Would the owner of the Ferrari number plate CSG 3P71 please sell your car and give the money to the poor.
That’s a joke from 10 Second Sermons by Milton Jones but it encapsulates the dilemma we have as Christians with money and our use of it. Our dilemma is that we live in a culture where spending money on ourselves is viewed as normal and essential to quality of life but we follow a God who challenges the rich young ruler to sell what he has and give to the poor and commends a poor widow for giving everything she has as an offering to God.
Learning to handle money responsibly is about as difficult as trying to say the phrase ‘where moth and rust doth corrupt’ in a hurry. What we do with our money is, in many respects, a yardstick for the depth and reality of our faith. As Helmut Thielicke has said, “Our cheque books have more to do with Heaven and Hell than our hymn books.”
A word that can help us significantly with this dilemma is the word generosity (see 2 Corinthians 9. 6-15):
“Remember: A stingy planter gets a stingy crop; a lavish planter gets a lavish crop. I want each of you to take plenty of time to think it over, and make up your own mind what you will give. That will protect you against sob stories and arm-twisting. God loves it when the giver delights in the giving.
God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you're ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist puts it,
He throws caution to the winds,
giving to the needy in reckless abandon.
His right-living, right-giving ways
never run out, never wear out.
This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God.”
There are three things to note here. First, everything that we have comes from God – “it is God who supplies seed to sow and bread to eat.” When we realise that life, and everything in it, is a gift of God to us then we also realise that we are stewards with the job of looking after things that ultimately belong to God. As Christians, we are then stewards of all that God has given to us – our life, our talents, our time, our money, our possessions, our family, our community, and the world in which we live.
Second, God is a generous giver – “God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways;” “throws caution to the winds, giving to the needy in reckless abandon;” and is “more than extravagant” with us. His generosity extends to Jesus becoming human and laying down his own life for each one of us; the ultimate act of selfless generosity. We are then to follow God’s example in our generosity: “He gives you something you can then give away … so that you can be generous in every way.”
Third, what he gives is not primarily about money – “He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way …” We are talking here about the whole of life being gifted to you and therefore of us being generous with the whole of the life we have. That clearly includes money but is also much more – “full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way.”
So generosity is to characterise our lives, including what we do with our money. That is also what we see in the story of the widow and her offering (Luke 21. 1-4). She didn’t give a lot in financial terms because she was poor but she gave generously because she gave all she had to live on. Oliver O'Donovan writes that, “Generosity means: not staying within the limits which public rationality sets on its approval of benevolence. An extravagant, unmeasured goodness, corresponding to God’s own providential care, defies the logic of public expectation.”
David Dark writes that, “Extravagant kindness of action … amounts to apocalyptic disruption of whatever norms currently crown themselves as “realistic,” “prudent,” or “appropriate” and that “These confrontations bring onto the scene an indiscriminate generosity that will often appear supernatural and scandalous as they necessarily go beyond what has appeared previously available or reasonable.” In this way, such actions expand “the sphere of what’s considered historically possible” and “testify to a transcendence in everyday activity with an earth-bound agility that interpenetrates all that appears mundane and insignificant.”
Milton Jones has said that, “The biggest question many Christians are asking the world today is ‘Will you give us some money to help pay for our new roof?’” David Dark is saying that Christians have the potential to ask far more searching questions of our culture and world. Our generous actions as stewards of all that God has gifted to us can actually challenge the fallacy that we live independent lives by making and spending our own money.
Remember, too that this isn’t just about money; instead it is about our attitude and approach to life itself. We can see that in the list of practitioners from recent history that he gives: “Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King Jr., Vaclev Havel, Lech Walesa, the Berrigan brothers, and the lone student facing down a row of tanks in
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sarah Masen - Unveiled Faces.
No comments:
Post a Comment