We have been blessed at our church to have had student interns in ministry for many years from Columbia Theological Seminary, Johnson C. Smith Seminary, and Candler School of Theology. They have been all varieties of cultures, genders, ages, outlooks, and approaches. As a multicultural church, we like to think that we have broadened their view of themselves and of ministry. I know that they have greatly enriched our lives.
We ask our interns to lead all parts of worship over the course of their time with us. Some parts obviously can be intimidating — the sermon, the time with the children, and the sharing of concerns and joys. In our sharing time, people often get up to ask for prayers for certain issues in their lives or in the lives of others. To repeat these and to weave them into the pastoral prayer can often be a daunting task. What often causes the most confusion for our interns, however, is the time of offering. We ask the interns to prepare us to give and to receive the offering and then to lead us all in prayer after the offering and the doxology. The initial approach of the intern is often to take this assignment lightly — just get into it with a short introduction and then a short prayer afterward. For those who take it a bit more seriously, it is intimidating. "I'm a bit uncomfortable asking people for money," is a familiar refrain.
It does often seem a bit dirty, even a bit common, to come down from the lofty sermon and prayers and anthem to the offering — to ask people, indeed, to tell people that they should be giving money, that God wants us to do that. Doing this is often difficult. Yet we remind the interns (and ourselves) that this is a special place in worship, a place where we have the opportunity to put feet on our ministry and our lives, a place to practice incarnation, and a place to come to terms with letting go of what we and our culture worship so much: money. In the offering time in worship, we face the fundamental questions again and again on a weekly basis. Though we may seek to skip over them during the week, the offering time brings them before us each Sunday: Who am I? To whom do I belong? What, or who, do I really worship, and really hold onto? So, far from being common and dirty, the offering time is central to the practice of theology.
In today's passage, Paul addresses these concerns and the struggle over money when he announces to the Corinthians that it is time to take up the offering. We should note what a bold step that Paul is taking here. When we last saw him in the lectionary, he was pleading with the Corinthians to open wide their hearts to him, almost saying, "Please love me!" Now, he is saying that they need to finish up the offering. No more pleading for love from Paul — now, it is time to get to work and practice one of the central disciplines of the Christian faith: sharing material wealth with those in need.
In the prior six verses of chapter 8, Paul has celebrated the unexpected generosity of the Macedonians in collecting money for the offering, and now he emphasizes that it is time for the Corinthians to demonstrate the same generosity. What offering is it? It is an offering dear to Paul's heart, the collection of funds for the mother church in Jerusalem. He has already mentioned this offering in chapter 16 of 1 Corinthians, and he mentions it also in Romans 15 and Galatians 2. Indeed, the delivery of this offering to Jerusalem was the occasion of Paul's arrest there, an arrest that began his final trip to Rome that closes the book of Acts.
In stressing this sharing of resources, Paul is following the pattern set by the early church (Acts 2 and 4) where excess income is shared with those in need. Those first disciples were following the pattern set by Jesus — that relationships and community are central. Dorothee Soelle captures this idea well:
But Jesus does not do this by himself. Even before the healing of the mentally ill man, we are told of his quest for relationships. Jesus begins with friendships, with the formations of groups, with fellowship. He asks some fishermen to go around with him. They are to leave their old trade — sailing on the lake, fishing, casting nets, selling fish — and go with him to be "fishers of men and women." What Jesus wants requires fellowship, not a retreat into the wilderness. His message, which could be summed up as "The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near" (Mark 1:15), needs people who can be inspired by him and who already want to live with him in this dawning kingdom. This is no miracle which rains down on the people from above. Learning, traveling around together, becoming disciples, pupils, are conditions which are important for Jesus.1
Paul stresses a strong sense of duty in these verses. We ought to share and to be generous in our sharing because God has been generous to us. Yet, Paul also stresses a sense of joy in being able to share back what God has shared with us. Chapter 2 of Acts describes the first generation of Christians living with glad and generous hearts. There are no long-faced folk coming forward to share because they have to do so, but rather folk sharing because they are grateful, and they consider it a privilege to share. Paul seeks to follow this approach in lifting up the development of both an attitude of generosity and an attitude of discipline. The Greek word for "grace" (charis) appears in various forms in chapter 8: blessing (v. 1), privilege (v. 4), generous undertaking (vv. 6-7), generous act (v. 9), and thanks (v. 16). His goal is to develop in the Corinthians those "glad and generous hearts" in their approach to the offering for Jerusalem.
The idea of gratitude, of glad and generous hearts, is central to Christian living, but we often have great resistance to it. The French theologian, Jacques Ellul, put it this way:
If we feel too much sadness in giving, if we feel torn or irritated, it is better not to give. But we must clearly understand what this means. It means that we are still under mammon's power, that we love our money more than God, that we have not completely understood forgiveness and grace.2
We wrestle with this at our church, as many churches do. Our emphasis is that we agree with Ellul's point, but while we are in the development of these generous hearts, we will take "grumpy" money. We prefer "glad" money, but we will take grumpy money until it becomes glad money.
Paul seems to be close to our attitude as he tries to persuade the Corinthians to finish taking up their offering for Jerusalem — and, to be generous in that offering. He starts his motivation with their excellent qualities: They have strong faith; they are articulate; they are wise; and they are committed. He wants them to add one more excellent quality: generosity. He wants them to develop glad and generous hearts. He reminds them of why they and Paul have been bound together, why they are wrestling with one another, indeed why they belong to one another, even though at times both parties doubt seriously that they do belong to one another: "For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich" (v. 9). In emphasizing this, Paul is not touting the so-called prosperity gospel whereby we "might become rich."
Rather he is emphasizing the great gift that is ours — that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we find the true center of our lives. We find our lives — we belong to God. In this one verse he succinctly sums up the eloquent hymn that he quotes in Philippians 2. At the heart of our lives is the great generosity of God in Jesus Christ. If we truly understand that generosity, then being generous in return will not be an issue or a chore. It will pour out of us in gratitude. Paul, of course, knows that most of us don't have that gratitude flowing out of us most of the time, and the Corinthians' flow of gratitude seems to have dwindled to a trickle, especially in relation to Paul.
Paul first reminds them (and us) of God's generosity, and then he speaks of the reality and the necessity of mutuality that we visited briefly in chapter 5. We belong to one another, and we need one another. That is a powerful truth in our lives, a truth from which we often seek to flee. It is a truth that is not formed just in human consciousness — it is a truth that seems woven into the very fabric of reality, as Huston Smith notes:
Thanks to the marvels of microphotography we can now see single nerve cells, and what catches the eye is their dendrites, waving in the air like the tendrils of sea anemones in the hope — so it appears — of touching the dendrites of another cell. When two dendrites do touch, they lock arms and, as a result, their cells stand a better chance of braving life's perils. It is religion in embryo, for religio in Latin means to "rebind," and bonding and rebinding are what religion is all about.3
One of those student interns whom I mentioned earlier in this sermon reminded us of this idea of mutuality in one of his student sermons at Oakhurst. His name is Mark Gray, and he had been a missionary to Malawi from the Presbyterian Church of Northern Ireland prior to his coming to Columbia Seminary. He had met his wife, Betsy, in Malawi, where she was a mission worker from Cartersville, Georgia — quite a gathering place of Georgia and Ireland in Malawi! In his sermon, Mark spoke of being the pastor in a small agricultural village in Malawi. It was harvest time, and Mark remembered being awakened at about four in the morning by one of the village elders. He rushed to the door believing that it was an urgent matter. It was urgent, but not in the way that he thought. The elder handed him a huge basket of produce, the firstfruits of the harvest. Mark protested, telling the elder that he and his family needed the produce much more than Mark needed it. He told the elder that he appreciated the gift, but that the elder should keep it. The elder protested in return, telling Mark, "Pastor, this is the way we live. God has been good to us, and we are good to you." In that early morning twilight, the light clicked in Mark's heart, and he accepted the gift of the elder.4
"This is the way we live." It is a good summary of what Paul is telling the Corinthians in this passage. This is the way we live — out of a sense of grace and gratitude, developing glad and generous hearts, sharing what we have as a discipline, as a privilege, and as a pleasure. In a culture like ours that is so materialistic and worships money so much, these words from the elder in Malawi and from Paul sound nice but also naive. Life just isn't like that. There are terrorists and drought and famine and global warming and guns and all kinds of things to fear. It's so hard to be grateful and gracious and generous.
The Corinthians had many of these same fears, so Paul closes this passage by quoting a verse from a powerful event in Israel's collective memory: the Exodus. He quotes from Exodus 16:18 in reference to the manna that God provided for the wandering Israelites to eat in the wilderness after their escape from slavery in Egypt. The verse indicates that God provided just enough. Those who sought to hoard the manna found that the excess rotted.
It is a metaphor for us in our time, also. If we seek to hoard out of a fear of God's not providing for us, there is the great danger of rot developing, in ourselves and in our community. This does not mean that we are not to save money — indeed, if we do save, we'll have more to share! It means that we are asked to examine our lives. To whom do I belong? Do money and materialism drive me, or does God's grace drive me? How do we live our lives? That is the question that Paul is asking the Corinthians, and it is the question that echoes from this passage across the centuries to us: How do we live our lives?
It is time to take up the offering. Paul tells the Corinthians, and Paul tells us. In so doing, Paul offers us all the opportunity to consider who we are and whose we are. May God's gracious Spirit guide us in our search. Amen.
1. Dorothee Soelle and Luise Schottroff, Jesus of Nazareth (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), pp. 33-34.
2. Jacques Ellul quote from an unknown source. I first encountered it on a bulletin cover series of the Presbyterian Church USA.
3. Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 51.
4. From a sermon preached by Mark Gray at Oakhurst in August 1995.