When I was in ninth grade at Battle Creek Academy, a 45-minute religion class changed my life. My teacher showed a video of a Tony Campolo meeting from the 1980s. It blew my mind. Campolo talked about communing with the down and out. He talked about resisting the conformity of the age. He talked about not wasting your life. He said that owning a BMW was a sin. I did not know what to think. The implications of what the man said were huge, and I knew it. In Campolo's speech, BMWs were only a symbol—the point was tougher than that. Owning a BMW was not an issue for me at 15, and I didn't think it would be, but I knew that needless luxuries were certainly a temptation and could easily rob purpose and meaning from my life.
My view of the intersection of money and faith has become somewhat more complicated than it was my freshman year in high school. Questions of priority and responsibility have arisen, and continue to bother me. How do we juggle our needs, wants, desire for meaning, and our commitments to God and society? Do we have a responsibility to help those less fortunate than ourselves? Is it alright to live comfortably as long as we are generous as well?
One of the difficulties of the concepts of comfort and generosity is that they're such nebulous, relative terms. We applaud people in developing countries who live with significantly less than we do and are "happy with what they have" on our way to Wal-Mart. Most of us would theoretically stop consuming when we become "comfortable," but we view ourselves as just-above or just-below comfortable and justify ourselves in buying the CD, backyard grill, lunch in town, or family-sized car that will help solidify our comfort.
Generosity is also difficult. We may pay an honest tithe. That's what we're supposed to do, we think. We may give $50 to ADRA when we think of it. We may go so far as to sponsor a child in Africa or Asia. But we rarely give until it hurts, and sacrifice is rarely part of the purpose of our lives. Our jobs, education, and family provide purpose; giving time and money often just provides respite from a guilty conscience. We see service and activism as good things to do—not as our responsibility.
The same Bible teacher who introduced me to Campolo was asked in class why, if Jesus said that God knows what we need and will provide for our needs (Matthew 6:25–33), Christians around the world lived in difficulty and pain. Why do Christians starve, the student asked, when Jesus promised that God would take care of them?
My teacher gave an answer that gave me an uncomfortable feeling, but put a thought in my head that never quite left. He said, "Maybe we as Christians, God's hands on earth, are to make sure that no one starves—maybe we are to take care of each other." This answer made me nervous, but partially because it made sense. No matter the mysteries as to why God chooses to intervene in some situations but not others, it is our responsibility to do what we can to lessen human suffering and work toward the liberation of impoverished and subjugated peoples. So what are we to do to this end, and why is it sometimes difficult to find the motivation to sacrifice for others?
Two years ago I traveled to Peru for a spring break tour with Andrews University's behavioral sciences department. We quickly traversed the lows (The Amazon River), highs (Lake Titicaca), and middle (Lima) of that amazing country. While staying in the high-altitude city of Cuzco, our group met a woman and her family who needed our help. Her daughter had a hernia which needed medical attention, but she had no way to pay for it. The small amount of money the woman made during the day selling trinkets to tourists was taken by her alcoholic husband. That mother and her children touched something in our group. We put aside our cynicisms and concerns about money and went so far as to call in a physician who came out to look at the little girl at 11 o'clock at night. He told us the surgery would cost around US$200 and that we could transfer the money directly to the hospital. We raised the funds quickly and spent the rest of the evening celebrating with the family, dancing around in the streets with the little children.
The meaning we got out of this experience was incredible. A question, though: why were we so willing to give money to help this little girl? For some of us, what we gave her was the last of our money for the trip. Some students begged and borrowed from friends for the rest of the tour because of their gift.
In reality, beyond the emotional effect that seeing suffering up close brings forth, the world is full of little girls with hernias, with distended bellies, with AIDS. It may be easier to make others a priority when their suffering is in our face, but people are suffering whether we can see it or not. The way we make decisions about our careers, our finances, and the way we spend money can be a reflection of our desires and feelings, or they can reflect the truth that we are the hands and feet of God. Rather than asking whether it is alright to live comfortably, we should be asking if there is more we can do. When we look at our responsibility to others in this way, we are less likely to make rationalizations for our own luxuries.
Every time I express these sentiments I feel like I should be careful or I might get caught. I believe that we as humans and as Christians who have been fortunate economically have a responsibility to put the well-being of others before our comfort. So I am afraid I will be seen at Starbucks, at a concert, or in the check-out line at Barnes & Noble, and someone will know that I don't practice what I preach. Idealism is an exercise in controlled hypocrisy, and as an advocate of self-sacrificing generosity, I am certainly a hypocrite.
Change, personal and corporate, is a process. As I grow toward a more humane stance toward my fellow humans and form a more coherent lifestyle, expressing my beliefs as to my priorities, I will stumble. We all will. We can be thankful for the grace that allows us to grow toward a love and respect for humanity, and the grace which allows us to change our lives so as to change society.
Andrew Gerard is a junior anthropology major at Andrews University.
