A living offering

Romans 12.1-8, Luke 21.1-4

Preached Canberra Baptist Church 30^th August, 2009

We come to the end of our series on offering. We have looked at the power of offering to change our lives. We don’t realize just how much a transactional mindset governs our lives. The principle of ‘user pays’ is widespread in our society – e-tags for motorways, surcharges for the use of credit cards, competitive tendering for government services, the keeping of close accounts over so many areas of life. We live in a marketplace where many things are costed, sold, traded and rarely offered, or given.

In 1983 I visited a small group of nuns serving in a village on the West coast of Sri Lanka called Munakkare. It was a fishing village – very poor and very low caste. It was a Catholic community of about 5,000 but there was no church and no resident priest. I sat with one of the older nuns, an Irish sister who sat in the cool of the evening by the little house the sisters maintained. The village had a culture of hospitality, of feasting. A fisherman would save for years from his meagre existence to be able to host a feast in which several years of hard work would be poured into a great meal to be offered to his friends and neighbours and eaten in one festive, joyful night. The Irish nun had herself learned something of this culture of hospitality and offering: she was dying of cancer. She had returned to Ireland to say her goodbyes and was now living out her life among the people she had loved and served for 40 years. We sat together and enjoyed the slowly setting sun in that poor but happy place.

Some years later I was visiting the central Philippines. I was just a student minister in a small suburban church in Melbourne but I was received like a visiting dignitary by the Christians of Panay. At one home I and my companions were welcomed to a house so poor they could offer us only ‘native coffee’ – grown outside the door, picked and roasted that morning over an open fire and served without milk, sugar or anything to eat. There was no furniture in the little hut, just a half-full old sack on which I was asked to sit and my companions had to sit on the floor. On hearing that the harvest had just finished and their food for another season gathered in, I looked around for a silo or a small shed or storage. ‘Where is the harvest?’I asked. ‘You’re sitting on it’ came the translated reply. 6 months food supply for a family was offered so the visiting minister might not have to sit on the floor.

An hour later we visited another house with furniture. Coffee and cakes and biscuits were in plentiful supply, and our very pregnant hostess, expecting her ninth child, insisted on serving us herself. Noticing she occasionally seemed to be taken a little ill or preoccupied we made a respectful inquiry after her health, only to discover that she had gone into labour 30 minutes before we arrived! Guests were guests and you offered yourself freely and completely, whatever the cost. Needless to say the cakes were left uneaten and we moved on.

All these communities had learned something of the secret of offering: of hospitality and gift. We have been looking at how that spirit of offering can transform our understanding of money and temper our use of credit and debt. The spirit of offering changes our experience of time. We live in a society that says that time is money and wants to account for every second of the day. When time is a gift that we are offered, and something that we can then offer to God and to others time loses much of its transactional, pressured character and becomes a rhythm that we can live within, that nurtures and carries us.

We explored the experience of work – the pressures that many people live by today, and considered what it might mean to move beyond the transactional structure of work and wage to offering our labour and activity not to our worldly bosses, but to God. Can we also discover the liberty and freedom of working for God, not human beings? There should be a little of the Blues Brothers in every Christian worker so that every working day we can say simply and with complete conviction: “We’re on a mission from God!”

Even the experience of illness and death can be anchored in a profound sense of offering. Christ offered himself for us, through his death. We in turn can find our deaths and our doubts anchored in Christ’s sacrifice and self-offering.

So all this theory has been put out there – some hints and suggestions and study guides and conversations. But what can be done with it all? How do we actually go about implementing some of this in our lives? Our two final texts on offering, Romans 12 and Luke 21, seem to point in almost diametrically opposite directions, but they share a common mystery of the transforming power of the offering.

Romans 12.1-2 is one of the best known passages in the Bible. It contains a succinct and powerful expression of what worship is, how we should come before God: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

It doesn’t need much commentary. Worship demands all that we are – that our bodies are to be a living sacrifice, holy (set apart, made sacred) and acceptable to God. The words ‘spiritual worship’ are variously translated. Some versions have ‘which is your reasonable service’. Not only are our holy bodies presented in ‘spiritual worship’ but we are to be ‘not conformed to this world, but [be] transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God.

That is a wonderfully lofty view of worship: that what we offer to God when we come to him are our bodies, prepared and made holy, our minds, transformed and renewed, and our capacities for discernment and obedience, awakened and active. That in a nutshell is what you are invited to do when you come to worship.

And I am sure there are some days when it happens just like that – when you are prepared and excited for worship and offering everything that is in you to God’s grace and God’s service. There are days when worship is straight out of Romans 12. They are wonderful and exciting days, when they happen for you. And that lofty and exalted spirit of offering is the true spirit of worship: when we can worship in that spirit life can certainly be expected to be quite rewarding and even triumphant.

But worship is not always like that for all of us. There are days when it’s hard to even rise from the pew to sing let along soar with the saints and angels. Even the great spiritual masters of the monastery, those who rise to pray from the small hours of the morning and spend their lives in devotion and service, cannot always worship like that. They too have their off days, when rising at 2am to go to the chapel to chant has no attraction whatever. They have mornings when the heart is reluctant and the mind revolts. There is a wise and ancient tradition that the first part of obedience is not in the will or the desire but in simply being there: your heart and your mind might be a hundred miles away but if your bottom was on the pew God would honour that sacrifice and gradually bring your mind and heart along too.

The Romans text itself goes on to acknowledge the varieties of grace and ministry that we have, to invite us to sober self-measurement and to acknowledge that we are a body of many members and many gifts - that we are different, and will experience our worship differently. Just how the offering is made and what is there to offer will vary from person to person.

Which brings us to the second reading, the story of ‘the widow’s mite’, the tiny coins that together made up a penny. As Luke gives us the story, the contrast is between rich who give out of their abundance, and the poor widow who gave two small coins – not much in the scheme of things, but according to Jesus the greatest gift of all because what she put in was (in one translation) ‘all her living’. What Jesus means is that God looks deeply into a person’s situation and does not despise the smallest gift, when it is all that someone has left to offer.

One thing that has emerged over the last few weeks, is that some people in this congregation have very little of some things to give. Especially when it comes to time, some are working so hard, have so many demands on them, that there seems to be hardly anything left over. There are time-widows among us. The lofty call of Romans 12 to present your body and your mind, to find in worship a complete transformation of being almost seems to mock them. It seems too much, an impossible kind of experience.

To such people we have to say that we all have choices, and we do need to ask ourselves how much we are complicit in the demands upon our time resources. Which of our choices and decisions has contributed to our experience in the present? What in our lives can be changed or amended or responded to? These are always important questions for each of us to ask, but we also raise such questions gently and respectfully, in a spirit of understanding and supportive friendship.

We also point to the widow’s mite – that tiny skerrick of copper that Jesus says was more than all the wealth of the rich, because it was all her living. Those of us who struggle with offering, who feel totally depleted and pressured, who struggle to get their bottom on the pew on Sunday morning - let alone lift up their sanctified bodies and renewed minds in the great act of praise - need to remember the widow’s mite. However little is left, however poor and barren you may think your time, however feeble you may find your will, offer it to Jesus!

The Brotherhood of St Laurence in Melbourne is one of Australia’s great Welfare organizations. The story of its foundation is God and Three Shillings – how an offering totalling 30c became the start of a great organization. Who knows what God might do with 30c of your money, or 30 minutes of your time, or 30 seconds of your thinking? 30 minutes with someone depressed and lonely can turn a life around. 30 seconds thought might bring a wise idea that brings new direction to a community.

When you learn to make an offering, even when you are tired and resources seem low and it all seems pointless, things begin to change. Offering becomes a little engine of transformation, of change, and it works its way gradually through our lives – our work and our time, our health and illness, our past and our future, our living and our dying – and makes us able to live and to worship as Romans 12 invites – even when we have to start with a few copper coins, or some stray minutes, or some tiny corner of the will.

We have had no takers to share their testimony publicly today – no-one has offered. But we are offering you something today – a few minutes to testify to yourself, to think about what offering might mean for you. We are going to distribute sheets of paper and envelopes in which we invite you to write a little note to yourself. We invite you to seal them up in an envelope and the church will post it to you in 4-6 weeks time.