Sunday, November 9, 2008 ~ Zillionth Sunday in Pentecost
I John 4:17-21
The spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, tells the following story.
He was counseling a relatively young woman, a teacher in her 40s. The woman’s body was riddled with cancer, and her doctors had given her no more than a few months to live. The woman was learning to live into a stillness and spirituality that had eluded her during her busy years as a schoolteacher.
But one day, Tolle arrived at her home to find her angry and agitated. Her diamond ring, of great monetary as well as sentimental value, had gone missing and she was sure that the woman who came every afternoon to look after her had stolen it. She said she didn’t understand how anybody could be so callous and heartless as to do this to her. She asked Tolle whether it would be better to confront the woman or call the police immediately. He said he couldn’t tell her what to do, but asked her to find out how important a ring or anything else was at this point in her life.
“You don’t understand,” the woman said, “it was my grandmother’s ring. I wore it every day until I got ill and my hands got too swollen. It’s more than a ring to me. How can I not get upset?”
Tolle said, “I am going to ask you a few questions. Don’t answer right away, but think about it, and let the answers arise on their own, perhaps without words.” She said she was ready.
“Do you realize you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss?”
There were a few minutes of silence after his last question. When the woman spoke, there was a smile on her face, and she seemed at peace. “When I asked my mind,” the woman said, “it wouldn’t let go of the idea that this ring was valuable to who I am. But when I set my mind aside, I began to feel my I-Am-ness.” She said this word, “I-Amness,” and I understood her to mean not something narcissistic, her ego, her her-ness, but something very different. When Moses asked God’s God’s name, God said only “I Am.” The woman felt, perhaps, the kernel of Life in her that belongs fully and only to God.
The woman went on, “I have never felt that before. If I can feel the I-Am-ness so strongly, then who I am hasn’t been diminished at all. I can still feel it now, something peaceful but very alive.”
She began to understand that it wasn’t the ring she was attached to, but the idea of the ring that had “mine” in it. And she said to Tolle, “now I understand something Jesus said that never made much sense to me before. ‘If someone takes your shirt, give him your coat as well.’”
“That’s right,” Tolle answered. “It doesn’t mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.”
In the last few weeks of her life, as the woman’s body became weaker, she became more and more radiant, as if light were shining through her. She gave many of her possessions away, some to the woman she thought had stolen the ring, and with each thing she gave away, her joy deepened. When the woman’s mother called Tolle to let him know she had passed away, she also mentioned that after death they found her ring in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Did the other woman return the ring, or had it been there the whole time?
When I first heard that story, I had a strange reaction. Maybe you had the same reaction. At first I felt pity for the woman. Of course she was going to die. Of what consequence is a ring? All of heaven is opening up before her, and she is pouring her life-force into recrimination of the woman who comes to bathe her. Then, as I heard how things turned out for the woman with the ring, how she changed and received the gift of freedom from things, I felt something quite different. I felt envy. I wanted to have that mandate to confront my fear and ego, the cleanness of relinquishing the anxiety of ownership. I want, and perhaps you want, the freedom of knowing that nothing belongs to us, and then really living it out in acts of flagrant generosity.
And I can’t help feeling, right now, that you and I are in our own story, and somebody beyond us is listening to me preach, and watching your faces as you listen, sees your hope and your doubt, perhaps your confusion or your boredom, and that someone feels pity for us, because of course, we are going to die, too, and all of heaven is opening up before us, and we just can’t let go of the words ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and ‘I’. Jesus said, “those who lose their lives, for my sake, will find them.”
In the last few weeks of these unsettling economic times, I have been listening to what the Christians I most admire say. Some of them are famous, and many of them are not famous. They have all been saying something very different from the mainstream. They are not anxious, and they are not grasping, and they are not asking us to shop to stimulate the economy. They are not saying the words “I” and “me” and “mine.” And they are, if anything, grateful for the economic crisis. They hope it will encourage people to live within their means, to pay down debt, to sit down more often at the table and eat simple suppers with family, with friends. They are hoping it will make Christmas powerful again, a few carefully homemade gifts given in the name of Jesus, a poor child, instead of masses of mall-bought stuff. This economic crisis may be the cancer that will allow us the clarity of the woman who lost her ring.
Every Christian I admire says more or less the same thing: that Christianity is countercultural, and when we are schooling with the rest of the fish, we should question which direction we are going in. Life sends us goads—cancer, national recession, personal economic crisis—all of these experiences can make us bitter and fearful, or utterly transform our relationship with money and things, can utterly transform us, reveal the kernel of I-Am at the center of our beings. When we start to swim against the stream, we develop those muscles that will make us spiritually strong and free—and we free others as well by our giving. When we give, the gifts themselves do matter, but not as much as the transformation that happens, the energy exchange that takes place.
Swimming against the stream, developing a counterrhythm to the drumbeat of ego and materialism, takes practice. One of my mentors, the pastor of an LGBT UCC in Houston, if that’s not an oxymoron, says, “Sometimes you have to practice faith until you have it. And generosity is one of the ways we practice faith.”
Generosity doesn’t come naturally to most of us. I am raising two children. Believe me. I know that generosity is not native to even the smallest human beings. It helps to have others close by who are more generous than we are. My husband Peter is one of those. For 14 years now he has been modeling generosity for me, and I can tell you, the more you practice, the better you get.
Let me tell you something about practice. We know there are things we can choose to do that will affect our health at a cellular level. There are studies that say, if you artificially deepen your breath, it will still relax you. And even if you fake laugh, it will still aid digestion, and cheer you up. Even fake smiling will shift your mood, and affect others similarly. And if you put a number of people into a room and tell them they should expect to laugh at the speaker who is about to address them, they will immediately relax, and be more receptive to humor.
The old saw in therapy, “fake it till you make it,” holds for life of the spirit as well. I want to make a distinction here between practicing and pretending. Pretending to pray never brought anyone closer to God, and pretending to give doesn’t bless either the giver or the recipient. I’ve been to churches where they are pretending—we all have. You can smell death when you walk in, but everyone’s ignoring the smell. They are churches that refuse to talk about what really matters, and get offended if you bring it up.
I’m not talking about pretending, I’m talking about practice. Practice means doing something, really doing it, even though we don’t want to, even though we’re not in the mood, even if we’re afraid. Generosity is one of the ways we practice faith.
And we have already well begun. Last week, 3 people who had never pledged to this church before, gave Liz Davenny their pledge cards. One of those people said, “This is a stretch for me. I’m going to need help learning how to do this.” This is practicing generosity.
Last year, the vast majority of American Protestant churches saw decline in people and giving. First Church Somerville had a 49% pledge increase. We brought in 24 new members. I remind you of this not because I want to show off our church, to show up other churches—I want us to inspire them. I think that our community has begun to do what the woman from Tolle’s story did. We started living without fear about our future, and God is now giving us one. So many churches are slipping down the same river of anxiety as mainstream culture; they have relinquished their call to be radically countercultural, to develop deep counterrhythms against materialism and fear. We are far from perfect at this, but we have made a beginning.
The author of I John tells us that Perfect Love Casts Out Fear. That word Perfect, so off-putting because it hints at failure even before we’ve begun, doesn’t actually mean flawless, it doesn’t mean expert. A better translation is “mature.” Mature love casts out fear.
Mature love is love that gives not for its own ego-need, but because it has to give itself away, or die. Our calling, here in this community, is to become mature Christians.
Mature love is a church that doesn’t wait until it has balanced its budget to give money away; and it is a church that raises up 24 new members only to relinquish 5 of them six months later, to new callings and new life. It doesn’t grasp. This is also the church we are practicing to be.
Mature love is a church that doesn’t rest on its laurels and say “we’ve done enough.”
Mature love is church full of people who work harder and dig deeper to keep people in their homes, to find and welcome the lonely, to feed people with the food that they need, even before their own needs are fully met. This is the church we are practicing to be.
Mature love is a church full of people, whom other people look to in times like this and say “how can they be so calm in the face of what is happening? How can they be so full of hope, so joyful?”
Mature love doesn’t wait for the right feelings to happen by before it gives itself away. It practices generosity daily, because it knows that this is the way to cast out fear, this is the way to kill death; this is the way to break open heaven and let it pour all over earth.
