Where Should We Spend The Tithe?

So why am I telling you this?

When my grandmother became ill, as we all eventually do, and needed home care, the family rallied to help her. My cousin Antoinette worked herself to exhaustion helping my grandmother to eat, and shower, and go to the toilet and get into bed. She couldn’t be there all the time, and for weeks I also stayed at my grandmother’s house, with my husband, caring for her. I helped my aunt and father with her finances. I helped everyone with their taxes back then, since I’m weird and I like paperwork. Try not to be that family member if you can avoid it. That’s not biblical advice. It’s just what I learned from doing 27 sets of annual taxes!

When I did my grandmother’s taxes, I found out that what she spent on the house, her glamourous clothes and jewellery, maintenance on that beautiful yard we used to run across for hours….represented less than 30% of her income. The rest of it went to her family or to the church. She was loaning money to anyone who asked it of her, and never expecting to be paid back. She was tracking down and acquiring books and artefacts relevant to our history, to the history of families who came to Canada on the Underground Railroad, and donating it to the church. Our local BME church was the recipient of huge gifts from my grandmother and from others like her. Who had wealth. Who gave it to the church.

But what did it do?

Well that depends.

The money my grandmother gave to people who were living in sin didn’t do very much. It didn’t go very far. They told her they needed money for food, and they gambled it away or spent it on drugs. They came back for more money, and they gambled it away or spent it on drugs. As we saw in the examples I gave earlier, someone can spend hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars on sin. If you keep giving it to them, they just keep spending it.

The money my grandmother gave to the church went to the people, and you can see those works even now. And that money grew.

Jesus calls us to give to the needy and the poor.

Matthew 25:35-40

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’

Matthew 25:30-40 doesn’t say “for I needed drugs and you bought them for me”

Matthew 25:30 doesn’t say “for I wanted to gamble, and you bought me poker chips”

Matthew 25:30 doesn’t say “for I abused my wife, and you supported me because I didn’t want to pay alimony.”

Jesus calls us to look for His people, Godly people who are in need. Elderly people who need care or who have lost their spouses and need our support. Families who are working constantly and barely making ends meet. Construction workers who are homeless three months a year. Shift workers who never sleep just to make the house payment.

My grandmother used quite a bit of seed money to start the Afro Canadian Carribean Association, which still exists. Over the years they have done amazing things for a lot of people. The organization was started on just this side of Jim Crow, when young black children had a lot less access than people who looked “white”. ACCA, as the Afro can cab assn is called for short, provided access to teaching, to education, to resources, and to mentorship for these young people. The organization can be credited with raising up educators and leaders, with supporting the dreams and aspirations of generations of black youth. And those works bore fruit. They planted the seeds of self worth and of God’s almighty gifts and of freedom to get an education and to make a difference in the lives of others, and it bore fruit.