CHRI$T

Midweek Vespers, Week Three: Almsgiving

Reading: Acts 2:38-47

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The three great pillars of Lent are fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. The first two we’ve covered, so now on to the third.

Jesus preached a lot about money—so often, in fact, that it’s kind of amazing how rarely we as modern ministers bring the subject up. Part of this, I suspect, is a reaction against the misuse of the pulpit by preachers of the so-called prosperity gospel. We’ve all seen the hucksters on television promising salvation and all your dreams coming true if you just put a dollar in the box, cash, check, or money order.

In the parish where I grew up, the pastor hated to preach on money, yet bills needed to be paid and paychecks needed to be signed. So once a year we would hold a special “Stewardship Sunday,” set aside, in effect, as a fundraising drive. I remember him seeming rather sheepish whenever these Sundays would come around, uncomfortable, I suppose, lest he give the appearance of fleecing his flock. But he would bite the bullet, and we would open our wallets, as a sort of necessary evil.

This, mind you, was a substantial staff ministry in an upper middle class suburban context. People were largely affluent, not to mention German, which meant we had been raised to understand that frank discussion of wealth was gauche. All of which would surely have baffled the early Christian Church.

In Jesus’ day, when Judea was a province of the mighty Roman Empire, there was no such thing as a middle class. Most people, some 95 percent, were poor. They ranged from the lowest of slaves, of which there were a lot, to merchants and skilled craftsmen. What they had in common, what made them poor, was food insecurity. If drought came, or bandits, or warfare, or plague, they would starve. But not the rich. The rich always had food. The rich always had everything. If you think wealth inequality is bad now—and it is—you should’ve seen it back then.

And there was none of this silly posturing that billionaires had earned their fortunes. An aristocratic Roman wouldn’t be caught dead with a job. They disdained the concept of working for a living as a sort of prostitution, of selling yourself. The rich were rich because they were rich, because their ancestors had bought up a lot of land in a crisis, or because they’d raised an army and conquered a neighboring country, like Judea. The poor, meanwhile, had neither citizenship nor rights. You can imagine what a man like Caesar was used to doing to all of his younger slaves.

So, yes, Jesus viewed wealth as a massive impediment to salvation, because it inevitably entailed dehumanization and the obscene accumulation of excess while most people around you starved. “It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to be saved.” Little wonder that the state made Christianity illegal.

Property and wealth, in the Bible, are bestowed upon us by God so that we may use them as tools with which to love our neighbors as ourselves. That very much upset the wealthy and the powerful in Jesus’ day, and it still upsets the wealthy and the powerful today.

We are told by elites in business and government, through law and through media, that the purpose of property and wealth is to get more: more of everything; to consume without end. When we have all that we need, new needs are then manufactured. No one gets upset when a politician buys a sixth house. But, oh, the outrage when a politician speaks of using tax dollars to help the poor.

Now, I don’t want to get into a debate about economics. The ideological systems so important to us today—capitalism, consumerism, communism, socialism—these didn’t exist 2,000 years ago. Our economic and monetary theories have advanced. But for Jesus the core of the matter is what wealth is for. And on this, the Bible couldn’t be clearer. Wealth is for community. Wealth is for our neighbor in his need.

The early Church in Jerusalem, preached by Peter and adjudicated by James, was a community that held all things in common. Most if not all Christians in the congregation sold what they owned and gave their money to the Apostles for them to distribute to the widows, the orphans, and those otherwise in need. This was not forced, mind you, though the Bible reports a rather infamous episode in which a married couple lied publicly to the Church about what they did or didn’t give, and were thus struck dead by God for the audacity of their sin.

Some have seized on the Jerusalem community as an example of early Christian communism. I think it more accurate to say that the Church in Jerusalem served as a proto-monastic community, and one that failed to stay financially afloat. We find in the letters of St Paul that, as Paul was going around founding churches throughout the cities of the Greco-Roman world, he kept having to gather offerings to send back to Jerusalem because holding “all things in common” only worked for so long. It seems that in order to give alms, you have to have alms in the first place.

Meanwhile, in those churches that Paul founded, he had to keep pressing people to break the deeply engrained habit of separating themselves by class. There were rich Christians who made poor Christians take the Eucharist in a separate room. When Paul writes about restraining sexual appetites, he’s very often telling rich people, “No, you can’t do that to your servant or your slave, not if you’re a Christian.”

In the liturgy of those churches, an offering would be taken, just as we take an offering each Sunday. People would bring forward bread and wine for the Eucharist and other foods for a communal meal, just as we share hospitality with worship today. Cloth merchants would bring their extra cloth. Tanners would bring spare vellum. Everyone brought whatever they had in excess, and this offering was then used to support the community—including, yes, the pastor’s family—and also the poor.

Understand, then, that giving alms—sharing our wealth—has never been some optional side piety that we might engage in just during Lent, like tossing spare change into a beggar’s cup or throwing a dollar into a can for the ASPCA. Offering alms for the poor has always been a central feature of Christian worship, right in the middle of the divine service, between the Word and the Meal.

That’s why we speak of stewardship rather than ownership. The Bible protects private property. “Thou shalt not steal.” But this isn’t some absolute right. It’s a trust. We are called to be stewards, properly distributing, generously offering, because to give, for us, isn’t just about economics. To give is our spiritual identity. It’s who we are in Christ.

I don’t know about you, but I buy a lot of stuff that I don’t need. And yeah, some of that helps the economy, or so I’ve been told. And some of it really does bring a certain measure of joy. But mostly it’s just junk, filling up my house, filling up my life. And the truth is that I would be happier, and I would be holier, if I lived out more fully what I already believe: that God gives to us all good things as great and abundant gift, that we might use these gifts for neighbor and for community.

It is Jesus who gives us our wealth, and who asks for it back in the hands of the poor.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.