11/30/05:
"To Excel in This Grace of Giving" - by Mark Jones
Good morning, and thank you for being here. Before I share my reflection, I first want to thank some additional colleagues who helped with this service:
• Mike Counter, who is helping lead our musical pieces but whose name was not included in the program
• Pam Hillert, who helped me organize the service, the program and our rehearsal
• Dan Robinson, who provided us with coaching and also with the welcoming music for the service
• And finally, Teresa Haas, the student intern who put together the printed program.
Thanks to each of you, and also to all the others who are participating in this morning’s service.
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My colleagues and I were a little concerned that when the community discovered College Advancement would be presenting today’s Common Prayer folks might decide to stay away for fear of being harangued about making year-end gifts to the St. Norbert Fund. I promise we won’t do that…but I understand Fr. Jim and Fr. Sal have still hidden the collection baskets just in case.
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We Americans are an extraordinarily generous people: According to recent IRS calculations, 70-80% of all American households give to at least one recognized charity each year.
We also know that St. Norbert people are even more generous. Our recent alumni survey indicated that 92% of all SNC alumni give to at least one other charity, often including the College itself.
The financial impact of all this giving is huge. The publication, Giving USA, reports that individuals and organizations within the United States made charitable contributions last year that exceeded $248 billion, including —$189 billion (76%) that came from individuals. Put in another context, that total of $248 billion represents 2.2% of our nation’s entire gross domestic product. Very big indeed.
Who are the lucky recipients of all this generosity? Well, standing here in St. Joseph’s Church at St. Norbert College, I am pleased to report that religion and education have been, and continue to be, the two largest beneficiaries: Last year organized religion got $89 billion or 34% of the total, while the educational sector got $34 billion or 14% of the total.
So that’s great news for us, I guess. More sobering, however, is the news that other meritorious sectors received a far smaller share. Perhaps most concerning is the fact that the human services sector—those organizations that help provide a safety net for the poor, the disabled and the disadvantaged—received just 8% of all American giving last year.
In any case, the good news is that Americans’ charitable impulse is not waning; indeed over the past 20 years, there has been only one year—2001—when the total of U.S. charitable gifts did not exceed the previous year’s total. The annual increase in charitable giving over the past 20 years has consistently matched or outpaced the average annual increase in personal income and the average rate of inflation.
Charity in America has grown despite periodic economic downturns, 9/11, major natural disasters, and periodic frenzies surrounding the leadership and effectiveness of prominent not-for-profits such as United Way, TV televangelists, Red Cross and the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, there is evidence that these apparent impediments to giving have actually prompted MORE giving.
Philanthropy has also become a major subject of media attention—and of course it’s the big gifts that generate the big news. Forbes magazine even publishes an annual list titled the “Philanthropic 400.”
Did you know that last year there were:
• 190 gifts of more than $5 million?
• 49 of them for more than $25 million?
• 9 of them for more than $100 million?
• And there were 3 gifts of more than $1 billion?
As an aside, I’ll bet many of you can even name those last three donors, especially if I gave as a hint the initials of K, G and B. (No, I don’t mean a certain defensive end for the Green Bay Packers.) That would be K for Joan Kroc, B for Mrs. Warren Buffett, and G for Bill and Melinda Gates.
But the news containing the big gifts, huge numbers and celebrity connections obscure what I think is a far more intriguing set of facts—facts that merit our attention and deserve additional research by scholars. Let me lay them out for you:
90% of all wealth in America resides in the 10% of our households that have with an annual income of $100,000 or more. Let me say that again: 10% of our citizens reside in households with yearly incomes of $100,000 or more, and they hold 90% of all our nation’s personal wealth.
The converse of that statistic, then, is that the remaining 90% of our population lives in households with incomes less than $100,000, and they collectively possesses just 10% of our nation’s wealth.
So can you see where I’m going? Surely the Krocs, Buffetts, Gateses and their fellow billionaires and multi-millionaires are the driving force behind our nation’s robust charitable picture, right? If they’ve got 90% of the money, then they must be giving about 90% of the gifts, right?
Well, if you think that, you’d be wrong. Wrong by a country mile.
In 2004, 59% of all individual charitable gifts came from citizens who have incomes of less than $100,000. Repeat: the folks who possess just 10% of our nation’s wealth gave 59% of all gifts last year. Put in other terms, the people who must devote much what they earn to pay for life’s essentials—for food, shelter, fuel and childcare—the people who therefore have only modest amounts of discretionary income—are consistently out-giving their more fortunate brethren.
So the folks who have 10% of the money make 59% of the gifts. Wow.
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Now I could take one of two paths here. One would be to bemoan the seeming lack of generosity by our nation’s affluent, to explore why they appear so parsimonious—if indeed they are—and to scold this apparent class of pre-conversion Ebenezer Scrooges.
The other path—and the one I will take during the short time I have left—is to explore this remarkable habit of giving among those who seem least able to pursue it; to ponder why they do it, what we can do to celebrate it, and how we can transfer their philanthropic spirit to others.
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I believe that what the modest but generous masses have discovered is what St. Paul described in his second letter to the Corinthians as the “Grace of Giving”.
What is this “Grace of Giving”?
Thanks in part to a sermon to by the Rev. Dr. Phil Newton of the South Woods Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee—and compliments of Google and the internet, of course—I think I have a better answer to that question than when I initially re-discovered this passage a couple years ago. Since Rev. Newton was of great help to me, I will borrow liberally from his October 2004 sermon for the next few moments.
Paul, explains Rev. Newton, wanted to help the Gentile believers in the new churches of Macedonia appreciate the debt they owed to the early Jewish believers in Jerusalem who had laid the foundation for the spiritual transformation of others that had now spread from Israel through Asia Minor into Greece. Apparently the Corinthians found this principle more difficult to grasp than did other Macedonian communities, such as Philippi, Thessalonica and Berea. But the Corinthians’ hesitation to help others was understandable, for they were in dire straits themselves. Corinth had once been an important source of gold and silver, but Rome had now seized those mines and was taxing Corinth in a punitive manner. Day-to-day survival obviously took a backseat to charitable giving.
So how did the Corinthians become transformed from reluctant givers to generous ones? By Paul’s remarkable appeals, found in 2nd Corinthians 8 and 9, that encouraged them to become so-called “grace givers”.
And what is “grace giving”? As best I can explain, it is a state that flows directly from the belief that in surrendering ourselves to God and accepting the Lord into our hearts, each of us is transformed. At its root, “grace giving” draws a parallel between ourselves and Jesus Christ, who gave up his seat at his Father’s side to join humankind on earth . . . who surrendered his heavenly riches and became poor, but through his poverty and ultimate sacrifice gave each of us the opportunity to share in those same heavenly riches. As Christ gave freely of himself to help us, Paul teaches, so should we give freely of ourselves to help others.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about Paul’s letters—especially in light of today’s sometimes arm-twisting and manipulative fund-raising techniques (but never at St. Norbert, of course)—is the fact that Paul does not resort to guilt, self-righteousness or promises that if we give we’ll somehow be rewarded by coming into more money for ourselves. Instead he encourages the Corinthians to simply share in the joy of giving to the best of their ability and to thus share in God’s grace.
God encourages us not only to give what we can, but to also to enjoy doing it. Generous giving is the outcome of God at work in our hearts.
The concept of charitable giving, or philanthropy, did not begin with Paul and the early Christian era. Confucius, for instance, exalted universal benevolence as a personal virtue, and Buddhist teachings of the fifth century B.C. sanctioned giving as a personal virtue. The Greeks, of course, are the source of the word “philanthropy”, which literally means “love of mankind.” And Judaism, the direct antecedent of Christianity, made charity (known as tzedakah) an imperative duty for all believers. The Jews also expanded the idea of charity to include a sense of social justice, which is clearly stated in Deuteronomy 14:22: “Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to the poor, and to the needy, in thy land.”
It is Paul’s first and second letters to the Corinthians, however, that take these concepts further and have since become the touchstones for the Christian teachings about charity. They are also the root of the concept of “stewardship”—the concept that posits we are not the owners of wealth but merely the stewards of it and have an obligation to use it according to God’s commands. Or as Rev. Newton stated it so wonderfully in his sermon on this subject,
“God owns everything and we are just his money managers. Rather than giving by deciding how little we can part with, we should be thinking how lavishly we can give as an expression of love and adoration for the grace that God has shown to us through Christ.
So how do I tie this all together, to make my point about “excelling in the grace of giving”?
First of all, let me say that the amount one gives and to whom one gives are personal, private matters. This morning I could have made a direct plea for grace giving to St. Norbert College itself or to other causes about which those of us here care most deeply. But I will not do that. Instead, I simply hope that you each choose to engage in supporting whatever causes that attract, engage and motivate you.
Finally, I will simply observe that as a nation, as a community, as a college and as individuals, we are all the beneficiaries of God’s grace and love. But we are also the beneficiaries of generations, indeed centuries, of grace givers who have not only given according to their ability, but have given both BEYOND their ability and done so cheerfully.
I urge you to follow their lead . . . to extend and expand upon their gifts . . . and to experience the great joy of engaging in your own grace of giving.
Thank you.
