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RSSGifts to Strengthen
by The Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
11/9/2007
Pentecost 24, Proper 27, Year C
Haggai 1:15b-2:9 Ps 145:1-5,18-21 or Ps 98
or
Job 19:23-271
Ps 17:1-9
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5,13-17
Luke 20:27-38
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word. -- 2 Thessalonians 2:17
What is a gift really for?
It isn't just a transfer of wealth from one person to another -- certainly that's a transaction, but it's not necessarily a gift. A gift is a sign of investment in another's personhood. I wish you to have a portion of what I have, so I give it to you as a gift.
One of the things we have, in the world's wealthier countries, is a basic confidence that our hard work will be rewarded. This is so much a part of our reality that we don't consider it remarkable, or even notice it at all. We think everybody has it. We think everybody knows that hard work will result in prosperity. We think that, until we meet people who work as hard as we ever will, but -- for reasons arising from outside themselves -- cannot rise. War, a storm, a fire, a drought, a flood: they destroy countless things, sweep away shoes, dishes, hand tools, ploughs and oxcarts, houses, entire villages. But no destruction they can wreak is as devastating as their destruction of the capacity to rebuild one's life.
When we offer support to them across the great gulf between our confidence in our capacity and the deep wound in theirs, we do so with an eye to their future reality as well as their grim current one. A can of food is one thing -- if you're hungry, it's a huge one. But the capacity to feed oneself in the future, as well as today, multiplies a gift immeasurably.
The holiday season will soon be upon us. Sit down now and browse a little, either at your computer (http://erd.servicenetwork.com/Store/CatalogList.asp) or with the "Gifts for Life" catalogue you can request from Episcopal Relief and Development, and do a little planning for the near future yourself. Notice that almost all the gifts in the catalogue -- seeds, animals, tools, schooling -- are really gifts that build capacity. Gifts that will help the poor narrow, through their own effort, the great gulf between our prosperity and their abject need. Gifts they can grow into something for the future, not just something for today.
And let your children join you. Children understand the gift of building capacity immediately, for they also are people in whose lives the meeting of immediate needs and the building of capacity are both works in progress, right now. They need your help and they need you to help them grow. Your children know just what it's like to have both those needs.
There's a special section in "Gifts for Life" designed to attract and delight your children. And to help you build in them the most important capacity a person to whom much has been given can have: the capacity to take joy in giving service.
