Sermon
The clear purpose of 2 Corinthians for Paul is twofold. He wants 1) to get in good standing with the Corinthians after a painful earlier visit and harsh words in a letter, and 2) to get the Corinthians to continue collecting money for a gift to the church in Jerusalem. Along the way, he has been encouraging them in their faith. He does this in a few interesting ways.
He uses a lot of comparisons. He compares himself to the other false apostles in Corinth; he compares the people of Corinth to the people in other cities he has visited such as Macedonia in this case. Sometimes he uses the comparisons to manipulate the listeners with guilt. Other times he just wants to rile up a little healthy competition between cities.
This morning's reading sound like more of the same. He wants the people of Corinth to give generously and immediately compares them to the Macedonians, saying in the very first line, “for during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.” It might be easy to overlook the first part of the sentence though and not notice that he isn't attributing the generosity of the Macedonians to a better quality of people. He says 1"We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia;” He's attributing their gifts to the grace of God.
Grace, or Charis in Greek, is one of those multi-depth greek words that Paul uses to mean many things. The translation hides from us that Paul used that word charis, 6 times in the lines we read for today. Charis is translated as “grace,” “generosity of God,” and “generous undertaking,” “generous act of our Lord.”
Paul has a special place in his heart for the word charis. For him it is inseparable from the concept of generosity. Translating from ancient greek is not a one-to-one prospect. Whenever we had trouble making an English word fit the ancient greek word in seminary, our professor would explain that that was English's problem. Paul had no trouble with the word charis. It's English that doesn't share the same complexity.
Even in English, the concept of generosity doesn't get a lot of press. That's because it's a little complex.
Dr. Christian B. Miller, Ph.D., writing in Psychology Today1 says that there are three criteria that must be met in order to consider an action a generous one:
1. Giving something of value to oneself.
2. Altruistic (not of self interest; requires empathy, i.e. truly caring for the other)
3. Going above and beyond. (Gift, not obligation)
The thing being given must be of value to oneself. If I give you my CD's that I don't use anymore, that's a great gift, but it's not necessarily generous.
When giving, the act should not be in your own self interests. The act should be completely truly caring for the other. And for those that believe that there is no such thing as truly altruistic behavior because at some level, everything we do is in our own interest, Dr. Miller offers a rescue. Dr. Miller says that true altruism only happens when there is also empathy. Only then does the act become truly for the other.
Third, the act must be truly a gift, not an obligation. It's nice of me to offer my time to visit someone in the hospital, but it's part of my job.
Mind you there is nothing at all wrong with all kinds of gifts. Gifts of things we no longer use that might be of value to someone else is perfect. Gifts of our time or our skills that can be used by someone is perfect. And there's nothing wrong with super rich people giving huge amounts of money away even if it's a tax write off. There's nothing that says being generous has to hurt you in any way. Taking the Macedonians for example, being generous “during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty” does not mean that your generosity should be the thing that brings you suffering.
Paul puts it this way: “12 For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has—not according to what one does not have. 13 I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between 14your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.”
This is where we need to understand Paul's concept of grace to understand just what kind of generosity he is talking about here. For Paul, the gift to us of God's grace is something that when we are filled with it, we automatically are overflowing to the point of needing to give that grace to someone else. For Paul, when we share the grace of God that we have been given with someone else, then ordinary grace has been completed and turned into the grace of God. It is in the passing on of our gift to someone else that defines grace. One writer writes, “God's grace comes into the world, finding expression through people. Grace achieves its goal, it becomes the grace it was intended to be, only as it reaches ever more and more people.”2 In other words, we can't hang on to grace. The same commentator writes, “…every encounter with another person is an opportunity to be a channel of God's grace. In fact, not to think of grace that way is probably to cheat God and certainly to cheat others, because it arrogates grace to us as a sort of possession whose goal and end is us as individuals and not us as community.”
I'm reminded of a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert. Sadly, they share the same experience of losing their father to tragedy at a very young age. They began to talk about the role of faith in their lives. Stephen Colbert is a man of deep faith. Anderson Cooper asked Stephen Colbert why he was relatively reserved about that fact publically. Along with other more serious answers, Stephen quipped, “More Jesus for me!”
Generosity has been studied using a medical model as well as a psychological model. In the medical model generosity was shown to have a positive effect on the amygdala and reduced anxiety in those who voluntarily donated to those close to themselves. This was called targeted giving. For those who gave to a charity, where the recipient might be not directly known, there was no effect on the amygdala.3
When we in the church ask what can we do when we feel that this world is broken and frightening, the answer seems to be, to be generous. We know that what we have comes our way by God's grace, and Paul says that it's not grace until it's passed on to another. If being truly generous requires empathy, then we need to find the empathy in ourselves and set our sights on a path that will fulfill that call in us.
18th century theologian and early reformer John Wesley didn't care about all that science. He puts it much simpler. He says, “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”
The world we are in today is calling us to new things, in new directions, with new ways of responding, at a new pace. We have no choice but to be new people. We have no choice but to walk by faith, because by faith we are not alone, we are not abandoned, we are not left behind by the world. Paul encourages us to be eager in sharing our grace. 7 Now as you excel in everything — in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness— so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.”
And we will.
2 The New Interpreters Bible, Volume IX, Corinthians,p.967
3 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322940#Generosity-and-the-brains-amygdala