One of the new delights of moving to Epping, and living opposite the forest, has been the mushrooms. Each day fabulous fruits seem to spring from nothingness – great parasols, delicate puffballs, white, lilac, green, brown. Even the poisonous species have exotic beauty. But this fruit doesn’t, in fact, spring from nothingness but the rich humus matting of the forest floor. They are like visible outputs of an unseen richness, built up, layer by layer, over decades.

Healthy communities are the same. The American social scientist Robert D Putnam wrote: ‘Communities don’t have choral societies because they are wealthy: they are wealthy because they have choral societies - or more precisely the traditions of engagement, trust and reciprocity that choral societies symbolise.’ Communities are not made by bricks and mortar but by years of living, working, singing together, laying down the roots of ‘social’ wealth.

Good churches, too, don’t spring from nothingness but an invisible richness which oozes from the spiritual soil of Christ in which we are rooted. God is the ground of all our being and we are the visible outputs of his love for the world and all creation. We are drawn together day by day to be fed and nurtured by God’s love and spirit, and from this our Christian communities grow – we are the ‘spiritual capital’ if you like: the wealth of God made visible to the world. God’s mushrooms!

The wealth we have is not the church institution, or the building, but what lies underneath it. But when discussion turns to giving, there’s a tendency to think how much the building, team or diocese needs to keep going, or regard giving as a members’ fee, or a spiritual ‘service’ that we can buy into. That is to focus too much on the monetary definition of wealth. We know how often this definition is inverted by Jesus: spiritual wealth, treasure, fruits of the spirit are what matters.

These two kinds of wealth are not to be confused, as our gospel illustrates. There is the wealth that derives from being thrifty and exploits material opportunities, and there is the wealth born out of generosity and love, and as Luke says, they serve different masters. Nor does this ‘spiritual wealth’ belong to us, any more than the wealth of the rich man belonged to his servant. In our giving and service, we give back to God, out of his own richness that in which we have been blessed to share and benefit. Like the two-pound coin that Alex and Tim ‘found’ in the church last week, we own nothing but that which we receive from God.

Mushrooms have a purpose in life and it is not to be eaten, or even to look pretty, but to release the thousands spores that will increase the fruitfulness of the forest and multiply its produce next season. They are not there for themselves but the future of the place in which they live. Perhaps, like mushrooms, we too should give to increase our fruitfulness, to be a blessing to the future, to enrich the communities in which we live, to be an investment in the life of the world here in Epping.

Helen Gheorghiu Gould

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