One of the parts of a worship service that rarely gets the attention it deserves is the offering. Rarely do you hear someone say after church, “Wow, the way we collected the offering this morning was especially meaningful to me.”
“Hey, you should come to our church on a Sunday morning and check out how we receive the offering. Very impressive!!”
The truth is that our ushers really do an amazing job. They know what they’re doing and I don’t take them for granted. If for some reason our entire ushering crew would take a Sunday off, it wouldn’t be that easy to replace them. Have you noticed that they have a method to how they distribute the offering plates. They have it down to a science.
Here’s a picture of one of our ushering crews one Sunday. Don’t they look great! They look like they know what they’re doing! So, join me in giving a hand to our ushering team. Let’s show them our love.
We often take their work for granted and we take the offering time in the service for granted. But did you know that our church made the local news one Sunday because of our offering?
Sixty-two years ago this month, back in February of 1958, our church held the first Sunday worship service in this building. A fire had destroyed the previous church building three years earlier and on Sunday, February 9, 1958, the long, anticipated first worship service in the new building was held.
The newspaper reported on this grand event and one of the highlights of that newspaper article was that there were so many people who attended that first worship service that we needed forty ushers to collect the offering that morning. Forty ushers!
We usually have four ushers but can you imagine forty ushers?? That’s a pastor’s dream!!
And so, our church was made famous by how many ushers we needed one Sunday morning to receive the offering. It impressed the local reporters, anyway.
The reason I’m so focused on how we take the offering for granted is because it seems like Jesus doesn’t want us to take our Sunday morning offering for granted either. He says in our Gospel reading for this morning that when you are about to offer your gift at the altar and you think about a broken relationship that you have with someone, to not offer your gift until you first go and seek reconciliation with that person.
I’ve always struggled with this scripture reading and who doesn’t struggle with the Sermon on the Mount teachings in general. These are hard, hard teachings to follow. Jesus is setting the bar really high in these teachings.
If you are familiar with the Sermon on the Mount, what Jesus is doing here is that he is taking those ancient commandments of Moses like don’t murder and do not steal, and he’s saying, that it’s not just about not killing somebody or taking something from somebody. It’s about out attitudes toward others. It’s about doing all we can to seek reconciliation with the other person. That’s the hard part about living out our faith. It’s in our attitudes toward others and not just our actions.
You have heard people say, “Now, preacher, don’t go meddl’n or stepp’n on my toes in the sermon this morn’n. Don’t make me feel uncomfortable.” In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is meddl’n. He’s stepp’n on our toes. And he is making us feel uncomfortable. He is raising the standard on what it means to live out our faith. It’s about our actions and our attitudes.
And we hear this all the time. One of the reasons why people don’t go to church is because they see how some Christians behave and treat others outside of Sunday morning.
A pastor was telling me about a church member who was speaking negatively about another church member and often times it was in front of people during church meetings. I asked him how he handled this and he said that he had gone to her and told her that what she was saying was inappropriate, but she kept on doing it.
So he prayed some more about it and he decided to approach her again, but this time with a slightly different theological twist. Instead of just telling her to stop doing it, this time he said, “Alice, as the pastor of this church, I will not permit you to speak negatively about another brother or sister in Christ.”
By referring to the other person as a brother or sister in Christ, this church member was able to start thinking about her attitudes about this person through the eyes of faith and not just based on her perceptions of this person.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is calling for us to not just obey the ancient commandments of Moses but to also obey through the eyes of faith which leads to our attitudes toward other people.
Following Jesus involves religious practices like putting an offering in an offering plate, but it also involves how we live out our faith in our relationships with others.
And so the best offering ever really wasn’t that Sunday morning, sixty-two years ago when forty ushers collected the morning offering. The best offering ever is when we offer our gifts, not to earn God’s love, not to just go through the motions of worship, and not without any thought of how we treat other people, but to always offer our gifts in the spirit of Christ.
Maybe this is why the Apostle Paul says in II Corinthians that God loves a cheerful giver. Cheerful giving is when we offer our gifts through the eyes of faith and in the spirit of Christ. Cheerful giving is when we see our whole lives as an offering to God. Our offering isn’t just about a bank transaction. It’s about a spiritual transaction involving our attitudes and our hearts.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount teachings are about inviting us to offer not just our money, not just our time, and not just our resources, but it’s about offering our lives and all of who we are to Christ. The offering time in worship is just a small symbol of that larger perspective. The offering time of worship is always an invitation for us to offer ourselves and not just our gifts to Christ.
In one of the churches I pastored, a church member stopped by my office at the church during my first week there. He had called to say that he would be stopping by at some point.
I’ll never forget this. He came into my office, introduced himself, and said “I just stopped by today to offer a prayer for you as you begin as our new pastor.”
And there in my office, he put his hand on my shoulder and offered this beautiful, beautiful, and encouraging prayer on my behalf. After he said, “Amen,” he welcomed me again to the church and before I knew it, he was out the door.
I would soon discover what an incredible person of faith he was. He just did simple things like that, very unassuming, where he offered himself and always blessed others with his presence. He was a living offering for God.
A favorite hymn of mine is “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And I love the verse in that hymn that beautifully says,
“Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
There’s a story about this hymn that involves one of the most prominent Christian leaders of the first half of the 20th century, William Temple who was the Anglican Bishop in England during World War II. His whole life was an offering to God as he worked to provide relief for Jewish refugees from Naziism.
He once led a revival at one of the churches in England and he led the people in singing the hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”
There are four verses of that hymn and he led the congregation in singing the first three verses. And when it became time to sing the last verse, he momentarily stopped the music and he said to the people, “Now, if you mean this next verse with all your heart, I want you to sing them as loud as you can. If you don’t mean them at all, keep silent. If you mean them even a little but want to mean them more, sing them very softly.”
When the organ started to play the fourth and final verse of that hymn, just imagine two thousand voices in that massive cathedral whispering in humility and reverence…
“Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small; Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.”
It is said that of those who attended that service, that holy experience was never forgotten. Whenever we offer our gifts to God in humility, in faith, and in the spirit of Jesus, those are always the most special moments.
Our ushers are unsung heroes who by simply passing the plates pew by pew are giving us the opportunity to offer not just our gifts, but our very lives once again to Christ. And they remind us that we offer our gifts in response to “love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, and my all.”
That is always the best offering we can ever give.
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