Offering As A Living Sacrifice Transcript

We want, we're continuing in a service that we've had a little break from last week, looking at each section of our worship, why we do it, what it means, and how it can shape our daily living, our spiritual lives, our devotion time. How what we do in this one hour a week can affect and change our lives in the other 167 hours in a week. We come to today looking at the act of our offering, our giving. Why do we do it? Why is it a part of our worship? Why is it so important? And why does it look, or how does it shape who we are? Just as I was on vacation, I came to the realization, driving back, that I prefer driving to the church. I prefer driving to the church. Driving south. I wasn't sure why. It always felt easier. It always felt more fun. It always felt faster driving south on 95 than driving north. And I was trying to figure out why. At first, I thought, you know why? It's because I'm getting away. I'm getting away from everything. I'm putting miles between where I was and where I'm going. I'm going to something new and exciting. And so obviously, that makes it more fun to drive. I was like, well, that's not always it, though. It's not about me just getting away. There's something more that makes it feel faster. And I'm not a treant from Tolkien, so it's not like I'm walking downhill the whole time. And then it finally dawned on We need these markers to help us know we've made progress. We need this feeling that we've made progress. And I need it, too, when I'm driving. And when you're driving south on 95, the mile markers count down to the next state line. The mile markers count down. And so when you can look at the mile marker and say, I've only got 60 miles to go, or I only have 50 miles to go, 20 miles to go, I know that I'm getting closer to the destination. I know I'm getting closer to the end of my trip. It feels very different than when I'm looking at mile markers that are counting up. And I have no idea when the end is. coming. I tell you that story because we look at our worship bulletin each week. And we go through the steps of our worship that we've been talking about. We go through, there's the greeting and the prelude and the call to worship and the prayer of confession and then the reading of the scripture and then the preaching and then the offering and then the prayers of the people and then communion, if we have it, and then the sending forth.

It's helpful to have the bulletin at times because it lets you know that we're progressing through the service. But at some point in our minds, at some point in our history, at some point in our society, at some point in our church culture, rather than being a helpful guiding post of where we're going next and what's happening, it became a checklist. All right, I've marked that done. And now we're moving on to the next thing. And I've marked that off. And now we're moving to the next thing. And I've marked that off. It's a checklist just marking to make sure we've accomplished all of the things that we're supposed to do. And this creeps into our language. It creeps into how we transition our worship. But in doing so, we lose what binds it all together. We lose the importance of each part. We lose the flow and we lose being present in the moment of that individual part. I think no other part of the church that we're supposed to do is going to be present in the moment of that individual part. of worship has been affected in the same way as the offering. Somehow the offering became this kind of time out step in worship. It's where you take a break. Everything kind of stops. The flow kind of stops. We wait for the ushers to come forward to get the plates. We walk through the building and collect what people are going to give to it. And then we say a prayer over it and then we move on. It becomes this stopping point. In some churches, it's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. In some churches, it's even more so. It's this halftime moment that's a break between what was and a break between what's coming next. And we just got to put it somewhere. The practicality of the offering kind of makes that so. The reality is when the church and its history started building buildings rather than meeting in fields, when it started having full clergy on staff and it had other people to pay for it, it's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. It's a stopping point. The offering became more and more important. Would you have believed me if I told you you wouldn't have to go more than 150 years to find a service that did not have this moment of offering within it? It wasn't a part of the worship. There was one point in the early church where in the Church of England where you actually paid rent for your pews. You have a pew that your family sits in. You pay a yearly amount for that pew, your pew rental, and that pew is yours. Nobody else sits in your pew. You don't sit in anybody else's pew. And I know some of you are thinking about that right now. We should bring that back. Nobody's going to sit in my pew anymore if this is mine. My wife's grandmother and grandfather, that church was building on and they were adding pews to the back of the sanctuary to fit more people. And they were taking donations for that project. And part of that was you got your name put on a plaque on the end of the pew. That became your pew that paid for through your donation. Now the funny thing with that though is they sat opposite side of it so that they could see their pew. At least that was the joke we always told. In reality, it was probably just this is where we sit. We always sit here.

I know that feeling was confronted last week when I'm so grateful that Reverend Deborah Tingsley Brown came and shared her message with us last week. And I saw the fear of the Lord. I saw the fear of the Lord. I saw the fear of the Lord. I saw the fear of the Lord as I was sitting in the back and kind of getting a handle on some of our technology that I don't get to sit back and make sure is working well because I'm up here. And I saw and I knew what she was going to ask before she even asked it. And I saw the look of terror on some of their faces when she said, do you want to come and sit closer please? But we have in our mind and ingrain that this is my spot. And that may come from that history where you paid for the rental of your pew. But that transition to offering and the offering became incredibly important because it needed to pay the bills. And then it became this add on this thing that we didn't really want to do because it's uncomfortable to talk about money. It's uncomfortable to ask for giving. It's uncomfortable all of this thing around the offering. And so it's that thing we don't want to do, but we have to do because we need to pay the bills. And in those moments, we forget about the power of this moment in worship and how it shapes us and where it comes from. When it's just about paying the bills, when it's just about making sure that we get the people in the pews to contribute to the mission of the church and contribute to that, we miss out on why we have an offering time and why giving and generosity is so important. In today's first scripture for today, we hear, and he has to build an altar of the Lord. He goes to buy a threshing floor and he's offered it for free. He said, take it. If it's for the Lord, just take it. You can have it, use it for the Lord, offer it up to God and put it to good use. And David says, no, I can't do that. I can't give anything to God that didn't cost me anything to purchase. I can't give up to God anything that doesn't cost me anything.

There is something in David's mind, there is something holy about the giving that says it should cost something. C.S. Lewis said the same thing when he was talking about the offering and giving and why Christians should give. And C.S. Lewis said, if there's some, he was asked, how much is enough to give? Is it 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What is it? What's the magic number that I'm supposed to give so that I know I'm giving enough?

And in his mind, this idea of it should be costing me something, his answer that he had to come up with is, if I am giving and there's something in my life that I really like or really want or I desire, and if it doesn't make me have to give up any of those things, perhaps I'm not giving enough. This idea of it costing something. For C.S. Lewis, like I said, to summarize, or rephrase, there should be things that I want to do that I can't because I'm giving up to God.

Now, I don't want this sermon to turn into or come across as feeling like y'all need to give more because it's not about the money. It's not about the amount. It's about this act of generosity that we are called to live out in every aspect of our life that is a part of our worship experience.

In the second passage, in the letter, from Paul to the Romans, he tells them all to be a living sacrifice, a living gift to the Lord in how we live, in how we interact with each other, how we use our gifts and our talents, the teachers, the exhorters, the administrators, those full of cheer, how we interact with those inside the church and outside, giving food to the hungry, giving water to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger. He's telling us how we are to be a living sacrifice to the Lord with our lives. These two passages, one from the Old Testament, one from the New, use this language of sacrifice, of burnt offerings, of gifts to the Lord, of something that should cost. If I am giving food to the hungry, that may mean I have less food for myself.

If I am welcoming the stranger into my space, that means I have less space for myself. If I am not returning evil in this world with evil, then I am putting aside those things that I would like to do, those retribution, those challenges, those things that I'd love to respond with, I am putting that aside and responding in a wholly different way. Not unlike C.S. Lewis's comment, there are things that I should want to do that I can't do because of my faith in Christ. When we look at it this way, our offering time in the church, yes, it is important, yes, it helps us pay the bills, but it shapes us and shows us what it means to give, what it means to say, I would love to hold on to something and keep it for myself, but because of God's call on me to be a living sacrifice, I am putting aside those things that I sacrifice in all areas of my life, I give it, I give it freely, and it costs me something to do so. And so when we get to this moment of worship, when we look at what it means to be generous, we are shaped by what God has already done. We opened our worship this morning with our opening hymn for the beauty of the earth. There are six verses in that hymn, recognizing all of the ways that God has poured out blessing for the gifts of the earth and the firmament and all of the things that we have that are physical, for the gifts of family, of friends, of companionship, and the last verse, for the gift of God's love expressed through his son, Jesus Christ. The message of Christmas, if we need a reminder here in the dog days of summer in August, is that God himself, poured out of heaven into human form, being born in a lowly estate, in a stable, in all of the dirt and the muck that comes with it, walked among us, lived and taught and called people to more fullness of life. And in response, the world put him to death. And his response was not to overcome evil with evil, but with life through resurrection, bringing us with him. We worship. We worship a God that gave us everything we have, everything we need, and invites us to live, to love, and to follow. We worship a God that held nothing back, including he held himself. He did not hold himself back. We turn to Philippians chapter two. We see some of the earliest hymns in the church. I invite you to read that this week, because it's a very important one. It's a very important one. It's a very important one. It's a very important one. It's that first account. I call it the first Christmas story, even though it doesn't have the manger or anything like that. It's the story of God giving up everything for our sake. We worship a generous God who asked for just a portion of it back, but it asks us to change our lives, to live a different way, not just on Sunday morning, but every day of the week. And that is hard. Old habits, creep in. Old desires resurface. We, myself included, say, well, I don't really want to give this up. I don't want to change. And that's ultimately the problem when Paul calls us a living sacrifice. With David, the sacrifices and the burnt offerings, there is nowhere that that offering could go but up to the Lord. But we who are living sacrifices, we can offer ourselves freely to God, and then we can say, never mind. We have the ability to climb back down from the altar. We have the ability to say, I want to hold this back. didn't mean what I said. And we go through these cycles over and over again, where we are all in, and then we pull back. We're all in, and then we pull back. each time we pull back, because we worship a generous and loving God with open arms.

This part of the way of living. I know maybe welcoming the stranger was a little hard this time. We'll do better next. I know giving water to the thirsty was a little hard this time. Next time we'll do better. Welcoming the stranger, a little hard, but next we'll do better.

This is how this act of generosity, the act of offering a portion of what God has given us on Sunday morning is a signpost, is a refreshing act each week to remind us how all of our lives should be lived when we're not gathered.

So what do we do? There's an invitation that God gives us to give, to respond in holy ways, to offer up that which we would rather cling on to. There are those out there in the world, as we go about our lives, who are collecting that, who are receiving that, and we can respond in prayer, say, God, hard this time, but I give you this gift. I give you myself. Take it and use it. May it be a blessing to others. So rather than just a halftime moment, a break in the normal things, rather than just seeing it as a, I'm paying my dues to this organization that I'm a member of, rather than seeing it as this obligation or this thing that you're supposed to do, what if we saw it as an enactment of how God wants us to live every single and helps us reset ourselves when we know we're not doing it? These are how the acts of worship that we do each week shape us for the weeks ahead and the days ahead. Next week, it's the first Sunday of the month, so we'll have communion like we always do. So next week, we're looking at what is communion. Why do we gather around this table? Why do we pass bread and juice? Why do we keep doing it? Why did John Wesley say we should do it every time we gather? Again, how will it shape us? What does it say about our tables? So that's a preview of next week. I know it's Labor Day weekend and many of you may be traveling, but I hope if you're here, you'll want to be a part of that conversation.