Anne Lamott, in her wonderful memoir, Traveling Mercies, talks at one point about her decision as a white woman to go to St. Andrew’s, an African American Presbyterian church in Marin County, California. She was an alcoholic single mother with a two-year-old son at the time. She says, “When I was at the end of my rope, the people at St. Andrew tied a knot in it for me and helped me hang on.”

In the book, she describes how the community embraced her and her young son, Sam, taking them into their arms and bringing “clothes ... casseroles to keep in the freezer, they brought ... assurance that this baby was going to be a part of the family.”

“And,” she says, “they started slipping me money.”

Anne Lamott writes:

Now, a number of the older black women live pretty close to the bone financially on small Social Security checks. But routinely they sidled up to me and stuffed bills in my pocket—tens and twenties. It was always done so stealthily that you might have thought they were slipping me bindles of cocaine. One of the most consistent donors was a very old woman named Mary Williams, who is in her mid-eighties now, so beautiful with her crushed hats and hallelujahs; she always brought me plastic Baggies full of dimes, noosed with little wire twists.

I was usually filled with a sense of something like shame until I’d remember that wonderful line of Blakes’s—that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love—and I would take a long deep breath and force these words out of my strangulated throat: “Thank you.”

Lamott talks a lot about the kind of love at St. Andrews, which she wants for herself and her son, the kind of love she wants to embody. And how this is a place that feels like home—in the old-fashioned sense of the word—where when you show up on the doorstep, they have to take you in.

But even after she’d sobered up and her writing career took off, leaving her financially stable, Mary Williams periodically brought her a Baggie full of dimes.

Anne Lamott says:

Mary doesn’t know that professionally I’m doing much better now; she doesn’t know that I no longer really need people to slip me money. But what’s dazzling to me, what’s so painful and poignant, is that she doesn’t bother with what I think she knows or doesn’t know about my financial life. She just knows we need another bag of dimes, and that’s why I make Sam go to church.

You see, the thing is, Anne Lamott’s situation had changed, but Mary Williams had not. Mary needed to give that money away.

If you notice in our Gospel this morning, Jesus doesn’t try to impress on his disciples how much better off the poor will be if they receive alms. He’s not trying to persuade his followers that those who are without need charity. Jesus wants to call his followers into the new world he’s announcing, where there’s enough for everyone, where people share as a matter of course, into a world that needs them to give their lives and their resources away before they calculate people’s needs. Because what’s at the heart of this world is becoming the kind of people whose primary need is to participate in the solidarity that comes from giving.

I get why people like charity. It’s tidy. It’s controllable. I can give what I want, when I want, to whomever I want. And it lets me keep believing that the world is set up the way it ought to be, that people with plenty have it because they have worked harder or lived better, and people without are just suffering the consequences of their own bad choices.

It is the kind of story we can tell ourselves while sitting at a stoplight, handing a dollar through the window, and feeling like we have done our bit for justice without having to think too hard about why that person is standing there in the first place.

But then we remember people like Jeffrey Epstein and his well-connected friends. Folks who had more than they could spend in ten lifetimes, whose choices were not just morally questionable but actively destructive. And suddenly that whole virtue-equals-success, vice-equals-poverty script starts to sound less like timeless wisdom and more like a bedtime story I tell myself so I can sleep at night.

Charity, after all, is the perfect exercise of choice. It fits neatly into our modern American conviction that the only things with real value are the ones we choose for ourselves. It is a voluntary mechanism for deciding who gets a portion of what we have. To choose to give charity is to use the power and resources at our disposal on behalf of those we deem worthy of our attention.

I’m not suggesting charity is bad or that we shouldn’t do it. Historically, it’s been one of the ways communities have made sure people have enough to survive. I’m only pointing out that even in the seemingly simple decision about who receives charity or whether to give it at all, we’re already exercising a level of power that not everyone gets to wield.

Choosing, in many cases, is a privilege of the wealthy and powerful. In my neighborhood, if I want food, for example, I can choose to shop at one of several grocery stores, each competing to offer the best selection of food. If I want something different, I can eat at one of the many nearby restaurants or opt for fast food.

But if I lived in another part of Jefferson County, I often wouldn't get to choose between bad food and good food. Generally speaking, I could choose between bad food and no food, which is to say, I wouldn't get much of a choice at all.

• The wealthy and the powerful choose where to go on vacation; the poor and the powerless often just "choose" to stay home.