‘Tis better to give than to receive'...or so they say!

During this time of year I am always reminded that it is better to give then to receive. Not because it’s what we’re supposed to do, but because I feel good when I give and I have a hard time receiving. For years my family and friends have thought my giving/receiving theory was neurotic, but now science has proven me right.

A recent study from Harvard University found that when one gives a gift to another, the brain releases dopamine, (the same response your body has to eating a piece of chocolate cake or being intimate), eliciting a feeling of satisfaction that would not be felt if you were the one receiving the gift. But beyond the physical response, though I am grateful science is now on my side, there is the spiritual side to giving and receiving that our lives testify to.

There is no worse feeling in the world than to be left empty handed. Have you ever received a Christmas gift from someone and not had one to give in return? Our reaction, typically, is to lie. ‘Oh, I accidentally left yours at home!’ ‘The manufacturer is late in shipping it.’ Then you hurry out and buy something for them, or you recycle a gift that someone else has given you.

At this point in your life you are prepared for most of these encounters. So, you spend your time Christmas shopping buying gifts for others who are going to get you something, not because you want to get them something, but because you don’t want to be left empty handed. You don’t want to simply be the receiver. There is no worse feeling in the world than to receive without the ability to give back; to be able to reciprocate.

If this is the case for you (as it has been for many, myself included), no longer can the thing given be called a gift, but an attempt to ‘keep things even.’

Many spend their lives keeping things even. When you go out to lunch with a friend and you pick up the check, after a lot of tug of war, there is an unwritten rule in our hearts that says, ‘They pick up the next one.’ The next lunch rolls around and the tug of war over the check ensues. Except somehow, you end up with the check again. In your mind you think, ‘Ugh, I picked it up last time,’ while you cheerfully put your credit card down to pay.

If in receiving we feel that we need to give and in giving we feel that we are entitled to receive, then there is no such thing as a ‘gift.’ In our society, there is no understanding, practically speaking, of ‘something bestowed or acquired without any particular effort by the recipient or without its being earned’ (www.dictionary.com). This is what makes Christmas feel like an obligation to some and Christianity too much to handle for many.

Most of us can make up the occasional lunch to our friends and can go out and get the gift (that is not really a gift at all) for the neighbor who gave you a garden gnome, but when it comes to God, we are incapable of giving anything to him in return for the gift he has given us in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the ultimate gift that is without equal.

It requires a great deal of humility to receive a gift and my prayer this Christmas is that we would receive into our hearts the greatest gift of all, salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. And thereby, enable our hearts to give without expecting anything in return, and receive gifts for what they are, undeserved.

Love and Cigarettes

Tennessee Williams’s play,
Night of the Iguana, is the story of
a defrocked Episcopal minister, the
Rev. Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon,
who after leaving the ministry,
takes up giving bus tours through
Mexico. On a trip he is leading
with women teachers from a Baptist
college in Texas, Shannon becomes
romantically entangled with the
17-year-old niece of the matriarch
of the group. Though Shannon is
innocent of the charges she lodges
against him, the stern matriarch
decides to ruin Shannon’s
career as a tour guide and in the
process uncovers his past.
Shannon begins to fall apart and
has a nervous breakdown
which leads him to heavy drinking. In order to save his job
as a tour guide, he shanghais the bus and takes the ladies to a
remote hotel on the coast of Mexico near Puerto Vallarta. It is
there in the midst of his despair that he meets Hannah Jelkes,
an attractive itinerant painter, who has resigned herself to
singleness for the rest of her life in order to care for her aging
grandfather.

It is Hannah who begins to nurse Shannon back into
shape giving him spiritual counsel and caring for him as no
one has before. The real breakthrough comes one evening after
dinner when Shannon and Hannah find themselves alone
on the veranda, and Hannah removes a crumpled pack of
cigarettes from her pocket. She discovers only two left in the
pack and decides to save them for later and returns the pack to
her pocket.

SHANNON: May I have one of your cigarettes, Miss
Jelkes? [She offers him the pack. He takes it from her and
crumples it and throws it off the veranda.] Never smoke
those. They’re made out of tobacco from cigarette stubs
that beggars pick up off sidewalks and out of gutters in
Mexico City. [He produces a tin of English cigarettes.] Have
these−Benson and Hedges, imported, in an airtight tin,
my luxury in my life.

HANNAH: Why−thank you. I will, since you have
thrown mine away.

SHANNON: I’m going to tell you something about
yourself. You are a lady, a real one and a great one.

HANNAH: What have I done to merit that compliment
from you?

SHANNON: It isn’t a compliment. It’s just a report on
what I’ve noticed about you at a time when it’s hard for
me to notice anything outside myself. You took out those
Mexican cigarettes, you found you just had two left, you
can’t afford to buy a new pack of even that cheap brand,
so you put them away for later. Right?

HANNAH: Mercilessly accurate, Mr. Shannon.

SHANNON: But when I asked you for one, you offered
it to me without a sign of reluctance.

HANNAH: Aren’t you making a big point out of a small
matter?

SHANNON: Just the opposite, honey. I’m making a
small point out of a very large matter.

In a very, very small way, this scene is reflective of the
one-way love, the grace, that Jesus shows us. It is, in fact, “a
very large matter.”

This is the love that is able to transform our lives, and in Night
of the Iguana, it is the breakthrough for the Rev. Dr. Shannon.
The great difference is that in the world this love is still imperfect.
We all want to be loved the way Hannah Jelkes loves Shannon, but it
still does not bring satisfaction. Shannon still wants it, Tennessee
Williams wants it, and we want it. We want a love that is unequivocal,
a love that is unwavering in the midst of our own constant inconsistency.

Woman Getting Her Truck Towed

More proof that the Law is incapable of producing that which it commands:

An Amazing Headline...And Warning!

"Ohio Transgender Woman Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison for Exercising Husband to Death"

Click on the headline for the full story.

Pastoral Theology

The Gospel and Tourism

While in seminary in England, I took a class on leadership with a professor named Simon Walker. I only signed up because it was expensive and my seminary would pay for it, and, I thought it would help with inter-seminary relations. Even so, me being me, I skipped the first class to go to Stonehenge. My absence was duly noted and prompted Simon Walker to exclaim to those present, “In the many years I have been teaching this class, this is the first time anyone has ever missed the first meeting.” In the end, however, it proved to be the most important and transformative class I would take in seminary. It is, as far as I know, the only leadership class influenced by the Law/Gospel paradigm.

Walker relays a powerful story in the foreword of his book, Subversive Leadership, which illustrates, I believe, what many in the Church have made life out to be.

“About an hour’s drive from Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, is the old Spanish port of Ocho Rios. Ocho Riso gained its name from the mistaken belief that eight rivers flowed in the Caribbean here. The area exhibits one of Jamaica’s most stunning natural features; the six hundred feet high water Dunn’s Fall, cascading down terraces of smooth rock and plunging directly onto the white sands below. If you visit the Falls, you will be invited to join one of the tourist groups to be guided up the falls by an official guide. You will join a group of twenty or so Americans to begin your ascent, back up the falls from the place where the crystal clear river water joins the Caribbean, at the beach.

As you toil slowly up the falls holding hands in a human chain, you will be invited to pause briefly at set times, for photo opportunities as official photographers pop up and video you. You will be told to sit for a few moments in a pool, to be snapped, ‘beaming’, before being moved on for the other nineteen members of your party to be taken through the same routine. You will pass by glorious cascades, tipping off the rocks, glistening plunge pools inviting you to dive in, or shower under; yet you will leave them unexplored. You will be within an arm’s reach of jets of water that would massage your shoulders and neck; yet you will stay stolidly in your line, hands locked, and miss your chance. You will glimpse magnificent view of the peaceful sea through palm fronds, but instead pay attention to the grinning faces and squawking voices of your official cheerleaders, urging you to whoop and holler at your ‘great time’.

And yet, no one will be doing anything different—not a single person will be out of line, enjoying the waterfall in any other way than this. Like obedient children, you will all, literally, tow the line. You will pass by all of these things, still linked, hand in hand, resenting every missed opportunity, every enforced tourist pose, every limitation and restriction enforced on you, as you trudge wearily up the prescribed route until you are led, some on hour later, out of the top of the Falls. You will exit feeling as if, somehow, what should have been the most exhilarating and liberating experience, was an experience of being led where you didn’t want to go, against your will.

And you will probably reflect that it is a tragedy that the Jamaican authorities have imposed these rules that prevent people being free and just enjoying the Falls for themselves. Abut at that point you will discover something quite unexpected; that there are no rules at the Falls….In fact there are no restraints at all to how you may enjoy the experience” (pp 7-8).

My experience in ministry has been just this: the Law is a ‘fun sponge’. It enters the room and sucks all of the fun out of it. People will call you antinomian, but these fellow believers do not know the power of Jesus’ words when he said that he came to ‘give life and life to the fullest’. Their diminished and oppressed lives will stand in stark contrast to the life that has been set free by the message of the Gospel.

“There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do” (Romans 8:1-3a).