This past weekend at Kanuga, we reflected on generosity. I thought I might distribute some of the teaching to the church this way.
When you read through Scripture, generosity is everywhere. It emerges as one of the basic habits of someone who is faithful to God—as basic as prayer, as basic as worship or repentance. Generosity is right up there as a defining feature of the faithful life. Last year, when Bishop Porter Taylor was with us, he spoke to us about hope. One of the things he specifically mentioned was active hope. He showed us a couple of quotes that would undo for us the notion that hope is something we either have or don’t have, like a talent or a trait. Hope, he said, is something that we practice.
Now, what I want to say here for us is that generosity is a hope-making practice. When I say “hope,” I don’t necessarily mean a conviction that the things that upset me will get better according to any distinct timeline. That to me sounds like optimism, which, well, sometimes comes out to be true and sometimes does not come out to be true. When I say hope I mean a capacity to know that my life springs from God, and that God is alive in the world even if the world itself is decaying. When I say hope, I don’t mean so much a what, as a how—am I still able to live, despite everything going on around me, good or bad, in such a way that my life testifies to the goodness of God.
In the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus talks about the end of the world, describes in vague details some alarming cataclysms, and the sort of chaos that spreads out over the world because the end is erupting. But there in that section, he has a fascinating line: “Because of the increase of lawlessness, people’s love will grow cold.” I think about this verse all the time. Once love has frozen over, hope has frozen over too. You see what I mean? The ability to love is connected to the ability to hope. Love grows out of the conviction that God is still alive in the world, and no matter what age we are in, that is an age in which we are able to know the love of God. How, in any age, do we keep our love from freezing over? That’s the question.
So: generosity. Here in this piece of writing I want to reflect on direct giving, especially to folks who are poor and hungry in Columbia. I suppose I mean this as direct as I can mean it: giving money, food, or clothing from our hand—unmediated—into the hand of someone else when they stop us and ask. As I see it, giving to someone in an encounter like this is a tremendous hope making practice. That’s for two reasons to me: first, generosity gives a us a new narrative to act out in the world (that’s what Walter Brueggemann teaches us), and second: generosity gives us a new narrative to act out between one another (that’s what St. Augustine teaches us). Let me say a few words about these two reasonings, or how I think about these acts of generosity.
In the first reasoning: I get to play a part in saying something new about the world. When I am being generous, the world is not simply cataclysm, it is also one in which people are being fed, even if the world is also a place with problems beyond my control. Here in this moment is a chance to testify that the world has not been lost to destruction but still contains possibilities for healing, feeding, connection. I am able—simply by finding food for someone or giving some money that I have on me—to testify that there is a God who is alive in the world and gathering strangers together in a loving way.
Brueggemann says that this is an act of telling God’s story in the midst of the world’s story. The world would like us to think that there is not enough to go around, but of course God teaches us that this is not true. That’s one of the implications that we can gather from Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand, he says. There is always enough to go around when God is involved, we just might have forgotten that because we’ve been taught to stockpile. So Brueggemann shows us that Jesus expands the horizons of what the disciples thought was possible between the faithful and the crowds. And we, as Christians, have a chance to play our part in acting out what is possible between the faithful and the crowds. Feeding is possible if we interrogate what we thought was ours.[1]
An example: making a sandwich on a Saturday afternoon, and going to see if anyone near me is hungry, and then giving that sandwich away. When we think like Jesus, suddenly we have a different relationship to our own resources, and things we thought were shut away actually become sites where generosity is possible. In other words, we actually can feed the poor. And this is a profoundly hopeful practice for us to take on: nothing complicated, just giving away some ham and bread every now and then. But for us it opens up an entire world; we no longer feel powerless in the world, nor do we feel like strangers are a problem to be avoided. But we connect our resources with God’s show of generosity, and we find that we have resources against the cooling of our hearts in an anxious time. That is, one of the ways to respond against anxiety is to be generous, or, as Brueggemann would put it, to be a good neighbor. Jesus teaches us that generosity is possible, if we’re creative with what we have. And then, when we are creative, it doesn’t take much—just $5 or a piece of bread—to say something about the Resurrection of Christ in the midst of a dying world.
In the second reasoning: giving money or clothes or food lets us proclaim our mutual equality before God. This might seem counter-intuitive, because food and money and clothing are usually how we mark our inequality, and sometimes we give in ways that reinforce the difference between us. Some charitable giving can be like this. Solidifying some peoples’ place as receivers and other peoples’ place as givers. But St. Augustine preaches a wonderful sermon on generosity and equality. It is precisely because money and food and clothing are markers of inequality that when we give them from our hand to another’s that they can be signs of equality. He says it this way:
We should consider, when we are asked for something, who it is that is asking [and] from whom they are asking…Who is it that is asking? Human beings. From whom are they asking? From human beings. Who is it that is asking? Mortals. From whom are they asking? From mortals. Who is it that is asking? Fragile creatures. From whom are they asking? From fragile creatures….Apart from the extent of their assets, those who are doing the asking are exactly the same as the ones being asked.[2]
Notice how Augustine continues to ground the encounter in increasingly theological terms. Human beings, to mortals, to fragile creatures. This is a fragility before God, not because God would harm us, but simply because we are not the kind of beings that can sustain ourselves, not the kind of beings that can bring ourselves into being. That need of life from God, this is something that our money can never change about us. Economic differences, in other words, cover up a fundamental theological reality, which is that, he says (somewhat provocatively), we are all “beggars before God.” We will always, no matter how much or how little we have, be fragile creatures before God. So we give to reflect our shared fragility, and counteract the story of difference that our money or food or clothing might suggest.
If money-kept was the symbol of a false inequality, money-given becomes the symbol of true equality because it is disbursed equally. This is one of the strongest cases for suggesting that money is, itself, not bad. Neither is the possession of money. Only with a very strong caveat: money is good when it is given away. It is not good when it is stockpiled or stolen. By my generosity, I am telling you that we are equal, and that my need to eat does not need to come at the expense of your need to eat. We can, simply, eat together. And here we’re coming back to Brueggemann’s reflection on the feeding of the five thousand as an image of the Eucharist. We can see how the two are thinking of one large theological vision: a world in which we know how to live well with each other, in which what we have is not isolable from the God who has given it to us.
These two reflections have obviously not answered every question in our mind, but by leading with “yes” instead of leading with “no” we find two remarkable things to be true: giving, paradoxically, reminds us that we have enough; and giving, paradoxically, can be a demonstration of equality. Both of these, especially when we do this frequently and willingly, are practices of hope for us in the world.
[1] “Sorting Out Fantasy and Reality,” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, vol. 2 (Louisville: WJK Press, 2015), 134-137.
[2] “Sermon 61,” in St. Augustine, Essential Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill O.P. (New York: New City Press, 2007), 99.
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