MINE & OURS

Have you filed your tax return yet? Did you get your refund already? April 30 is the tax filing deadline. It’s not too hard for me to file a T4, and a few charitable and political receipts – then the government sends me a windfall. A lot of you were nodding, familiar with the annual ritual, though others after worship described more complex tax filing challenges, with balances owing.

I know too much about taxes, and even wrote a little book about taxes for the United Church a dozen years ago. The basic operating presumption of taxation is that my stuff is mine, and the government has to prove that any tax levied is justified. Mine. Not ours. The money to pay for health, education, social services, infrastructure, and or general commonwealth is assumed to be grudgingly paid by resistant people who prefer to keep it all for themselves.

There is a modest tax incentive encouraging people to give to charity. When I volunteer to pay some of my money to charities to share benefit and control as if that money were ours, I get a tax receipt, and a tax credit. In the 2007 tax year, Canadian tax filers reported donations of $8.6 billion dollars to charities, and got tax relief for doing so. After all, Canadians are good people, generous people, and not just selfish folks who can’t think beyond what’s mine, to what’s ours.

I tried some simple statistics to examine the charitable exception to the standing presumption of what’s mine is mine at tax time. About 1 in 4 tax filers report charitable donations. 3 out of 4 do not claim any charitable deductions. The median donation among that quarter of us who report, the level where half of us give more, and half of us give less, is $250. The average donation, taking the whole $8.6B and dividing it by the quarter of tax filers reporting gifts, is about $1,600.

How does this news from the Canada Revenue Agency relate to other surveys, in which 85% of Canadians assert that we give to charity? Sure, all those folks are buying chocolates from children to support school trips, or sponsoring a friend in a walkathon or a fun run for charity. Don’t we all? But that sort of giving is simply not large enough to bother with charitable receipts and claims. We convince ourselves that we are a generous people, and repeat that perception of ourselves as truth. Which is right: our opinions of ourselves, or our tax return?

Another popular claim is that nearly half of all giving goes to religious charities like this one. That is true, even if our share in the charitable sector is a bit smaller at 45% than it once was. However, an older study showed that of the donations going to non-religious charities, more than half was coming from donors who also gave to religious charities. You know that is true – your donations are not only to church. I expect typical United Church folks to give at least as much to non church charity as they do to church. We learned how here – but didn’t stop here, did we?


In 2007, about 350 of you gave about $420,000 to TUC. The median gift was even lower than the national tax-filing median, and the average gift was smaller. I said without fear of contradiction that the median giver kicks in about $20 a month, and average giver $100 a month to the church. Of course, most of the total comes from the minority of large givers – and less than $10,000 comes in loose cash on the plate from all of us.

Many tell me that you just give money on the plate, claiming moral superiority since you don’t ask for credit or recognition in a tax receipt – but it’s a lot like the 85% who say they give to charity, and just don’t tax file receipts. We also often hear that you give of your time and talent instead of your money, and buy things at sales and fundraisers instead of envelope or PAR gifts. Sociologist Reginald Bibby tested those theories for the United Church a few years ago, and reported instead that there is a tight correlation between active participation and generous giving – the same folks do both.

There is a gap here between rhetoric and reality, talking the talk and walking the walk. There is a lot of self-deception going on, and people sincerely feeling generous and charitable while acting selfish and greedy. I don’t think people are lying, as much as they are telling themselves what they want to be true, convincing themselves and then telling others to reinforce the illusion. It happens in the church – and it really happens in our culture. What do you think about these rates of charitable giving as reported by the Canada Revenue Agency: 1/4 of tax filers have charitable deductions, with a median claim of $250, and an average one of $1600, and while almost half of the gifts go to religious charities, half of the rest come from the religious donors.

What I was talking about this morning was ethics. People expect the language of ethics to be principles and ideals, and moral norms. Propositions about what is good, and ‘should’ statements of prescription and prohibition, are familiar elements of ethical talk. But if that’s the limit of our ethical discourse, all we’ve got is self-righteous moralistic talk. Who’s against motherhood? Who is not in favour of going green? We should recycle, and use less power, eh? How much should we give? What values should we hold?

What I wanted to focus on were two other elements of a sound ethical model: sources and practices. The distinctive contribution of the faith tends to be in these areas. The roots of our morality, and the voices we weigh most heavily, are our sources. The habits of action, the small disciplines and routines of living, are our practices. If principles and ideals, and moral norms, risk becoming rhetoric disconnected from reality, sources and practices ground us again.

So we began in this first week of Easter season to read our way through the Acts of the Apostles. Daily readings, available on audio CDs, with daily blog entries at www.hereticslikeus.com, and weekly study groups on Sunday and Wednesday, will continue until Pentecost, late in May. The Acts of the Apostles is our source. It’s not the ideas or ideals of the apostles, nor is the good intentions of the apostles. It’s the Acts of the Apostles. Their actions and behaviours, the way they walked the walk, may inform our own practices – beginning with daily attentions. Try it!

Now the whole group of those who believed
were of one heart and soul,
and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions,
but everything they owned was held in common.

What did you think of the early Christian commune? ‘From each according to his means, to each according to her needs’, eh? If our culture presumes what’s mine is mine, and only reluctantly surrenders some of our stuff to become ‘ours’, part of the commonwealth, this was the opposite. Cana you imagine a community of pooled resources, not in a monastic remote retreat, but in an open urban community? How long would that last? Read on in Acts, and find out.

Now Barnabas sold his field and gave all the proceeds to the common pot. He committed himself and his stuff completely, and he became one of the great leaders of the early church with Peter and Paul. But Ananias and Sapphira held some back – and each dropped dead. Folks were scared – who wouldn’t be? Peter saw right through them, and called them on their deceit. He said it was their choice to sell the land, and their money to choose what to do with the proceeds – but not right for them to lie, and act as if they were giving, when really they were holding back.

I hope that doesn’t need much more explanation. As Ron Sider titled a book 20 years ago, we are Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. We’ve got a lot of stuff, that we call ‘mine’. We’re not very good with the idea of ‘ours’, resisting taxation and grudging in our charity. We hold back big time, at the opposite end of the spectrum from that early Christian commune. I get to choose what to do with my stuff, and how to spend my money – and consumer marketing is eager to tell me how to get more ‘me’ stuff. We don’t often talk of this commonwealth of ‘us’.

John Chrysostom in the 4th century, wrote this:

Tell me, then, whence art thou rich? From whom didst thou receive it, and from whom he who transmitted it to thee? From his father and his grandfather. But canst thou, ascending through many generations, show the acquisition just? It cannot be. The root and origin of it must have been injustice. Why? Because God in the beginning made not one man rich and another poor… God left the earth free to all.

As the Marxists put it, ‘behind every great fortune is an equally great crime’. Aboriginal folks have something similar to say about where we got so much of our stuff. This is about reaching deeper into sources, weighing other voices, to balance the dominant ideals of success and progress and prosperity, the language of ‘mine’, with some reminders of ‘our’ commonwealth.

Augustine put it this way:

Greed is not something wrong with gold; the fault is in a man who perversely loves gold and for its sake abandons justice, which ought to be put beyond comparison above gold

We’re more familiar with Wesley’s sermon on ‘The Use of Money’, building on Augustine’s idea that money is not intrinsically good or bad, but that our use and attitudes may be:

1. Earn all you can
2. Save all you can
3. Give all you can

I’ve preached that before here, and will again. The Methodists who built this community over 200 years ago, and the Methodist Mafia who led Toronto’s industrial boom 100 years ago, could recite that with us. The Massey family did not just build farm tractors, but also, by saving, built banks, and by charity built colleges and social services. We remember the 3 part plan – it’s just that most of us never get past #1!

In our generation, our consumer choices have a global impact. The more we say ‘mine’, and deny others’ place and participation in ‘ours’, the worse it gets. I decided not to speak today about incremental choices of environmentally friendly ‘shoulds’, but to stick to these source and root issues of who we are and whose we are. You may think I was selling my product to pay my own bloated salary – but I think you get plenty of consumer marketing to balance my claim.

Have you filed your taxes yet? What does your tax return say about what you really believe about what’s ‘mine’ and what’s ‘ours’? How does it compare with the early Christian commune, and Barnabas or Annanias and Sapphira? How does it relate to our religious tradition of charity? What small first step or next step in practice will you take, to walk the walk less badly? What will your tax return look like next year?

God, creator, who brought order out of chaos
God, whose spirit moved over the face of the waters
God, whose word was from the beginning
Make some sense of it all, make some sense for us, with us now.

For we live in constant chaos, confusion rising around us
Too much data, overwhelming inputs, inviting, demanding -
Cacophony crashing our silences with noise and nonsense
Environmental and ecological harm done with our complicity

God, creator, bring order to our chaos again
Sort out what matters about us, for us, with us now
What’s mine, and what’s ours – and who is in the ‘us’
Give us a glimpse of the promise of your commonwealth
To help us see and hear and feel and act with truth and integrity
And then it turn to embody your gospel, citizens of your promised land
Walking the walk, trusting that in our daily practices, you will provide. Amen