Our Delight and Our Duty

You may have noticed that the Saint Francis pledge cards sent to you a few weeks ago are headed by II Corinthians 9:7, “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”  It’s perhaps the most famous passage in the New Testament about giving to God, and it’s a very fitting way to encapsulate one set of reasons why we commit part of what God has given us back to His Church, to use in doing His work. 

Saint Paul is identifying giving as a free and loving response to God’s generosity to us.  Giving brings us joy because it allows us a stake in the way the good news about Jesus is advancing and changing people’s lives.  Giving is a delight, a way to express what is most meaningful in our lives.  To fully account for these factors, giving should be without compulsion.  We discern carefully the kind of commitment we have been called to make.  We place our hearts in the brass collection plate.

The passage is a wonderful summary of one set of reasons why we give. 

Ponder: "sympathy that fails to recognize culpability also fails to recognize potentiality"

Vance conceded that Obama’s comments had been “well-intentioned” and that he had named “legitimate” problems. Nonetheless, he said, Obama’s comments had lacked “sympathy.” Reading “Hillbilly Elegy,” you see what Vance means. Vance is after a certain kind of sympathy: sympathy among equals that doesn’t demean or condescend. Such sympathy can’t be deterministic and categorical. In fact, it must be a little judgmental; it must see the people to whom it’s extended as dignified individuals who retain their moral obligations. For Vance, it’s “anger at Mom for the life she chooses”—recognition of her present-day freedom—that makes “sympathy for the childhood she didn’t” meaningful and humane. That’s because sympathy that fails to recognize culpability also fails to recognize potentiality. It becomes a form of giving up. If you’re a politician representing a troubled community from afar, as many élite politicians must be, then it’s easy to fall into this sympathy trap. At best, you can be a well-intentioned but nonjudgmental—and, therefore, condescending—outsider. Only an insider can speak about his community with honest anguish. “Hillbilly Elegy” is especially compelling because Vance writes with the sorrowful judgment of a betrayed yet loyal son.

Joshua Rothman, "The Lives of Poor White People" The New Yorker 12 Sep. 2016

The Spirituality of Financial Management

From the September 2016 issue of The WORD of Saint Timothy's, Herndon.

“Pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, that we may appoint to this duty.”  Acts 6:3

This summer, Rick Wilson resigned after twelve years as the treasurer of Saint Timothy’ Church.  We all owe him a great deal of thanks for the way in which he has discharged his responsibilities with steadfast patience, integrity and care.  For twelve years Rick has been a careful and diligent steward of the resources entrusted to us to God’s work. 

One almost never hears of someone committing to such a demanding (and often thankless) role in these days when so many responsibilities and social activities fill people’s calendars.  Maybe he didn’t think he would be at the task for so long when he first took it up.  But Rick has been faithful, pressing on to complete tasks week by week, and carefully training those people (two of them) who will continue in his stead.

Rick has been the classic “behind the scenes” worker, coming in on weekends and burning the midnight oil to keep up with the demands of our large and complicated organization.  A highly skilled professional, his generous donation of time and talent has saved our congregation tens of thousands of dollars in accountants’ fees.  Most importantly, Rick has maintained the trust that is absolutely essential for the management of church finances.

It’s interesting that the early church’s first major conflict centered around financial management. 

Ponder: "the chief obstacle and the only possible solution"

"In the early 1990s the cod fishery along Canada’s Atlantic coast disappeared almost overnight due to overfishing. The ecosystem was pushed beyond what it could bear, and the fishery simply and suddenly collapsed. There were no fish left. In 1992 the fishery was closed for good, and the cod population has never recovered. Neither the cod nor their prey nor the ocean itself cared a whit about the collapse. But tens of thousands of people in hundreds of coastal communities suddenly found themselves unemployed, and a way of life centuries in the making came to an end.

God said to Noah and his sons, “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.” (Gen. 9:1-3)

With great power comes great responsibility. Our reason enables us to approach the boundaries of its own capacity and gesture beyond it, toward eternity. Here lies the mystery of our status as priests and kings of creation. Reason, the thing that separates us from brute beasts, does not liberate us from animality, but it liberates animality itself, for the actualization of a potential that cannot be actualized without reason. Cod do not fall into a depression when they run up against the limits of their codness; they accept it without wonder. And people who see our own species as the chief obstacle to conservation are only half right. Man is at once the chief obstacle and the only possible solution."

Will Brown, “A Catechismof Nature: Reason and the Destiny of Animal Life”  Covenant 3 Mar 2016