(We recommend you have a poster or some other large image with the new logo with you as you present this minute for mission.)

OK folks, the insert this morning talks about this new image of One Great Hour of Sharing, that strange new presence in the middle of this poster. What is it? Is it a fruit? Is it a heart? Sure, it could be. Do you see anything else? Here, maybe if I cover up half the image, you may see them—the pair of figures whose dance forms a joyful circle. This image is the offering’s first attempt to focus graphically on the last word in its name: Sharing.

Why is sharing represented as a dance? Many of us might have other images of sharing, something along the lines of someone splitting what he or she has with another person who doesn’t have any. The problem with that kind of image is that it can freeze both of us into an uncomfortable position. Let’s look at the encounter the insert suggests: Usually when I begrudgingly give that beggar my 35 cents, neither of us is very happy with the transaction. We both know I could probably give a lot more, and neither of us wants the subservient gratefulness the receiver feels obligated to show. But we’re both kind of stuck there as long as we believe that I’ve just transferred something of mine to another person.

We only begin to get free of those postures when we realize that what I’ve given was never mine to begin with. It was only a temporary gift from God, whose primary nature seems to be unending generosity and mercy, who allowed me to have what I had precisely in order to share it with someone who needed it more. Since I’m not truly the source of the gift, the beggar is free from the need to grovel before me; as for me, giving frees my hands to receive whatever God is offering now.

That recognition is one of the first steps to freedom from bondage to the things we think we own, but which in fact own us. I need to give even more than the beggar needs to receive because I am at least as trapped in my dream of ownership and self-sufficiency as he or she is in the nightmare of dependency. So long as we believe that the path to our security lies in owning things and looking out for ourselves, we will always be stuck needing more and more—no amount is enough to truly provide security. It is only in placing our reliance on others, and ultimately on God, that we can free ourselves from that trap. It is only then that we can come down from the pedestal of the haves where we decide how much to share with the have-nots, and join the dance of the sharers, the dance of those through whose hands and lives flows an endless stream of grace.

I invite you, as this image of sharing invites you, to join that dance today by giving joyously and generously to One Great Hour of Sharing.

Haiti was once an incredibly rich and lush environment, but for centuries it has been a clear example of what can happen to a country when injustice, poverty, and desperation build on one another. Since the earliest days of European colonization, its environment and its people—the native Taino, then African slaves—were mercilessly exploited. Fear and repression spawned slave revolts but no good models to replace the corrupt systems. Thus, for most of its history, a small class of wealthy people continued to control the much more numerous poor through fear and violence.

Desperation seldom breeds creative long-term vision. People with few means of survival sought to use the few resources at hand. Firewood was the cheapest fuel, so forests were stripped to allow people to cook their food. With no roots to hold it in place, the rich topsoil washed into the sea, leaving a landscape even less capable of supporting life.

Poverty, political powerlessness, desperation, and ecological collapse have seemed to build on one another into a spiral of hopelessness.

Yet hope too can build on itself. When people recognize they are not alone, they take a more active and positive role in shaping their world. When they learn of techniques that can reverse the cycle of devastation, they begin reclaiming small patches of land that give hope a foothold. When trees and vines find a bit of good soil to grow, they slow the waters that would strip it away and, little by little, more soil gathers around them. Slowly, small corners of the abundance God wills for all people begin to burst forth here and there on people’s land and in their lives.

The healing of people’s land and lives and communities is not something either we or they can control. But as the Farmers’ Movement of Papaye and the Presbyterian Hunger Program have learned, hope is a powerful force for healing. As the name of the group Moccene helped found suggests, it helps people Put their Heads Together. In the words of the project that got him started, it helped them all get back on the Road to Life. As the poster of this year’s offering proclaims, when people share their resources, lives can be changed. Let us celebrate the hope and possibility that God’s love creates in all our lives by sharing our resources through giving generously to One Great Hour of Sharing.

Any disaster, be it earthquake, hurricane, flood, or fire, destroys much more than the homes and highways, bridges and buildings that burn into the retina of our mind’s eye as the images of that disaster. In the everyday routine of our habits we take for granted the thousand strands of relationship that connect us to our surroundings and to one another. When disaster strikes, many of those strands can be torn apart. The routine becomes a struggle, and each day presents a long list of tasks that before the disaster we would have done without thinking.

The spiritual needs of survivors of disaster are no less important than their need for new homes and a rebuilt community, and the time needed for that recovery will take at least as long as the physical rebuilding. Members of the National Response Team, who are specially trained in responding to human-caused events like school shootings, can be deployed to provide pastoral care to caregivers, assist the presbytery in assessing the need for further opportunities for support, and consult with church leaders about future needs of the community.

When a church burns, it can have the same effect spiritually as house fires affecting hundreds of families. If a sanctuary disappears overnight, the spiritual center of a worshiping community is gone, and it can be difficult for that community to find its center anew. This was true in Moscow, Idaho; although still standing, the sanctuary was cordoned off as a crime scene. The presence of Laurie Kraus and Rick Turner, two members of the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance national response team, meant much to the pastor. “It was confirmation that our efforts were heading in the right direction, support for those efforts, and reminders of some of the resources available to help. But first and foremost, it was the witness and presence of the larger church.”

Through support to middle governing bodies for leader events and training, PDA helps pastors and other church leaders understand and cope with the effects of disasters on spiritual functioning. Once the immediacy of an event has passed, PDA— in consultation with the presbytery and synod— provides opportunities for caregivers to have training in compassion fatigue and in dealing with the symptoms of stress brought on by the disaster and its aftermath.

In cooperation with other denominations, PDA helped develop Light Our Way, a Guide to Spiritual Care in Disasters. This brief, excellent guide makes the concepts of spiritual care in disaster accessible to church leaders, elders, and pastors.

As important as any specific resource or service, however, is the sense of compassionate presence. When our sisters and brothers have been stricken by incomprehensible violence, whether of human or natural origin, the sense of being surrounded and held by the larger church is a powerful source of comfort. That presence, perhaps more than any one thing we say or do, is the balm our gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing enable us to bring to those wounds in the side of the body of Christ. Let us rejoice in this opportunity to witness to God’s love.

Under the new One Great Hour of Sharing logo are the words, “Sharing Resources, Changing Lives.” It’s easy to think of those words as instructing us to share our resources to help change other people’s lives. And that’s a crucial part of the ministries of One Great Hour of Sharing. But think for a moment about how your life could be changed by letting those whom we label disabled share what they have learned.

Most disabled individuals have to come to grips with the fact that they depend on others in some way. It is all too easy for those of us who are helping others to take for granted how negative this experience can be for them. If someone makes you wait when you need a drink or a trip to the bathroom, you become acutely aware of their power to make you uncomfortable, even if they are not consciously abusing that power.

This vulnerability that comes from depending on others is an important part of what we must learn from individuals with disabilities; without learning it, we can easily and unnecessarily make their lives harder. But they have something else important to teach us: none of us is as self-sufficient as we might like to believe and, more important, that dependence is a God-given part of who we are. Most of us carefully protect our illusions of self-sufficiency because we want to believe we are in control of our lives. Recognizing the limits of that control and letting go of the rest are part of the invitation our disabled brothers and sisters extend to us.

For more than thirty-five years, Self-Development of People has been working to birth a new vision of how to join people where they are in their own struggles—not to hand them charity or even to help them get where we think they need to go, but to partner with them, to walk alongside them as they get where they want to go. One crucial part of this vision is that our own hope is deeply interrelated with theirs—if their dreams have not come to fruition, then neither have ours. Similarly, that vision means we need to be open both to sharing what we have to offer and to accepting what they offer us.

For that reason, it shouldn’t be surprising that a group of disabled individuals seeking to find some measure of control over their own lives can tell us at the same time that we could really profit from learning to live with a little less control over our own. Since in our culture, resources—money in particular—are one of the means of exerting that control, it seems to me they are calling us to shed some of our resources and share them through One Great Hour of Sharing with people for whom they will be a blessing. I believe that this act of sharing resources will change and bless both our lives and theirs, and I invite you to do so joyfully and generously.

So what is One Great Hour of Sharing? If you’re like many of us, it’s one of those traditions you think everyone else understands, so you don’t ask. And a tradition it is—there are a fair number of congregations that will receive the offering for the sixtieth time this year. But even in those congregations I’ll bet there are people who don’t really know what it is.

It started in 1949, when a lot of Christian leaders, seeing the devastation that World War II had left in much of the world, recognized both a responsibility to our sisters and brothers and an opportunity to witness to a loving God. They organized an hour-long nationwide radio broadcast on the last Saturday evening in March in which some of the best-known stars of the day highlighted the needs and invited people to give through their church the next morning. The response was overwhelming, so the offering was held again the next year, as it has been every year since.

Over the years, the offering’s mission has grown from simply emergency relief and rebuilding after disasters such as wars, earthquakes, and floods to addressing many kinds of human suffering, from the sudden to the chronic. Increasingly it has included focusing on the root causes of this suffering, so that the solutions can be sustained after our attention moves on to other communities. At first most of this work was done through Church World Service, which was then the relief and development arm of the National Council of Churches.

Within the PC(USA), this evolution was accompanied by the addition of new programs to the offering. In the 1970s, both Self-Development of People and the Presbyterian Hunger Program were added as One Great Hour of Sharing ministries. Since that time the Presbyterian Disaster focus was reorganized as Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. As each of these programs has evolved, more of the ministry Presbyterians support with their gifts has been done by these three programs while we continue to work with other denominations through Church World Service. The ministries of these three programs address a wide spectrum of human suffering from the acute to the chronic, from offering short-term relief to addressing root causes.

Even today, however, the offering continues the tradition it has maintained throughout its history—standing with our partners in the face of suffering, walking with them toward a more hopeful future, and witnessing to the love of God in Jesus Christ in tangible ways that proclaim in word and deed that they are not alone. I invite you to join this great tradition of sharing resources that truly changes lives.