Sacrificial Giving and Works of Love

The scriptures referred to are mentioned in the text.

On the internet there are so many misquotes and just plain made-up sayings attributed to famous people that I tend to mistrust ones that sound a bit too apt. Luckily there are websites that track down who actually said these things and exactly what they really said. For instance, the words, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” has been attributed to either Plato or Philo. In fact, thanks to the Quote Investigator website, we know it is a paraphrase of what a Scottish minister, the Rev. Dr. John Watson, wrote in 1897 under his pen name Ian McLaren: “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.” And Gandhi never said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It's a shortened paraphrase of a much longer quote of his. And Plato never said, “Love is a serious mental illness.” Rather this is a misleading translation of what he recorded his teacher Socrates said in the dialogue Phaedrus: “Love is a madness.” Far from condemning love, Socrates was alluding to the common idea that madness was sent from the gods. Sometimes it was a punishment but sometimes it granted the person insight. Socrates often reported what we would call an audio hallucination: a voice that spoke to him. He saw it as a lesser deity or guiding spirit since it usually advised him not to do certain things. So for him love was a divine madness, a kind of enthusiasm, which literally means being possessed by a god.

He probably said this because love changes people and makes us do things we normally wouldn't. Macho guys will write bad love poems to their girlfriends. Women will suddenly develop an interest in sports or D&D or certain topics they previously didn't care about. People get the name of the person they have been dating for a few months tattooed on their bodies. Love inspires us to do amazingly good things and appallingly bad things. Neurologically love looks like addiction, triggering in the brain the same neurotransmitters. It also overrides the parts of our brain that usually restrain us from reckless actions. So Socrates wasn't far wrong.

Yet love also gets us to appreciate persons and aspects of life we wouldn't usually focus on. Love gets us to trust folks and to work for the good of people other than ourselves. Love binds groups of individuals who are otherwise quite different in their personalities and their outlook on life.

This shouldn't surprise us because, as Christians, we believe that God is love and that we are created in God's image. Jesus rated two Old Testament commandments, to love God and love others, as the greatest of all commandments. To which he added two other commandments: to love our enemies and to love each other as Jesus loves us. In an earlier edition of his book The World's Religions, Houston Smith subtitled the chapter on Christianity The Religion of Love.

Yet there are many who would feel that our faith does not deserve to be known as the religion of love, largely because of the awful things that have been done by members of the church and by church bodies. I will not justify any atrocities done in Jesus' name but I will point out that people who are willing to throw out Christianity because of its failings don't seem to want to do the same thing with democracy, though the history of this country is filled with the same sorts of horrible acts. You don't abandon an ideal because some people espousing it betray its core tenets. You try to do better in realizing its aspirations.

I watched the recent HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, an engineering student and college dropout with the dream of coming up with a way of doing medical tests with drops of blood rather than vials. When I first read about the concept years ago I was enthusiastic because as a nurse there is nothing more frustrating than having a blood test rejected because you were simply unable to get enough from an aged patient with veins that had long since collapsed, due in large part to the enormous number of blood tests we continually demanded of them. We can determine your blood sugar from a drop of blood; why not other substances? So I don't think the spectacular failure of Holmes' silicon valley startup was due to her having the wrong goal but to refusing to rethink how to achieve it. She wanted a mini-lab in a box capable of doing 200 blood tests. When actual engineers said that at the very least the box needed to be bigger because of a little thing called the laws of thermodynamics, she refused to consider it. In the end, her company switched to secretly doing blood tests on commercially available machines using regular vials of blood rather than pinpricks and she lied about the fact. Had she not tried to roll out the tests before her engineers perfected the technical challenges, and had she not taken $900 million under false pretenses, she might have ended up a great hero. Instead she endangered lives by having people with insufficient training doing tests and giving out inaccurate results. Her original motivation was to catch diseases early enough that they could be treated in time. She betrayed that commendable ideal.

Our ideal is to treat everyone as a person who was created in God's image and for whom Christ died. If we do it right, people will be motivated to investigate Jesus and hopefully follow him. Though we are not saved by works, works should naturally follow being saved, the way love changes people and they just naturally do things for those they love. It was not so much the preaching of the church that drew pagans to the faith but the acts of love they saw the early Christians do, such as staying in the cities during times of plague and taking care of the sick and dying at the risk to their own lives. Their works of love brought people to examine their motivation, which is the God who is love.

As I said last time the Lutheran version of the Instruction for Lent replaces “self-denial” in its list of spiritual practices to adopt with “sacrificial giving and works of love.” And I wholeheartedly agree because too often our faith is characterized by “don't”s. Christians are better known these days by what we are against than by what we are for. And verbally trying to correct the impression won't do. People need to see us doing positive and constructive things if they are to believe our message of the good news. After all, do you think as many people would have to come to see and hear Jesus if he was only preaching and not healing and feeding people as well?

So what are the works of love we should be doing? Love is primarily an attitude of wanting good things for those we love. If they are sick, we nurse them. If they are hungry, we feed them. If they need help, we provide it. We tend to learn how to love from those who raised us. Good loving parents meet the physical and emotional needs of their children. They make sure their kids are fed, clothed, cleaned, sheltered, educated, and loved properly. When the parents are out of the picture for some reason, hopefully others step up and take over: grandparents, uncles and aunts, adoptive parents, or even an older sibling. How well they do this job will affect how well the children will be at loving others.

Loving means developing the emotional intelligence to figure out what form of love is needed in any given situation. New parents eventually learn which of the cries their baby makes means “I'm hungry,” “I'm wet,” “I'm in pain,” or “I'm lonely and need picking up.” Perceptive parents continue to construct a vocabulary of how kids, even those who can speak, express themselves in other ways and what the loving response should be. Sometimes the kid does something bad just to force the parent to put down his or her phone and pay attention to them. Studies show that as bad as abuse is, neglect is worse. To a kid, as well as some adults, bad attention is better than no attention at all.

Adults are not always forthcoming about their real needs either. They may act out not to get attention but because something else is bothering them. The resulting outburst is all out of proportion because it's not really about the immediate triggering incident. Hurt people tend to hurt people and the ultimate cause may be deeper than what we see. A therapist says she wonders not why people come to her but why did they come now. What long buried problem has the immediate situation reawakened? Her response is to listen attentively, and we can do the same, even when we don't know what to say.

Of course, often the need is fairly obvious. The hungry person needs food; the sick person needs medical care; the person with holes in their shoes needs new shoes; the person fleeing violence in their home needs a safe place to stay. Jesus gives us a very common sense rule of thumb in such situations: treat other people as we would like to be treated. (Matthew 7:12) If I were homeless how would I want to be treated? If I were suffering from an illness with few obvious and outward signs how would I like to be treated? If I were forced to flee my country because of violence, how would I like to be treated by those in a wealthier, more stable country? In fact Jesus raises the bar on this ethical rule. In Matthew 25, he says that what we do for the least of his siblings, we do for him. (verse 40) The obverse is also true: what we neglect to do for the least of these, we neglect to do for him. (v.45) It does not go well for those whose sins are that they did not help the unfortunate. (v.41) And the examples he gives are feeding the hungry, quenching the thirsty, inviting the foreigner in, clothing those who need it, looking after the sick and visiting those in prison. That's still a good place to start.

And you can help people in a number of other ways. There are groups and organizations within and outside the church that help with those in need. You can choose to participate in or support whichever groups are doing what you are interested in or have a gift for. If nutrition or teaching children to read or helping the victims of domestic abuse or aiding prisoners who are dealing with addiction are important to you, there are local organizations that address those problems. If you wish to help the victims of human trafficking or help rebuild the lives of those who were hit by disasters or positively affect the lives of those in other countries, our denomination has ministries that do that and they can always use volunteers and contributors.

Now confess: how many of you, hearing “sacrificial giving,” thought I was mostly going to be talking about money? And, yes, giving money to churches, ministries and non-profit organizations is vital. It's not like they have tangible products to sell and make money with. But, as I have learned at the jail, sacrificial giving can simply mean giving a portion of your life, your time, to others.

A lot of the problems of the world are caused by disconnected people. How often have these gunman who have made places that should be safe, like schools and churches, into slaughter sites been found to have been loners? Not introverts who merely need time alone to recharge but people who want to connect to others but somehow fail to. You know what attracts a lot of people to gangs and terrorist groups? The need to connect with others. These groups often recruit through the networks of family and friends. They target people who do not feel that they are regarded as valuable members of the society in which they live. They give them a place where they are accepted and where they have a role. Whether they are neo-Nazi groups, or terrorist cells, or street gangs, they provide a surrogate family and community for people who do not find that in their home or in their country. Providing such a person with your time, caring for them and listening to them and offering them a role in helping and healing rather than blaming and harming, can literally save lives.

Usually when we talk about Lenten disciplines we think about giving stuff up. But there are also things we can take on. Like works of love, ways to make our message concrete. God made us both spiritual and physical. He did not just give us words, breaths shaped into sounds, or squiggles on paper. He gave us Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. Jesus did not merely speak the good news; he expressed it in physical acts of healing and helping. As Jesus embodied God's love, so we are to embody it in all we do. We are not, as someone once put it, to be so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly use. We are to make real solid changes in this world.

Some Christians think our main task is to simply evangelize others. But Jesus clearly told us to take care of the hungry, the poor, the sick, the foreigner and the prisoner. He touched lepers and bleeding women and corpses. He washed dirty feet. He was a spiritual and physical being ministering to a physical and spiritual world. The two are entwined and it can get messy. But people believe you more if you show as well as tell.

And part of following Jesus is to, like him, look for opportunities to perform acts of love. Look for the neighbor unusually downcast, the coworker struggling, the person who is jumpy for no reason or uncharacteristically irritable. Don't just keep walking past like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Ask how they are. Say “What can I do?” Sacrifice some time. Give them an ear to bend, a shoulder to cry on, an arm to support them. Reach out.

Our elder siblings in faith, the Jews, have a concept called tikkun olam, repair of the world. Rabbis think that God left part of creation unfinished for us to tackle. As Rebbe Menachem Schneerson put it, “If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and what is ugly in the world, then it is you yourself that needs repair.”

Jesus came to repair us so we can repair the world. He came to make us better so we can make the world better, not just with our words but with our works. We are not just to proclaim but to reclaim, not just to reveal but to heal, not just to root out evil but to plant and nurture the seeds of all that is good.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:14-16)

This is a dark time for the world. People are groping for hope and not finding it. We have that hope. You may not feel that you are the brightest lamp around. But that reminds me of what E.L. Doctorow said about writing. He said it was “like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” So let your light shine however much it can. It will be enough to get you and whoever is holding your hand, and whoever is holding theirs and so on, through the gloom to the risen Son of God, who calls us out of darkness into his marvelous light.