On the Difficulty of Giving and Recieving

The Rev. Jeffrey A. Geary
Setauket Presbyterian Church

The Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Genesis 18: 1-21 Romans 12:13 Matthew 18: 23-35
August 11, 2002

"Ignorance is Bliss." These were the final words of a conversation I had not been privy to, uttered by one of the guys reclining on his bunk one evening after work during the senior high mission trip. Though I knew nothing of the conversation that had led up to them, or if they truly represented a retreat from understanding, I could not help myself adding in reply, "Knowledge is power."

Well, that effectively ended the conversation, but it initiated some very fun verbal sparring. "Power corrupts" I was told, which somewhat took me back. "And absolute power corrupt absolutely," I thought to myself. For a moment I didn't know what to say as I watched the power of knowledge turn corrupt in conversation and reinforce that perhaps there are some things it is just better not to know about. Perhaps. It's true that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing," but we are also taught by Jesus to love God with our whole mind, as well as our heart, soul and strength. So digging deeper, I leaned upon Socrates and concluded: "The unexamined life in not worth living."

Mission trips are about far more than hard work, good deeds and good fun. They are all that, but they are also about examining life. They're extended opportunities to look more closely at the world in which we live, the people with whom we worship, and the faith which holds us together. They are about raising questions relating to poverty, justice, and our responsibility toward one another as citizens of the kingdom of God. The knowledge we gain is often found with difficulty and after much searching, some of it only after we come home. Learning this way leaves our assumptions challenged and our values questioned, a process that is not necessarily fun and does not yield easy answers. "Yes or no," I was told at the end of the week by another of the guys, totally frustrated that every question he asked was answered by me either with another question or with a dissertation. "All I want you to say is yes or no."

But the truly big questions in life don't have simple answers. Socrates again: "wisdom comes in knowing that we don't know as much as we think we do." We discovered that there is a lot we don't know about this Appalachian region of our country, its history, or about entrenched poverty and politics; as well as much we still have to learn about ourselves, about our own community and about God. I want to let you know that the youth you commissioned for service in Kentucky struggled hard while they were there, not only with their tools but with themselves. And I'm really proud of them. Many of the conversations we began on this trip will be ongoing; some may, if the kids have their way, find their way to a session meeting; all of them were more important than we realized while they were happening.

I want to let you in, this morning, on one of the struggles I found most interesting. It has to do with a perception that there are some who deserve help and others who do not, or at least some we feel good about helping and others we feel should help themselves.

I think much of the struggle came from the fact that the people whose homes we were repairing were not the poorest of the poor. They were needy but not destitute. One team from our church worked on a new home construction in a developing neighborhood, backfilling the foundation and hanging new vinyl siding on the house. Our other team painted the home of a newly married couple, Chris and Krystal, both 19 years old. Their home was run down, but it was on a paved road in a neighborhood near the highway, not up a holler or clinging to a mountain. Chris held a steady job at the Safeway grocery in Cumberland.

I think we wanted our families to be poorer, to truly deserve the help we were offering. We didn't want to offer help to someone unless they were REALLY poor, really needy, really destitute. It didn't matter that these families needed help and could not do better themselves. I think that if the families we were working for seemed truly poor we could have felt good about the work we were doing and good about ourselves. Instead, as the week progressed, we questioned the value of our work: Were there not others who needed our help more? Did these folks, one student inevitably asked on Wednesday, deserve our help?

And there it is: did we travel 900 miles and give up 9 days of our summer because someone deserved us?

There was another aspect to this trip which I should mention. The families whose homes we were working on were paying for the work. Granted it was greatly discounted, amounting only to the cost of materials with our labor donated, but that simple fact established an exchange and meant that we were not simply giving, but working with these families to improve their homes. I'm not sure which upset the kids more, the fact that the families we were serving had to pay for some of the work, or that they could afford to pay for some of the work.

Since those we worked for did not so obviously need us, we had cut out from under us the ability to feel proud of ourselves simply for being summer missionaries. And for a group of teenagers on a summer experience unlike anything many of them had ever shared before, this pride is important. And we found way throughout the week to nurse it. Once, late in the week when a few of the kids got in trouble from the camp director, they suggested that their behavior ought to be overlooked because they had given up a week of their summer to do good.

But in small ways, the tables were turned on us.

No matter how often I go on mission trips with the kids, I am amazed to watch as our charitable intentions are transformed into experiences of giving and receiving hospitality. The homes we work on begin as job sites: we arrive ready to do good works and help others. But somewhere along the way we realize that there is more being exchanged. We listen to and share stories about our lives. We are thanked not for the work but for the smiles, humor, excitement we brought to a home. Packing up the last day, one student was asked by the contractor if he could have his picture taken with her, after which he said "thank you." "I've never been thanked for having my picture taken," she said. "It's only me!"

Traveling home, we spent the night a Round Hill Presbyterian Church in Winchester, Virginia. When we pulled in, four elders from the congregation had prepared dinner for us - more food than we had seen all week. A neighbor opened his swimming pool to us. As the elders went home they let us know that the fully stocked refrigerator was all for us, as were the chips, desserts, cookies and other snacks laid out on the table. Breakfast would be served at 8:00 am. Later that night, one student, his hand in a jar of snack mix said, "I can't believe this is all for us. Look at this. We don't deserve this!"

We've often been told that it's more blessed to give than receive, but it is also easier to give than receive. Giving, when it's charitable, can make us feel good about ourselves, our ability to share and our willingness to share. And when we give we decide to whom we will give and under what circumstances. We decide who is deserving and who is not.

Giving doesn't challenge whether we deserve what we have to give.

But receiving can shake us up. It exposes us to an economy based not on merit but on grace and need, and that is at the very heart of the gospel.

Now the protagonist in our gospel story needed the master to forgive his debt. In this he has an advantage over us. Too often we don't realize that we are in debt to circumstances and to other people, for what we possess. And our well-being and possessions allow us to live in isolation from others. But this guy has a head start on us. He knows he's desperately in debt and he can never repay. And then, inexplicably, his debt is forgiven. But even when the debt was forgiven, it didn't shake him up. He thought he had the right to continue to decide who was worthy and who was not.

One of the learnings that the mission trip brings home to our church is this question: will we behave like the protagonists in this story, or will allow God's grace to make us able to receive and give - understanding our destiny to be inextricably tied to the destiny of our neighbors?