When we talk about spiritual growth, a key point to learn is the distinction between motive and action. God, it seems, wants us not only to do what is right, but also to do it for the right reason. Looking to straighten out their motives, Christians might turn to Matthew 6:1-4, where Jesus teaches,
I’m not sure this passage tells us exactly what we want to hear, if we’re approaching it with normal ideas about Christian spirituality. Though we want Jesus to send us into our own hearts looking for good motives, Jesus appears more concerned with how alms are given than with why alms are given. In the case of the hypocrite, it appears that the two are the same: he wants to be seen giving alms, so he does it publicly. But for the disciple, Jesus never really gets at why she should give. He doesn’t seem to insist here that the giver have pure motives, or that she even care about the people she’s helping. In fact, the use of the word “wages” sort of sets up the whole thing as a trade-off. It seems that Jesus uses our hope for reward as motivation to do good. The question, as he presents it, is not whether we have pure motives, or whether we would give if no one were looking at all. All Jesus talks about is who will see us––God or humans. If we don’t pay attention, we can be tempted to out-spiritualize Jesus. When it comes to caring for the poor, Christians naturally want to make sure we have right motives and to put our hearts into the help we give others. Some good-natured folks who wish to avoid works righteousness might even say something like, “It’s really not about what we do; what God really wants is our hearts.” And I think this reflects something important for Christians. However, while God does want our hearts, for us to act as if our own spirituality should be our focus in things like helping the poor surely leads us away from what God really wants. As my friend Matt has written before on his blog (or maybe mine), when God tells us to feed the poor, God may hope to win our hearts over so that we give cheerfully (thus 2 Corinthians 8–9), but we should probably assume that what God really wants is something a lot simpler: for the poor to have food to eat, houses to live in, and jobs to work at. I think it is instructive that the prophets call the people of Israel to stop offering sacrifices because they aren’t taking care of the poor, not the other way around. I bring all this up because of a blog post I read this week by Larry James, who runs a major food pantry and community development center in Texas called Central Dallas Ministries. He suggests that a lot of people, when they say they want to “really make a difference,” rather than “just throw money at a problem,” actually mean they want to make a difference in their own life. In other words, their spirituality is turned inwards, so that they don’t feel they’re doing anything good if they can’t really put their heart into it and get involved. James, however, suggests that often, the best way to make a genuine difference in the life of someone who struggles with poverty is indeed to throw money — lots of it — at organizations that help people in need. Heart-warming experiences are great, but money puts a lot more food on people’s plates. Last week I bought lunch for a panhandler in Boston. We had a nice conversation, and I think it was absolutely worth my time and money to share that meal with a nice fellow who frankly seemed more lonely than poor. But I shouldn’t kid myself that I was somehow fighting poverty by the $6 is spent on him. I’m sure it was a nice change for him, and of course I get to feel sort of virtuous about the whole thing. But in the end, that kind of experience is no substitute for giving a substantial portion of my income to people like Larry James who know how to work within poor communities to improve people’s lives. Maybe at some point in my life I’ll make the time to really participate in an organization like that, but in the meantime it would be a tragedy if I used my failure to give time as an excuse not to give money either. So if you have the time, please read Larry James’ post, because I think it will help you grow. In fact, subscribe to his daily blog on your rss feeder: larryjamesurbandaily.blogspot.com. But once you’re done reading it, please give to his organization, and then keep giving regularly every month. I really doubt in this case that God is as concerned with what you learn from Larry James as God is with whether people have jobs, homes, and food. |
September 2007
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Virtue as Act: Throwing Money at Larry JamesPosted by Scott Haile under Gospels, Central Dallas Ministries, money | [8] Comments | |
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Ten years ago today, Rich Mullins died in a car wreck at the age of forty-one. Some might remember that my first post when I started this blog last year quoted a Rich Mullins song, and I’ve mentioned him often enough that Matt has even poked a little fun for it. I have a lot of reasons for loving Mullins. The poetry of his songs moves me in a way unlike the work of any other musician, and as a theologian I find him to be a kindred spirit. I believe the values he embodied reflect the way of Jesus unlike anyone I know personally, and I aspire (perhaps unrealistically) to model my life after his. He’s my hero. Stories about Mullins’ life have grown into legend, but really they’re plausible enough. They’re just not common. His hero was Saint Francis of Assisi, who started a religious order known for its vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Mullins and his best friend Beaker started a sort of religious order of their own that they called the Kid Brothers of St. Frank. Their first goal was to follow Francis’ vow of poverty, which they interpreted as a life of simplicity, and a practice of sharing, almost indiscriminately. As a result, Mullins redirected all his money through his accountant, who paid him an annual allowance of $24,000. The rest went to Mullins’ church, to the other Kid Brothers of St. Frank, or to people he encountered in need. He also decided that God would have him use his musical gifts for something more than the Christian music industry, so in the middle of his recording career, he went back to college as a 34-year-old to earn a degree in music education. In the last years of his life, Mullins moved to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico to teach music to the kids there. He was the best kind of idealist: he structured his entire life so that he would live out his ideals rather than just talking about them. Ragamuffins Mullins took the word Ragamuffin (from a book by Brennan Manning) as the name of his band, and their performances suited their name. While Mullins’ studio albums are polished enough, recordings of the Ragamuffins’ live performances reflect a mismatched group of musicians for whom community appears to have been more important than precision. Mullins would even say in concert that he disliked anything that was too perfect, and that instead the mess of life (and, to a degree, music) is what makes it interesting. In the end, I think he was just too passionate about his music and his message to care much for precision. He was shamelessly sentimental at times, both about life and about God, but that just reflected who he was at his core: a poet. Maybe the thing that makes Mullins unique among popular Christian musicians is that his lyrics are so relentlessly human. He may be sentimental when he talks about God, but he is rarely simply pious. His music is compelling for me because he was utterly genuine: his non-conformity was grounded in his passion, not in a bid to attract listeners. The lyrics I want to quote are from a song that hardly mentions God at all. Mullins died single, but at one point he was engaged to be married, before the relationship apparently fell apart. He recounts his pain with striking passion:
While I love including long quotations like this (hopefully you all will humor me), this has been a difficult post for me to write. It’s not that I’m particularly emotional about the anniversary–I didn’t really even know who Mullins was until a couple of years after he died. But even though I’ve been planning on writing this post for at least a couple of weeks, I can’t seem to capture who he was, and that’s frustrating. I recently bought a book about Mullins called An Arrow Pointing to Heaven: A Devotional Biography; it has a lot of great material, but it is poorly written and also frustrating. (The author uses lots of quotations from Mullins, but then he explains them all with what amount to tedious paraphrases of the quotations that were clear enough already.) It makes sense that a book (or a blog post) would only poorly capture the work of a musician, and frustration is a fitting emotion for describing Mullins’ legacy: he lived a life of pain wrapped up in a desperate desire to serve God, and the rest of us are left frustrated by his early death, wishing he could have gone on writing and recording. I wish I could convince everyone reading this to appreciate Mullins’ music the way I do, but I know I can’t, so I won’t bother with any links. You can type his name into youtube and watch some concert clips, but he can be off-putting at times, and in any event no one of the clips will do justice to the complexity of his person and his music. Still, this is a man who is worthy of being remembered and honored, so I’ve done what I can. |