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Good Morning! Today marks the beginning of the new tax year in the United Kingdom, the 6th of April. As a Minister of Religion I have to fill in a tax return, albeit a fairly simple one in my case. Every year I promise myself to do it early: it’s not a promise I’ve ever kept, but hope springs eternal, as they say. Back in September 1752 when Britain switched calendars and jumped forward 11 days, the Crown simply moved the date of the tax year to avoid losing revenue, and again by a day in 1800. The 6th of April has been the beginning of the new tax year ever since. Clearly there are many reasons we levy tax: not least, to do collectively the things we cannot easily do as individuals. And at its simplest, to share burdens of one part of society across many. Yet it seems to me paying tax should never be about outsourcing our compassion or responsibility for what we do otherwise with our money. Paying our tax doesn’t get us off the hook to behave well with what we have. John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, was acutely aware of cost of living pressures in the 1700s: he taught that we should earn all we can, save all we can, and give all we can. But in the earning, he taught that we should never earn in such a way as to hurt our physical or mental health or someone else’s. He was specific for instance that he thought it absolutely wrong to undercut market price to shut down a competitor, among other things that were legal but perhaps not moral. While Wesley preferred the idea of taxing spending rather than taxing income, he thought a failure to pay tax was as much stealing as taking bread off a neighbour’s table. Wesley was a minister, not an economist: and yet, his basic teaching about money and the common good bears looking at again, for all of us. It was not just about paying the Crown and thinking we had discharged our economic responsibility for the year, nor was it about simple ‘charity’. For an economic system to work, we have to share trust that our common needs will be met, over time. And we know this public trust once lost is very hard to re-establish. But however hard, I’m not willing to give up on that project. The stakes are too high, for too many. So well before I fill in my tax return this year, alongside John Wesley I will work on being trustworthy with what I have, and I wish us all a just and prosperous new year.