–Frederick Buechner,
When I participated as a member of a Lazarus at the Gate group in 2008, I knew one other participant. We were a bunch of people that were interested in the study but didn’t have a group underway at our churches or other affiliations that we could join. So some of us went in as strangers, and then connected as we shared thoughts and fears about money, security, and faith.
That group helped me to understand, at a much deeper level, why as Christians we are called to live in community with each other—that is, to engage with other Christians in ways that go beyond showing up at a church service and saying hello. For as much as we hear about the negatives and positives of Western or U.S. individualism, humans are relational. We describe ourselves in terms of relationships: son, daughter, sister, brother. Our actions are determined by our connections to others in ways that range from the mundane (reading yelp reviews to find out what other people think about a restaurant or service) to the profound (forming advocacy groups in support of specific issues).
Or, as Frederick Buechner wrote, “humanity is like an enormous spider web, so that if you touch it anywhere, you set the whole thing trembling.”
Our Lazarus group was that trembling web, constantly in motion from the effects of each other’s words and actions. We challenged each other through our individual acts of giving. Some gave more, some gave less, but I think all of us engaged in our own genuine struggle toward generosity and away from fear. We extended grace to each other as we understood each person’s story and context. Because we discussed times that we found changing our economic choices to be difficult, it was easier to know how to be supportive.
I think we saw God’s call to each of us more clearly through our conversations. We came to trust that everyone in our group was committed to trying to understand how God was asking him or her to spend or give money, and in fact to live generously, with the ultimate goal of working against injustice in the world. So when we spoke together, we could hear God speaking to us when we agreed—and, maybe especially, when we differed.
That seems to be how God set it up. That’s part of the we read about throughout the Bible, in the Torah and the prophets, in the words of Jesus and the words of Paul. “The vision of wholeness,” wrote Walter Brueggemann, “which is the supreme will of the biblical God, is the outgrowth of a covenant of , in which persons are bound not only to God but to one another in a caring, sharing, rejoicing community with none to make them afraid.”
And so when we give together in community, we reflect that wholeness in the process of giving. But the giving itself, and all of our economic choices, also set the web trembling. Because, like it or not, our economic system is relational. Every single thing we buy affects other people, and we have some power over whether those effects are for good or for ill. We can throw up our hands with the responsibility of it all, or we can look for God’s direction, in community, to figure out our next steps toward the vision of .
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