Deut 26.1-11, Exodus 13.11-16, Luke 2.22-24

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 12th July 2009

We sing these words from time, or others like them. What do they mean? What would it be to bring your life as a daily - offering? What is this word ‘offering’ anyway and what is involved in it? It’s there every week printed in the order of service. It’s almost the last thing we do. It comes in the section headed "Response". It looks like we’re collecting money, and indeed we are, but it is so much more than that! It is actually the great culmination of our worship and if we are doing it right there is a lot more going on than the rustle of notes, the tinkle of coins, and some pleasant music.

In the primal human family ‘offering’ was made. This passage tells us very little about offering other than it caused great problems. This brief story gives the background to the entry of jealousy and violence into the human community. It doesn’t tell us why Cain and Abel chose to do this or why the Lord had regard for one and not the other. It doesn’t really teach us anything about offering at all but sets up the consequent actions of jealousy and murder and banishment and the beginnings of civilization.

That is very understandable when you look at the recent history of ‘offering’ in the Western church. Several centuries ago in England ‘tithes’ were owed to the church out of the produce of the land. If you were a farmer the tithe was a tax you owed the church. In many Lutheran countries of Europe the church is funded still by taxes that the state collects on behalf of the church. When official tithes fell into disuse some churches still funded their operations through ‘pew rents’. You would actually have every quarter to pay a rental to have your family pew in the church. My former church at Collins Street in Melbourne charged pew rents for a time in the 19th century. Now of course all churches work by free-will offerings – not tithes, not pew rents, not fee for service, but free-will offering.

That sounds a bit like Cain and Abel. But it also reflects modern attitudes to money and freedom and choice and autonomy: in our culture we see offering in terms of ‘gift’, of empowered and autonomous individuals exercising a choice to give out of their own resources as a spontaneous act of generosity. That is not how the Bible actually understands ‘offering’.

This is not about money. It’s much more than just a matter of money. It’s about understanding aright the relationships between God and gift. It’s about our relationship with the world, about the nature of ownership and rights and about how we use the power of choice. It’s about how we find priorities and principles to live by in a society where every little decision of the day is served up to us as a choice we have to make usually within a framework of cost and benefit.

The form of words require an initial declaration "Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us." So the offering happens within a context of declaration, of affirmation of the primal promise which underlay Israel’s very existence. Offering is a statement of the central fact of the people of God and their existence under promise.

What you then have to say is one of the most ancient little fragments of the whole of Scripture: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor and he went down to Egypt…." If you read that wonderful ancient creed you will see that the act of offering rehearses the whole history of God’s dealing with his people in a nutshell – their slavery and liberation, the promise and gift of the land, God’s generosity and gift to us, ending with the words ‘so now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me". The story throughout has been the story of us and suddenly it affirms that the gift of the land is from the Lord to me, the worshipping individual. And then there is to be a joyful celebration.

It is a really rich action – declaring the nation’s existence, rehearsing the nation’s history, acknowledging God’s action to save and establish his people, confessing that God’s rich bounty has been given to me and letting the joy of the harvest, the history and the holiness of the one who saves, overflow in gratitude and celebration.

Embodied in this celebration are attitudes and beliefs that go well beyond our shallow idea of a one sided gift from an empowered giver to a dependent receiver. It’s much more interactive, even transactional. Out of the deep sense of the abundance of God’s giving, not just of this harvest but of the very land itself, of ancestors and family and history and culture, all of this calls forth the offering of the first fruits, of the prime cut of life to be offered to God.

Do you begin to sense the complexity and the richness of what is involved in real offering? Of course there were elements to those rituals that made them special: harvest would be only once or twice a year whereas we get paid fortnightly or monthly. They had to gather the harvest and then bring the offering in a journey of pilgrimage. Even the fortnightly collection of your pay packet is now largely a thing of the past- we have banks and direct debit, and credit cards and telephones and BPay by which we can order our money about. It’s very convenient but we lose that vital connection with the full meaning and magic of what offering brings to life.

I said earlier that the act of offering is actually the climax of our worship. For each one of us there should be a basket of qualities and experiences we bring into worship and offer in that part of the service. What do you bring in the basket?

Do you bring a passionate declaration that you are God’s man, God’s woman, living in the place where God calls you to live? "I am yours Lord and I am standing in the land and in the life that you have given me to live!" That’s the first act of offering. You are not called to be here as tentative consumers, assessing the singing, or sniffing at the sermon to see of there is anything worthy to take home and think about. You are called to stand up somewhere deep inside yourself and say "Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the life that he gave me!" What declaration is woven into the bottom of the basket you bring to set down in this place?

Do you bring a sense of real and vital history? Do you rehearse and celebrate the long history of God’s people of which you are a part? By that I mean the long history of the Patriarchs and the Israelites and the disciples and the Apostles and the saints and the Reformers and the people sitting around you. It’s all one glorious, complicated, rich and life-giving history. Do you rehearse it and think about it in your worship?

In offering do you connect with the history of our country as well because that is where God calls us to worship and witness. Do you feel the sadness and dispossession of indigenous Australians who, like the Israelites in Egypt, cry to the Lord in their affliction and oppression? Do you reflect on our recent history and what is happening in the papers this week so that the current history in formation is offered to God and mulled over in our hearts and minds even as we silently tell the story?

Do you connect with your own family’s history in the act of offering? "A wandering Scottish farmer was my ancestor and he went down to Wangaratta and lived there as an alien small in number …." Our personal histories matter to God, and they too are the fabric of our offering. We offer to God the story of our people, our ancestors – all the love and sacrifice, the struggle and the silliness, that is part of the story of every family.

And sometimes we too are in Egypt as we come to worship - small in number, our marriages in trouble, our careers struggling, our kids (or our parents!) causing us grief. Sometimes the most poignant and precious offering is the cry of pain, and even as you speak it you hear the ancient prayer of offering "and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil and oppression, and brought us out ... with a mighty hand and outstretched hand .. into this place …, a land of milk and honey…." Bring all your history in the basket of offering.

Do you bring a recognition that everything you have is not your possession, is not yours to own? The right of property is sacrosanct in our society but the basket of offering says ‘this was never mine in the first place’ – I am giving it to the one who owns it. The first born child is God’s, not ours. When we start to think about it none of the children are ours – not our possession. They are a miracle, a gift, a trust, a work of art, a work of grace. We start to see how our passion for ‘owning’ contaminates so much of life.

There was this little thing recently - I don’t know whether you heard of it - called the global financial crisis. I don’t know much about money, but I do know this: that those who caused it were not wandering about with an offering basket acknowledging there are some things you can’t own, that the first obligation for all of us is to give back to life and to God.

We live in a world that thinks anything can be owned, can be made into a commodity and priced and traded. We can buy futures, we can trade water, we can sell pollution credits. I know these are just mechanisms and they might be efficient, but the act of offering says right at its core there are just some things we can never own. Who owns the polar bears or pelicans? Who among you can rent me a cloud or sell me the sunshine? Offering acknowledges that God is the primary owner and, far from us giving him money or things that we ‘own’, we are simply redeeming for our use that which he has graciously allowed us to enjoy.

Do you bring in the basket a deep sense of gratitude? Offering isn’t a random spontaneous unpredictable thing – it is the fruit of gratitude. I suspect that gratitude is not a very popular emotion. We are all so independent these days that gratitude may have overtones of feeling less powerful, or perhaps even obligated to someone else. When was the last time you felt truly grateful? Gratitude can be one of the most empowering experiences. It puts life in perspective. A great rush of gratitude lowers your stress levels and slows down your life. And it is the secret of worship! Gratitude is really the heart of prayer – not need, not desperation, not tragedy, not even love, but gratitude, true thankfulness. What thankfulness do you bring in your offering basket?

What do you bring in the basket of offering? If you want your worship to be deep and nurturing and your life to be rich and well ordered, bring a clear inner declaration of faith however simple. Bring a sense of history that is alive and real and vibrant and personal. Bring a recognition that there are limits to ownership and much that our society whispers that we own is not our possession at all but really belongs to others and to God. Bring the careful and intentional practice of gratitude, of learning to say "thank you" and discovering how gratefulness unlocks abundance and transforms life. Then, bring the first fruits of your labour and your lifestyle, not in some fantasy of generosity but in discipline and awareness and service and humility.