I was stood by the door waiting for someone else to arrive when a refugee banged on it. I was annoyed. It wasn’t opening time yet and it’s always awkward explaining that across a language barrier. I took my time coming to the door and fiddled with the key, hoping my body language would set the tone for a short conversation.

“We’re not open yet”, I said as I cracked the door open and felt the chill of the early December cold snap.

The Iranian man looked me earnestly in the eyes, thrust a heavily laden shopping bag into my hands and said in a heavy accent:

“I’m sorry, I can’t come today”.

He flashed me a grin that showed his missing teeth, leaned over to hug me, turned his bike around and rode off up the hill.

I’d known Ebrahim (not his real name) for a few weeks – maybe a month – since another refugee had introduced me to him. I’d heard rumours of his generosity, but this was my first experience of it.

I shut the door to the church against the cold, and as I locked it my mind wandered back to an interaction with John Barclay – a professor at Durham University. I was a PhD student at the University of Nottingham at the time, and he was a world-leading theologian who had been invited to give the Firth Lectures. It was as close as you come in academia to meeting a rock star.

He came to mind as I closed the door because in those lectures, he argued that one of the key reasons the first Christian communities grew was because they practiced risky generosity.

The first followers of Jesus were likely poor enough that they relied on each other to get by: you can borrow my coat today because I’m going to need your saucepan tomorrow. That was not unusual in the ancient world and lots of communities were generous in that way.

What made Christians unique was that they were much more willing to risk including outsiders – they were willing to give to people who they didn’t know well enough to be able to rely on them giving back.

I retreated from the door wondering what had just happened and whether Ebrahim would get a decent meal today if he couldn’t come to our drop in. But mostly, I wondered why he was being so generous and I was so stingy. I mean, one of us is rich by almost any metric – and it’s not Ebrahim.

As I turned round, I saw Sami (not his real name) across the room. He’s been around longer than Ebrahim and has actually been helping us by translating sermons into Farsi for other Iranian refugees. He was already inside because he was helping us today.

They show up with gratitude, and give generously of the very little they have. They practice this risky generosity with no guarantee of return.

I know a bit of Sami’s story – how he has arrived in the UK seeking asylum because his family found out about his faith and suddenly he was no longer safe in his own home. I’ve seen the scars he got from living through that story. And yet, when Sami manages to find a way to work under the radar to supplement the pittance he’s living on and make his days more meaningful, he is as generous with what he earns as he is with his time.

There’s something striking about the risky generosity I see in Ebrahim and Sami. I can’t imagine living through what they’ve endured, but they show up with gratitude, and give generously of the very little they have. They practice this risky generosity with no guarantee of return – not least because the church is so mindful of being taken in by a sob story that we make big demands before we’ll baptise or send letters of support for anyone. It challenges me. Despite the fact that I’m the rich one, my asylum seeker friends seem closer to the attitude of the first Christians than I am.

It particularly challenges me when I then read stories about small boats, Home Secretaries and Rwanda. Because somehow people like Ebrahim and Sami seem to go missing in all the debate.

I’m not in a position to solve immigration, and I’m not for a second pretending it’s not complicated. But I thought about Ebrahim, Sami and John Barclay again when my children’s CofE primary school told me what they were teaching my boys about British values and Christian values. It’s probably no surprise that there was no mention of this kind of risky generosity that was in fact a hallmark of the first Christian communities and that I think I’ve seen in these brothers from another nation. I think that’s a shame.

There’s no doubt that the Bible talks clearly about God providing for his people –wealth is not bad, and Jesus’ call to give it all away came to one particular person rather than to every follower. But God’s own generosity runs like a thread throughout the story told in Scripture.

Maybe that’s why Paul writes that ‘God loves a cheerful giver' . The original Greek word translated ‘cheerful’ there is hilaron and we get the word ‘hilarious’ from that root. It might not be funny, but within the conversation we tend to have about wealth it is surely laughable for Ebrahim to give away a bag full of goodies when he has nothing? It’s risky, certainly: better to hold onto the money as you might need it next month if the Home Office moves you without warning again. And yet, he gives.

And because he gives, he challenges me. If John Barclay is right – and I think he is – Christians have always been the kind of people who take risks to welcome others into their community. That makes no sense if you’re trying to keep your own food and energy bills down in the face of inflation. It’s laughable, in fact. But apparently, that’s the kind of giver God likes – a hilarious one!

I think he likes that kind of giver because when he looks at them he sees the image of his own generosity. After all, according to Genesis, that’s the image humans were made to carry. Seeing Ebrahim and Sami giving reminds me that for all the complexity of the immigration debate these are human beings. Their risky generosity challenges me to live up to the actual values of the first Christian community.

Article

Change

Character

Sport

30 January 2025

5 min read

Rugby teaches how to live for others

The unseen players, doing unseen work, witness a truth of a content life.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A muddy rugby player carries equipment off a pitch.

Quino Al on Unsplash.

It’s a Tuesday evening and I’ve got my face in the dirt, as usual.

About two years ago I rejoined a local rugby team for the first time since I was a teenager, and this is the result, a particularly brutal training exercise involving press ups, tackle bags, intricate running patterns, and repetitive sets. The coaches push us hard on a Tuesday so that by Saturday we can perform the same tasks at a slower speed than we knock them out in training.

Although there are the occasional jokes about the coaches’ sadistic temperaments, there is no complaining or easing off. We’re locked in on the pain of preparation for the real thing.

It’s obvious to list the individual benefits the training brings; remembering I have a body after a long day pastoring people’s spiritual needs, physical fitness, strength and conditioning. Even if these benefits seem outweighed when you get bashed up! But I have noticed that nobody is motivated primarily by these. It is the ability to be there for your mate that motivates the lads to be gluttons for punishment, the need to be fit enough to do the dirty work so the team can succeed.

At almost any time in a game of rugby, half the team are doing things that you don’t see. There is almost no glory in playing in certain positions, you never make highlights reels or win player-of-the-match. Your only success is the team’s success. No perfect bind on a scrum, well timed clear out at a ruck, or perfect positioning in defence ever makes a highlights reel.

Dan Cole is a bit of a local hero in my patch, playing over three hundred times for my team, the Leicester Tigers, and winning well over a hundred caps for England, third on the all-time list. Because of his position, playing prop, and his particular skillset, he is famous for almost never being noticed, he has scored just four international tries and never, as far as I could see, been named man-of-the-match. In fact, he was widely teased by teammates and opponents for daring to score a try for Tigers over the Christmas period. (He shoved the ball over from a yard out- not a glorious finish).

Cole doesn’t trundle around the rugby pitch for his own glory, but understands that the best gift he can give is to prefer the team to himself, doing those quiet, unseen bits of the game he excels at. After all, you don’t win all those caps without being good at something, even if most of us don’t even notice what it is.

Nothing tests my ability to die to self than when I’m flat on my back after tackling or being tackled and I need to spring up.

When I was thinking of getting back into playing, I wondered when I opened the clubhouse door, what I would find. Within half an hour of my first session I had joined the band of brothers, nicknamed ‘Rev’ forever, expected immediately to grasp the objective of working for others just as they worked for me, despite being a newbie who spent most of the time getting in the way.

Because of this, I have found the two parts of my life - trainee priest and distinctly average rugby player - to fit neatly together. What I preach in the pulpit on a Sunday and try to demonstrate throughout the week about the spiritual life is demanded from my physicality on a Saturday afternoon. Jesus called his disciples to die to their own desires so that they could better serve the needs of others: with the kicker being that in this service, true joy, happiness and contentment will be found.

This is perhaps the heart of the Christian message, that loving, genuine, service of others is so close to God’s heart that it is impossible not to find wholeness in living this way. It seems to be a lesson that has been unconsciously heeded in the sport I play; nothing tests my ability to die to self than when I’m flat on my back after tackling or being tackled and I need to spring up quickly for the next phase of the game. Or chasing the play from one end of the field to another at the end of the game to get back into the line to defend. Or a man mountain running at you with the ball, and you’re desperate not to let your end of the bargain down with your teammates by failing to tackle him.

No doubt the language for thinking about these self-sacrifices for the team given to me by my faith is helpful. But I have found the opposite to be true too. Having experienced the joy of this service to my teammates, it strengthens the value of putting my own desires aside for the good of those who need my support. When at inconvenient times family members, friends, or congregants need a meal, a visit, some advocacy, or simply to be listened to, my spirit has been strengthened for this work by the experience of playing rugby and being part of a team.

The spiritual training I undertake; reading the Bible, prayer, and confession, and the physical training; those beastly Tuesday evening sessions, are all preparation for making the choice of sacrifice over selfishness in the moments when it counts, on and off the pitch. My body and soul are learning the same lessons from multiple sources and coming to the same conclusion: serving teammates- on the rugby pitch and in life- is the way to contentment. Even more so if we find some of those teammates hard to love.

As the Six Nations rolls round again this weekend, we will see plenty of skill and flair from the players in certain positions who have certain gifts. But watch closely, and those players whose work you cannot see are the crucial cogs in the machine which the flair players gloss. Those unseen players, doing unseen work, teach the truth of a content life, whether they know it or not.

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