based on Hebrews 10:11-25
The minister stands and walks to the pulpit. A gorgeous anthem has just been sung by the choir. The congregation sits silently, many of the men reaching slowly behind their backs to retrieve their wallets. The minister adjusts the microphone, takes a look at the congregation and says, “There is no more offering.”
The chairman of the stewardship committee suddenly gets a little restless; he turns up his hearing assistance device while simultaneously looking at his wife, “What did he just say?”
Around the sanctuary, in every pew, people are staring, not toward the chancel where the minister stands, but at each other, confused.
The minister has expected this. He leans closer to the microphone so no one will miss a word, “There is no more offering.”
“Why, he’s kidding,” says the astonished Sunday school superintendent to her equally astonished seventeen year old daughter, “How are we going to buy new curriculum!”
Many in the church at first rejoice. But then come the second thoughts. “No more offering! How are we gonna keep this church alive?”
Two hands hover over the organ keyboard. The organist doesn’t know what to do. “Should I play the offertory anyway?” she wonders to herself.
Three men and a woman stand at the back of the sanctuary, flummoxed. One of them begins walking very slowly up the aisle. The woman tries to call him without breaking a whisper, “He said no more offering. Should we go up anyway?” The first usher just shrugs his shoulders and keeps walking. The other three, not knowing what to do or who to follow anymore, fall in behind him.
Seeing the ushers moving, the organist begins playing the piece she has selected for the offertory.
The minister still stands at the microphone though hardly anyone notices. He whispers now, but in a more urgent voice, “There is no more offering.” The ushers however, pay him no heed. They get the plates, they pass the plates. The offering proceeds as always. The minister sits down, and the individuals in the congregation quietly resolve never to tell anyone about their pastor’s brief vacation from sanity.
It does seem insane doesn’t it? I mean, who would think of canceling for all time the one thing that actually works to keep the church alive these days. Crazy, right?
But whoever the pastor was who wrote the letter to the Hebrews penned these very words, “There is no longer any offering…” to his flock. And it had to seem just as crazy to the Hebrews in their day as it would seem to us in our day. Of course, the offering these days is a lot different than it was for the Hebrews. We won’t be killing any animals on the altar today. And the weekly collection (which is still a part of our worship service) is for a different purpose than it was thousands of years ago.
In those days, one of the priest’s main jobs, if not THE main job, was to offer sacrifices for the sins of the people, every day. Sin offerings. There was only one problem with these sin offerings—they didn’t work. They never did. The priests stood up every day and made a sacrifice for the sins of the people that could never take away their sins! Yet that was the system. Every day. Sin offerings. They never worked, but what else were they gonna do? How else were they going to get God to show them favor? How else were they going to earn their place in God’s eternal, glorious kingdom?
Even though we don’t make sin offerings anymore, we live with the same questions as the Hebrews, “How am I going to get God to bless me? How am I going to get to heaven? What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Oh, I know, I know—Jesus is the way the Father, and I assume that most of you know that and believe it. But let’s face facts. Though we say that Jesus is the way, we often live our lives as if it all depended on our good behavior. Even though this crazy pastor who wrote to the Hebrews tells us it isn’t so.
There must be a way to get God’s favor, though. There must be something we can do. We’re to be obedient, right? We’re to live as sin-free as we possibly can, and try harder every day to check off one more sin on the victory list.
Yet the message is the same. There is no more offering for sin. Our offering of obedience won’t get us in either, just as our acts of penance won’t get us in.
There is nothing you can offer that will cause God to be good to you. There is nothing you can offer that will cause God to be gracious to you. There is nothing you can offer that can cause God to forgive your sin. There is no sacrifice you can make, no mound of effort that you can undertake, that will put you right with God.
No sin offering remains because the old offerings couldn’t get the job done in the first place. The only offering that ever could work to take away our guilt has already been offered. Just like the reading says: The ancient priests stood every day at their service offering again and again the ineffectual sacrifices that could never and would never take away the guilt of even the most righteous, holy person living, here or anywhere.
Jesus made the ultimate and only sacrifice that could take away our guilt, and that caused the Old law with its regulations and holiness code to be set aside. Jesus did it once. It worked. And he sat down, his work accomplished. And from that seat he saw the priests continue to make ineffectual sacrifices day after day. He saw generations of his followers try their best to get it right, to live right, to not sin, and he watched each of them fail, and fail again. “Um, excuse me.” You can almost hear Jesus saying, “You don’t have to do that anymore. I already took care of the whole guilt thing. You’re free now. There is no more offering.”
But just as our imaginary congregation went on with their offering, ignoring their pastor, many of us pay no attention to that man seated to the right of God the Father, there behind the curtain that is now torn in two. Instead we stand outside the holy of holies and continue to promise that we will get it right one of these days.
But Jesus opened up a new way to be reconciled to God. Through his one sacrifice, the giving of his very life, the curtain that separates human beings from the presence of God was torn in two. The throne room is open. The Welcome sits in the doorway. Jesus sits at the right hand of God the Father and invites us in.
There is still an offering that we can give, but this new offering is one we give not to earn this grace, but to respond to it.
The church, in general, has busied itself with many other things, bible study, youth programs, potluck suppers, fundraising, administering of sacraments and worship, pursuing corporate models of organization and growth. The church has been busy, busy, busy. And the busy-ness starts to seem like offerings given, sacrifices made in order to get on God’s good side.
The new offering is something else. I’m almost afraid to say the word because we’ve so lost its meaning.
The Church… and I mean the institution here, not any one church in particular… the Church will urge holiness, the church will sometimes uphold discipline, the church will run programs upon programs, gather in worship on a weekly basis, hold capital campaigns and stewardship campaigns and yard sales and bake sales and mission trips and potlucks and Christmas Pageants and bible studies, they’ll maybe even pray. They will offer their busy-ness on the altar in the hopes that busy-ness as usual will save them when they’ve already been saved. But what the church seems less willing to do is love.
Jesus does talk about obedience—no question about it! Jesus also talks about “sinning no more”, as do the other New Testament writers. But when it came time to give his final charge to the disciples, he said “my command is this—love one another.” And the other writers go out of their way to make the point about love being the basis for everything in the Christian life: in John’s letters, “love one another, for love is from God,” in Paul’s writings, “nothing counts except faith working through love”, or here’s what love looks like, it looks “patient, kind, unselfish, etc….” Peter says, “Love one another with a tender heart, and a humble mind.” And the writer of Hebrews says, since we’re now free to enter the throne room of God with a clear conscience and lives sprinkled clean by Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, let’s consider how we can encourage each other and spur each other on to love one another.”
In other words, since access to God has now been granted to you for free, stop thinking about how to perform for God and start thinking about how you might live a life defined by the love of God.
It’s easy to do the church thing. It’s easy as a church to do the activity thing. It’s a lot easier to do a ton of stuff and view it all as a sacrifice for God, than it is simply to love in response to the sacrifice that God made for you.
And if we’re talking about loving someone who is difficult to love (we ourselves, are of course, not difficult to love), than it gets really tricky.
It’s tricky because you have to stop and think about it. “Wow, that person is, well, I don’t know, difficult! How do I love him in Jesus’ name?”
Do you want to be made right with God? Good! You already are. Do you want God to be gracious to you? Excellent. He already has. Are you thankful for this grace and this reconciliation that God has provided for you through Jesus? Super. There is one thing you can do to express this gratitude. Forget the striving to do better and be better through your own efforts.
Instead, receive from God the pronouncement that all is forgiven and that you can have life in His name, not because YOU are good enough but because HE is good enough. Then, in response to this grace you can start asking, regarding your relationships with both those who are easy to love and those who seem impossible, what does it mean to love this person in Jesus name?
Forget about repeatedly offering again and again your efforts to do right and be worthy, efforts that can’t do anything that hasn’t been done already; working so hard to get a love that is already yours. See access to God is open and free, the throne room is open. God who made you sits on his throne with the Son beside him, both of them with arms wide open. Waiting to embrace you and give the love of God to you and through you to others.
We still do take an offering here at Temple Church. But I hope we can understand that our offerings don’t do anything to make us right with God. That’s already done. Instead our offerings are to be used to sustain our efforts to love one another, to love our neighbors and to love the world in Jesus’ name.
One of the fringe benefits of preaching from the revised common lectionary. It repeats every three years!
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Listen on posterous
During the summer of 2001 I was with some students on a mission trip. We went out to the Pine Ridge reservation for a week and then headed to Rocky Mountain National Park for a couple of days.
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Listen on posterous
Here's something that came up in the shuffle today. It's an instrumental song called Hot Pants that I wrote and recorded with my friend Sam Getz. Sam is a very gifted guitar player who is now on tour with Stephen Kellog and the Sixers (here he is in live bearded mode:
).
For the drums I ran a keyboard percussive bass sound through two large speaker cabinets, put the speakers in the booth and recorded them with a single Neumann 287 through a Joemeek mic preamp. We recorded Sam playing the snare separately from the drum fills and cymbals just for the heck of it, and I compressed the crap out of them with the Joemeek and then again in the final mix. The high hat is also a keyboard sample, and was recorded on yet another separate take. Sam was very patient with my eccentricities.
I forget who played the Egg, but they did a darn good job.
I engineered, mixed and produced. This was part of a three song (with a fourth bonus track added) project we did just before I moved from Ohio to PA. We called ourselves Wrath of the Mosquito; it was just a random name we came up with. Maybe later I'll post the bonus track, which is much more low-tech and based on a true story.
But for now, Hot Pants…
For a while I was happy using ping.fm to post my status, microblog and other updates to multiple destinations. When ping started to go wonky a few months back (to be fair, ping.fm has improved significantly since implementing OAUTH a few weeks ago), I tried out hellotxt which offers way more flexibility but rarely works at all. Today I heard about pixelpipe, which I thought was simply a neat iphone app to upload photos to multiple sites. It is that, but as it turns out, it’s a whole lot more. Set up your own ‘pipes’ by choosing from well over 100 services, including friendfeed and posterous. Post updates, microblogs, longer form blog entries, pics and even video. Use routing tags to post to specific services. I haven’t really played with the iphone app yet (ironic considering I downloaded and set that up first before browsing pixelpipe.com) so I’m not sure if you can do video that way, but apparently you can push video with pixelpipe’s android app. Sweet huh? I’m looking forward to the day when pixelpipe adds more functionality for its routing tags (or maybe that’s there already but I haven’t found it), but the service works. That’s more than I can say for some others.
After this overloaded week of wage slavery, greeting trick or treaters seemed like just another in a long list of unwanted obligations. Since one kid is away with her mother at a band competition and the other kid is spending the night with a trick-or-treating pal, I opted for some Mexican take out (from the excellent Los Aztecas here in Pottstown where the hostess was Halloweened to the nines) and some much needed sermon writing.
… plus a few other places. Here are some pics we took.
A guy just showed up at the bakery who lives on the route I will deliver tomorrow. He has no idea who I am. For some strange reason, I take a small amount of pleasure in this.
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