Birds, Lilies, and Us
by Joyce Holliday
The sun was a mere glint of orange on the eastern horizon. I had just spent a short and restless night on the floor of a church in the tiny town of Ocotal. I had journeyed there with the first U.S. delegation of Witness for Peace, a nonviolent, faith-based effort that established an ongoing prayerful and protective presence in Nicaragua’s war zones.
Around us, U.S.-backed forces known as contras were raiding vulnerable villages and terrorizing the population. We shared the church with refugees, mostly women and children, who had fled under fire from homes scattered throughout the mountains, leaving behind what little they owned. That night was filled with the cries of frightened children and punctuated with the sound of gunshots.
When our group awoke before dawn, the refugee women were already slapping out tortillas and cooking them in a dome-shaped clay oven. They invited us to partake in their meager breakfast. Uncertain about where they would spend the next night or find their next meal, they shared everything they had with us, affluent strangers from a country that was sponsoring a war against them. Our communion of tortillas and coffee at dawn was a sacrament of generosity.
Almost three decades separate me from that moment. I have used this story as a sermon illustration probably more than any other from my travels around the globe. I have longed to be like those women. I don’t romanticize the poverty and violence that they suffered, but I envy their faith. They had learned how to live for each day and share all that they had, trusting in God’s provision.
I feel light years away from their spiritual maturity. I inhabit a culture that relentlessly screams at me that I am supposed to be self-sufficient, able to take care of my every need. And as I face the financial and physical realities of making my way through middle age, the external pressures and internal insecurities threaten to grip me in their stranglehold in ever-new ways.
I have tried, in this stage of my life as in every other, to ask this one question: What does being faithful to the way of Jesus and the demands of the gospel require of me in this moment? Of all the aspects of life that this question entails, none is more confusing to me than my relationship to money, made more complicated by our particular time and place. How can we live faithfully in the heart of an empire whose obscene rate of consumption is unprecedented in history, whose exploitive economic reach creates massive disparities and global poverty, and whose war coffers are larger than the military budgets of all other nations combined?
No other topic gets more space in the pages of Scripture than economic relationships. When the early Israelites were liberated from slavery in Egypt, God directed them to a forty-year wilderness training school in trust. God provided manna for sustenance and formed them into a community based on equality; committed to the common good. Everyone got just as much as they needed—and only that much. If they hoarded, Scripture reports, the manna “bred worms and turned foul” (Exodus 16:20). Before they left for the Promised Land, God commanded that the Israelites put a measure of manna in a jar, to be a reminder for generations to come of how they ought to live (Exodus 16:32-34).
I’d like to know what happened to that jar. Wilderness behind them, the hoarding and accumulating began. People went into debt and were forced into slavery when they couldn’t repay. Some among them grew rich, and others became destitute; some were satiated, while others died for lack of food.
God decided some divine intervention was in order and established the Jubilee Year, a time when debts were forgiven, slaves were freed, and land was returned to its original owners. But still the disparities grew. The prophets regularly chastised the people for their greedy and exploitive ways, commanding them to care for widows,orphans, sojourners, and others on the economic margins.
Jesus, who lived a dispossessed life on the run, surrounded himself with such as these. And when announcing his mission, he picked up Isaiah’s refrain about the Jubilee Year, promising to “bring good news to the poor… let the oppressed go free…and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). When the Holy Spirit rushed in at Pentecost, bringing the church to birth, the response of believers was to correct the economic disparities and hold all their possessions in common, making sure that no one was in need (Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32).
Today, the disparities and divisions in our world boggle the imagination. A recent report by the United Nations states that the world’s three richest families own more wealth than its forty-eight poorest countries. Corporate CEOs rake in millions, while laborers in fields and in sweatshops here and around the world slave for pennies a day to grow, pick, or manufacture cheap goods for our consumption. We are all deeply entangled in this web of disparity.
I would like the answer to this complicated dilemma to be as simple as Jesus seems to make it. In his Sermon on the Mount, he points to the birds in the air and the lilies of the field, which thrive under God’s care. “Therefore do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’…But strive first for the realm of God and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6:25-33).
I once believed these words. But then I saw too many children with the distended bellies of hunger in Central America, too many child-sized graves in South Africa. Jesus’ promise seemed a mockery of their privation.
At a moment when I was ready to rail at God through tears about this injustice, I was reminded that righteousness means right relationship. Children die of starvation, not because God wills it or overlooks their cries, but because we have not learned how to live justly and generously.
This promise of Jesus isn’t a promise to individuals; it’s a promise to the community. We have all that we need; the only question is whether we will share it, so that all are recipients of the bounty. If so, the audacious promise holds.
We have lost our minds in this country, gobbling up about six times our share of the earth’s resources, tying up billions upon billions of dollars in retirement accounts and second homes, in long-term care insurance and alarm systems and extended warranties, convinced that each and every one of us needs enough money and stuff and protection to take care of ourselves, whatever may come. Think what that money could do toward alleviating hunger. Imagine what a different world we would inhabit if we chose faith over fear. If we decided to abandon our greed and share rather than exploit and threaten other global citizens, we might actually have something resembling true national security.
As for Social Security, dire reports are circulating about it careening toward bankruptcy. We’ve witnessed what can happen to the stock market, an entity so far beyond my comprehension that I don’t even have to try to believe in it or feel bad about not possessing an IRA. I will not have the option of retiring in the American way, but I have lived my life in exactly the way I hope always to live it, inspired by good work and surrounded by great friends, earning money when I need to. There’s a degree of liberation that comes from knowing that it’s too late for me to do otherwise.
But occasionally I turn myself over to the grip of fear and wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. I’m single and childless. Nobody is obligated, by virtue of the fact that I changed thousands of their diapers, to do the same for me when I lose the capacity to take care of myself. What if I become a burden on people I love? What if I actually need to go into a nursing facility? Then I remember that I’m part of the tiny affluent minority on the globe and go back to sleep.
I’m blessed to be spiritually, emotionally, and financially invested in a fourteen-acre farm on the edge of western North Carolina wilderness. I share it with two families and a couple, along with a llama, seven sheep, an assortment of cats and dogs—and a few bears who sometimes appear uninvited. We are attempting to shape a faithful existence grounded in simplicity and sustainability, with dreams of creating hospitality space for people in need of it.
To those who find this odd or un-American, I can only say that this is pretty much how people lived for centuries of human existence and still do in most of the world. We are created for interdependence. Ultimately, the only social security I trust is that which comes from the covenants made between friends and family members committed to caring for one another, through the provision and by the grace of God.
Our nation possesses some of the greatest abundance human civilization has ever known, and we act as if scarcity is our lot. In times of fear, when one choice is to hoard, many people—like those refugee women I met in Ocotal—choose instead to tie their well-being to the common good. I pray for such a spiritual revolution of generosity to sweep through our hearts and open wide our hands.
