cor 11.17-21; hence the need for chapter 13). But are mean-spirited excesses the only excesses that disrespect the moment of worship?
Study after study has shown that if you talk to a child and listen to her – a lot – she will do much better in every way we can test intelligence, than if she is ignored. The key to growth is interaction. A study, first published in the journal Pediatrics (2009), and recently cited in a Deborah Fallows article in The Atlantic,* shows that talking to a child and listening to their response even before they start using understandable language makes an enormous difference in the level of achievement that child will attain. The cause for concern among researchers, child psychologists, educators, and others who care about our children is that we are quickly switching from our tongues to our thumbs as our primary communication organs. We don’t talk anymore, we text, and this is having a measurable effect on our children.
I don’t text. Although I receive and read text messages from others, I don’t know how to text myself. I fully understand the advantages of texting, however. It is wonderful the way folks can stay connected, even when separated by thousands of miles and vast oceans. My nephew Nathan got a text from Will Jarrell at our house last April. Will was texting from Western China. But he could have been texting from across the room.
Texting from across the room seems a pointless exercise to me, and yet one most teens, and many adults practice regularly. It seems the most natural thing in the world to some folks to communicate with someone in your immediate presence by not looking at them, not listening to them, not speaking to them, but by staring at a tiny, hand-held device while we peck at it with our thumbs.
