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Excelling In This Grace
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 5, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 15:7-11 II Corinthians 8:1-15
The church in Corinth was dead in the water when it came to parting from their money. Asked to take up a weekly offering for the larger church, they had made a good start just a year before. But in that intervening year it seems the church’s humanity had become a handy excuse for their hoarding rather than their helping the saints in need. Specifically, it was Paul who had teed a number of them off, something having to do with a stern letter he wrote to them calling them to account, exhorting them, in effect, to grow up! With scant evidence that they had, Paul again was faced with finding words capable of jump-starting a church whose means outstripped her generosity. Likely the apostle had at his disposal the same stops to pull out as I do…as WHYY does…as your alma mater does! There might have been the appeal to “nobility (‘Show the world how kind and good you are’), human solidarity (‘We are the world’), demonstrated need (‘Help stop hunger’), personal recognition (‘Get a free T-shirt’), inner satisfaction (‘You will be glad you did’), friendly competition (the ‘challenge’ gift), earthly or heavenly reward (‘God will bless you’), loyalty to someone or something (‘This is your church’), envious rivalry (‘Look how much they gave!’), reputation (‘You are known for your generosity’), gratitude (‘Show how grateful you are’).” [C. Thomas Rhyne, Interpretation] Misread and misheard down the ages, Paul’s words have been misconstrued in precisely these ways by preachers begging congregants to make a pledge to the church’s budget for Christ’s sake. But Paul rejected any word that might have raised the needed money while leaving the Corinthian community, at the end of the day, unchanged. Rather he chose to ring the changes on a word whose meaning is presumed though rarely parsed of a Sunday morning. The word is charis, that is, grace. Beginning with the grace of God granted to the churches in Macedonia, Paul proceeds in these two chapters to speak of grace ten times in six different senses. Grace, says New Testament scholar Murray Harris, forms “the opening chord and dying refrain of every Pauline symphony.” That symphony is in the air of this congregation I do believe! And this morning I want us to listen for its strains together before we seal the envelope that is both our privilege, our act of grace, our eucharis and our thanksgiving to the God whose unconditional kindness toward us in Jesus Christ awaits us at his table. With his opening chord, I think Paul sets out to give the church an imagination for the grace that is God’s kindness working in us and among us, enabling us to participate worthily in the collection, which is also to say, in the gathered community, the koinonia. Imagine, says Paul in so many words, a community so alive to the gift of God’s love in Jesus Christ that its members are begging for the privilege of giving themselves and their money away. Not only that, imagine a community of folks who barely have the wherewithal to keep body and soul together, yet who are downright overjoyed at the thought of offering what they do have to the glory of God and for the sake of the saints in need. This, Paul says, is God’s grace working among Christ’s church. All of us have known individuals like this, unconscious of their unbounded generosity, tickled to death to be of help to another even though it would mean they must go without. For the most part, they are unaware of any deprivation because they know themselves as rich, as fully alive in the act of giving themselves away. But try to imagine a community, seven hundred souls say, begging for the privilege of giving away both self and substance: a community of grace. Paul writes of just such a community—actually of three communities in Macedonia: Philippi, Thessalonica and Berea--not in order to shame the Corinthians, I think, but rather to ignite a longing in them for the grace that would enable them to live openheartedly, free of the burden of hoarding, of controlling, of securing, of keeping their lives. Apart from Paul’s words concerning the Macedonians, I swear I could not imagine a whole community transformed by the grace of God and therefore eager, clamoring for the privilege of giving. No doubt such a community cannot be conjured by the Corinthians nor is this a work they can accomplish: it is, by definition, a gift, a grace. Perhaps, then, Paul meant to recommend to the Corinthians the poverty of the Macedonians that gave them space enough and time enough, with arms empty and stretched out wide enough, to receive the gift of God’s unconditional kindness toward them. No doubt the poverty of the Macedonians afforded them a special understanding of the plight of the Jerusalem church, yet there is no evidence that Paul believed poverty to be a necessary condition for God’s grace to be given or received. If that had been the case, he would have instructed the Corinthians as Jesus had the rich young ruler: give everything away, become literally poor, and follow him. Instead Paul writes, “I don’t mean there should be relief for others and pressure on you.” So if not that, then what did he mean? Again, Paul says of the Macedonians, quite apart from the collection, that they gave themselves to God, put themselves in God’s service, surrendered the life they had in mind for the sake of the mind they had in Christ who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped but emptied himself. Perhaps Paul meant for them to deny themselves, though for the same reason as before, mere self-denial misses the grace notes running throughout this text. It is a human work, not God’s grace working in them. Moreover Paul had written earlier to the church in Corinth that if they gave away all they had and even if they delivered their bodies to be burned, this act would be nothing without…you guessed it: charitas! Without the gift of God’s grace—God’s loving-kindness, God’s tender mercy, God’s unwarranted acceptance while we were yet running as far as we could from God: without the gift of God’s grace, he wrote, we gain nothing. Nevertheless, Paul urges the Corinthians to excel in this grace, in this generous undertaking. “I do not say this as a command,” Paul insists, knowing that love given or received cannot be commanded, knowing that he has been given only the power of suasion as he comes to the gift that is at the heart of the matter. “Now,” says Harris, “he appeals to the ultimate incentive for wholehearted participation…the reason why the Corinthians should excel in this grace…namely the knowledge that Christ himself gave voluntarily and sacrificially” for their benefit. At the center of the score and in the midst of our material lives, Paul appeals to “the generous act [the grace] of our Lord Jesus Christ that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” The richness of Christ from the beginning with God, and the richness given to us in him in the fullness of time…means simply that we can only properly utter the word “rich” in relation to a life lived with God! Because the Son in whom God was pleased to dwell quit his dwelling with God in order that God might dwell with us, we have been given all things in him! The operative offering, my friends, is Christ who now collects us around his table of grace: grace as eucharis, as thanksgiving. Therefore “For your sake became poor” corresponds in the thought of Paul to “my body which is for you” says preacher Fred Craddock. What more could we need for comfort and help, for abundance and treasure, for assurance and safety than the gift of the God who is for us and with us in Jesus Christ? Yet as at this table he collects us into the one body, his grace would change us into his body offered anew to the world, re-presenting the self-emptying love of God, the grace of God broken and poured out through a community of disciples begging for the privilege of giving ourselves away! So what keeps us from excelling in this grace, my friends? Why is it that every year the thought of a congregation begging for the privilege of giving is missed in the necessary begging of the Stewardship Committee, a begging that issues not in abundance and thanksgiving but in the needs of the saints neglected? “All human nature vigorously resists grace,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others….Human nature is so faulty that it can resist any amount of grace and most of the time it does.” Our resistance to being parted from our money, then, is simply the outward and visible sign of our inward and invisible gracelessness: the lie we tell ourselves of our material scarcity in the face of the truth that we are rich because God has come to dwell with us in Jesus Christ. To receive the gift of God’s grace, to receive Christ and his benefits would be to be changed and change is painful. “To worry about the poor,” write Frederick Buechner of this change, “when you have worries enough of your own, to start becoming yourself fully by giving yourself prodigally to whoever needs you, to love your neighbors when an intelligent fourth grader could tell you that the way to get ahead in the world is to best your neighbors to the draw every chance you get”: these surely are the outward and visible signs of the inward and invisible grace which changes the human heart and mind. Metanoia Scripture calls this: a complete turning around, a total reorientation of our human existence toward the God for whom we were made. It is as if by grace we were “throwing ourselves,” said Bonhoeffer, “completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings but those of God in the world….That, I think is faith,” he wrote, “that is metanoia.” I must confess to you that I pray for the metanoia, for the conversion of this congregation even as I pray for my own. I pray that the grace of God will enable us to throw ourselves completely into the arms of God and I pray the same grace may find us one day—even today--begging for the privilege of sharing in the ministry to the saints, singing together at the dying refrain of Paul’s symphony of grace: Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift! Amen. |