Immanuel Baptist "On the Journey" Articles
On the Journey
                        Does our abundance make us more or less—generous?
            The journey back to Moscow from Klintsy is a long one. The air is hot. The road is bumpy. Weariness compounds the difficulty of the journey. You are tired from a long week of service. The emotions you experienced leave you feeling drained. For a while, your soul is caught between the pain of leaving your brothers and sisters in Christ and the joy you anticipate upon being reunited with your family. The journey back to Moscow has a way of numbing your body, mind, and soul.
            To pass the hours, I often find myself pondering things that I would rarely contemplate. As we were making our way back to Moscow this summer, we encountered substantial road construction. Yet, unlike in America, there was very little warning about the construction that lay ahead. There were no signs or cones for miles and channeling us into the proper lane. Construction just suddenly appeared with no warning—a hole in the center of the road or expansion of a bridge. This experience made me ask, “Does all our emphasis on safety in America make us more or less safe?”
            Of course, there is no way to answer this question about being more or less safe, but it does open the door to other ponderings. For instance, I pondered, “Does the abundance I enjoy make me more or less grateful?” This question then led me to, “Am I more generous because I am grateful for the abundance I have received?” There is even a more direct spiritual question requiring prayer and reflection, “Do I joyfully receive life as a gift?”
            With these questions about abundance, gratitude, and generosity running around my brain, I recalled a story John Claypool once told. John was a wonderful preacher among us Baptists for a long while before becoming an Episcopalian. From the pulpit of Crescent Hill Baptist Church in Louisville, he inspired many a young Baptist seminary student and pastor. His reputation grew across the nation when Yale invited him to deliver the Beecher Lectures on Preaching. Many of us lost a close friend when John died last September. Yet, his sermons continue to inspire us.
            The insight of life as “gift” was a foundational theological affirmation for John. He wove this insight into sermons and lectures on preaching. In a sermon entitled, “Life Isn’t Fair, Thank God!” John recalled the following story:
       There is an old rabbinic parable about a farmer that had two sons. As soon as they were old enough to walk, he took them to the fields and taught them everything that he knew about growing crops and raising animals. When he got too old to work, the two boys took over the chores of the farm and when the father died, they had found their working together so meaningful that they decided to keep their partnership. So each brother contributed what he could and during every harvest season, they would divide equally what they had corporately produced. Across the years the elder brother never married, stayed an old bachelor. The younger brother did marry and had eight wonderful children. Some years later when they were having a wonderful harvest, the old bachelor brother thought to himself one night, “My brother has ten mouths to feed. I only have one. He really needs more of this harvest that I do, but I know he is much too fair to renegotiate. I know what I will do. In the dead of the night when he is already asleep, I’ll take some of what I have put in my barn and I’ll slip it over into his barn to help him feed his children.”
       At the very time, he was thinking down that line, the younger brother was thinking to himself, “God has given me these wonderful children. My brother hasn’t been so fortunate. He really needs more of this harvest for his old age than I do, but I know him. He’s much too fair. He’ll never renegotiate. I know what I’ll do. In the dead of the night when he’s asleep, I’ll take some of what I’ve put in my barn and slip it over into his barn.” And so one night when the moon was full, as you may have already anticipated, those two brothers came face to face, each on a mission of generosity. The old rabbi said that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but a gentle rain began to fall. You know what it was? God was weeping for joy because two of his children had gotten the point. Two of his children had come to realize that generosity is the deepest characteristic of the holy and because we are made in God’s image, our being generous is the secret to our joy as well.
            With this story in mind, I wonder how often I have made God weep for joy. What am I doing with my abundance? I wonder, too, how many of us have discovered the secret of God’s joy and ours—generosity? jamie
Website last updated:  Thursday, September 27, 2006                     Website Related Questions/Comments:  Chris Cash-ccash@vci.net

Immanuel Baptist Church  -  3465 Buckner Lane  -  Paducah, KY, 42001  -  270.443.5306  -  www.immanuel-paducah.org