I'm So Beholden
The Rev. Dr. Daniel P. Matthews
Rector, Trinity Church, Wall Street
New York, New York

What a joy to be a part of your Lenten preaching series at Calvary again this year. I’m always delighted to be asked and happy to accept. Every year the competition gets keener to be in this pulpit. I showed, as I think I expressed to some of you, the bulletin this year, the brochure that Doug mentioned to some of my staff. They said, “How do they get all of those good preachers in Memphis?” I want you to know that if you don’t know some of the preachers in that group, they are really superb, and any day you attend this series... I assure you, I wish I were able to be a part of Memphis for the next forty days or so to participate with the stellar crowd of folks who are going to be sharing themselves with you. I love to be in Memphis and Deener and I feel like we are coming home. It is a joy to be with so many of you whom we remember from so many, many years ago. I also like to be close to Mississippi. My mother grew up in Mississippi, in a little town called Canton, near Jackson. My relatives, every one of them, still live in Mississippi, and I enjoy going back.

My mother had some expressions that were, I’m not sure they were Mississippi expressions, I think of them as being that only because of her rootedness in that culture. One of them occurred when my mother or my father, who was a Southerner as well, would be in the context where something would be given to them - maybe someone had been sick, and the person comes to the front door and knocks and has a plate of food and my mother would take it; or maybe when the grandchild was coming, and they brought over a bassinet or something and loaned it; or maybe when the car wasn’t working and they picked somebody up to take somebody - that kind of event. My mother would often say this: “Much obliged.” Remember that? Did your mother do that? Yes. Much Obliged. When she really meant it, she would add this: “I’m so beholden.” Sound familiar? They don’t use those phrases in New York City. I’ve never heard them once. Lost that haven’t we? It’s really kind of sad that we’ve lost it. You know what we’ve lost? We’ve lost what it was my mother meant when she said that. It was not only do I like and appreciate and thank you for the gift, but it was something else in there that went something like this: This somehow bonds you and me. This somehow makes you a part of me and me a part of you. It was like we are really close; I want you to know it as a result of this gesture. It didn’t contain in it what we today so fearfully avoid. Oh, my goodness! Now we owe them something. Hurry up, honey, get something and reciprocate quickly, so we won’t be beholden.

My mother loved being beholden, and she loved just as much having that said to her. When she presented something to some friend, relative or neighbor, and they said, “Oh, Martha, I’m so beholden,” it tickled her to death, because somehow that meant a deep quality of friendship that only could come when you were a gift-giver, or a gift-receiver bonded in obligation and beholden. Gone. I don’t know exactly what happened to it but it is practically gone. No, not just in New York City. In Memphis, Mississippi, itself.

We’re into a culture now that says, “Pay for what you get. Pay a fair price and don’t be beholden to anybody or anything.” Better yet, maybe in some parts of the South, “Nobody or nothing.” You see, we’ve kind of turned the world upside-down from a culture of gift-givers and gift-receivers to a culture of market-driven economy, of commodity-based reality, of bottom-line philosophy. Everything now is a commodity. There is hardly anything that is a gift anymore from anybody in any way. It is all a commodity. You and I wonder what’s happened. How did it happen so quickly? It seems like in a blinking of an eye - twenty, thirty, forty years ago, it wasn’t this way, was it? Oh no, it’s all just come before us. We don’t know how to operate in any other way except through competition. Competition on every level - it’s good, it’s healthy, we think. Everything is now based on the bottom line. Everything is a commodity.

Think for a moment about one area of our lives. Health. A precious, precious thing just to be here today - just to be healthy enough to join with this fellowship. What a joy! I’ve just been through some extensive [surgery], four procedures, four operations, on my right eye. I am so grateful I can see out of that eye that I don’t know what to do. Just to be here - a wonderful, wonderful gift. Health. Hospital - hospitality. When is the last time you’ve felt hospitality in a hospital? We’ve turned our prized, precious, highly revered physicians into competitors for a real bottom line. They’ve become for us a commodity. God forbid. No, it used to be the doctor was like the person my mother was talking about with her friends. Oh, we’d kind of like to have the doctor beholden to us and us to the doctor. Oh, that was a treasured relationship, wasn’t it? Called him all kinds of affectionate names? Every time you saw him, your heart was warmed because you knew he was yours and you were his - what a bonding that was. He was your doctor. Now he is in some sort of commercial plan and they change about every six months. He doesn’t like it and you don’t like it. Health has become not hospitality, but a commodity. Competitively bought and sold just for those who can afford it.

The same is true with education. Think about it for a minute. Remember when you were a kid. Remember you couldn’t afford to go to college, some of us couldn’t. Some of us remember so well applying for what was called a scholarship, and we got it. We were able to go to college and finish four years of that treasure of treasures - learning, knowledge, becoming more than you thought you could ever be because of the professors you had.

The New York Times carried a story the other day that said those scholarship funds that you and I got when we were kids are now being diverted. The marketplace is so tight for rankings for schools. There is such competition - school with school - that the scholarship funds are now buying the commodity called the brightest and the best students with the highest SAT scores, not the kids like you and I might have been who needed the money. No, the money is not for need. It is to compete against that other school which might have higher scores. Taking our professors, those persons who made a difference in our lives - some of us had our whole lives changed by one teacher - now they’re commodities, and the students are bought and sold because of the competitive spirit of the bottom line.

The story in the scripture that helps me with this is the most famous, “The Story of the Prodigal Son.” You remember it well. The prodigal gets the inheritance from the father and, if we use contemporary language, he heads west into the sunset with his fantasies and his dreams of what life could be like free, apart from the confines of mother and daddy and the homeplace. Probably today we would [say] he got into a heroin addiction. Whatever happened to him, it would be like that for a kid today. He hit the bottom. There’s an interesting phrase in the scripture that Jesus used to describe the bottom. After the kid wasted himself, all of his money, he was at the bottom of the bottom, Jesus said, “And no one gave him anything.”

What is hell? No gifts. What is Heaven? Showering of gifts. What would it be like for you if you never received a gift? Hell. And no one gave the kid anything. That is the bottom. Yet, our culture today is saying be careful about gifts, they will obligate you, they’ll want something back. They’ll expect something from you. You’ll be beholden. So we’ve almost lost that ability to see a gift as something that draws me into your world and you into mine. What is the essence of the gospel? God gives God self to you. Everyday, showers you, showers you with blessings. We just miss them most of the time. They just fly by and we don’t catch them. They’re everywhere. Being here is a gift. No, we’re so competitive, we’re so frightened what a gift might do to us in relationship to another person that we’ve just about lost it.

You remember when you were a kid? You used the expression, this was a terrible thing to say to somebody, “You’re nothing but an Indian giver.” You remember you said it to your brother when he took something back, or your sister when she wanted her bicycle that she had loaned you. “You’re an Indian giver.” Remember where that comes from? You see, the Native Americans who were here before we were never thought of things being owned, being possessed. Everything was owned by everybody. So, when that Indian gave to the Puritan that peace pipe, the Puritan took it as if it were a gift that he then owned, and six months later, the Indian came back and wanted his peace pipe. It didn’t mean he wanted it to own, it was just to be passed around. It is what a gift is supposed to do. It’s supposed to go from here to there, to here to there. What is the purpose of a gift - to give to somebody else. (Some of us have done it sometimes with wedding gifts we didn’t like, but we don’t tell anybody.) The gift-giving process is the essence of living - giving. Now not in a commodity market. Not where everything has a price.

I was shocked to read in The New York Times a few days ago a big story about New Orleans tombstones. Evidently, people are going into the cemeteries in New Orleans and stealing these old, beautiful tombstones and selling them to antique dealers. I would never have dreamed that you could put a price on an old tombstone. Everything that we know is slowly or quickly developing a price structure. Because competition is so intense for whatever it is, and whatever field you want to look in, we’ve even turned our doctors and our professors, two of our most revered vocational professionals, into commodities. We’ve done it to children, too. We’ve done it to little kids.

When I was a boy growing up, every Saturday morning meant the same thing. Every Saturday morning, except in the winter time, every Saturday morning meant you went to the closet, got out your baseball glove and went down the street. At the end of our street was a little field, a little vacant lot is what it was. Everybody gathered down there. This was in the Depression. Very few kids had gloves. Those of us who did have gloves brought them, because you shared. There were not many bats and maybe one ball, you brought it if you had it. We all got to the lot, and the two oldest boys, biggest boys, best baseball players, said, “I’ll be the captain of one team,” and the other said, “I’ll be the captain of the other team.” You automatically knew that you couldn’t have them both on the same team, then it wouldn’t be any fun to play because they would win all the time. This is all worked out [by] little kids, not an adult in sight. We decided where the first base was - I remember it changed every Saturday. No. let’s put first base here, no, no, first base here, first base, second base, third base, home plate. We decided what a foul ball was. Foul ball. Nobody in the adult world was a referee or an umpire. Everything was done by us. Every Saturday the teams changed. You might be on Billy’s team this time, you might be on Sammy’s team - it didn’t matter. The only people that were there cheering were the kids who were too little to play. They were waiting a year or two, but they would sit there and scream and holler. No adults screaming, “Slide Jimmy, slide.” We would play until we got tired. Usually we couldn’t remember the score. See it wasn’t a competitive thing, it was play. There wasn’t any bottom line to win, it was to play. There wasn’t any commodity called “whose the champion.” No, no, that had nothing to do with it. It was to play. The purpose was to have fun. Though I wouldn’t have said it as a kid, we learned to love each other. We learned to get the kid who wasn’t very good in a position that was suitable for him. Even once in a while a her got in it, even in those days.

But you see what we’ve done? We’ve taken the little kids, just little bitty kids, and we’ve even said, “If you want to play, you have to bring your birth certificate. We don’t allow anybody to play on our team who hasn’t presented a birth certificate because we don’t allow anybody in here who is older than they should be.” No, the sense of giving and receiving, the sense of being a part of something that is free and open and obligated is just about gone. You see, we’re really back to the story, we’re really all the older brother. Every one of us in this room is the older brother. Every one of us in this room is living in a society that says, “If you’re going to have dancing and singing, you’ve got to earn it. You can’t just be given a dance, a party, like the younger son. You’ve got to earn it. You’ve got to be worthy of it. You’ve got to make sure you’re appropriate for what is given to you.”

A commodity culture is killing us. You don’t know it yet. We haven’t quite gotten focused yet as to how to handle it. Those of us who believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior know full well that how we’re living is not the way the Lord wants us to live. Something is wrong. Something is too selfish about me, maybe even about you. Somehow I really have turned into the big brother unable to rejoice in the free gift of a party when it hasn’t been earned.

Lent is a good time to start saying, “I’m going to be a gift-giver,” and maybe, Lord, with your help, I might even be able to say, “Much obliged.” Lord, let me be beholden. Amen.

Copyright 1999 The Rev. Dr. Daniel P. Matthews

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