Sharing Is Daring
Philippians 4:10-13
Home Moravian Church, October 20, 2024 (Commitment Sunday)
If you’ve been worshipping with Home Church over the last couple of months you’ve discovered we have some daring people in our congregation. People who have tried new things. People who have stepped up for ministries that challenged their comfort zone. People who, in making connections through those ministries, have opened their lives to new friendships. People who have even been brave enough to think about a plan for financial giving to the church—and even been brave enough to get up in front of the congregation and talk about it! All these members, with all their courage, have spoken in worship about taking the Stewardship Committee’s invitation: Dare to Be Generous!
What’s so daring about generosity? Well, for one thing, it’s counter-cultural; and it’s always daring to stand against the prevailing culture. Our society tends to make celebrities of the rich, to the point where those who live humbly and unselfishly, sharing their resources with others, giving their lives in public service, might be demeaned on national platforms for being humble and unselfish. That shows the strength of the tide against generosity. Just being generous with one’s money is discouraged in a society with a scarcity mindset and a fixed belief that the distribution of resources is a zero-sum game: That is, “the belief that success, especially economic success, is possible only at the expense of someone else’s failures.”[1]
And there are ways, so many ways, to be generous beyond the sharing of money—all of them requiring bravery. To share our time, or our space, our skills, or even—hardest of all—our personal journeys, our emotional baggage, our hopes and our dreams, we have to trust that we can manage the consequences of the sharing. Now it all sounds a little more challenging, doesn’t it? No wonder the Stewardship committee sees generosity as daring. How does anyone find the courage to take that kind of dare?
It helps to know people whose daring generosity can inspire us; and one example I’d like to look at today is the Apostle Paul. Paul, the man who preached Christ throughout the Mediterranean world, helping to found, guide, and encourage assemblies of Christ-followers everywhere he went. The man who, as a consequence, suffered imprisonments, floggings, a stoning, a shipwreck, hunger, thirst, cold, and, as he writes in second Corinthians, “danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, dangers in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea.” Paul did it all because of a powerful personal encounter with the risen Christ. Maybe Christ dared him. If so, he took the dare.
In urging a “dare to be generous,” we of the Stewardship Committee looked to Paul for inspiration; and we found it in his letter to the Philippians, which he wrote from prison.
When a man imprisoned for his faith writes that he’s rejoicing, we are bound to listen. He is in prison because he dared to share his experience of Jesus Christ. How did he bear that? Not only bear it, but how, instead of complaining of his sufferings, did he write a letter full of joy, gratitude, and love for the community of believers? His simple explanation is our verse for inspiration, Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
How did it feel for Paul to be strengthened by Christ? How does it feel when Christ strengthens you? How can you tell you’re being made strong? Is it like the old Popeye cartoons, where Popeye would suck down a can of spinach and suddenly his biceps would inflate like balloons, so that he could vanquish a bad guy? What does it mean, that Christ is strengthening you? Does it mean you can bear the most unimaginable horror without grief or rage? Does it mean you never cry?
I don’t think so. If I thought Paul suffered beatings and shipwrecks and stonings and imprisonment and never got sad or angry, I wouldn’t think Paul was strengthened by Christ. I’d think that Paul was not human.
But that’s not who I see in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, or any of his letters. I don’t see a man who never cried, never complained, never felt rage or grief. What I do see is a human who feels surrounded by a community of believers. And I think he feels the presence of Christ through the presence of the Christian community that is always right there with him in his heart, mind, and jail cell.
How is it that he feels, so near and so real, the presence of the believers of Philippi? He feels it in their sharing. He prays for the Philippians “because,” he says, “of your sharing in the gospel.” “You hold me in your heart,” he says, “for all of you share in God’s grace with me.” Paul is confident that he accompanies the believers on their spiritual walk and plans to “share abundantly” in their “boasting in Christ Jesus” when he is physically with them again. He encourages them to focus on “any sharing in the Spirit.” He says it was kind of them to share in his distress. Right near the end of the letter, he also thanks them for sharing their resources for his financial support.
This level of sharing takes courage, because it makes the believers vulnerable. As followers of the gospel, they are vulnerable to the same persecution he suffers. To share in God’s grace, they must make themselves vulnerable, as Paul is, to God’s all-seeing eye, which searches and knows every heart. If Paul is to share in their “boasting in Christ,” they must open their personal spiritual walk to his accompanying presence. To share in Paul’s distress, their hearts must be open to empathetic grief. With all of this vulnerability, sharing their financial resources might be the least daring thing they do.
What strengthens them to bear their vulnerability? The most important sharing of all, which Paul commends to them when he says, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” When a community of believers strives every day to share the mind of Christ Jesus, they are strengthened by the spiritual journey; strengthened by their relationships as, in drawing nearer to Christ, they draw nearer to each other; and strengthened by carrying in their own minds the mind of one who “did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.” They are strengthened by Christ’s sharing in their humanity. Strengthened by Christ’s presence, in all his divinity.
In sharing we make ourselves vulnerable to one another—and that is an act of great generosity. In our life together at Home Church, we share as Paul’s community shared. We share in the gospel. We share in God’s grace. We share our spiritual walk. We share one another’s grief, as well as one another’s joy. And we try, we do try, to share in the mind of Christ Jesus; we pray constantly to share more and more in the mind of Christ Jesus.
While our pledges of financial support are vital to the work of Home Church, they are still just tokens, standing in for all the ways we are generous in our love, our faith, our sharing. Important as our pledges are, generous as our pledges are, I suspect they are not the most daring thing we will do as we continue our journey together.
Maybe the most daring thing we do on any given day is what Paul does all through his letter to the Philippians. He rejoices. Even in prison, he rejoices. Surrounded and uplifted by the constant presence of Christ Jesus and his Christian community, he feels himself strengthened; and he feels grateful. Grateful people know they have occasion for rejoicing whatever the circumstances.
We are strengthened by Christ’s sharing in our humanity. We are strengthened by Christ’s presence, in all his divinity. We are strengthened by all that we share as Christ’s community. Thus strengthened, we not only can dare to be generous; we can dare to rejoice. Amen.
[1] Rozycka-Tran, J.; Boski, P.; Wojciszke, B. (2015-03-19). “Belief in a Zero-Sum Game as a Social Axiom: A 37-Nation Study”. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. 46 (4): 525–548. (Citation from Wikipedia, “Zero-sum mindset.”)
