Dallas pastor challenges Stewardship Kaleidoscope audience to consider the relationship between desperation and generosity

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Desperation can be a faithful fundraising strategy, said the Rev. Amos Disasa, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas.

He spoke on the healing justice of generosity in a plenary gathering at Stewardship Kaleidoscope in Portland, Oregon Sept. 25. The annual conference is presented by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Disasa offered two stories, the first from an encounter on his way home from church on a hot August day. A man standing in front of a minivan on an exit ramp shoulder waved him down.

As he is in the habit of doing, Disasa stopped to help. He admitted the question “What will I think of myself if I don’t stop?” was in the back of his mind.

The man was well dressed, right down to his Gucci belt, Disasa said. He said he ran out of gas on the way to visit his brother in Denver and asked for money “to get to the next gas station.”

Disasa offered to take him to get gasoline and bring him back. The man, saying his wife and children were in the minivan, just wanted cash.

Disasa decided to give the man $25, but there was no way to discreetly separate a $5 and a $20 from the $69 in his money clip.

“Five would have been enough to solve the problem he identified, but I added 20 to relieve my sense of shame” at not giving the man all he had, Disasa said.

He thought that would be the end of the interaction. It wasn’t.

The man handed back the money, took off the gold ring he was wearing and demanded Disasa hold it. He then took one step back, got on his knees and said, “Sir, I beg you, please — give me all of it. Now.”

The man was desperate and irrational, begging on his knees on an exit ramp in the heat, Disasa said. “His desperation was a demand for justice. He refused to shield me from my shame.”

A few weeks later Disasa saw the man in a different place on another Sunday, again waving cars down.

The discovery did not alleviate Disasa’s guilt. “He was acting the part of real people that subsist on the scraps from our feasts of decadent consumerism, ecological degradation and unfettered capitalism. His story was fictional but revealed something true for me: Injustice always exists in the absence of generosity.”

Healing justice is different

Disasa turned to a story of another desperate man: the royal official imploring Jesus to heal his dying son in John 4:43-51.

The man was from Capernaum, where Jesus had been rejected. The royal official had left home and walked two days to Cana to beg this prophet he’d heard about to walk the two days back with him and save his son. “Sir, come down before my little boy dies,” he said.

“Have you been there?” Disasa asked. “There is nothing you can reasonably do to make someone well, so you start pondering the most irrational, far-fetched and mildly irresponsible courses of action.”

Jesus chose to heal the boy from a distance and assures the royal official his son will live. Had he made the two-day trip to Capernaum only to find the boy had died, “he would have been just in his trying. Instead, he chose to be generous in his healing,” Disasa said. In doing so, Jesus gave the royal official immediate relief from the pain, grief and helplessness he carried.

“Generosity is how you tell healing justice from justice that makes you wait,” he said. “Healing justice is different in the time it returns to the people who have acted out of faithful irrationality to demand that people in positions to heal actually do it.”

Disasa left his audience with a question: “What are you so desperate for, what healing are you longing for, what hope do you cling to that you would get on your knees and beg someone, ‘Give me all of it. Please. Now.’

“If it is the survival of your institution, please go and find something else to despair and be desperate about.”

A long pause followed.

“All right. I’m going to stop talking,” Disasa said quietly before leaving the lectern.