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Why we Give
In 1936, Dale Carnegie published his famous How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book that has sold over 15,000,000 copies and is still in print. Carnegie’s primary premise was that the way to gain friends and money is to pay genuine interest to people and to give lots of gifts. In his latest book Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace the Yale theologian Miroslav Volf takes Carnegie to task, arguing that at its heart the giving it represents is calculating and insincere, masquerading self-interest as generosity. Volf goes on to discuss why we have such difficulty giving truly generous gifts which are always rooted in acceptance, gratitude and participation.
We can not truly give until we have received. You can’t give away anything that you haven’t first taken on. As Christians, we believe that all comes from God so the first step is to acknowledge and accept the astonishing generosity of God’s munificent gifts. God is the source of all and as we accept that reality we find that our hearts are moved with deep and profound gratitude. That gratitude inspires in us the desire to participate in giving, sharing with others the incredible bounty we have received.
Such a graceful dynamic is free from the taint of self-interest or self-benefit. We do
not give because we expect something back but we give out of the joy we have gratefully received, moved by our passionate desire to share it freely with others. When we give with such joyful abandon, the act of giving becomes itself the gain as we participate in self-giving love of God in Christ.
If you believe those are just nice theological ruminations with no real basis in reality, I would challenge you to give it a try and see if it actually works. It is that time of year when we ask you to make a gift to this Christian community. Don’t make that gift calculating the benefits or measuring the worth of the investment. Let’s try to give out of the depths of joy in response to the inestimable and incalculable generosity of God’s gift of love and life which come to us with every breath we take.
Peace and blessings
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