You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan invites you to consider joining the work of transforming lives and communities by giving to the Allender Center and the Seattle School.

Dan invites us to consider that receiving a meaningful gift with gratitude

always leads to the invitation to give.

We have come to the end of what we call our fiscal year.

And as we arrive at an event that legally July 1st is the end of our capacity to fulfill the budget of the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and the Allender Center.

We are in, shall we say, our last workings of fundraising.

And this is what this particular podcast is about. And before you bail out and go, I don't want to be asked for money. And you are going to be asked for money.

Don't, don't fear.

Primary point of this podcast is to think about the role of giving, and whether you give to us or whether you give to your local church or to an NGO that's working to bring clean water in Uganda.

The task of asking for money is really the invitation to gratitude.

And actually, to understand that in giving the gift, whatever gift you give, you are actually coming to a point of completion of another gift that was given to you.

So what I want to do is ponder two realms, really the realm of Philemon, I think it's one of the most extraordinary

books in the Bible. And also a book by Lewis Hyde, H-Y-D-E, and the book is called The Gift.

And the absolutely lovely subtitle is imagination and the erotic life of poetry.

And I will tell you that the book of Philemon is not easily read and comprehended,

even though it's only 25 verses long, and even more so, this book called The Gift is a demanding work involving

ethnology, understanding gift cultures, really the sociology of giving and receiving, as well as

looks at fables, nursery rhymes, all sorts of realms to think about the role of a gift and why certain cultures are viewed as gift cultures and others as mercantile cultures, cultures that know that certain things have

a value that we create and then require people to pay to be able to get. Two totally. Different

cultures are often coinciding, and yet the preponderance of a gift culture

versus a mercantile culture creates a level of connection and and response ability to one another

...