I was thinking today, about the way the feudal system of paying rents to ‘land lords’ might have influenced the view of givings and offerings in the church in England, and by extension, (what we still call) the rest of Christendom. Taxes to the lord of the manor meant you could grow food in your little plot of mud, as far as I understood it, without being (pardon the pun) turfed out.
Was it sown into those old Norman parishes that offerings to your local church were taxes of a different kind, I wonder?
Ah but, I grew up watching Maid Marian and Her Merry Men*. I have a late-1980s warped view of the feudal system and the Robin Hood story..
There were certainly indulgences. That was what got Martin Luther riled up - that you could pay your way to being prayed for by a saint who’d get you a seat in Heaven. The Reformation was partly about liberating poor people from that kind of nonsense.
But have we always linked ‘giving’ with reward? I wondered today. Is that link still intangible, but sort of still there? Sometimes people promote giving on the basis that you can’t ‘outgive’ God and he will always give more back. It might be true, but that seems like a really terrible reason to give, to me! In fact, that’s more like investing, which isn’t quite giving at all. I think ‘giving’ means handing something over that you don’t expect to get back. Ever. I kind of think that might have been the point.
“What do you think of those televangelist prosperity preachers?” someone asked me at work the other day. I told them that I thought a lot of them were snakes in suits. They shout about giving all the time, with the full-force prosperity pull that you’re bound to get more in return when you give with faith. Then they shout a snaky ‘amen’ and climb aboard their tax-free private jets so that they can go and shout somewhere else at other people for a while. It’s a pernicious twist. And it’s back to the feudal system where the land owners get fatter.
“If you folks go ahead and send us just a seed, just a small faith seed of twenty fahv maybe thirty dollars, God’s gonna open up the floodgates in yer lahf and answer all yer prayers of faith hallelujah.”
The rich land lord collects the rent, promises you your own manor one day and tells you to just dig harder and believe for that harvest, when nothing happens.
It occurred to me then that ‘giving’ is all about the receiver, as it always was at Christmas time, at Easter and throughout the history of the early church. And therefore it’s all about love.
I don’t think my nephews will get their uncle a pressie this year, and I simply don’t expect them to either. But will I bless them anyway? You bet I will. And I will rob from the rich (myself) and give to the poor (them) to do it. And who knows, maybe I won’t stop there. Maybe I shouldn’t stop there.
But then, I grew up watching Maid Marian and Her Merry Men, and I have quite the late-1980s warped view of the feudal system.
*Like Horrible Histories, but sort of better, and with deliberate 80s cringe-rap.
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