Generosity As Prayer

April 15, 2019

Monday in Holy Week

One of the things that characterizes how we live today is the intense accountability many of us feel for how we use our time. We work longer hours and we have multiple demands on our leisure and family time. There is an intense pressure on us to be productive and high functioning, certainly at work but increasingly in all areas of our lives.

It’s that pressure that often pushes out time for prayer in the course of our day. Prayer isn't an obviously good use of our time. It doesn't appear that we would lose very much if we allocated the time to something else. Or if we do pray there is a growing trend to regard prayer as some kind of well-being activity that we only do because it enhances our productivity.

This is one symptom of advanced capitalism where time, alongside everything else, has become commodified. Time, as they say, is money. So the mentality that Judas Iscariot represents in today’s Gospel of stringent financial accountability is now pervasive. Mary of Bethany is made to feel she has wasted resources in anointing the feet of Jesus. And we are made to feel that we are wasting time when we too spend time with Jesus in prayer. Jesus responds, in an un-self-aggrandizing way, that he is worth wasting resources on. The anointing is an act of generosity by Mary towards someone who has been generous to her.

I want to suggest that we should think of prayer as an act of generosity too. We can think about that in three ways.

First, prayer is an act of generosity towards others. We instinctively feel that. When we say, "I will pray for you," we feel that we are doing something generous and that the recipient is grateful. Praying for someone does not obviously or immediately further their interests. But it is to honor them in our own eyes and to hold them before God in the belief that they are loved and valued. Prayer is an act of generosity to others.

Second, I think we should also think of prayer as an act of generosity to ourselves. I don't mean that in the sense of the well-being activity that enhances productivity. I mean it in the sense that prayer is the activity that most deepens and enriches our own humanity. Prayer is where we remember that we are loved and valued by the God who has purposes for our lives. If we neglect that central Christian identity then we are not generous to ourselves. We deny our potential and all that God wants us to be.

And third I believe we can think of prayer as an act of generosity towards God. God does not, of course, need our prayers and anything that we give to God in this world is simply a miniscule return of all that God has given us. But God does not demand that we pray, and like the father of the Prodigal Son, he does not just look on us with compassion but with delight when we return home after days of absence. I like to imagine that God smiles when I finally make time for him in my busy day.

So if prayer is an act of generosity then it's training us to develop a characteristic that our culture is pushing out. Acts of generosity are increasingly questioned. Is it wise to ask a crying woman in the street if she is okay? She might be on drugs or have a knife.  Is it sensible to take a Syrian refugee into your home when that's only one person in the face of such enormous migration problems? Even in the world of philanthropy the drift towards impact investment and clearly defined deliverables is encouraging us to think that true generosity is really rather reckless and irresponsible.

But Christians believe that generosity is beautiful and it is the essence of the Gospel. God so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself that we might have eternal life. “Freely you have received,” Jesus says to his disciples, “freely give.” In his sermons on John's Gospel St Augustine of Hippo has interesting things to say about the anointing at Bethany. The Gospel tells us that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” and Augustine interprets this as the power of generosity in the life of the Christian: “The world is filled,” he says, “with the fame of a good character”. And how powerful it is in this ungenerous age, when political leaders think it's acceptable to say the most disgraceful denigrating things about their opponents, for us Christians to say, “That is not our way. We are generous.”

So if prayer is an act of generosity then I want to suggest that generosity is also an act of prayer. Generosity is a sign of God's grace in the world. It is the power of the Gospel which flows from our hearts into the lives of others. And we learn to do that when we give of our time generously in prayer.