"A Perpetual Gift," the Senior Sermon of Teri Daily, Class of 2008 from the Diocese of Arkansas, given on April 30, 2008, in Christ Chapel

Gift-giving in my family has never been simple or straightforward. I can’t really remember if I actually told Dave before we were married how gifts work in my family, or if I added that to the long list of things I considered to be “premarital adiaphora”—you know, those things that shouldn’t be essential to Dave’s decision about whether or not to marry me, and so could just come to be known over time in their own way. But however it happened, Dave was totally unprepared for his first Christmas in the Wooten family. You see, in Dave’s family, gift-giving is pretty simple. A gift is given, a thank you is said, and it’s a done deal—the transaction is complete. In my family—not so much.

A box is opened, with five shirts in it. “O these are great—thanks!” My mother leans over and says, “You can keep two—I’ll take the others back.” Alright… Once I received a coat, two sizes too small and a hideous color. The explanation came right away: “I got that off the clearance rack. The salesperson told me a new shipment of those is coming in next week, so we’ll go back and exchange it for one the right size and a better color.” Good thinking—I’ll have access to a variety of colors and sizes, but now at only a fraction of the regular price. Cool—that’s worth a little delay in the gift. And then there’s the gift that you’re not really sure is a gift at all. Like when you receive a pocketbook or a watch, and are told: “I’m not really sure I want you to keep that. I couldn’t find one I liked, so I just got that one.” Now that adds another level of complexity to gift-receiving. At what point do you invoke the “common-law” gift rule, assume it’s yours to use, and take the tags off. Should you wait one month, or six?

But perhaps nothing illustrates the Wooten family concept of gift better than the “couch incident” of 2004. I received a phone call one day from my sister; her tone of voice told me that trouble was brewing. Our brother and his wife had gotten rid of their couch, of our couch— because the boundaries were a little blurry on that point. The couch in question was an old brown plaid sleeper sofa from the 1970s. It had spent 10-15 long and good years at my grandparents’ home before coming to rest in my sister’s apartment. When it arrived at my apartment five years later, large areas of fringe had been chewed off courtesy of my sister’s psychotic dog Alex. Well, the couch lived with us another five years, during which time its legs were lost—we don’t exactly remember how that happened, although I miraculously found them in a bag when we moved to Austin. Finally, in the great tradition of hand-me-downs, the couch ended up in my younger brother’s apartment where, after he got married, it was promptly shunted off to a storage room or something.

But then one day the news came that he and my sister-in-law had given the couch away, and to someone not in the family. My sister and I went to work behind the scenes to try to reduce the amount of time the two of them would inevitably spend on the family blacklist. But we couldn’t help asking the question: “What had my brother been thinking?” After 35 years as a participant in the Wooten family economy of gift, when did he ever start to think that just because something was given to him meant that he could do with it as he pleased? Gifts in our family had never been a simple, one-time transaction after which you were completely free to do as you wish. Gifts in my family come with a history—a past, present, and future.

And so, frankly, I’ve always had empathy for the Israelites, perpetually stuck as they are between “I give you this land” and “the land is mine, says the Lord.” After all, how can something really be a gift, if it still belongs to the giver? How can God give the Israelites the land, if God then claims to retain ownership?

Well, it seems there are two possible answers to this question. The first: The land isn’t really given to Israel in the way we think of a gift—maybe it’s on loan. Certainly many well-meaning sermons take this approach—the earth and all of creation belong only to God. We’re given authority to use and care for it, but it’s not given to us. And here I have to cry “foul”—for such an explanation buys into a false dichotomy, it seems to say that either something belongs to God or it belongs to us. And worse, it denies the pure graciousness of God’s gifts to us.

But there’s another way to look at this: Perhaps it’s only because the land belongs to God that it can be given to Israel in the first place—not as a one-time, simple transaction. But as a perpetual gift. For only if the land belongs to God, can it be for Israel a gift each and every second, every minute, every hour, every day, on and on—pure grace without end. For some of us, this is a difficult concept to wrap our minds around—and even more difficult to live into, to keep right in front of us. No doubt it was a difficult thing for Israel as well.

Every seventh year was to be for Israel a sabbatical year, a year of rest for both the land and the people. In the section of Leviticus from which we get today’s reading, we find a series of increasingly severe consequences for failure to follow God’s commandments. And besides idolatry, one of the major sins that seems to be at issue here is the failure to observe the sabbatical years. The Lord says: “You I will scatter among the nations…Then the land shall enjoy its sabbath years as long as it lies desolate, while you are in the land of your enemies...As long as it lies desolate, it shall have the rest it did not have while you were living on it.” A scathing indictment…

The sabbatical year was supposed to be a time when Israel would have to trust, not in her own work and resources, but in God’s continuing goodness and provision. In fact, the practice of Sabbath in all its forms is a recognition that God’s gift is not a one-time event relegated to the distant past; instead, it’s a gift with a past, present, and future—it’s perpetual.

But what would happen if Israel were to fall into the temptation of seeing the gift of land as a one-time transaction? Well, then it would be as if the gift has been given, thank-yous have been said, and now it’s up to Israel to make the most of the gift God has given her. And so she works—at first to honor God, but then so hard that there’s no time to rest. Sabbath practices are the first to go by the wayside. And in a blink of an eye, the work of the Israelites is no longer an offering—it’s a burden. We see this in Leviticus. The Lord tells Israel: “Your strength shall be spent for no purpose; your land will not yield its produce, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.”

What the sabbatical year teaches is that the only real response to a gift of pure grace is to offer it back. Because the moment you try to hold onto sheer grace, it ceases precisely to be grace and becomes instead a burden.

Well, it’s easy to lapse into thinking of God’s gifts to us as one-time events. There’s the well-known statement: Your life is a gift from God, what you do with it is up to you. As if God kick-started it and it’s our job to take over from here. What a weight to carry around! Just ask almost any of us at the end of spring semester. (You know, besides those few who naturally need no sleep and turn in their papers days early—I’ll refrain from naming names…) But I have seen the burden on many faces around here over the past three years—and, no doubt, you have seen it on mine. We go through periods when there’s no time, we think, to take a walk, laugh with friends, watch a child sleep. And not much enjoyment of the work that’s also inevitably a part of our life, and often what we’ve worked hard to actually have the chance to do. One day when I was racked by time constraints, feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt, and just plain frustration, my husband suggested gently: “Hey Teri, why don’t you write that paper out of your love for God?” Oh yeah, there is always that … God’s gifts to us are never one-time events; they are given to us anew every second of every day. But when the sense of gift is lost somewhere along the way, the work of our lives ceases to be for us an offering, and becomes a burden.

So, whatever comes next for all of us—whether it’s the day to day work of running a seminary with all the jobs that entails, if it’s CPE, studying, teaching, writing, pastoring, preaching, parenting—whatever comes next for us, may our eyes be open to the perpetual gifts of God. May we offer them up to God in the complex mixture that is our life, only to receive it all back again the very next second. And may the work of our lives be for us an offering. Amen.