In my almost thirty years of ministry, I’ve been asked more questions than I can remember, but I can remember the questions I’ve been asked most often. One of those questions has to do with “how much”? How much do I need to pray/read my bible/come to church? Of course, one of the most frequently asked ones is, “How much do I have to give?”
Questions like this aren’t surprising; after all, we live in a “how much” culture. How much is this going to cost me? How much is this going to set me back? How long is this going to take? How much do I have to pay in taxes? How much is so integral to our society that we have laws and professions that mandate and regulate how much. Courts will tell father’s how much they have to pay in child support (though I’ve seldom seen this enforced consistently). Tax professionals will tell you how much you have to pay in income taxes. HR departments will tell an employee how much time you can miss and still keep your job. Generally speaking, when someone tells us how much, we make sure we don’t go over that line if we are paying out and we will go as far as that line allows us when we are taking in. We hire a CPA to tell us down to the penny, what we have to pay the IRS, and we never pay any more than that, while doing everything short of lying, cheating, and stealing to pay less.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to live in a culture that did not need boundary markers, gatekeepers, and lawyers to parse out “how much” in minute detail? Imagine a world where a father committed that he would pay whatever was needed to ensure his children were cared for fully, without the injunction of a court order. Imagine a world where people contributed whatever was needed to make sure their neighbors had what they needed, even if there wasn’t an agency enforcing it. Imagine an employer providing an employee with whatever time they needed for specific and unique circumstances that might arise without warning or avoidance. Imagine a world where we took care of one another and stopped keeping score of who gets what or who deserves how much.
We don’t have to imagine a world like this, because our ancestors have handed us a detailed description of a world like this. This “world” is referred to in the Bible as “the kingdom of heaven”. Resist the urge to hear “kingdom of heaven” and think “This is what it will be like in heaven.” That’s true, of course, but what our spiritual ancestors were telling us about was a kingdom that originated, came down from heaven. Think of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as in heaven.” Our spiritual ancestors recorded stories where, “All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” (Acts 2:44-45); “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had…God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.” (Acts 4:32-35). This is the kingdom Jesus brought down from heaven and planted in the midst of the kingdoms of men, but throughout the ages, humans got glimpses of this kingdom every time and everywhere there were people who trusted God.
One of my favorite examples of this is found in the book of Ruth. Ruth was a Moabite widow who had pledged her devotion to her deceased husbands mother. Though under no legal obligations, Ruth committed herself to her mother-in-law Naomi and vowed to care for this elderly woman as if she was her own mother, even moving to a foreign land with her. These two women were so poor and destitute that their literal survival depended upon the kindness of others in the community. Fortunately for them there was a virtuous man named Boaz who took seriously the call of God to care for the poor. One of the directives God had given His people Israel — those who were called to live according to the ethics of heaven in the midst of a very cruel, violent and selfish world — was what is called “gleaning laws”. The laws went something like this: when you harvest your fields, whatever falls to the ground, leave it for the poor to come and collect so they can eat. Beyond that, intentionally leave the corners/edges of your fields unharvested so that the poorest in your community (i.e. those who do not own land wherein they can plant their own crops) can come and find food they need to survive. Most of the harvest went to the owner of the field, but a portion was set aside for the poor, the elderly, the sick. The gleaning laws were an extension of their practice of tithing, wherein they kept 90% of what they made/owned/grew and gave away 10%
Something that Honey and I feel very strongly about pertaining to this garden is a sort of reverse tithing. Yes, our family eats from this garden, but we seek to give away 90% of it and keep just a small portion to glean for ourselves. We feel strongly about it because we have been blessed abundantly our entire lives with always having what we needed when we needed it. There have been many hard and lean times, scary and concerned times, but we have never gone without. At this stage in our lives we have all that we need (a roof over our heads, a job, healthcare, grand babies and love…what else could we want?), so our focus for the second half of life is to plant, water, and trust God to give the increase. We want to do what we can to be an answer to the prayer “thy will be done on earth as in heaven.”
The first story in the Bible is of a man and woman that God joined together, placed in a garden and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” They were caretakers of what God had created, and that sounds like a pretty good place to start. As the season rolls on from Winter to Spring, stop by this little garden and you will find a man and woman God joined together doing their best to take care of the piece of land where He planted us. You are welcome to join in or simply enjoy, either way, we plan to share what we have because we know God’s grace is powerfully at work.
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