Every year around this time, we spend a few weeks considering our commitment to giving, and you are invited by the Parish Council to register your financial commitment to our parish for the year. Next week there will be a letter and a form and a brochure and there will be emails and posters and sermons and notices and lots of things to help you to consider your giving.
It is tempting for me, and for our parish leaders, to categorise this time as a sort of ‘fundraising’ season. There are practical, pragmatic things in the parish that require money. In fact, the biggest practical pragmatic thing that requires money around here is, well, me - so I have something of a vested interest in this whole process of pledging and giving to parish funds. Unlike some other churches, we don’t have any passive income here. We don’t have an op-shop or a rental property or a handy office block or petrol station or a trust fund like some other parishes in this diocese. Everything we do here is paid for by us. We are a member-funded organisation, so we all chip in. So, like I say, it’s tempting to categorise this time as ‘fundraising’. Shake the can, pass the hat, beg and plead and cajole to get some cash in for another year and keep this boat afloat. This year, it is particularly tempting because a couple of households who were committed givers have moved to other parts of the country. Others have moved in, of course, but there’s always a bit of a gap as the demographics ebb and flow over time. We’ve actually run at a paper surplus on occasion in the last few years (though of course, the ‘profit’ has been set aside to pay for the restoration project). But this year, we are headed for a deficit – not because of the restoration work I hasten to add, that is all paid for from donations and money put aside. We are probably going to have a deficit because our income hasn’t quite reached enough to pay for the basics this year – my stipend and allowances, and our insurances and bills and, you know, all that boring stuff. It’s not a disaster – we keep some money in the bank for this exact situation – but it is a bit of a challenge and it is tempting to turn it into a crisis by making emotive pleas for money. I could tell you that if we don’t get more money I will leave, or the parish might close or a giant squid might eat your children.
But I’m not going to do that. Not today, not ever.
What I want to invite you to do is something that I have done, and continue to do, and continue to find difficult. I want to invite you to reflect on your relationship to money. But be warned, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have a dysfunctional relationship with money. Which is why so many of us try not to think about it too much. But Jesus talked about money A LOT. Like a real lot. More than sex, certainly. More than heaven. More than just about anything, Jesus called his followers to work through their relationship to wealth, property, ownership, acquisition and generosity. As we mature in our discipleship, part of that journey is facing the demon of money, and the many ways it finds to infect our lives.
Often when I meet with a couple preparing for marriage, I ask them to describe their home and family life during their tweens – roughly when they were 10-12 years old. Were you a ‘sit down at 6pm at the table for dinner prepared by Mum’ family, or a ‘grab a plate and eat on the couch just as soon as someone has managed to throw together some food’ kind of family? Were you the kind of kid who had a regimented schedule of formal activities, or were you allowed to go wandering your local neighbourhood with the kids down the street? And, inevitably, the question arises about the role of money in your family. Like, ‘when an unexpected expense came up (a school excursion or dental fillings) was this a source of stress in your family? Did you feel like you could ask for things and you would get them, or did you know not to ask because it made things awkward. Were you the kind of family where you’d have spontaneous treats like ice cream or going a ferris wheel or just getting burgers for dinner instead of cooking, or was caution required, because pay day was still a week away?
Maybe as I speak your imagining your own tweens, and the lessons you learned about money at that time. Maybe you delivered newspapers like me, or maybe you got pocket money like I didn’t. Maybe you were dirt poor, or comfortably off, or seriously wealthy. The point is, regardless of what your childhood was like, regardless of how much or how little money you had then or have now, everyone gets screwed up by money. It either makes us overly comfortable or exceedingly paranoid. It makes us jealous or lazy or miserly or wasteful. Therapists are fond of saying that every challenge you face in your life will be about your family of origin somehow – and they’re right. But the same applies to the way we learned about money as kids, and the relationship we’ve had with it ever since. We like to imagine that good financial management is about understanding numbers. But actually it’s about understanding behaviour. Our behaviour when it comes to money and possessions is a window into the psyche. And while you can’t get spiritually healthy just by focusing on money, good spiritual health includes a transformation of that relationship just as much as it means transforming our relationship with God, other people and the earth.
I still have a sick, twisted relationship to money. I think about it and worry about it more than I need to. I fantasise about having more of it, and I’m sometimes too stingy and sometimes too wasteful. But there’s two things that I have learned that I’m going to share with you that have helped me to mature in my relationship with money. I’m going to share them with you in the hopes they might help you too.
The first thing I’ve learned is that I need to constantly re-assert to myself that none of this belongs to me. I have to say it like a mantra, because I love owning things. New shirt? Fits nice, looks great – not mine. Sweet new stick blender for making soup – it whizzes things up so well, but it’s not mine. I’m just looking after it. Fresh parsley in a pot? Not mine. Iphone. Not mine. The hair dye that I should stop using now I’m forty? Also not mine. And it means that when the money lands in my account each month, that’s not mine either. I have been given it to care for, it is a gift to help me be well and healthy, it is a way of helping others earn a living and stopping me from being a burden to others – but it all belongs to God. When you and I can really embrace that, it starts to change us. We become more careful, and more generous. We cherish what we have, and grieve less about things we lose or break. We cling lightly to money and possessions, seeing them as a means to glorify God the creator, rather than tools for our own self-aggrandisement. None of this is mine, it all belongs to God.
The second thing I’ve learned is to give first. Don’t get me wrong here, if you’ve got a mortgage make sure you make the payments on time, and the same goes for utilities and insurance and all that. But for me at least, I’ve learned not to wait until I’ve spent all my money before thinking about giving away. In practice, this means I’ve got all my little direct debits and transfers neatly lined up on the 16th of the month so they all fly away to their recipient before I can get too attached to them. In the Hebrew scriptures, we find this principle of the ‘first fruits’, which is an offering made to God of the first things harvested from your land. It was symbolic – we don’t give God the dregs, but we give God the first serving. For me, this means that a proportion of my income (currently around 14%, but everyone is different) is skimmed off the top before I can get my grubby sinful hands on it. It goes to various charities and causes and people, and of course to this parish like many of yours. But it goes first, because it’s not just about being efficient, but about remembering whose it really is, where God’s priorities lie.
So welcome to this uncomfortable time of year, when going to church suddenly means having to think about the bank balance and the super account and how much I spend on coffee (hint: too much). But we do this not only because we need money to support the work and witness that we all share in and we all care about. We take this time each year to think about this hard topic because, in a weird way, it helps us to know God more fully, and in the process, to know ourselves more fully. So I think it’s worth it.
The Lord Be With You