003. The Gospel according to Giving
Make intentional generosity a consistent, defining part of your experience with money. -Matthew Weaver, Owner My Shed Rental
Hey you,
In an evening with the young adults at church, we started talking about spiritual gifts and what they mean, how do we know that we have them, and what does it look like to practice your gifts?
I immediately went to giving, and the work I’ve been doing to understand the intersection of giving, the Gospel, and economics. Since mom died my understanding of the Gospel has gotten practical, which is a surprise to me. I’ve always been a head-in-the-clouds thinker, being more happy to look at abstracts and philosophy than boots-on-the-ground.
My understanding has been taken back to fundamentals. What have I been given? Life. My name. A house. Friends. Food and air and water and clothes.
Giving has always felt difficult to me, but I’m beginning to wonder if it feels complicated because I don’t want to give of myself, just whatever surplus I have laying around that is deemed not needed. I don’t want too many people to know my name, or I want too many to know it but not know me. Let me preserve safe distance between me and needs. This is my stuff. Go away. If they know me, they might need something from me.
Who knew that being known was the beginning of all generosity? I didn’t. I would’ve spit out a glib answer like, God is our beginning. It’s true, he is, but why are we here, if not to be known by God and each other? We pay lip service to the fact that God knows everything while he is walking around trying to coax us out of the bushes. Do we actually think that God only knows us in a cerebral sort of way? He is a spirit, and he created flesh. He wants to know us in every way, which is to say that he wants to actually interact with us, not just watch us. I had to go through a painful relationship where I felt more observed than known to realize that God wants to interact with every cell of our being. To know. To experience. To delight.
What is this mystery of giving? Marriage is one way that I think about, because you give yourself to another person. You give them your time, your witness, and in a way, things like hopes and dreams. Another way is work. You give yourself to the work you do. Time, energy, and problem solving. Building, creating, learning.
Giving, at its most fundamental state, starts with things like air and food, which I like as an avid outdoors person and foodie. It is why I love France as much as I do. They eat amazing food outside. Now there’s a great tag line for any restaurant, and one I’d be happy to frequent.
The most generous people are not the ones who have money to throw around. They are the people who know what it is to know and be known. Who know what it means to receive daily grace, and give it. The ones, in short, who know what it means to need and be needed.
The Sermon on the Mount is something which has been grossly misunderstood. As a teacher recently pointed out in my church, to be poor and broken is not a spiritual achievement. It is the beginning position of our lives and hearts. Blessed are the poor and broken. They actually need something, and they will receive it. Those who do not need, do not receive life. They will continue to be dead in their sins for ever. I see that while I lived in the deepest and highest and widest of self-sufficiency I also lived in a bondage of pride. I didn’t need anyone, therefore I neither gave or received more than about 1% of my life. The rest was hidden, and not in Christ, but in bushes and isolation.
I had paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs of the philosophical meaning of giving worked out in words. They won’t be published.
If you wish to be a generous person, whether with finances or otherwise, you must know that you are not your own. It is that simple. God is your beginning, and so are people. Now do not take this to mean that you have not been given things, because you have. You have a name. You have a place. You have a body. You have a spirit. Those must be respected as the autonomous creation that they are, but you are not meant to be kept for only yourself. You are meant to share, to connect, and to know fully how sweet and wonderful it is to have someone know you, and you them.
I don’t think I truly understood the story about taking a lower seat at the table only to be called up higher. Yes, there’s a story there about humility and learning not to advance our own agenda, but even more than that I see that we are meant to know that we have a seat at the table. That seat is not our birthright. Our invitation to the table is our birthright. We humans spend much of our time figuring out how to move up the table and sit by Jesus. We miss the point that it is not those at the right hand of the Father who have arrived. It is those who are known by him. I doubt that the Apostle John’s spot by Jesus was because he had status or ability or a right to that spot. He was there because he was beloved and he knew it.
Depart from me, I never knew you.
If you wish to give, you must learn to know and be known. All else becomes a mere ritual, an add-on to our lives here on earth, and not the generous cheerfulness of our hearts. It will earn us praise, but not knowledge of the Most High.
I just deleted the 6,200 other words I had written about generosity. They were not necessary, because unless you give all that you “own” away, you will not be able to follow Jesus. Start with your name. Give it to people. Give it to unlikely people. Take your name before the throne of heaven and ask what it means.
Come and follow Jesus.
