January 29, 2023 – Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Deuteronomy 26.1-4, 10-12
II Corinthians 8.3-7
An Offer(ing) We Can’t Refuse
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
It has been exactly one thousand fifty days since we last collected the offering here at the United Church, so it may be, since we are going to resume the practice this morning, that a refresher is called for. This is what we call “the offering plate.” When the ushers come by in a few minutes, they are going to place the plate in front of you approximately chest high. You may be wondering what to do with it; allow me to explain. First, you take out your wallet or purse, extract all the money, bills and coins, and place that into the plate. Or if you prefer, you can write out a check some time between now and the offering, there’s still time, and don’t forget, Froggatt has 2 g’s and 2 t’s. You may also place the credit card of your choice into the plate as well. Any jewelry you might be wearing, your watch, wedding ring, into the plate they go. And if you have the new iPhone 14 Pro, feel free to toss that is as well. The usher will then remove the plate and move on to your neighbor, extracting the same bounty from him or her. It’s all quite simple, just put in everything you own and we move on. The choir will be singing throughout the process in order to keep you distracted, so you probably won’t remember quite what you did until later this afternoon, by which time it will be too late and we will repeat the entire exercise next Sunday.
This is how I remember it, anyway.
At their meeting last week, the Deacons voted to restore the offertory and collection to the service after a nearly three year absence. We’ve learned a lot since the early days of the pandemic, and one of the things we learned is that Covid is not transmitted by surface contact, as we once believed. So passing the collection plate isn’t quite as dangerous as we thought it might be back in 2020. I’m grateful for this, because presenting our offering to God is an important part of morning worship. And it’s not really about strategies for collecting pledges and loose offering. This congregation has done a really good job of finding ways to keep up with our pledges and supporting the church, offering or no. We even have some intrepid souls who can’t rest on Sunday morning until they’ve discovered where we’ve been hiding the offering plates, which have been cleverly camouflaged in plain sight in the entryway. Others of you have been faithful about bringing your offering to the church office, particularly during the fourteen months the church building was closed. And some have even discovered the joys of the “Donate” button on our church web page, which we have duplicated in the morning bulletin; if you haven’t seen it yet, feel free to give it a test drive! But the real reason it is good to have the offertory back, the theological reason, the worship-impacting reason, is that to give something back to God is a vital part of what we do here on Sunday mornings. We hear the Word of God in the scriptures and in the sermon; we have listened to the choir sing praise and we have sung praises ourselves; we have prayed together; we have experienced God in a variety of ways and in response, in grateful response, we offer something of ourselves. It is both practical and symbolic at the same time. Practical because it supports our ministry, symbolic because it declares that when we have experienced the grace and mercy and presence of God, we respond with generosity and gratitude. It is what we do as a people of faith.
This morning’s reading from Deuteronomy is one of many instances in the Old Testament where the Hebrew people bring their gifts to the altar.
“When you have come into the land that the Lord you God is giving you… you shall take some of the first fruits of the land…. And you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling… When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar, you shall bow down before the Lord your God… when you have finished, pay the tithe of your produce… giving it to the Levites, the sojourners, the orphans and the widows, so that they may eat their fill.”
The tithes and the offering, a way of glorifying God and of sharing with our neighbors. It doesn’t get much more elementary that this.
I attended a funeral at a Roman Catholic church last week; it was for my son-in-law Adam’s grandmother. Toward the end of the service, Adam and a cousin of his brought the host and the chalice forward for the mass, or what we call communion. The act of carrying the host and the chalice from the back of the church to the front in the Roman Church is called – does anybody know what it is called? I had forgotten until last Friday – it is called the Offertory. It really has no connection to our Offertory, but I allowed myself a little mind wandering as I watched all the church members in attendance go forward for the sacrament. I wondered, is there a way that we can perceive our own offertory as a sacrament? The two Protestant sacraments, baptism and communion or the Lord’s Supper, are called sacraments because they represent something sacred, they bear the presence of God. Christ is present at the table, we say, and baptism represents God’s place in the life of the one being baptized. How is God present in our Offertory on Sunday mornings? Well, one excellent way of recognizing God’s presence is in the voice of the choir, who will be offering their second anthem as we receive the collection. Music has a way of conveying the presence of God on a regular and sacred basis. And coupled with this is the ministry our tithes and offerings equip us to maintain. Remember, the mission and ministry of the United Church of Chester bears the presence of God to our membership and to our wider community. We do. And in the moment we bring our offerings to God we are doing something sacred. So yes, maybe there are ways that we can consider this act of passing the plate sacramental.
Now I know this is beginning to sound suspiciously like a Stewardship sermon. But it can’t be a Stewardship sermon, because those come in the fall, right? And I’m not telling you how important it is to keep your pledge to the church current, and I’m not reminding you how sacramental it is to be generous with the church, and I won’t mention how 2023 is a particularly challenging year, what with last year’s elevator repair and ramp expenses, and far be it from me to list all the ways our contributions help support community groups like the Shoreline Soup Kitchen and Pantry, the Scouts, AA, knitting and quilting and craft clubs and the Garden Club and the Library and the High School Alumni and all the other folks who use our building, and of course it would be partially self-serving to talk about our superlative staff and their efforts to make the United Church a fine place to worship and serve, so I won’t, because this is not a Stewardship sermon. Because this morning is not about the church’s need to receive. It is, rather, about our need to give.
The Science of Generosity is a white paper that was written for the John Templeton Foundation in 2018, and it makes the intriguing suggestion that human beings are biologically wired for generosity. “A host of studies have uncovered evidence that… generosity activates the same reward pathway that is activated by love and food,” the report says, “a correlation that may help to explain why giving and helping feel so good.” Human beings need to be generous, the study concludes, it is our default setting. We don’t really need an academic white paper to tell us this, so we?. That feeling you have when you give a gift to a child or a grandchild, the time taken to send a card to someone just for no reason at all, the decision to support public TV, or your alma mater, or the time you give to the soup kitchen or the land trust or the historical society, we feel good when we give. It is good for us, it is good to us. The eleventh chapter of the book of Proverbs reminds us, “Some give freely, and grow all the richer; others withhold what is due, and only suffer want.” There is a good deal of wisdom to the book of Proverbs; there is a good deal of wisdom in the practice of generosity.
The apostle Paul echoes the idea in his second letter to the Christian church in Corinth, as we heard earlier. Paul was in the process of taking up a collection for the churches in Asia Minor, and he wanted to encourage the generosity of the Corinthian church by citing the example of the Macedonian church. Paul wrote of the Macedonians, “They voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means, begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing this ministry to the saints.” Begging us earnestly – for the privilege of sharing – when the plate is passed in a few moments, I want you hear you begging the ushers to pass it in your direction. Generosity in the service of God and each other is sacramental. Who knows, maybe in his next letter, while encouraging others to be generous, Paul will write about us.