When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this. Deuteronomy 24:19-22
“A responsible practice of materiality might consider two other dimensions of saving. First, save the earth as our natural habitat. The earth is now being wasted and devastated by our industrial practice of excessive fossil-energy use coupled with a throwaway attitude toward consumer products. Mature materiality will usefully take a plunge into the inimitable work of Wendell Berry, our great apostle of frugality:
“We have only one choice. We must either properly care for all of it [nature] or continue our lethal damage to all of it. In the age of industrialism, this relationship [of mutuality between nature and human beings] has been radically brought down to a pair of hopeless assumptions: that the natural world is passively subject either to unlimited pillage as a “natural resource,” or to partial and selective protection as “the environment.”
We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only a few years, after all) to “need.” It is surely the duty of the older generation to be embarrassingly old-fashioned.”
Such a saving is not storing up for one’s self; it is rather saving in a way that articulates our lives as a part of a larger web of creaturely life to which we may contribute. The great decision for materiality is to be a contributor to creaturely well-being or to be a user who diminishes and exhausts our common creatureliness.
Second, our mandate to “save all you can” means to save our neighbors. In the Bible the “quadrilateral of vulnerability” includes widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor (see Deut. 24:19–22), all those who have no standing or leverage in a predatory patriarchal economy. Such saving would entail sustained acts of charity whereby the disadvantaged share in the wealth and property of the community.
Ownership is everything! Beyond charity, however, the great marker of saving the neighbor in the Bible concerns the regular cancellation of debt, and that in a society that willfully creates a debtor class in order to ensure a pool of cheap labor! Thus Moses provides for a periodic cancellation of debt in the “year of remission” (Deut. 15:1–18) and a restoration of lost property in the practice of Jubilee (Lev. 25).
The Lord’s Prayer, the one that Christians pray most habitually, has at its center a petition for debt forgiveness: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matt. 6:12). The intent of these provisions is to preclude the formation of a permanent poverty class and to permit the disadvantaged to participate in a viable economic life. Clearly “save all you can” draws energy away from a simple private accumulation of money to a wise deployment of money for the sake of the
neighborhood and for a neighborly creation.”
Walter Brueggemann in Materiality As Resistance: Five Elements for Moral Action in the Real World (Louisville: WJKP, 2020), 24-25.
Brueggemann has used the famous statement from John Wesley, “Gain all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can” as his outline for engaging the topic of money with a lens of materiality. Today’s focus is saving.
I have taken my stewardship more seriously linked to creation care after two things happened in my life. I met Dr. Milan Hluchy, and I became a grandfather.
Dr. Hluchy of Czech Republic is a world authority in organic plant protection. He cares about the healthy ecology for plants and I work with GTP to advance the healthy ecology of churches and ministries.
His work has caused the same number of hectares (think: acres only bigger) of grapes in Czech Republic to increase both yield and quality by ceasing all use of pesticides.
The President of Czech Republic seeks his counsel for all agriculture in the country. The European Union wants his advice for many nations. And on two trips to Ukraine during the war, we have serve in the war zone and met with the top agriculture figures in the nation.
What’s my point? If we do any saving, we need to care for creation and care for the quadrilateral of vulnerability that God cares about throughout the Old and New Testaments: widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor.
Most Americans save to care for themselves and have rationalized so much disobedience they don’t know right from wrong with regard to money and faithful stewardship..
As I have arrived in India I see a world filled with an overabundance of people and unspeakable pollution. The needs of the quadrilateral stand out even more dramatically.
I shot the new header photo from Conquerors Software Technology where I had strategic meetings today regarding possible technology services. This view features a rare stretch of green space to “Cyber Towers” in the Silicon Valley area of Hyderabad.
Whether in America, India, or elsewhere, most people seem to focus on how they care for themselves.
Regarding saving, I always go to what my mentor and friend John Stanley has taught me. Saving is simply creating margin. We need margin in our finances and our schedules to show our love for God and neighbor.
Without margin, there’s no hope for creation (we trash the place) and the quadrilateral of vulnerability (we have no time and resources for those less fortunate).
When we were less fortunate, God sent Jesus to sort our sin problem. And He’s commissioned us to serve as His hands and feet. Will we? The future of the widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor depends on the choices we make.
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