Generosity and leaving a spiritual legacy- Numbers 11.4-15
We are celebrating our Harvest season starting from this week, as over the next 3 weeks all our churches will mark the bringing of produce and gifts that we will hope to pass on to our local food banks. It’s a part of our thanksgiving for the generosity of the very world we live in for supplying our needs through the opportunities we had and have in life, to be ourselves generous for others in addition. Whether they are in any particular need or not, we are called to give of our generosity knowing we have also been given to.
In fact this week is the national church’s Generosity Week, which runs from today up to the 6th of October, and tries to help us ponder upon not just the importance of harvest and thankfulness, but in what form that thankfulness will take and in what corners of our lives harvests will appear beyond today’s obvious one of food and produce.
It’s a chance to think of the fullness of our giving, and the many forms in which life calls us to give of ourselves: from our time to others, such as those moments when we are called to listen to someone in the shop and change our schedule to hear them properly; to events like today and our efforts to stock our food banks for all people to be provided for; or with our gifts and skills or even our coins as we seek to ensure there is a community of loving christians here in our town, who are known about, and seen, so that others can reach out and connect with too.
There’s more to this season though than just a calling to connect with the generosity with which God calls us to live. There’s a sense that we are to leave a mark of this in the land that we have been a part of, to flavour the air, as it were, to say that here was a place of deep generous love. There is a legacy to create as we fulfil our calling as Christians. We aren’t just generous in our living and giving for today, we are actually looking to leave a mark of generosity for who comes after us. And when I say ‘after us,’ that doesn’t just mean a couple of generations down the line, that means, when we have left this place today, for example; that our attitudes and our concerns have been so generous enough to have left a mark in the air for whoever might come in during the week or might in some way connect with the churches.
A comment I often hear when I have people visit our churches is, ‘Oh, you can almost feel the centuries of prayer coming out the walls.’ And I’d like to think that’s the ambience of a legacy of faithful living that the community of St Martin has left here in the generations before us and which we every single week are able to benefit from.
No one is in a place forever. Life models this for us.
We are called to pass on a legacy, to leave a mark. Sometimes we will move to new places either geographically or even just emotionally as we navigate the way the world around us changes. And we need to consider what it is that will be seen in the space we leave behind, whether that’s from the whole story of our life, or the idea that we leave something of our essence, our focus and attitudes behind us after we leave the service today.
There was a chorus song that was sung by the students I worked with when I was young, the words ran,
Oh, may all who come behind us find us faithful
May the fire of our devotion light their way
May the footprints that we leave lead them to believe
And the lives we live inspire them to obey
Today we have a wonderful opportunity to reflect on that task of being a legacy maker through our generosity. We are not just here in church to be provided for. We will be provided for, but we are also actively involved in the shaping of what will be available for others who come later and we need to have a mind on what those as yet unmet people, maybe unborn people, may need of this Christian home.
The Israelites in the Old Testament reading demonstrate this very very clearly. Here were people who were brought through such large trials, escaping from tyrants, and for whom God did provide for quite well on the way, and yet their next thought wasn’t how do we get to our proper home so we can provide a safer place, a more understanding place for those generations to come so they don’t have to go through what we went through. No, they just complained that they didn’t have all the foods they’d had before. They were focused on their needs, and whilst that was needed too, it’s sad to realise they weren’t thinking of ensuring there was a legacy for who came after them. They looked backwards to produce they could have had, forgetting that their previous life was a starved, enslaved life at the hands of strict masters that stopped them being fruitful at all.
Our service today is an emblem to a deeper truth that runs through the whole of the year and the whole of our lives on so many different levels.
I want us to dig down further into what it means to be generous creatures. Today we have a handle on this proffered through our harvest celebration. Do go and look at the leaflets on the table, get some ideas for how your life is already being generous and how it might develop further.
When I use the word legacy it does bring up for us images of things involving money and rather big questions of what we might do with the money we have. It can mean that, and if you want to explore what to do for that then I can recommend having a chat with Richard our treasurer who can introduce some things. But no, the word legacy, can be that and so much wider too. We are not here just for ourselves. We receive the goodness of a harvest in abundance in order that we can have a table laden with things enough left for others who have not yet arrived here.
What will we have from all the skills and gifts we carry, the things we have built St Martins with? And what do people who are yet to come here actually need? This is the legacy building we all need to be a part of. These are the 2 questions we need to travel with to really give thanks for the harvest.