IDK, my BFF Jill?

First of all, the title has nothing to do with the blog. Just to clear that up.

So we were talking about Crazy Love (Francis Chan) in small group and about joyful giving versus begrudging tithes and the point was made that there are verses in the Bible that talk about being wise with your money, and we have to balance that advice with how generous we are. To get right to the point, I don't think that's true. I don't think there is a balance, because I think being wise with your money and being generous with it are, more or less, the same thing. You could compare the "balance" to a see-saw with a super fat guy weighing down Generosity's end and a basket on the other end marked "Money for Food" that may or may not have just enough dollar bills inside to keep from getting blown away on the wind. The thing is though, this see-saw isn't tilted toward the fat guy's end, like you'd think. It's completely level, even though the fat guy might weigh 300 times what the basket weighs. Because that's how the kingdom of God works, isn't it? Oftentimes defying worldly wisdom, practicality, even logic?

Even though the see-saw is balanced, the risk should always be that your security basket will get blown away due to the weight of your generosity, and not the other way around. (Stingy people don't exactly make out very well in Jesus' parables, see Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16. In fact, almost more so than any other kind of sin, Jesus really seems to hate failure to be generous with those in need. He talks about money more than sex and cursing believe it or not, and yet oftentimes as churchgoers we get really hung up on avoiding things like sex and cursing and yet we cling desperately to our money.) We should always err on the side of being generous, even on the side of risking that we might not have enough for ourselves. Because if we live a lifestyle of generosity, we can have faith that God will also ensure that we have enough. Going into credit card debt is unwise, gambling is unwise, no argument there, but I don't think any attempt to be generous is ever unwise in God's eyes.

I was thinking about the story of the widow Jesus saw putting her two coins into the tithe box and how he told everyone that rich people might donate higher quantities of money but she was truly generous for giving all she had. And I think that there might even be something deeper going on in that story. For one thing, it took a lot of faith on the widow's part, faith that giving it ALL away wouldn't result in her starving to death, but in a miracle of God's provision. It wasn't just about her generosity, but her faith. But I think there may even be something else going on here. See, widows were already a burden on society in Jesus' culture. It was the responsibility of God-fearing people to provide for widows and orphans, who were never in a position to provide for themselves, and some probably did it joyfully, and some didn't. But the point is, whether or not widows would have had enough money to eat was dependent on the generosity of others. So for a widow to give away all her pennies meant that she was, in a way, intentionally making herself an even bigger burden on those who provided for her. Which we in American middle class culture might consider being "foolish" with your money. And yet, her action was praised by a guy who didn't save enough money for himself to even keep a low-end apartment...a guy whose meals were often dependent on others' generosity and his disciples' luck with fishing. And we're tempted to say "but he was Jesus! surely he doesn't expect us to actually live the way he did!"

This kind of feeds into another Jesus story in the book of Matthew where the ultimate homeless man says "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you." Now the previous insight about the widow might have come from my own brain but the following is stolen from a Rob Bell podcast, "Ask, Seek, Knock" in case you want to listen to it later. http://marshill.org/teaching-past/

What if that advice about asking and seeking and knocking isn't simply referring to our ability to find God in a spiritual sense whenever we desire to, but to something else as well? What if Jesus is painting a picture of how Christian society is supposed to look? We all know that God often uses us to work his miracles, that his provision for Person A might come in the form of generosity on the part of Person B. And that ties in with what I think Jesus is getting at in the whole "ask and you will receive" deal. What if he's saying, that instead of trying not to be a burden on anyone else, that we SHOULD take it for granted that our Christian brothers and sisters will desire to help us, to be generous with us, to pay our debts, to buy us lunch, to let us sleep on their floor when we don't have anywhere else to go? The thing is, if you believe God intends for YOU to be generous with others, don't you also believe that he intends for others to be generous with you? The early church did. They recognized that nothing they owned belonged to them, that it all came from God, and so they all lived together and shared everything. That means Lawyer Joe making $150K and Trashman Steve making minimum wage were on the same page. All the time. Not exactly a picture of our current society, even our modern church society, is it?

Maybe that's due in part to the fact that some of us who think we don't have too much trouble being generous with our own money may be terrified of being in debt to anyone else. There are a few of us who'd almost rather skip lunch than have someone else pay, and when we do give in to letting other people be generous toward us, we promise to pay them back as soon as possible. When we do that, though, we're denying other people an opportunity to be Christlike. And we're also revealing the fact that we, in fact, don't especially like to be generous because we obviously assume no one else likes to be generous toward us. And why would we do that? If we enjoyed being generous, we'd want to allow other people that same enjoyment, right?

Rob Bell gave the illustration that if your friend chooses not to call you at 3 in the morning when they're in a bind, "Because I didn't want to bother you," you should feel slightly betrayed, slightly hurt, actually. The friend may have, on the surface, been trying to be considerate of you, but they also exhibited a lack of security in your friendship, a lack of trust that you would WANT to help them out. And as Jesus followers, we're called to be the kind of people who will give away our money, our food, our time, whenever God calls on us to meet a need. Because in the end, it all belongs to Him anyway, right?