| Blessings and Tithes and How You View Your Stuff
[Genesis 12v2]
Now the Lord said to Abram, "Go from your country and your people and your father's house to the land I will show you. I will make a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great...
...so that the world will be blessed."
| Blessing
This story gets talked about all the time.
But we often leave that last part out.
We talk about God blessing us and we throw around the phrase in common greeting. And usually we leave it at that. You don't typically hear someone pray, "God, continue to bless us so that we may go and bless the world." We just want to be blessed in a static and self-assuring sort of way.
We don't like reading the second part of what God says to Abram.
Yet this is central to the very nature of how God blesses (which itself is a profound and deep and mysterious word that can't be flattened out with some two dimensional definition). Even when God gives blessings in the midst of creation, they are blessings that deal with movement and expansion.
Because a blessing is not for you.
It is for the world.
Which means that when you are "blessed", it simply that you happen to be the medium that the blessing flows through.
What we want this to say is that Abram is blessed and he goes on to live the good life. We want a picture of the blessing being about him and what he gets from it and what it does for his comfort and security and prominence. But this just isn't how it works. God doesn't bless you for your sake.
God blesses you for the world's sake.
Because your blessing isn't for you, it is for everyone. What you have is actually for the world.
Being blessed is simply being a conduit of that.
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| Manna
We can learn a lot from the community of Israel's first attempt to be a community. They have just been liberated from an oppressive empire and are wandering through the desert in an attempt to achieve the very thing God was talking to Abram about back in Genesis 12.
So this desert thing is taking quite awhile and, being an entire nation living in the middle of nowhere, food is a hard thing to come by. Enter the popular motif of the manna.
Manna is interesting. It is typically portrayed as a kind of bread that comes from the dew in the morning and the word manna literally just means, "What is it?" Basically, we don't know what this stuff is.
But something happens in this story that says a lot about how God creates the world to work. God is introducing what this thing is, that it will keep them fed, and how the whole thing is going to work and in Exodus 16 we read this:
"Then Adonai commanded, 'Everyone is to gather as much as they need.
Take an omer [a description of weight] for each person in your tent.'
The Israelites did as they were told. Some gathered much, some little.
And when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did
not have too much and the one who gathered little did not have too little.
Everyone had gathered just as much as they needed.
The picture is that there is a particular amount of people and God gives enough of this manna stuff for everyone. So some tents are big and need a good bit and some tents are small and they only need a little, but only just enough fell.
Which means no one can take more than is needed.
There is an emphasis here that everyone needs to get what they need because there is only enough resources for everyone and if someone takes more than they need, then that means someone else isn't getting theirs. Their taking more would be at the expense of someone in their community.
Instead, there is a sort of responsibility to make sure this doesn't happen. To make sure that everyone has the right amount of manna. Notice that God doesn't have the appropriate amount of manna appear at each tent. God doesn't disperse the resources for them.
God expects the people to properly disperse it themselves. (And not just one person doing the dispersing...they are supposed to do it together).
There is just the right amount of manna and God relies on the people to make sure each other are taken care of.
Which makes this story in Exodus a microcosm for the entire world. Just look at nature. It is the poster-child for how to pull this off. For example, if you examine a tree or a plant, you realize that the tree gathers a certain amount of sugar from its leaves and a particular amount of water from its roots. But it never has any waste. It only gathers as much as it needs in order to flourish as a tree. Or, in an ecosystem, nothing is ever depleted. The ecosystem gives and takes in a way that meets the needs of the whole ecosystem while not taking anymore than necessary. Which is the very thing that allows the ecosystem to survive. If it began depleting itself or if the tree overused the resources around it, everything would eventually come to an end. Engrained in nature is this idea that you just don't take as much as you want. There is no hoarding or overuse or affluentism. This disease is foreign to the world around us.
Rather, the world is meant to work like this:
God gives enough for everyone.
They all have the responsibility of getting it properly dispersed.
And everyone has at much as they need.
Beautiful.
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| Gift
And this is what the blessing is all about.
It is God wanting to bless the world and counting on you to properly disperse it.
Just like the manna.
Because in order for God to bless the world, God starts by blessing you. Like God handing you something and saying, "Hey, can you make sure everyone gets this?"
This is what it means to be blessed.
But this requires a particular perspective of the world.
It means seeing everything you have and everything you are as a gift. You are carrying this gift that God has given in order to disperse it. You own and have these things, but you own them with the larger understanding that God owns everything. That this is God's gift to the world.
You are just the conduit.
Maybe this is what the "tithe" is all about. It is just the reminder of what you are supposed to be doing with the blessing and the gift. It is the process of properly handling the gift.
It isn't some law or command or requirement - it is just a reminder.
Maybe we could just say that it is a way to instill the awareness that your gift is actually the world's gift. That God has blessed the world and you are just participating in carrying it out. There is just enough manna and you are doing your role in making sure it is getting properly dispersed.
God implements the tithe to make sure everyone has enough.
To remind people that what you have isn't yours.
It is ours.
And that it is just your responsibility to pass it along. The responsibility to take the gift and make sure it is properly shared.
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| Egg
Which makes a blessing kind of like holding an egg.
Because if you hold onto an egg too tightly, it breaks. If you hold onto your stuff and resources and money and gifts too tightly, it, too, will break.
Because no longer will you own it.
It will now own you.
How often do we take the blessing that God has intended for the world or a gift that God wants passed on to everyone and close our hands and squeeze the egg to ensure that we don't lose it.
And we are just left with a broken egg.
We take the manna and assume it is all for us and try to get more and more and forget that we are supposed to be making sure everyone is getting enough.
It would be like Abram hearing that God has blessed him and then ignoring the entire second part and never doing anything with it. But the point of Abram's blessing is to take it to the world. To be a conduit. And instead of squeezing the egg, Abram shares it.
We need to open ourselves up to what it means to be blessed; that we are simply the medium that carries God's gift to the world. That we all have this manna and we need to be getting it to one another.
Because what you have isn't yours.
It is ours.
All of ours.
You are just making sure it gets properly dispersed.
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