So Abram said to Lot, “Let’s not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herders and mine, for we are close relatives. Is not the whole land before you? Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I’ll go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.” Genesis 13:8–10
The preacher at the church we’re attending since we’ve moved a month ago seems to me to be awfully young; but then, because I’m now retired, most do. He started, last week, a series on generosity, he said, assuming, I guess, that most of us need a spike in our giving. I don’t doubt that we do, all of us.
I wanted to tell him about the Yankton Sioux, who were right here on this prairie long before any paleface showed up on what once was an ocean of grass – the Dakota, a tribe of people we worked hard to convert, a people who practiced “the giveaway” ritually (which is to say “religiously”), before we put them on reservations and told them giving away their meager fortunes was a heathen practice and outlawed it.
Most tribes in the Sioux family practiced “the giveaway” at significant moments in their lives, a kind of garage sale with one major exception: instead of dumping the clothes our toddlers have grown out of or an 8-track stereo, they gave away their best – their horses, their buffalo robes, their bead work. Their best. Get that. Their best. Didn’t sell it either. Gave it away.
Reputations were made or broken – one’s standing in the community was created – by how much one gave away to those not blessed. Leaders became so by their sheer largesse. Bank accounts didn’t cut any mustard among the Dakota; compassion marked character.
These people were plain heathen.
A young Albanian woman named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu became Mother Teresa because of commitment and character, I suppose, or nature and nurture. But the heart of her commitment was something in her soul that made it impossible not to think royally of those, all of those, who weren’t royally blessed.
In her book, Mother Teresa: The authoriszed biography, Navin Chawla quotes from someone she’d interviewed, someone with whose family Mother Teresa had stayed for some time. This man, Michael Gomes, told Chawla that once upon a time Mother Teresa had told him, “I feel it very deeply that I should be snug in my bed and that on the road there should be those who have no cover. I think it is wrong not to share.”[1]
In her lifetime, Mother Teresa saw more terrifying squalor than most of us will ever see – or want to. What she saw and experienced on the streets of Calcutta was, to most of us, unimaginable. Certainly the depth of suffering all around her created the spirited need to act.
But you can’t help wondering, too, just how much of her commitment was generated by, first of all, her own character and, just as importantly, her commitment to be someone who has loved Jesus “as no one has loved Him before.”
“I’d rather have Jesus than silver or gold.” Richard Mouw used to say that as a Christian community we’d all be better off if we really believed the words we sing. I think he was right – of me, too.
But then, the American dream isn’t about giveaways, tribal rituals we made illegal because, after all, those savages had to learn how to get along in a glorified world of private property, where mine is mine and yours is yours—except if I can get it cheap.
When you read about MT’s almost instinctive commitment to serve, I can’t help but think we believers would do ourselves a great favor by giving away t-shirts plastered full of some of her most memorable statements, like this one: “I think it is wrong not to share.”
Maybe we ought to sell them at the political conventions, where we’d likely lose our shirts.
Still, it’s some ethic, isn’t it? – “I think it is wrong not to share.”
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