The Individual Spiritual Life: Giving Time, Treasure and Talent
+In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, in the second sermon in this series about spiritual life, I want to start talking about the individual spiritual life in sort of an unusual place. Prayer is the central part of spiritual life, and I mean to talk about prayer in the third and fourth sermons, but I wanted this morning to start, not with prayer, but instead with the idea of giving--or even, to use more religious language, with the idea of sacrifice. Giving is an aspect of Christian life--an aspect of religious life in general, for that matter--that people generally skip over in talking to young people, I suppose on the theory that relatively few kids have a lot of money to give away. But that theory is wrong on several counts. In the first place, of course, some young people do have a good deal of money at their disposal. Then, second, as Jesus told us in the parable of the poor widow woman, a person with very little money may actually turn out to be more generous than a rich one. And third, there’s more to giving than just money. One my Jewish friends mentioned to me the other day that their family temple’s Sunday School had recently cancelled all of its regular classes in favor of having a “mitzvah” day—a day on which all the students, even the youngest ones, went out into the community and did some sort of a good deed (a “mitzvah” is literally a commandment, but in cases like this it refers to the kinds of good things the commandments might require you to do). The little kids at the temple might not have had any money to give, but they could still give a good deed.
It’s been a tradition for twenty years or so in the Episcopal church to talk about giving in terms of giving Time, Talent and Treasure. “Treasure,” of course, is just a word for “money,” but it does have that extra connotation of our being emotionally attached to it: Jesus said once, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” But it is precisely because we do get emotionally attached to money that it is good for us to give some of it away. I would urge you now, young as you may be, to start the habit of giving. The traditional standard of giving, going all the way back to the Jewish law—is the tithe—ten percent—and there’s a lot of wisdom behind that tradition. Ultimately, Jesus calls us to give up everything—100 per cent, not just ten—so I don’t want to make the tithe sound like it’s the last word: but giving a fixed percentage helps psychologically to make giving a part of our way of life, and ten percent seems to be a pretty good percentage. Pick a charity, or a couple of them, and give away ten percent of your allowance or your baby-sitting money or whatever. And don’t worry for a minute that the charity will be upset to get such a small amount from you. In a totally non-religious way, they know that people who develop the habit of giving will be the sorts of folks they can rely on over the years. They’ll be happy to have ten percent of your baby-sitting money now if they think that will lead to ten percent of your annual salary when you have an MBA and ten percent of your estate when you die. So: first step in giving, give of your treasure: give at least a fixed percentage: and consider very strongly making that fixed percentage ten percent.
That’s Treasure, then. Now think about giving Time. This is what the kids from the Temple Sunday school were doing, and it is one way, though not the only way, of looking at community service (community service could, for example, be seen as a completely non-religious civic duty). To be a volunteer is to give away the one thing in our lives that we know we have only so much of, and will never be able to get more of. It is also to give away something that we very often admit that we are just wasting. When we had a visitor from Central America last year, you’ll remember, he described our culture as very wasteful: I think he meant, primarily, to say that we wasted money, for instance by throwing away things that people in Honduras would use over again. But we are also wasteful of time: all of us have hundreds of ways of wasting time—and that wasted time could very often be sacrificed to God by our using it to help someone else.
The third “T” in this group is Talent. Giving of your talents is closely related to giving your time, of course, but what the people who came up with this system were trying to get at (I think) was the idea of giving something of your talent back to God. Playing a concert for people in a nursing home might count as giving of your Time; playing instrumental music in a church service, simply for the greater glory of God, would be what they mean by giving of your talents. Of the three kinds of giving I’ve been talking about, this is the one where I myself can promise your gift good reception: we can use most talents in the Chapel—dance and music and plays and sculpture and painting and even carpentry and sewing and embroidery are talents that we can put to good use right here, from one day to the next. Later in life, you may find that your talent for the law or for accounting or just for being able to run meetings can serve a congregation as it goes through all the business of being a human organization. Ironing, believe it or not, is a talent that many congregations are desperate for: between permanent-press clothes and our use of dry cleaners, lots of Episcopal churches are honestly desperate to find someone under the age of seventy who knows how to press a flat piece of linen.
So, then: the Anglican idea is that well-managed spiritual lives include the corporate Daily Office, the Holy Eucharist, and an individual spiritual life; and a first step in that individual life is giving of our Time, Talent, and Treasure. In the next sermon in this series, I’ll turn to the central part of an individual spiritual life, which is Prayer.
--John Wm. Houghton
+In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today, in the second sermon in this series about spiritual life, I want to start talking about the individual spiritual life in sort of an unusual place. Prayer is the central part of spiritual life, and I mean to talk about prayer in the third and fourth sermons, but I wanted this morning to start, not with prayer, but instead with the idea of giving--or even, to use more religious language, with the idea of sacrifice. Giving is an aspect of Christian life--an aspect of religious life in general, for that matter--that people generally skip over in talking to young people, I suppose on the theory that relatively few kids have a lot of money to give away. But that theory is wrong on several counts. In the first place, of course, some young people do have a good deal of money at their disposal. Then, second, as Jesus told us in the parable of the poor widow woman, a person with very little money may actually turn out to be more generous than a rich one. And third, there’s more to giving than just money. One my Jewish friends mentioned to me the other day that their family temple’s Sunday School had recently cancelled all of its regular classes in favor of having a “mitzvah” day—a day on which all the students, even the youngest ones, went out into the community and did some sort of a good deed (a “mitzvah” is literally a commandment, but in cases like this it refers to the kinds of good things the commandments might require you to do). The little kids at the temple might not have had any money to give, but they could still give a good deed.
It’s been a tradition for twenty years or so in the Episcopal church to talk about giving in terms of giving Time, Talent and Treasure. “Treasure,” of course, is just a word for “money,” but it does have that extra connotation of our being emotionally attached to it: Jesus said once, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” But it is precisely because we do get emotionally attached to money that it is good for us to give some of it away. I would urge you now, young as you may be, to start the habit of giving. The traditional standard of giving, going all the way back to the Jewish law—is the tithe—ten percent—and there’s a lot of wisdom behind that tradition. Ultimately, Jesus calls us to give up everything—100 per cent, not just ten—so I don’t want to make the tithe sound like it’s the last word: but giving a fixed percentage helps psychologically to make giving a part of our way of life, and ten percent seems to be a pretty good percentage. Pick a charity, or a couple of them, and give away ten percent of your allowance or your baby-sitting money or whatever. And don’t worry for a minute that the charity will be upset to get such a small amount from you. In a totally non-religious way, they know that people who develop the habit of giving will be the sorts of folks they can rely on over the years. They’ll be happy to have ten percent of your baby-sitting money now if they think that will lead to ten percent of your annual salary when you have an MBA and ten percent of your estate when you die. So: first step in giving, give of your treasure: give at least a fixed percentage: and consider very strongly making that fixed percentage ten percent.
That’s Treasure, then. Now think about giving Time. This is what the kids from the Temple Sunday school were doing, and it is one way, though not the only way, of looking at community service (community service could, for example, be seen as a completely non-religious civic duty). To be a volunteer is to give away the one thing in our lives that we know we have only so much of, and will never be able to get more of. It is also to give away something that we very often admit that we are just wasting. When we had a visitor from Central America last year, you’ll remember, he described our culture as very wasteful: I think he meant, primarily, to say that we wasted money, for instance by throwing away things that people in Honduras would use over again. But we are also wasteful of time: all of us have hundreds of ways of wasting time—and that wasted time could very often be sacrificed to God by our using it to help someone else.
The third “T” in this group is Talent. Giving of your talents is closely related to giving your time, of course, but what the people who came up with this system were trying to get at (I think) was the idea of giving something of your talent back to God. Playing a concert for people in a nursing home might count as giving of your Time; playing instrumental music in a church service, simply for the greater glory of God, would be what they mean by giving of your talents. Of the three kinds of giving I’ve been talking about, this is the one where I myself can promise your gift good reception: we can use most talents in the Chapel—dance and music and plays and sculpture and painting and even carpentry and sewing and embroidery are talents that we can put to good use right here, from one day to the next. Later in life, you may find that your talent for the law or for accounting or just for being able to run meetings can serve a congregation as it goes through all the business of being a human organization. Ironing, believe it or not, is a talent that many congregations are desperate for: between permanent-press clothes and our use of dry cleaners, lots of Episcopal churches are honestly desperate to find someone under the age of seventy who knows how to press a flat piece of linen.
So, then: the Anglican idea is that well-managed spiritual lives include the corporate Daily Office, the Holy Eucharist, and an individual spiritual life; and a first step in that individual life is giving of our Time, Talent, and Treasure. In the next sermon in this series, I’ll turn to the central part of an individual spiritual life, which is Prayer.
--John Wm. Houghton