The Generosity of God

A sermon preached at All Hallows by Tom Lusty on 28 June 2009
(Third Sunday after Trinity)

• Audio (listen to this sermon online)

Readings:

2 Corinthians 8:7—15, Mark 5:21—43

At the risk of being mindlessly repetitive, I have been allowed to choose two songs which say exactly the same thing — using more or less exactly the same words! Our opening song from the Iona Community, ‘He became poor that we may be rich’, and the hymn immediately before our Gospel reading ‘Lord, you were rich beyond all splendour’. Both songs are really Christmas songs and they explore the implications of the incarnation, God becoming human.

I wanted to sing these songs with you today because of the link with the words of Paul today in our reading from 2 Corinthians chapter 8 — and specifically verse 9: ‘For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, so that we through his poverty might become rich’ He became poor — the message of the incarnation: God becomes human, a form of poverty compared with divinity. I wanted to have these words in our minds as a way of setting up a theme for today — for us together to explore what it means for us to live generous lives.

Paul at this point is trying to get a bit of money out of the Corinthians — he is encouraging them to be generous and so he feels it is appropriate at this point to remind them of the generosity of God.

In the light of the current state of the economy, I could be prompted to talk about acting in a generous fashion with the material resources God has provided us with — but you may have heard that sermon before and I feel that is the vicar’s job not mine.

Our Gospel reading reminded me that the Church faces more pressing more immediate ways of being generous when we consider that what we do with our money is such a small part of being generous. Whichever way we read the Gospels it is clear that Jesus wasn’t a wealthy person financially speaking. And yet… without the need for having any money at all he could still be generous in other ways (mainly in his case to do with being God really!) — which gave those he touched, or those who touched him, what has been described as the miracle of experienced resurrection. In the instance of the dead girl quite literally — he raised people up. We the Church are asked to do share in this work. Yes, generosity is about what we do with our money but it is also a lot more than about that.

For some reason I was reminded of the film The Simpsons the Movie and the point where the man who heads up the Environment Protection Agency explains why he applied for that job. He says: ‘I’ve been really successful. I’ve made a lot of money and I want to put something back into the community — but not the money, obviously’…

Anyway, how do we see Jesus being generous today?

What might our Gospel reading have to teach us about being generous in the way that Jesus is being generous here?

How can we follow his example of costly self-giving love?

I would like to begin by looking at how Jesus’s generosity overcomes exclusion — how does Jesus ‘bring grace’ with him into a situation of exclusion?

In the context of the wider context of Mark’s gospel Jesus is hard at work in these opening chapters overcoming exclusion. In Judaism menstruating women were regarded as ritually taboo. The child, being dead, was taboo — the woman because of her illness had the same status. She might as well have been dead. Humanly speaking in terms of his status and credibility as a rabbi, his career was over. Jesus puts himself outside Judaism twice in our Gospel reading today. But it wasn’t as if this was the first time. He’s already done it touching lepers, and doing things that it is unlawful to do on the Sabbath, like healing people.

Jesus condemns the world of exclusion — a world in which the innocent are labelled evil and driven out — by a strategy of re-naming. He abolishes the warped system of exclusion — what people ‘call clean’ — in the name of an order of things that God, the creator and sustainer of life, has ‘made clean’. [ Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace]

A little later in Mark’s gospel Jesus says that no food is unclean. Why, because division into clean and unclean foods creates false boundaries that unnecessarily separate people. In today’s story the implicit message is that the flow of blood from a woman’s body is also not unclean. The laws of purity for women are false boundaries that marginalise them. Exclusion is sin.

Jesus uses a double strategy for fighting exclusion — he does so by exposing what is falsely labelled unclean, and he also exposes as sin the pursuit of false purity — the purity of a person or a community that sets itself apart from the defiled world in a hypocritical sinlessness which excludes the boundary-breaking other from its heart and from its world.

Consider the deadly logic of the politics of purity: the blood must be pure: German blood alone should run through German veins, free from non-Aryan contamination. The territory must be pure: Serbian soil belongs to Serbs alone. The origins must be pure: we must go back to the pristine purity of our linguistic, religious or cultural past. The blood, the soil, the origins, the inside and the outside, everything must be pure: one people, one culture, one language… whatever does not fall under this all encompassing ‘one’ is ambivalent, polluting and dangerous. [ Volf again]

It is a dangerous programme because it is a totalitarian programme, governed by a logic that reduces, rejects and segregates. In extreme cases we kill and drive out. Most of the time we are satisfied to assign ‘others’ the status of inferior beings — as in the case of our Gospel reading. Jesus does not tolerate this form of exclusion. He names it as sin. The exclusion is overcome. The woman is healed.

Have you ever experienced something that has shut you off from all the brightness and hope of living? It might be that you have been disablingly ill, and felt isolated from the community of strong healthy people who seem to have so much energy, so many choices.

Or perhaps through depression you have been locked in a dark prison shut away from the community of cheerful, purposeful people.

Or maybe a long period of unemployment, you have felt excluded from people with jobs, money, prospects and status.

Or maybe there is a lot of pain for you in your sexual orientation or behaviour. You’re afraid to be yourself, unsure, with a thousand messages about your unacceptability running through your mind.

Or maybe you have done something that you feel very bad about, something that fills you with guilt or horror, which excludes you from the community of good people.

There are so many ways of feeling oneself to be excluded, shut out, unworthy, unclean. We can each name our own shame, our own exclusion zone.

And that shame, that exclusion, that uncleanness becomes like a haemorrhage, draining all our confidence, all our sense of self-worth, of being people who matter in some way. Hope and joy and freedom seep away like a never-ending flow of blood. And the more it goes on, the more we loathe ourselves, and assume that everyone else must find us loathsome. It’s a vicious circle. The less we feel at home in ourselves, the less confidence we have to reach out to other people — and the worse we feel about ourselves.

It is important to name the exclusions — as Jesus does. It often requires considerable determination and courage not to accept the exclusion, not to go along with it. Another sad truth is that we all exclude people sometimes — even at All Hallows — often without realising it, and we do it for all sorts of reasons.

Sin is living out of our fears. Sin is about not being free. It is the seepage of the whole sense of ourselves. Its feeling like the woman with the haemorrhage of blood… But shame is not the end of the story. Like the woman, perhaps there is something else, some instinct, some deep desire or belief, even some despair, that says, every so quietly, ‘This isn’t true; this is nottrue; this is a lie’. That small voice drives us to take a risk, to reach out, to touch just the hem of a cloak, to claim back our humanity, our life, to put and end to fear. That small voice is the voice of God! The woman who touched Jesus’s cloak took a risk. Not only was she an outcast. But touching him she made him unclean too. No wonder she tried to do it secretly, no wonder she trembled when she was discovered. But she heard the voice of God — and she acted.

If human is acceptably
what I am, or you, or you,
then I am this,
and this is human,
and there is no shame
in being this.
And this is
shameless
touching
who I am.

[Kathy Galloway]

This woman would have known the rules as well as anyone.

She must have known that the rules said she would spread her contamination if she touched another person. So for her to reach out and touch Jesus would have taken a lot of guts. Both actions, that of the woman and that of Jesus when he touched the girl, both actions cut across the taboo and they brought healing.

I wonder what it would be like if our present-day taboos were to be broken: what are the possibilities for wholeness we deny ourselves because we dare not break these boundaries?

I would suggest that this is the first way in which we can be generous. By breaking the taboos which exclude people today.

Generosity does not think about the cost of breaking the taboos and crossing the boundaries, but generosity does think about the greater cost of the wholeness we deny ourselves by putting ourselves in a position where we are untouchable.

This woman touched him and in so doing brought about her own healing. She did not ask permission ‘Would it be OK with you Jesus? She knew what she needed and she took it. She literally helped herself. And then Jesus says something like ‘Good on you’. She took, and Jesus says well done. Here the man Jesus lets us know that he is there to be taken from.

It speaks of a God who is there to be taken from, and whose grace is free. As we take from God the grace freely offered we constantly open up for ourselves possibilities of becoming more fully human.

So how this text speaks to the Christian community pastorally?

Someone whose life has gone wrong may, like the woman in this story, need to be able to take from others freely, without feeling guilty. Our health or wholeness is not purely an individual matter, but those around us significantly influence our capacity and our will to wholeness — they have the potential to carry the resurrection hope for those who feel that the rest of life is going to be one long Good Friday.

So when you feel that the rest of your life is going to be one long Good Friday, have the courage to reach out to others. For each of us we should be able to take — not what we want, or what we feel we are entitled to, but what we need for our own healing — without being afraid to ask.

All around us, there are people who reach out to touch us, Christ’s body, the Church: to make contact, to be reassured that they matter, that they count, that they need not be ashamed of getting in touch with who they are: the unique, God-created people they are. We can let them touch us. The cost of letting them touch us — and there is a cost — is not so high as the cost of being untouchable.

In our Gospel reading we see a natural development from Jesus allowing himself to be touched by this unknown woman to then himself reaching out and touching this unknown girl. The extent to which we allow ourselves to be touched by others is the extent to which we in turn are able to touch in our own need.

Being Christ’s body today we need to accept that other people are going to make demands of us. And to accept that this is part of what it means to live generously.

Finally what is at the heart of what Jesus does as a man in relationship with these unknown women — he literally ‘gave himself up’ for them, he gave himself up for her.

I think of echoes of Ephesians Chapter 5 which takes the self-giving of Christ for humanity as the model for relations between engendered persons: ‘husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her in order to make her holy’ (25,26) [ Volf again].

Jesus was there at creation, and he sees male and female, made in God’s image. He, as a man, as a human being, reflects on what he had set out to do at the start of creation, and he sees how things had gone so pear shaped. He realises that a radical decisive intervention is needed to restore equality — so he says ‘let us be very clear about what is clean’. Generosity is what God would do in this situation and what God already knows. He gave himself up for her.

So my final point is about the way in which the generosity of God enables us to be men and women finding wholeness. And the way in which God finds wholeness in the mutuality of this encounter with these two women as a truly self-giving encounter.

Is Paul’s ideal in Galatians chapter 3 verse 28 that there is no male or female ‘in Christ’ implying a cancellation of gender and sexuality? No. We have to assume the permanence of gender differences, and that the wholeness that men and women seek is specific to each — but never to lose sight of the fundamental equality between men and women.

The word self-giving needs to be used carefully or it will do more harm than good. It is not about the loss of the self. We presuppose the affirmation of the self: in the Ephesians passage we read that one should love the other as one loves oneself because ‘no one hates his own body’ (5.29).

But what does self-giving mean positively? It means abandoning self-absorption and moving towards the other in order to make ‘without blemish’ and to ‘clothe in splendour’ (5.27,29). Self-giving also means the opening of the self for the other, letting the other ‘find space in the self’ — so much so that love for the other … can be experienced as love of the self (5.28).

Poetically it has been put it this way:

Your retreat reveals my existence
As my withdrawal is dedicated to you.

So where is God’s generosity? It is in overcoming exclusion certainly. But it is much more than this. In Jesus’s own self giving here, Christ loved this woman and gave himself up for her.

It is in Jesus’s own self giving and generosity, we learn how to be truly generous, truly self-giving ourselves.

Where self-giving is seen in this twofold sense of seeking to make the other blossom — and of creating space in the self for the other, that men and women should grow ‘into the likeness of that great circle of God’s self-giving love’. Amen.

Copyright © 2009 Tom Lusty

Audio

This sermon was recorded. If you wish, you can listen to the sermon online. Just click on the appropriate link below:

*Notes on the audio formats

• MP4 format
  MP4 format is a multimedia container format standard. Audio MP4 files can combine high compression with very high quality. Many media players can play MP4 files, including RealPlayer, QuickTime, iTunes, and recent versions of Windows Media Player (you may need to download a codec from www.free-codecs.com/download/3ivx.htm).
• Windows Media Player format
  Windows Media Audio is the native format of Windows Media Player, which is installed as part of Windows. If you have an earlier version, you can download version 9 (for Windows 98SE, Millennium and 2000) or version 11 or later (for Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7) from www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/download/AllDownloads.aspx?displang=en&qstechnology. These are quite large downloads [~ 10 MB or larger], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
• MP3 format
  MP3 is a commonly used audio format using lossy compression. Most media players can play MP3 files, including RealPlayer, QuickTime, iTunes, Windows Media Player and many others.
• RealAudio format
  RealAudio requires RealPlayer (or the older RealOne Player) to be installed. A free version of RealPlayer can be downloaded from http://uk.real.com/player/ (choose the free player on the left of the page) — but again it’s a large download [~ 13 MB], so if you have a dial-up connection you may prefer to ask Phil for a copy of the installation program on CD.
  
  Alternatively, you can install Real Alternative, which will allow you to play RealMedia files without having to install RealPlayer/RealOne Player. Real Alternative is free, and works well with all major browsers; it is also a much smaller download (5.7 MB). Get it from http://www.free-codecs.com/Real_Alternative_download.htm.

This page was last updated on Sunday, 28 June 2009

home | about all hallows | what’s on | worship and prayer | discussion and reflection | action in the community | projects | an open, welcoming … | weekly bulletin | site map | search site | admin |