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Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter – May 9, 2010
“I do not give to you as the world gives,” Jesus tells his disciples today in the portion of John’s Gospel known as the “Farewell Discourse;” a last will and testament before his impending death; a lengthy speech in which he instructs his followers in how they are to carry on without him; a speech in which he outlines the gifts he will leave with them in order that they may behave in accordance with his wishes.
“I do not give to you as the world gives,” he says. Now, weighing in on the worldly side of the spectrum, about as far away from Prince of Peace’s selfless love as you can get, we have the final instructions and parting gifts from Leona Helmsley, who died in 2007 at the age of 87 and proudly bore the title of “The Queen of Mean.”
You remember her; she’s the one who famously said “only little people pay taxes,” before going off to jail and paying a stiff fine for her failure to be little. When she got out, she still had plenty in the bank. “I direct that when my dog Trouble dies,” she wrote in her will, “her remains shall be buried next to my remains in the Helmsleymausoleum.” This mausoleum, she stipulated, must be “washed or steamed clean at least once a year,” and designated$3 million to ensure that this would be done. And, to ensure that at least someone would mourn her passing, she left $10 million to two of her four grandchildren with the contingency that they show up at the tomb at least once a year and sign a registration book to prove that they had been there. If they don’t, the bequest gets cut in half. Mrs. Helmsley’s other two grandchildren got, as my friend Rabbi Eisenbach would say, “bupkus,” nothing, “for reasons that are known to them,” she wrote.
Three million here, ten million there, a lot of money, true, but when Mrs. Helmsley cast off this earthly veil, her estate was valued between $5 and $8 billion, that’s with a “b.” So who got most of it? “Trouble” - a white Maltese who appeared in the family’s hotel ads and was said to have lived up to her name by biting a housekeeper; Trouble was the recipient of a $12 million trust fund, the biggest single named beneficiary in Helmsley’swill.
“It’s all about the ego,” said one Manhattan trust lawyer, who added, “Leona was an unusual person, to put it charitably, but she was also mega-wealthy, so everything in her will is sort of exaggerated.” Sort of? Mrs. Helmsley was certainly not alone in her ego-exaggerated bequests, although as I understand it, her will has been successfully contested and the disinherited grandkids will get something after all - $6 million, pocket change – and Trouble’s share has been sliced to $2 million, still a lot of puppychow. The remainder of the dog’s original bequesthas joined the $5 billion in a charitable trust which the trustees have begun to dole out, awarding only $1 million to canine causes, training seeing-eye and bomb sniffing dogs. The rest has gone to medical research, Jewish day schools, and charities for sex abuse victims. Someone is showing some sense.
So far there have been no reports of Mrs. Helmsley returning from the beyond to trouble those who went againsther wishes. Others have tried to micro-manage from the grave, just as others have left their fortunes to non-homo sapiens.
According to the People’s Almanac, there was a 19th century hatter from New England who demanded that a pair of drums be made from his skin and given to a friend, provided that the friend drum “Yankee Doodle Dandy” each June 17thwhile standing on Boston’s Bunker Hill.
In 1991, a German countess bequeathed her $80 million estate to her dog, Gunther and, in 2000,a Danish woman left $60,000 to six chimpanzees who lived at the Copenhagen Zoo. She reportedly sent a lawyer to the cage to read the will aloud; his parents must have been so proud.
Harvard law professor Robert Sitkoff, who specializes in wills and trusts, says that there has been a sharp increase in recent years in what are known as incentive trusts, that is, wills contingent onthe beneficiaries’ reaching some milestone or otherwise doing the bidding of the dead. The amount of an inheritance, for example, could be based on whether a grandson or daughter graduated from college; other bequests could be paid out based on how much the recipient earned, matching dollar for dollar.
Some of these contingencies and restrictions seem reasonable, an exercise in post-mortem common sense. Professor Sitkoff calls them “efforts by people to avoid profligate, wasteful, slothful existences among the children.” Still, most legal experts agree that it was Mrs. Helmsley’s famous domineering will that played the largest role in her efforts to control her legacy, attempting to shape from beyond the grave how she would be remembered.
The fact that she gave more to her dog than to her grandchildren is not going to win her any popularity points. As Professor Sitkoff put it, “I’m sorry to say, I don’t think the will will help her look more menschy than she really was.” “Mensch,” you remember, means a human being.
Indeed not. If that was her goal, then she failed miserably. While Mrs. Helmsleyundoubtedly had a team of very expensive lawyers draw up her documents assigning millions to a Maltese, anyone can write their own will; in order to be valid it just needs to be signed by the person who made it – the testator - and by at least two witnesses who should not themselves be beneficiaries of the assets.
As you can find anything on the internet, there are guides for those who wish to save attorney’s fees. I came across one which makes the following obvious, but no less important, suggestion. “Prior to framing a will, a testator’s objectives must be clear.”
Sometimes, as we’ve seen, that objective is to be vindictive. But, thankfully, that is not the only way the world knows how to give. Sometimes the objective of a will and testament is to ensure that those closest to the testator are able to do all in their power to keep that person’s memory alive.
When Marie Curie – known to all as Madame Curie, winner of the 1903 Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium – died in 1934, the only property of any value she had was a gram of pure radium given to her by the women of America. In her will she left the radium to the University of Paris, “on the condition that my daughter, Irene Curie, shall have…entire liberty to use this gram…according to the conditions under which her scientific researches shall be pursued.”All she wanted was that her beloved child would carry on after her, as indeed she would.
Irene had earlier worked with her mother, promoting the use of radium in cancer treatment and, following World War One, advocating the use of the element as a means to reduce suffering. Irene Curie would go on to earn a professorship and win her own Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the synthesis of new radioactive elements. In recognition of her efforts on behalf of the social and intellectual advancement of women, she was made an Officer of the Legion of Honor, kind of like a French knighthood.
Irene Curie died in 1956, leaving behind one daughter and one son. I don’t know what she left them in her will in the way of money or incentives, but I wouldlike to think that she wished her children’s lives would be a living testimony to their mother and their grandmother, truly a legacy with a price above rubies.
All gifts of any value are like this, beyond measure, beyond time, beyond anything the world can either give or take away. As Christians, we are beneficiaries of such gifts.
When Jesus assembled his disciples – his family of faith – for a reading of his last will and testament, he had absolutely nothing of any material value to leave with them to remember him by: no money, no jewelry, no property. Nothing.
All he had for his little children was a bit of himself and the promise of his eternal presence. “Peace I leave with you,” he said, words which would only be written down later; words which would be witnessed and validated by his followers. “My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.”
The kind of peace the world can give is fragile, temporary at best, contested successfully all the time. I read somewhere that historians have calculated that in the whole of human history, only 29 years can be considered to have been times of global peace. And during most of those years, the peace has been brought about at the point of a sword, as it was during the “Pax Romana” of Jesus’ day; a peace maintained by soldiers, paid for through surrender to the emperor’s domineering will.
This is not the peace that Christ offers, not the peace he paid for with his life, not the peace he leaves us in his will. As beneficiaries of his estate, each of us – the sons and daughters of God – have received what the Book of Hebrews calls “the promised eternal inheritance;” what Paul called, “Peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” And as executors of his estate – as inheritors of the blessing -each of us is assigned the task of establishing God’s peace in ourselves and in our world.
“Those who love me will keep my word,” he tells us. And if that’s not incentive enough, he will later add this to his testament: “I have said these things to you to that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”
Peace, love and joy; those are the objectives God has for us; day by day these gifts are bequeathed to us; day by day they are ours to treasure, ours to share, ours to pass on to those around us and those who will come after us.
We may not have a Helmsley type fortune; we may not have a Curie type genius; we may not have won any prestigious awards, but each of us, I am convinced, has gifts galore to share. If you were to draw up your will today – and don’t forget St. John’s Church when you do so – think about all that you would want to give to all those who have entrusted their legacies to you.
After Pope John Paul II died in 2005, the Vatican released a copy of his last will and testament, begun in 1979 and added to periodically until 2000. The document begins by saying, “I leave no property behind me of which it is necessary to dispose.” Twenty-one years later, it concludes, “As the end of my life approaches I return with my memory to the beginning, to my parents…to the parish where I was baptized, to that city I love, to my peers, friends from school…to the people who were entrusted to me in a special way by the Lord. To all I want to say just one thing: ‘May God reward you.’
May the faithful lives we share and the loving legacy we leave behind be a sound testament to the rich rewards we have all inherited. This is, I am sure, the will of God.