September 8, 2024 – Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Deuteronomy 10.17-23
I Corinthians 13.1-7, 13
The Charity Muscle: The Church, The Heart of the World
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
When the floods came for northern Vermont last year, Brookfield resident Monica Hampton suffered a double whammy. In January of 2023 her home was completely destroyed by fire, and it was a struggle for her to make the necessary repairs, but she managed to cobble the funds together to begin reconstruction. It all came to a cascading halt in July when the waters went crashing down the street and barreling through her only partially rebuilt house. To add insult to injury, her car was in the shop for repairs, but the shop was located next to the river, and when the floods came through the shop hers was totaled.
Then something magical happened. She received a call from an organization called the Hope Coalition, a collaboration of the faith and business communities. As a result of that phone call, one morning she was greeted by eight women from the Mennonite Disaster Relief Foundation. They had traveled from Pennsylvania, and still sported their traditional Old Order clothing complete with long dresses and bonnets. They arrived fully equipped for the work, and in short order they were cleaning up the flood damage, measuring, framing, cutting and installing drywall and insulation as Hampton looked on with a combination of gratitude, relief and wonder. The crew stayed at a nearby Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the personnel rotated weekly among other reconstruction projects in the area. For the Mennonite community, this is just something you do – you go out and help people in need wherever they are. When asked about who they are and why they do what they do, one of the women replied, “We want to help people that need help. Just say we’re the Mennonite girls. We’re not here for fame, we just came to help these people who need us.” But they are so much more than that. In Monica Hampton’s view, “They’re amazing. I feel more than blessed. I don’t even have words for how grateful I am. They do the work of God and they are here to help without anything in return.” Some day soon, the Hampton family will return to their rebuilt house and make it a home once again, thanks to the efforts of a small but mighty band of anonymous Mennonites.
First United Church of Christ in Somerville, Massachusetts, where I’ve had the opportunity to worship on a handful of Sundays, sits in a leafy neighborhood just a stone’s throw from Tufts University. Somerville is a thriving, somewhat upscale and definitely hip community. The church features a wildly popular annual Drag Sunday service for the LGBTQ community. But like many communities in the greater Boston area, it suffers from lack of affordable housing and is home to a growing homeless population. The Somerville Church is a large stone edifice with a busy sanctuary most Sunday mornings, but it also has a lot of unused space during the week. Their minister, the Rev. Jenn Macy, initiated a conversation with her congregation about how the church might be called to address the homeless community, looked around the building, and realized the answer was sitting all around them. So after doing the necessary due diligence, the church reconfigured their ground floor space and now provides a 26 bed space for homeless adults. “We consider this work central to our call as a Christian church and are convicted by the Gospel to center the needs of the most vulnerable,” Jenn told a reporter earlier this summer. “The unhoused in our neighborhood were underserved, so we began to dream about how our congregation might help.”
Now it won’t surprise anyone to learn that for some reason the church’s neighbors weren’t too keen on the idea of locating a shelter for the homeless in their neighborhood and are taking the church to court. As one neighbor stated without a trace of irony, “Doesn’t the Bible say to love your neighbor? We’re neighbors too!” As though the books of Deuteronomy and Leviticus were written to protect neighborhood property values. The court, which is extremely reluctant to determine what is and is not legitimate church mission, is unlikely to agree.
There are many edifying stories of people of faith reaching out in ways large and small to make the lives of their near and not-so-near neighbors more livable, more humane. You heard me speak a few weeks ago about what our sister churches in Western Connecticut did when the towns of Seymour and Oxford and Southbury suffered violent flash flooding. They did not just open their wallets, they opened their doors and their hearts, and provided shelter to the temporarily homeless.
In a study for the Philanthropy Roundtable, an outgrowth of Philanthropy Magazine, researcher Karl Zinmeister writes, “In study after study, religious practice is the behavioral variable with the strongest and most consistent association with generous giving. And people with religious motivations don’t give just to faith-based causes – the are also much likelier to give to secular causes [as well].”
The Old Testament is rife with commandments and mandates to minister to the needs in our midst; this morning’s reading from Deuteronomy is but one: “The Lord your God… is not partial and… executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and loves the stranger, providing them with food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And we remember well Jesus’ great commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” When he said this, he was quoting directly from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
Time and time again, when the world has a great need, or when a neighbor has a small need – small to us perhaps, though great to the neighbor themselves – it is people of faith who step into the breach. Now I am not talking of people with a specific church or temple or mosque affiliation per se, although this is certainly true, but people who are grounded in the spirit of God are often those who are first to respond to the needs of others. Boston Globe writer Jeff Jacoby wrote about this last month.
“From the earliest days of American history, religious faith and practice have been the foremost drivers of charitable giving and good works… None of this means that people who are irreligious or even anti-religious cannot be openhanded supporters of charities or avid volunteers helping those in need. Without question there are avowed atheists and secular humanists who give generously of their money or their time to feed the hungry and alleviate suffering… But no force in American life has ever matched religious belief in its ability to translate “love the stranger” and “love thy neighbor” into organized, effective and ongoing action.”
And I think he is correct. Without needing to blow our own horn, Jacoby is correct. To me, the church’s inclination – and respecting Jacoby, who is a faithful Jew, the temple’s inclination, and the mosque’s inclination, and the inclination of so many communities of faith – is always and ever in the direction of charity. To most folks, the idea of charity has a somewhat limited focus, to be generous toward those in need. And while this is true, it is only partially true. As Paul reminded us via the King James Version of the Bible, charity is broader, deeper and larger than the inclination toward doing good unto others. We are all familiar with Paul’s words in I Corinthians, “Faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” But King James helps us to understand the depth of this love; in that 17th century translation we read “And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; and the greatest of these is charity.” Simply put, charity is love. Charity is providing for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the outcast, the impoverished, the displaced, not because of their need to receive – let me say this again: Charity is providing for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the outcast, the impoverished, the displaced, not because of their need to receive – but because of our need to love. “Love one another as I have loved you.” Love is the heartbeat of the church. Charity is the muscle that pumps the lifeblood of the church which is the heart, to the arteries and veins and nerve and sinew of the community and the world.
Together you and I make a difference. Through our presence, through our promises, through our prayers, through our practice, we supply the oxygen that feeds the circulation system of love and justice and grace to our community and our world. As I was writing this in my office yesterday with the windows wide open, I could hear the encouraging shouts of our neighbors cheering on the bicyclers riding in the Closer to Free Ride to benefit the Smilow Center in the battle against cancer. I love that our church is a rest and safety stop for the riders. I had a conversation with one of the volunteers as she was setting up a little after 8:30, and she was excited about providing water and energy bars and whatever assistance the riders might need, because cancer had struck her family as it has so many others. My mom received treatment for her cancer at Smilow, so I know from experience all the good work they do. None of the volunteers are paid, they are just doing this to help provide hope and life for others. I did not ask if she was a member of any particular faith community, all that matters is that she was doing this because it would help people she is unlikely ever to know. The same can be said for all of yesterday’s volunteers and riders. The same can be said whenever you and I reach out to a stranger on the pulse and impulse of love and charity. As Jacoby reports,
“All the areas in which charitable behavior is disproportionately motivated by religious belief or association, such as sheltering homeless people, resettling refugees, adopting children and assisting disaster victims [makes it] clear why the US Department of Housing and Urban Development recently characterized faith-based organizations as ‘the bedrock of our society.’”
The bedrock of our society? Absolutely, but I will continue to prefer the phrase, the heartbeat of our world.