Giving and Getting Rich

This is one of the ideas I had that started the blog thing – I was originally going to bother people on Facebook about it, but now it’s here with a pretty background instead.

I was seriously challenged by the sermon at my local church – St Michael’s Anglican, Wollongong – last Sunday. Normally when Christians, myself included, throw around the word ‘challenged’ they mean they were somehow influenced to think differently or more deeply about a certain theological issue, and often the implication is that the different thinking should (and sometimes even does) lead to different behaviour. This was a very practically-minded sermon, though, and the thing that got me wasn’t a theological issue, but actually a rather worldly thing to do with practice. The sermon was from 2 Corinthians 8 and dealt with that irritating topic of money and what we should do with it.

This passage is apparently often invoked to drum up donations for church finances, but Sandy (the senior minister) made it clear that in the context of the passage Paul was talking not about supporting gospel workers but about ‘poor relief’ – giving to the poor ‘that there might be equality’ (v.13). Since I’m working on foreign aid and development at university, this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently (although from a different perspective).

The bit that got me was this: Sandy was talking about the Macedonians and how ‘rich generosity’ welled up our of their ‘extreme poverty’, and also about the widow’s two copper coins, and also about some less well-off churches he knew that had been instrumental in poor relief efforts, and mentioned almost in passing how this could be because these people could empathise better with those in need. That made me sit up and think.

See, I’m graduating this year, and my wife and I are trying to line up graduate work for 2012. With proper jobs come proper salaries, and I’d been thinking that once I had more money coming in I could really start organising my charitable giving, supporting more organisations, and so on. I was thinking that more money would make it easier to give. My pastor, however, had just told me that once I got more money it would be harder to give. Harder to empathise with those in need. Harder to appreciate that everything I have is a gift from God, not to be hoarded away but to be shared liberally.

I think that realisation brought home the meaning of verse 12: “For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have.” God doesn’t care about my accounting. He’s not especially interested in how many times more money I can contribute once I have full time work (although amounts are obviously important from a worldly perspective). He doesn’t want to know about the balance sheet I’ve devised where I put off generosity now in order to maximise benefits in the future. If I don’t “get it” now, not only will I not “get it” in the future, it will actually be harder to do so. It’s hard for the rich man to love the poor man as his brother. And the richer you get, the harder it gets.

I went home knowing that I had to sort out my attitudes now rather than later, and I think I’ve taken a couple of (practical) steps towards that. It’s an attitude thing more than anything, though, which means I’m relying on the power of Someone other than myself to change me.

Dear Lord: please grant me the understanding to know that what is mine is not mine.