When You Give: Ancient Answers & Contemporary Questions
Copyright © 2023 L. Joseph Letendre
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All Old Testament quotations, unless otherwise identified, are from the Orthodox Study Bible, © 2008 by St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology (published by Thomas Nelson, Inc., Nashville, Tennessee) and are used by permission. New Testament quotations are from the New King James Version of the Bible, © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc., and are used by permission.
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Copyright ©2023 by L. Joseph Letendre. All Rights Reserved. Published by Ancient Faith Publishing
To the pastors and people of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church, Chicago, Illinois
“May Christ bring us all together to everlasting life.”
(The Rule of St. Benedict)
Who?
both Scripture and clear-sighted common sense offer three answers to the question of who should give alms. In descending order of magnitude, they are: (1) Everyone. (2) The Church. (3) Me.
Everyone
By virtue of our humanity, we have an instinct to provide for those in need, to protect those in danger, to care for and to help those we can. In other words, to act humanely. This is neither particularly spiritual nor exclusively Christian. It is universal common sense, widely acknowledged if not invariably practiced.
What the Bible contributes is insight into the origin of this instinct. Human beings have it because
we are made in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–27). Loving our neighbors, greeting those we meet with a hearty “hail and well met,” and wishing the best for those who wish us well are simply good manners. What Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount is to move the goalpost. He establishes a higher standard for His followers, and through them, for all humanity. He teaches us to love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. . . . Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. (Matt. 5:44–45, 48)
Nonetheless, the lower standard is expected of all human beings. In the Gospel description of the Last Judgment, we read that “When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then He will sit on the throne of His glory. All the nations will be gathered before Him” (Matt. 25:31–32, emphasis mine).
“All the nations” encompasses even those who did not or could not have heard the Gospel or known of Christ. Both the righteous and the unrighteous protest, “When did we see You . . . ?” (vv. 37, 44). The hymnography for the Sunday of the Last Judgment, one of the Sundays that prepares us for the Lenten effort, reminds us of this repeatedly: “In fear all mankind will be judged according to the deeds they have done.”1
Any objection or accusation of unfairness is met by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans: “What may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19–20).
When God judges humanity, He does so on the basis of our being human and humane.
The Church
Almsgiving has always been a key part of the life and mission of the Church. This is no surprise to anyone who has read the Acts of the Apostles. From the
1 Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans., The Lenten Triodion (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1978), 150–151.
beginning, the first Christians are described as selling their “possessions and goods” and distributing the proceeds as “anyone had need” (Acts 2:45; 4:35).
Because almsgiving was central to the life of the Church, when the growing numbers of Christians made administering “the daily distribution” too time-consuming and burdensome for the apostles, they had to tell the people, “It is not desirable that we should leave the word of God and serve tables” (Acts 6:2). At the apostles’ suggestion, the first Christians chose seven deacons, whom the apostles appointed (i.e., ordained) to supervise and administer the Church’s almsgiving so the apostles might give themselves “continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (v. 4).
Two centuries later, the deacons’ connection with the material goods and charitable giving of the local churches was well known among the pagans. During Valerian’s persecution of the Church in 258, one of the deacons in Rome, Lawrence, was arrested. When the prefect ordered St. Lawrence to bring him the church’s riches, he gathered some of the poor and presented them to the prefect.
He was not amused.
The original ministry of the diaconate is still visible whenever a deacon serves the liturgy. His primary responsibility is to deal with the things being
offered. Prayers are offered, so he leads them; incense is offered, so he censes; bread and wine are offered, so he carries the bread to the altar and helps distribute the Gifts at Communion.
As we will see later, before Constantine’s reign, the Church was the Roman Empire’s only charity. After Constantine legalized Christianity, the new imperial entanglements brought rapid and dramatic changes. Suddenly, joining the Church was seen as advantageous by wealth-and-status–seeking individuals. The sudden spike in (nominal) membership and income presented challenges. The Church had to face the same temptation that Jesus overcame in the wilderness: the temptation to exchange the cross for material wealth, coercive power, and earthly glory (Matt. 4:1–11 and parallels).
The faithful fought back against the new ecclesiastical worldliness. Monasticism emerged to take up the mantle of prophetic witness to the world. From the pulpit, St. John Chrysostom admonished his flock:
If you want to honor Christ, do it when you see Him naked, in the person of the poor. No use, if you bring silk and precious metals to the temple, and leave Christ to suffer cold and nakedness on the outside. No use, if the
temple is full of golden vessels, but Christ
Himself is starving. You make golden chalices, but fail to offer cups of cold water to the needy. Christ, as a homeless stranger, is wandering around and begging, and instead of receiving Him you make decorations. 2
Church historians often focus on world-changing achievements, fiercely fought conflicts, and largerthan-life personalities. Critics single out the many times the Church was more player than prophet in the politics of the day. Enemies of the Church gleefully rub their hands and point to pogroms, crusades, and inquisitions. It is easy to forget the quiet work and small services the Church was always doing for the God who sees what is done in secret.
Some Nuts and Bolts
It is beyond my competence or the scope of this book to suggest what churches should be doing at the patriarchal or diocesan level, but I’ve noticed things that work on the parochial level. Charitable giving to
2 Commentary on the Gospel of St. Matthew, quoted in Florovsky, Georges, “St. John Chrysostom: Prophet of Charity”
in Aspects of Church History (Maura, Norway: Nordland Publishing Company, 1975).
©2023 by L. Joseph Letendre.
those in need can be a line item in every parish’s budget. I suggest the goal should be that a tithe (10%) of a parish’s income should be used for almsgiving. These funds could be directed toward:
» Responding to appeals from the primates and bishops
» Supporting individual missionaries or missionary organizations such as OCMC
» Supporting Orthodox charitable organizations such as IOCC
» Establishing and maintaining a discretionary fund for the priest. As pastor, a priest may be made aware of needs for financial assistance both within and beyond the parish. He should be in a position to meet these needs. It must be understood that often these will have to be kept confidential.
» Adopting one or more local charities. For example, it has become a tradition for Chicago-area Orthodox parishes to purchase gifts for children in the foster system. My own parish donates school supplies to a Catholic school where students are in need.
» Taking advantage of opportunities for almsgiving or service projects within or outside
the parish. Also, it costs nothing to frequently remind everyone to remember the poor, especially during the fasting seasons of the liturgical year.
These various ways of giving should be business as usual—as routine a part of parish life as Saturday vespers and Sunday Liturgy.
Me
The work of almsgiving and service is given to all of us ecclesiastically and to each of us personally. Three texts from the New Testament can help us see our job description more clearly.
The Priesthood of Believers
The first text is from St. Peter. Before it was repurposed as a letter, parts of his first epistle were likely a baptismal sermon. The themes we expect to find are all there: rebirth, the call to holiness, a new orientation to the world, and the possibility of persecution. Among these, Peter also makes it clear that our baptismal entrance into the Church makes us one of “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people” (1 Pet. 2:9).
The idea did not start with St. Peter. In Isaiah, God
tells His people, “You shall be named the priests of the Lord, they shall call you the servants of our God” (Is. 61:6 NKJV). Nor does it end with Peter. In the first few verses of Revelation, John glorifies Christ as the One “who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father” (Rev. 1:5–6).
For Peter and John, baptism is closely linked to priesthood: every baptism is also an ordination, and every Christian is, to some degree, a priest. In The Church of the Holy Spirit, Nicholas Afanasiev echoes and expands St. Peter’s words: “The people of God live in the Church as its living members. Their life is action, their unceasing service in the Church, beginning with their entrance into the Church and their ordination as kings and priests there.”3 An Orthodox priest summed it up this way: “One is priest, therefore all are priests, therefore some are priests.”
In the Roman Empire, unwanted infants were thrown into the streets and alleyways and left to die. Christians would rescue them and raise them as orphans. In the early Church in Rome, even these orphans made an offering at the Liturgy. Roman
3 Nicholas Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 78.
records indicate that the orphans “who had nothing of their own to bring, always offered the water to be mingled with the wine in the chalice.”4
A priest by definition is one who makes an offering. By insisting on the priesthood of all believers, the Church is defying and subverting the dominant view of our culture. Numerous entities around us— corporations, educational institutions, and political organizations, to name the most obvious—are determined to instill in us the opposite image of ourselves as producers and consumers.
The Church disagrees: everyone is meant to be a priest. Anyone can bring an offering, because everyone has been given something to offer.
The Equipping of the Saints
The second text we need to look at is from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. Concerned that “all things be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40), he presents his readers with a blueprint of what ministry in the local church should look like: “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping
4 Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945), 104.
Copyright ©2023 by L. Joseph Letendre.
of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11–12). Separated as we are from the epistle’s original recipients by time and culture, our understanding can be stymied because of a comma.
Punctuation matters. A misplaced or missing comma can drastically change the meaning of a sentence. Paul and the other biblical authors were writing long before modern punctuation was invented. This presents a problem for anyone translating an ancient text, be it biblical or not, into contemporary language.
This comes into play in this verse from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. Some translations insert a comma between “saints” and “for the work of ministry.” This changes the meaning of the text and its description of the Church’s functional organization. With the comma, we have an expansive job description for “apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers, and pastors.” It includes equipping the saints, the work of ministry, and building up the body of Christ. This suggests a framework in which those we call the clergy are primarily, if not exclusively, tasked with performing the work of the Church.
Without the comma, the work of the clergy is to equip the other members of the parish: “for the
equipping of the saints for the work of ministry.” It is they, the laity, who are to do the work of ministry that will build up the Church. This reading, supported by the commentary of St. Theophylact, suggests that the clergy’s ministry is largely directed to those within the community, and their ministry, in turn, is largely directed to those outside the church. With the comma and the paradigm of church life it supports, the Church’s work in and for the world is severely handicapped.5
The Act of Seeing
Our final text is our Lord’s parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37). In it, the act of seeing is crucial. The priest, the Levite, and the Samaritan all see the naked, beaten man by the roadside, but only the Samaritan sees him with the eyes of a servant. He not only sees the man, but he also perceives there is something he can do to help.
Restoring our vision and redirecting our gaze was—and continues to be—a literal and metaphorical hallmark of Jesus’ ministry. At His Transfiguration, Jesus reveals His glory as far as His disciples can bear it. But He doesn’t stop there.
5 I owe this understanding to the late Rev. Terry Fulham.
Through the work of the Holy Spirit, God expands our ability to see. Shortly before His arrest, Jesus reassures His disciples that “the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things. . . . He will guide you into all truth. . . . He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you” (John 14:26; 16:13–14). Saint Paul reminds us that the opening of our eyes has only begun: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12).
How does this growth in perception emerge? It comes to us through the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church; through the reading of Scripture; and by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This is no “pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps” endeavor. It is Christ who opens our eyes, directs our gaze, and gives us a servant’s heart. It is Christ who fulfills the promise made through Ezekiel:
I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk
Copyright ©2023 by L. Joseph Letendre.
What?
the next question is, What do we do? What do we give?
The answer we are given to the first question is the same one given for prayer and fasting: We do what we can, not what we want.
The answer to the second question is that we orient (or, if necessary, reorient) our lives more toward almsgiving. The partnered practices of prayer and fasting will help here. Prayer will open our hearts and eyes to the needs around us. Fasting and other forms of ascesis will simplify the way we live so that more of what we have will be available to give to others.
In the first chapter of Isaiah, we see that fasting is crowned by almsgiving.
