“Do Good and Share What You Have”

Luke 14:1, 12-14; Hebrews 13:1-16; Jeremiah 2:4-13

Jeremiah 2:4-13

⁴ Hear the word of the Lord , O house of Jacob, and all the families of the house of Israel. ⁵ Thus says the Lord :

⁷ I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things. But when you entered you defiled my land, and made my heritage an abomination. ⁸ The priests did not say, “Where is the Lord ?” Those who handle the law did not know me; the rulers transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal, and went after things that do not profit.

⁹ Therefore once more I accuse you, says the Lord , and I accuse your children’s children.

¹¹ …My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit. ¹² Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord , ¹³ for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.

Hebrews 13:1-16

{13:1} Let mutual love continue. ² Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. ³ Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured… ⁵ Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” ⁶ So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”

⁸ Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever... ¹⁵ Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name. ¹⁶ Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Luke 14:1, 12-14

{14:1} On one occasion when Jesus was going to the house of a leader of the Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

¹² He said to the one who had invited him, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. ¹³ But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. ¹⁴ And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

The Sermon

“I’m so thirsty,” said the man in the desert, “I’d sell my mother for a drink of water.”

“I have such an abundance of water,” said the man in the shadow of a great spring, “I would share it with my worst enemy.”

Sometimes the feeling is so overwhelmingly wonderful to live by that spring. You feel the water nourishing your roots.

For some, that feeling comes when they’re alone, or just very quiet, looking out across the ocean at the great, vast expanse; and they’re filled with such tremendous gratitude for being a part of this infinite and staggeringly beautiful creation.

For some it happens in worship—with 1500 people in Anderson Auditorium at Montreat, or among 25 people in a Service for Wholeness, with two elders laying hands on their shoulders and a minister anointing them with oil.

Some feel it when they’re helping in the soup kitchen. And some feel it when they’re being served in the soup kitchen. They know they are living by springs of living water.

And at those times, when no matter how much or how little you have materially, you feel your spirit splashing around in the waters of the fountain of life, it’s easy, and the most natural thing in the world, to want to live by the wisdom from the letter to the Hebrews: “Do good, and share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.”

But sometimes, you hear your spirit calling out Psalm 63: “O God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

The bills have stacked up, or the phone isn’t ringing, or the inspiration just isn’t there. “Enthusiasm” is from root words en, in, and theos, God: enthusiasm means God in you. Sometimes, you don’t feel very enthusiastic.

“Oh, the places you’ll go!” says Dr. Seuss, “There is fun to be done!”

“There are points to be scored. There are games to be won.

Fame! You’ll be famous as famous can be

With the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t.

Because, sometimes, they won’t.

I’m afraid that some times

you’ll play lonely games too.

Games you can’t win

‘cause you’ll play against you.” [1]

Sometimes, you’re that man in the desert with a parched throat, straggling after mirages; and you’re so thirsty for the fountain of living water you’d do anything, sell anything, give up anything, or withhold anything.

You would give up the best of who you are, just for a taste of that water.

That was the problem in Judah.

God said through the prophet Jeremiah, “I brought you into a plentiful land to eat its fruits and its good things.”

But the priests quit praying to God; the people who were supposed to know the commandments forgot; the rulers transgressed against God; and the prophets prophesied by some other god.

“My people have changed their glory for something that does not profit,” God said through Jeremiah. “For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and instead dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”

They’ve turned away from me who gave them everything and offered them protection from every storm, and instead they’ve put their investments into the kinds of insurance policies that can never pay their claims.

They lived for themselves, and they forgot that they were a people, the people of God. They neglected to do good; they failed to share what they had; and their sacrifices were no longer pleasing to God.

I have such tremendous admiration for the people in desolate places who have such a strong faith. You see this all over the world: they barely have enough to eat, and they live in circumstances where they are denied basic human rights and freedoms and dignity—usually on purpose—and yet they worship for hours and hours, celebrating God’s love for them.

It would be short-sighted and preposterously condescending to envy them in their situation. But I think it’s difficult sometimes in situations of health, and wealth, and abundance, and prosperity to remain that celebratory. When you’re not hungry, you don’t feel so dependent. When the money’s there and you’re feeling no pain—things that would seem appropriate to celebrate—it kind of becomes, “Hey, where’s the waiter? How come gas went up a nickel?”

A high school friend of mine, really good kid, was sitting with a number of us by his family’s swimming pool, and he realized that a fragment of tile was crumbling into the water. He said, “Oh, man! The tile’s falling into the pool!” And then he realized what he was complaining about and looked up and said, “Life really stinks, doesn’t it.”

But it’s easy to forget who we are and what we have, and it doesn’t take too much prosperity before we need the reminder: Do good and share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

A few days ago a man came to the door asking for some money for a place to stay.

I won’t just give out money, and I don’t put people up in motels anymore since a disastrous event several years ago when I got a local hotel owner to agree to let me pay for one night for a transient, and he showed up drunk and disorderly and they had to call the police.

But what do you do? We send them to the shelters in Wilmington, if we can get them in there. Beyond that…

A few nights earlier, I was driving on a long stretch of road and in the distance a car headed toward me had their high beams on. I figured they didn’t realize how far ahead those create a glare, so I flashed my lights. Just at that moment, they were already about to switch to their dimmers.

But now I had insulted them. So after they passed a car that was maybe 500 yards ahead of me, they turned on their brights again.

So I flashed mine again, in case they didn’t realize it. But they kept their high beams on.

So I flashed my brights again one time, in case they still didn’t get it. But they just kept speeding in my direction with their high beams glaring. Now they’re making a statement. Now they’re being deliberately unkind, and a little dangerous.

But I didn’t take the bait.

I thought about it. I thought about shining my high beams right in their eyes—“Let’s see how YOU like it!”—and blaring on the horn as we passed, and maybe shouting out some things that aren’t exactly Presbyterian. That wouldn’t do a lot of good, but wouldn’t it have been cathartic?

But the Biblical model of peacemaking does not include doing spiteful things to make ourselves feel more at peace.

And I remembered that old story about the guy driving his sports car around the mountain, and a lady in a station wagon was coming around a curve and saw him in his shiny new sports car and shouted, “Pig!” And he thought, who is she to call me that? She doesn’t know anything about me. So as they passed he shouted, “Cow!” And he went around the bend and crashed into a pig.

But anyway I did the Christian thing and just let the car pass; maybe they had a long day at work, or just got in a fight, or maybe they’re just jerks; I don’t know. But why not just say a prayer for that person and let it go? Plus I got to pat myself on the back for being so charitable.

The only problem is I spent more time over the next few days thinking about that mild insult than I did about the guy who had come looking for a place to stay.

And I remember the words: Do good, and share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

We have a sacred trust.

And I’m not saying I would or could do anything different the next time somebody comes to the door looking for a place to stay. But clearly, something has to change.

We make our commitment to God, and we try to grow ever more faithful, ever more useful, ever closer to the God who gave us life and then when we had squandered that gift, bought it back for us at great and terrible cost.

We can never repay what God has done for us in giving us our life back, but we can live as if it mattered.

When Jesus says, “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind,” most of the time that sounds an awful lot like us: poor in knowledge and faith; hobbled by our poverty or our wealth; limping our way through life; blindly struggling on from one room to the next.

But we have resources that can be counted as blessings, and we have something that only the Church of Jesus Christ has, and that is the central message for all humankind: that God is real, and God is love, and God lives in every corner of the world, in every atom of every bit of creation, and God’s will for everyone is life and abundant life.

And if we have it, we can share it. It is not diminished by even the most extravagant wastefulness, so give it out freely, without any expectation of any return. Risk it on the ungrateful; waste it on the lost causes; spend it on everyone you come across: God’s love is a fountain that turns deserts into streams of living water.

It doesn’t belong to us so that we can hoard it; we’re just stewards of it, until we take our own place at the great banquet table, alongside all the other poor and crippled and blind and lame, who like us could never repay our host for this staggering invitation.

In the meantime, do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

September 2, 2007

[1] Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! New York: Random House, 1990.