Ain’t I Great? Text: Matthew 6:1-4 Date: March 6, 2011 Hope United Church
(PCUSA) By Rev. Dr. James R. Berger
One day a boy took his baseball and bat out to the field. He was practicing some
positive thinking. He said to himself, “I am the greatest batter in the world. Here’s the
pitch, and, …” He swung at the ball and missed. Undaunted, as would be any great
batter, he picked up the ball, tossed it up again, saying, “Here’s the pitch, and …”
Woosh! He missed again. Still muttering about how great he is, he tried a third time
and … struck out!
So what did the greatest batter in the world say? “Yes, I am the greatest pitcher in the
world!”
Ah, yes. Self-confidence, a positive world view. Or, is it arrogance? Dizzy Dean, the
pitcher and sports-caster used to say, “If you can do it, it ain’t braggin’.”
When you think about it, bragging or pride is a form of coveting. It is coveting a good
name, a great reputation. It is the willingness to do whatever it takes to be noticed, to
be approved, to be esteemed, to be loved.
People coveting a good name or good reputation have been all over the news in this
past week. Actor Charlie Sheen was rambling on about how exceptional he is in
interviews, claiming that he shouldn’t be judged. After all, he has tiger blood and Adonis
DNA in his veins. He claimed that he has cured himself of his addiction. Of course he
made that claim despite having failed the drug test.
Bernie Madoff was interviewed by The New Yorker magazine, and told his interviewer
that he is a good person. He also asserted that everyone of his investors will recover
their principal investment, so in the end will lose nothing. At least to his way of thinking.
Col. Moammar Gaddafi told Christiane Amanpour that his people love him. He wasn’t
the problem. Al Qaeda was the problem, because they had administered drugs to those
rebels, making them delusional.
There is no shortage of hubris on the airwaves this week.
Now, Jesus didn’t have CNN or Fox News to contend with. But spiritual hubris and
pious pride were all over the place. He was dealing with a bunch of people who actually
trumpeted their piety for the world to see. Hey, ain’t I great? I’m a good person and I
want the whole world to know!
Let’s play a game of “What If …?” Imagine that as you arrive at church for worship, you
see a man standing on the front steps. His eyes are closed, his hands are clasped, and
he’s praying. Praying out loud, in a very loud voice. He, of course, takes no notice of
your disturbed glances as you walk past.
As you pass by he is shouting, “Blessed art thou, O Lord, to have a servant such as me.
I thank thee, O Lord, that I am not like those wanton sinners driving past this church on
their way to the golf course or to their boats to go fishing on the Lord’s Day. How
blessed art thou to have a servant such as I, one who prays daily to you, one who gives
generously of all that I have to feed the poor, one who fasts every week because of my
devotion to you. I thank thee, O God, that I am such an exemplary servant of yours.
Receive my humble thanks for this privilege.”
And on, and on he goes, as people file into the church.
Now what would your thoughts be, as you hear that? Probably, “I hope he doesn’t
come into church with me!” Right? Why not?
It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Yet that is what was happening around Jesus. The rabbis
taught that one should practice one’s piety privately. But that was certainly not what
was happening. The three greatest virtues in Judaism were almsgiving, prayer and
fasting. And the greatest of these was almsgiving. So if you wanted to get on the fasttrack to piety, you practiced almsgiving. And you did in public, with lots of press
coverage. What good does it do you to do good if nobody knows about it?
There is an old poem that says,
The codfish lays a thousand eggs,
The little hen but one.
But the codfish doesn’t cackle
To tell us what she’s done.
And so the mighty cod we shun,
The little hen we praise.
Which only goes to show again
That it pays to advertise.
Jesus begins a series of lessons on these virtues. Today he talks about almsgiving.
Next will be prayer and then fasting. He tells us to do all of these virtuous things, but
not to make a big deal out of it. And he assures us that we shall be rewarded for our
actions.
At issue is that we should do good things, why we do good things, and what’s in it for us
if we do them. In other words, the actions, the motives and the rewards.
We know that we should do good to others. There is no question of that in our minds.
But as we learned in last week’s lesson, we are afraid that we will be told to love those
we don’t like, that we disagree with, or who are different from us. We don’t like that sort
of change.
We don’t mind having our TVs bombard us with reminders that we need to upgrade our
lives. But some of those same people have resisted church services which include calls
to confess our sins and change our behavior. A colleague told of shaking hands after
the service at the door, when a woman stopped. She said to him, “Pastor, did you write
that prayer of confession?” Of course he had, and she knew that he had. Then she
said indignantly, “Well, I just want you to know that I didn’t do all of that!”
Some people today don’t mind if Revlon tells them they look awful, but could be
beautiful if they just changed everything about themselves. Yet they don’t like worship
services that suggest the need for confession, and so reform. But as long as we live on
this side of the new creation, we cannot encounter God without that Biblical sense of
“Woe is me!” coming over us.
The motive for our giving is to be in response to God’s love for us. Jesus cautions us
that if we broadcast the fact that we are giving in order to be famous or to be seen, we
will get the reward of recognition by the world. But God will not honor such actions. For
that is giving because we covet the recognition. God is interested in our actions done
quietly out of concern for others.
So if you give a large gift to your college, or to a medical center, and are identified as a
donor, that’s fine. But do not confuse that with service in God’s name. If you want to
give that same amount to the church (which I hope you want to do), do it simply and
quietly. What matters to God is the commitment that motivates you to make the gift.
But suppose your motives are mixed, should you wait until you are sure of their purity
before you start giving? No. It is better to learn pure motives by practicing the art of
giving than to horde the money or spend it while you wait for the proper motives to
develop. The motive develops in the giving. Practice makes perfect.
On a stifling June afternoon in Philadelphia, New York Yankees Manager Joe Torre was
about to step into the air-conditioned comfort of the players' entrance at Veterans
Stadium when a middle-aged man called his name. Torre is not one of those celebrities
who walk past people head down as if they didn't hear a thing. So he stopped,
assuming he would be asked for an autograph.
He was wrong. The man said, “I met you almost 30 years ago. I was in high school, and
I wanted to drop out. My parents asked you to talk to me one day because they thought
I might listen to a ballplayer. They were right. I'm a lawyer now. I just wanted to tell you
thanks.”
Torre was pleased by the story, albeit a bit stunned. He said, “I had a little, tiny, vague
memory when he brought it up. But that was it.”
Before he could take the last few steps to the players' entrance, Torre was stopped
again, by a younger man. “Twenty years ago I had cancer,” he said. “They thought I
was terminal. You were with the Mets. You came to see me and gave me a pep talk. I
never forgot it. When you were sick, I realized I never said thank you.” Again, Torre
was rendered almost speechless.
[Later, he said,] “It makes you realize what all of us in sports can do if we put just a little
effort into things. And I mean just a little. A word here, a pat on the back there, a phone
call. Right or wrong, because of who we are and what we do, it can have a tremendous
effect on people. It's something I wish we could all be a little bit more aware of.” John
Feinstein, Pride of the Yankees, The Washington Post Magazine, July 25, 1999, 7.
You don’t have to be a sports star to make a difference. All you have to do is care
enough to act, regardless of the motive. If the left hand knows what the right hand is
doing, we are serving ourselves, and our ends and egos. We must allow the old person
within us to die, and that takes time, it is gradual, learned process. It must be willed,
continuous, and disciplined. In the end, it becomes automatic and natural, a following
that is lived discipleship. (from Bonhoeffer)
Some people give out of a sense of duty or obligation. It is, after all, what one ought to
do. It provides one with a sense of well being to help others less fortunate.
Unfortunately, it can also create an attitude of condescension on the part of the giver.
When someone gives from a pedestal with a sense of calculation, from a sense of duty,
they may give generously of things, but the one thing never given is yourself. The
giving is incomplete. Jesus saw this in the people around him.
In his book, Parables From the Back Side, J. Ellsworth Kalas tells how his church
purchased Christmas presents for ghetto children and prisoners' children. He confessed
immense pride in the love and generosity of his congregation. He says, “Then I was
troubled by a question: Suppose some of the welfare mothers had begun coming to our
church, or suppose one of the convicts just released from the state penitentiary had
come - how would my people respond? Would they work as hard to bring such persons
into their adult Sunday school classes as they did when a bank president or a college
professor joined? Would they ring the bells of heaven as happily for them as for the
'good people' who appeared? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 24. What would you do? What
would I do?
Jesus did not condemn the people he saw for their giving, but for their arrogance and
condescension.
And sometimes the givers covet the sense of prestige that comes with the gift. It may be
the legacy of having your name on a university building or a medical center. Without
the recognition, the odds are this person would not give at all. Of course it is proper to
acknowledge and thank the giver. Nevertheless, when a person gives to bring glory to
him or herself rather than to God, all they have done if to gratify their own vanity and
sense of power. When celebrities or politicians seek to identify with those in need, the
entire press corps is there to document it. Yes, they are doing good. But they also
seek the prestige it brings. When I am good so that others think highly of me, I deny my
Lord.
There’s another motivation for giving. This is the one that springs from the heart. You
give because you cannot not give. You have to because that is who you are. It flows
from the abundance of love and compassion in one’s heart that will not allow you to do
less. This is the giving of joy, in which one learns that the reward one receives is that of
satisfaction and peace. It is only as Christians that we discover the satisfaction of a
non-material reward.
Our world is oriented to material rewards. Jesus promises that our reward will be great
in heaven. That only makes sense to the Christian. The great paradox of Christian
reward is this—the person who looks for reward and who calculates that it is due to him
does not receive it. The person whose only motive is love, and who never thinks that he
has deserved any reward does, in fact, receive it. The strong fact is that reward is at
one and the same time the by-product and the ultimate end of the Christian life.
The great English poet George Herbert was a member of small group of friends who
gathered to play chamber music. One evening as he was on his way to such a
gathering he came upon a man whose horse-cart had gone off the road and was stuck
in the mud of the ditch. Herbert set down his violin and helped the man get the cart out
of the muddy ditch.
It was a long and dirty job. By the time he reached the home of his friends, it was too
late for music. One friend said, “George, you have missed all the music!” George
Herbert smiled and replied, “Yes, but I shall have songs at midnight!” He had the
satisfaction of having done the Christlike thing.
Jesus calls us to do good things from simple motives. To help others without thought of
our gain. To consider not what is in it for me, but whether I am responding as God
would have me respond. At issue is understanding that our Reward is in heaven.
In other words, it is not how much money we get for doing good, or how many people
know about it. What matters is that I understand that God’s love impels me to be
compassionate towards others.
Our giving must never be the grim and self-righteous outcome of a sense of duty. Still
less must it be done to enhance our own glory and prestige before the world. It must be
the instinctive outflow of the loving heart. We must give to others as Jesus Christ gave
himself to us.