Giving to a Need and Needing to Give: A Sermon for Proper 8

 Today’s reading from Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians comes at a great time in the life of our parish. If you’ve been around the past several months, you know that we’ve been talking about money quite a bit. If it feels like  we’ve had a yearlong stewardship drive, well, we basically have! Through God’s grace and the abiding faith of many lay leaders in our parish, we made the decision to launch a major building project and a capital campaign in the middle of a global pandemic. And I am delighted to report to you that as of today, we have surpassed our original financial goal of $675,000.

The members of the Rooted + Grounded in Love Steering committee deserve our deepest gratitude. They agreed to take on an incredibly  challenging task in perhaps one of the most difficult years in recent memory. 

As a member of this team, I think my primary role was to continue to remind us of the spiritual component of fundraising. Yes, there was a very pragmatic task at hand. We will always need to raise money to fund the mission and ministries of Christ the King. Our consultant Rob Townes calls that approach to giving as “giving to a need.” There are clearly articulated, pragmatic needs that need funding. Such is the case for all non-profit organizations. 

But Rob also helped us understand the more theological, spiritual approach to giving, which is our “need to give.” This component of giving can be more difficult to understand and embrace. Our “need to give” is grounded in our belief that we are created in God’s very own image. And as baptized Christians, we represent God’s image as Christ’s Body in the world. Jesus Christ was the ultimate gift giver - he gave everything - he emptied his full self - for all of humanity. In our reading today, Paul says it this way:  “For you know the generous act 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.”

So as representatives of Christ in the world, we too are called to be sacrificial givers. It is in our very DNA as beings who are created in God’s very own image. As such, when we begin to embrace this theological, more spiritual approach to giving, we begin to give simply because that is what we were created to do. Gift-giving becomes a primary part of our very own identity. And when this becomes the reason for which we give, we become less inclined to worry so much about the need for which we are giving. We don’t need to be convinced to give. We simply give because that is who we are and what we were created to do.

The context for today’s reading from Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians is the “Jerusalem Collection,” which was a major fundraising campaign by Paul, Timothy, and Titus. In the past year, they had requested money for the Christians in Jerusalem from all of Paul’s churches in Gentile territory. There was a severe famine in Jerusalem at that time, which, combined with the many other hardships and persecutions that Christians at that time and place faced, the Church in Jerusalem was in desperate need. As I mentioned before, there was a clear, pragmatic need to which Paul, Timothy, and Titus were asking their churches to give. 

But there was more to Paul’s fundraising campaign than the specific, pressing needs of the Christians in Jerusalem. Another reason for the Jerusalem relief fund was to “serve as an important, visible expression of the interdependence of believers worldwide.” We must remember that Christianity was a brand-new religion. And most of the people to whom Paul was writing were Gentile, Pagan converts to Christianity. They had no geographic, emotional, or ethnic connection with the people in Palestine. As citizens of the Roman Empire, they were accustomed to sending money to a foreign land. But that was in the form of forced taxation. And, whether true or not, the philosophy of taxation was that they would get things in return from the Roman Empire - namely, military protection and infrastructure such as roads.

But these new Christians were not in the practice of voluntarily sending money to other communities simply for the sake of helping others who were less fortunate. This day and age, most Christians are familiar with this sort of connectional, charitable giving. But that wasn’t the case back then. The Jerusalem Offering was perhaps  the first-ever Chrisitan “global” outreach initiative. And what Paul was trying to communicate to his churches was that regardless of a particular pressing need at hand, as Christians, we are called to be in relationship with one another. And one way that we can express that connectivity is through giving.  We are an interdependent body that shares in our abundance and in our suffering. Paul asserts that “it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.  As it is written,

‘The one who had much did not have too much,

and the one who had little did not have too little.’”

In other words, as members of the Body of Christ, we are connected with one another, whether we are from the same community or not. And this principle also goes for the relationship between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Paul’s efforts to raise money for Jewish Christians who were suffering from Gentile Christians who were thriving was an effort to break down the barriers between these two ethnic communities. 

So with the Jerusalem Offering, in addition to his goal of meeting an actual, measurable need in the midst of a crisis, Paul was doing much more. He was instructing his churches on the need for Christians to give, because through their giving, we can become more like Christ. It was through giving and receiving money that these very different Christian communities could begin to experience their unity in Christ Jesus. 

And while Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians was written almost 2,000 years ago, in a context far removed from our own, the principles remain true for us today. As Christians, we are called to be generous, sacrificial givers. We give to needs that are identified for us, but we also simply need to give. And the community here at Christ the King has done a remarkable job of faithfully embodying the Christian call to sacrificial giving in a time when we were unsure how this pandemic would unfold. And though these have been challenging times for us here, they have been much more challenging for Beckwith - our diocesan camp and conference center which was hit hard by hurricane Sally and covid-19. So we committed to giving 10% of everything that we raised in our capital campaign to Beckwith so that we could embody the principles that the apostle Paul laid out for us today. And may we continue to look and listen for specific needs beyond our community to which we are called to give, while also giving simply because that is who God calls us to be and what God calls us to do.