Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship · April 19, 2009

Second Sunday of Easter

Prayer of the Day

Resurrecting God, we come seeking your power, healing, and energy in our lives. We celebrate the invitation to be your people and lend our lives to your service. Complete your good work within us that others might know the joy and hope of companionship with you. Amen.

A Word of Explanation

Kim Gage Ryan

Following the lovely song of praise sung by our choir, I am so glad that it is a psalm that is the Scripture for today. It steps right into the flow of all the praise and beauty of that anthem. Psalm 133 is short, and it is sweet. It is a celebration psalm. It’s a celebration of harmony, and hospitality, and generous anointing. It is a recognition of God’s blessings, both in nature and within human community. It is an affirmation of joy, well-being, and life. May it be so.

Scripture

Psalm 133

How very good and pleasant it is

when kindred live together in unity!

It is like the precious oil on the head,

running down upon the beard,

on the beard of Aaron,

running down over the collar of his robes.

It is like the dew of Hermon,

which falls on the mountains of Zion.

For there the Lord ordained his blessing,

life forevermore.

Message

Generous Living and Loving

Kim Gage Ryan

It was a simple question asked at the beginning of a meeting. It was one of those get-acquainted questions. The question was, “How did you learn about generosity?” A simple question, and yet, it took us to a deeper place than those get-acquainted questions tend to do. We listened to one another, and we heard some wonderful stories.

Dennis talked about his father, and how every Saturday of his life, he remembered seeing his father sit down at the kitchen table with the stack of bills. On top of the stack of bills was the box of offering envelopes for the church. Times were tough. But every Saturday, his father would count out what would go first into that offering envelope. Sometimes it was a dollar. Sometimes it was $5. On rare occasions was it $10. Most often, it was a combination of dimes and nickels – the top ten percent of what the week had provided.

Scott talked about how his mother would be waiting for him whenever he came home from a camping trip or an adventure of any kind. He mentioned how she would listen, and listen, and listen, so that those experiences could be integrated right down to the bottom of his toes and his soul.

Generosity? Yes.

Don talked about the woman who was his best friend’s mother, who has prayed for him every day of his life since he was 12-years-old. He will tell you he has needed a lot of praying. Fifty years! She is 93. Every day she prays for Don, and not just for Don, but for all those whom Don loves.

And I… Well, I remembered something I hadn’t thought of in a very long time. I remembered my parents’ Sunday School class at First Christian Church, in Amarillo, Texas, and how those young couples learned that a teen-aged young woman in our congregation, who was 14, and was extremely lonely. The offerings of social activities for children had dwindled as she had gotten older. So that Sunday School class organized once-a-month gatherings for teens with Downs Syndrome. I grew up going with them to parties, and to bowling afternoons, and to bar-be-cues in the backyard, and badminton games in the park, and lots of hugs and laughter and kisses.

You know something? I am still learning about generosity from my parents. I have a mother who creates beautiful cards from pansies out of her garden and out of some of your gardens (thank you very much, Susie Moore). Then she sends out words of encouragement and prayers every week. How many of you have gotten a card from my mother? [Editor’s note: Many hands were raised.]

And I have a father, who for the last 16 years, has befriended and walked along side persons who were living and dying with AIDS.

Generosity? You bet.

If our Broadway Christian children have been paying attention this weekend, haven’t they just gotten a good dose in a lesson of generosity with the Habitat for Humanity extravaganza? Generosity!

So, how do people become generous persons? Is it nature or nurture? Does it come naturally, or is it learned? Is it virtue or practice? Or all of the above? 

Certainly in our Life Focus Seminars, here at Broadway, where we help each other identify and name our spiritual gifts, those of us who have been involved in that process could tell you. There are people with generosity gifts that it is just in their DNA. It’s just who they are. It is in the fabric of their being.

Then there are those of us who have learned our generosity, through example by watching others. Then there are those of us who it takes something tremendous to break through, to reach into our heart, something out of the ordinary to open our heart or to open our hands in generosity. It is a dramatic shift.

I invite you to think about – be thinking for yourself – how is it that you have learned about generosity. How has that happened in your life?   As you are mulling over that, I want to share with you a story about one of those persons I have heard about who had that kind of dramatic shift – that rude awakening, almost, into generosity. His name is Edward W. “Ward” Brehm. In February 2007, he became the first businessman to deliver the keynote address at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC.

His business was in Minnesota. He is the founder and chairman of the Brehm Group, Inc., described as “a boutique estate planning firm catering to sophisticated tax related life insurance strategies for family investment offices.” Now, can anybody explain that one to me? I don’t know how business is going these days.

Ward was shocked, surprised, when he was asked to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. His story is a story worth being shared. I want to share his story in the words that he used to address those gathered for that prayer breakfast.

He says:

A bit of background: I am a recovering Type-A, controlling businessman. I’ve been described, even by people who like me, as someone who is often wrong, but seldom in doubt. I was a bit of a problem-child growing up. In fact, my pastor since childhood, Arthur Roener, recently referred to me as a ministerial long shot. 

They say if God wants to get your attention, a pebble will be tossed into your life. If that doesn’t work, a rock will be thrown. It that doesn’t work, a brick will be heaved. 

Africa was my brick. In 1994, Africa was not on my personal radar screen. In fact, the only thing on my radar screen was me. In the Los Angeles Airport, I bought a copy of Stephen Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I didn’t buy it to learn anything. I just wanted to make sure he got them all right. I was intrigued by Covey’s notion of paradigms – identical sets of facts that can mean something totally different because of your world view. 

Somalia was in the news at the time, and countless numbers of Africans were dying from starvation. I felt no real connection to this humanitarian crisis. My radar screen was full. 

Paradigms usually change because of shock or trauma, but I wondered if it might be possible for someone to change their paradigm on purpose. I supposed that if I were to see people starving, it would change the paradigm and perhaps much more. The thought left me nearly as quickly as it came.

But God sent me a reminder. One week later, I made one of my occasional stops at church. My pastor, out of the blue, took me aside and said, “Ward, I’m going to Africa in two months, and I would like for you to go with me.” 

I told him I couldn’t believe the coincidence of his invitation, given my recent reflections on Somalia. Then I said, “No!”

He looked at me in a strange way, and he said, “Would you at least pray about it?”

I looked at him and said, “You’re the pastor. You pray about it. I’ll think about it. But I suspect that my answer will still be, ‘No’.”

Well, he must have prayed hard, because two months later, I found myself in the Minneapolis Airport with a ticket to Ethiopia in my hand. I was surrounded, for lack of a better word, by church ladies.

(Kim inserts: “Not like Broadway’s Church Ladies, I’m sure. Surely not.)

They were hugging me. Then someone suggested we pray before we departed, so I found myself outside Gate 8A, holding hands with a group of strangers. As I stand here before the National Prayer Breakfast, I can honestly say, I uttered my first and heart-felt and sincere prayer, “Lord, don’t let any of my clients see me.”

Then we flew, 12,000 miles to Africa, and a million miles from my comfort zone. I had the high privilege of having my heart broken. I saw poverty on an obscene level. Children with flies on their eyes, and for the lack of a 50-cent medicine, doomed to blindness. The emaciated faces of famine.  Families shattered by civil war. In Masaka, Uganda, I held the hand of a 22-year-old mother as she died of AIDS, and then turned and looked directly into the eyes of four brand-new orphans. I was an eye witness. 

It put a face on the statistics. I always believed that those statistics were true, but now they were real. It got personal.

Ward experienced, not just a paradigm shift. His life changed. As a result, he is changing others lives. In 2004, Ward Brehm became the chairman of the United States African Development Foundation. It is a U.S. government agency which serves the “poorest of the poor” by making direct investments into African enterprise initiatives. He has helped implement a bold new vision that has helped the poor not be poor anymore through small enterprise and agricultural coop strategies designed and owned by Africans themselves. 

He has helped bring leaders from both sides of the political aisle together to unite in the fight against starvation, poverty, and disease on the African continent. He has used relationships built over the years to be personally involved in the peace and reconciliation efforts in Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, bringing a model of reconciliation based upon faith, friendship, and common understanding.

What happened? What happened to this Minnesota businessman?

He became a generous person. He awoke the generosity in his soul.

Now, few of us are going to be a Ward Brehm. Our radar screens are full. We’re not likely to fly 12,000 miles out of our comfort zone. When we hear a story like his, it can almost be overwhelming. Can’t it? Almost paralyzing. Almost as overwhelming and paralyzing as the morning news on just about any given day.

That’s why I want to share with you just one more part of his speech. It is my favorite part. He asked those gathered for that prayer breakfast:

Do you remember when Jesus was talking to his disciples and he asked them, when he was hungry why they didn’t give him any food, and when he was naked why didn’t they give him any clothes? The disciples said, “Lord, we never did any of those things for you. We didn’t see you.”

I always thought like most folks that Jesus replied, “Whenever you did this to the least of these, you did this unto me.” 

Except he didn’t say that. What Jesus said was, “Whenever you did this to one of the least of these…”

Then Ward asked, “How often do we forget the word ‘one’?” 

One!

Generosity. It has been described as sharing, unselfishness, free from meanness or smallness of mind or character, being magnanimous, charitable, bountiful. Certainly, it is all those good words. But there is one word. There is just one simple word that also expresses generosity. We know that word. It is the word “love.” Maybe we’re just so familiar with it, that we forget its power.

A group of four-to-eight-year olds were asked, “What does love mean?” Their observations are instructions for living generous lives.

“Love is what is in the room,” says Bobby, age 7, “when at Christmas, if you stop opening presents and you listen, and you hear it.”

Chrissie, age 6, “Love is when you go out to eat and you give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs.”

That is love.

Lauren, age 4, “I know my older sister loves me, because she gives me all her old clothes, and then she has to go buy more.”

I’m thinking Lauren is going to change that definition of love in a few years.

Rebecca, age 8, “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails any more, so my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis, too.”

That’s love. You bet.

And the best… A four-year-old child, whose next-door-neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife, and upon seeing the man sitting on his porch crying, the little boy went into his yard, climbed up on to his lap, and just sat there. When his mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing. I just helped him cry.”

That’s love. Generous, generous love!

How often do we forget the word, “One?” One person. One card. One dollar. One family. One Habitat for Humanity Garage Sale. One listening heart. One prayer. One tear. 

Plus one. Plus one. Plus one, equals generous living and generous loving.

May it be so, in my life, and in yours.

And together we say… “Amen.”

Benediction

God of Our Hearts, thank you for your generous spirit! Thank you for graciousness that is endless. In our abundance of your love, let us give to one another this love that knows no ending. Amen.