What is it to be rich and what is it to be generous?
Ten million pound coins on a desert island would be as useless as a tissue paper canoe. Less useful, because burning the canoe would at least keep you warm. Physical money on its own has no value – you can’t eat it, you can’t build a shelter out of it, you can’t easily use it to keep warm or dry, yet it has a peculiar hold over us.
Why? Probably because of what it represents. Bankers say that money serves three basic functions: it is a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. It makes buying and selling things easy, we can use it as a way of keeping count of our wealth and it is a way of holding onto wealth.
For example, if I tie up my wealth in cabbages, it wouldn’t last very long. Two or three weeks after cutting the cabbages, they’d have no value because they’d be mushy and revolting. But if I sell them when they are fresh and green, I can get £100 to put in the bank to use whenever and wherever I want.
These very useful things about money are also at the core of some of our worst temptations. If I use money to buy and sell, I am distancing myself from the thing that I am buying and it makes it easier to do things that I wouldn’t do if I was close up.
Once, if I wanted to swap my cabbages for your wheat, I’d have to meet you to do that. Today if I want to buy some cheap clothes, I don’t have to take my vegetables all the way to a sweat shop in the far east and see the conditions of the children there. I can use my £100 in the bank to pay for clothes in a shop without worrying where they came from. Or if I send my struggling widowed sister £100 every month to help with living costs but never visit her, I never see that she needs company as much as she needs food.
If we have stored up our wealth, we don’t rely on God meeting our daily needs. In the desert, when the Israelites tries to store the manna they were given every day by God, it went off. In the wilderness, the Israelites learnt how to trust God for their daily bread – money helps us not to have to trust.
Counting my wealth leads me quickly into the sin of pride – I’m somehow better than you because I have more money in the bank. Pride leads to anxiety – worrying about what will happen if we lose our wealth and our status. In a number of places in the Gospels Jesus talks about the anxiety that accompanies money and things. He knows that pride and anxiety are the enemy of hope - they lead use into ungenerous lives, holding on to the things we have instead of opening our hands, letting go, and living simply so that others may simply live. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money,” he said.
As you think about your life, do you control your money or does your money control you? Do we hold onto more than we could ever spend in our lifetime when others in the world have so little? Can we be more generous with our money and our time? How can we use our money to bring hope to the hopeless and renew our own faith in the God who is always faithful?
Sam Rushton is the Chief Executive Officer and Diocesan Secretary of Lichfield Diocese.
This is the second in a series of three articles encouraging the whole diocese - parishes, clergy, lay leaders… everyone - to explore attitudes to money together, looking at ‘Gratitude, Opportunity and Hope’.