How well do your deeds match up with your words?  Uh oh.  Anyone can talk about Christianity and the Christian thing to do.  Living that way, though?  How many opportunities I have let slip away!  I tremble to think about it, yet I know that God, in His mercy, will help me to perceive many more opportunities before I exit this life, and God, in His grace, will so continue to be at work in me, that I will let fewer and fewer of these opportunities slip by, as I grow in Christ, as Christ grows in me.

The New Testament includes many letters written by St. Paul.  Jesus had twelve apostles.  It seems significant that so few of them left anything in writing.  Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me, though, because what Jesus did was put God’s Word—himself!—into action: he poured himself into deeds as well as teaching.  His apostles, schooled in that powerful, indelible example, followed.  The time came, however, when these original apostles were reaching the end of this earthly journey; many of them were seized and executed because of the message they proclaimed—I hope we won’t go back to those days.  I look around and I sometimes wonder.  This world doesn’t really care what we believe, so long as we keep it to ourselves, but that isn’t what Christ tells us to do, and it isn’t what he did.  Please don’t keep your faith to yourself.

The aim of all of Paul’s letters is clear: he means to help Christ grow in us so that we grow in Christ.  The subject in what we heard in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthian Christians is giving.  Giving can become a sore spot in our life together, as it looks to have been for those Corinthians nearly two thousand years ago.  Paul had determined to take an offering for the church in Jerusalem, which was especially hard hit by persecution.  The government was determined to cripple this religion; so, they hunted down the leadership and, like any other government determined to stop a group it doesn’t like, they hit the church and its members hard, financially.  The flip side of follow the money is go after the money.

Someone somewhere is always in dire need: a few thousand would make such a difference in their lives!  For that matter, a few extra thousand would make such a difference in all our lives, wouldn’t it!?  We work hard for what we have.  We made sacrifices, real sacrifices, to save, denied ourselves things, lived within our means—we had a clear goal in view.

There are some who strive, struggle, to live within their means, and still can’t set anything aside, and often don’t have enough each month even for basic expenses.  Well, give up the cell phone.  Yeah.  Give up internet access.  Right.  Give up the car.  Say what?  Set the thermostat to 85 and turn on a light only for an hour between 9 and 10 p.m.  You first.

Our times do not encourage disciplined financial behavior.  Consider our pervasive debts: educational debt—good Lord!  Anybody still paying theirs?  Mortgage debt.  Medical debt—anybody here know about that?  Where’s that $40,000 going to come from?  National debt—please!  Don’t get me started.  Our society does not tell us save, save, save.  It tells us, in such a friendly, free, and fun way: buy, buy, buy!  The fulfillment of our dreams is only a few more purchases away, a little more debt away.  Saving, buying, giving.  The first is necessary, but hard.  The second is necessary to an extent, and all too easy.  And the third, giving?

When we are asked to give at church, we aren’t especially enthusiastic.  Nor were those Corinthians.  Lack of enthusiastic giving to the church is not a new phenomenon.  One objection the Corinthians seem to have raised is that it isn’t fair that they should give, sacrificially give, to make life easy for someone somewhere else.  This is what so enraged and still bothers people about welfare and similar programs.  Social Security Disability is probably the most recent example.

Are there lazy people out there, abusers of the system, abusers of the generosity funded through our money?  Probably.  If you knew poverty growing up, or if you grew up in a home where one parent or another was in poor health, or had suffered a catastrophic injury, you know that laziness was not an issue—income was the issue!  Your family worked and worked and just never seemed to get ahead.  I don’t intend to get into a debate about minimum wage laws—I believe we do still live in a land of opportunity—and I would also ask you to reflect on how you and your family would fare, on a total income of $1300 a month, before taxes.  What sacrifices would you have to make, and what could you just not give up, no matter what?

What St. Paul says is that it’s not his aim to burden those who give in order to make things easy for those who will receive.  Keep in mind that the giving Paul was encouraging was going to people who were being driven out of their occupations by the government because of the religious convictions of the believers.  Hmmm.  Was confiscation of property, land and home, far behind?

The point Paul is making is that when we have plenty—and in this land of plenty, beloved, we do know plenty—when we have plenty and fellow believers elsewhere, brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, suffer real want, real deprivation that would make us weep, what is fair?

We are so accustomed to giving to third world believers that I think we can barely imagine receiving anything from them.  We are the patrons and they are the dependents, and that is that.  However, I can imagine a time (God forbid, but I can imagine it) when our churches will have declined so sharply, and our financial means become so inadequate to our financial needs, that mainline Christians such as Presbyterians will begin to despair.  I can also imagine that churches in third world countries, which are at this day the fastest growing churches, I can imagine that these churches will begin to collect special relief offerings for us.  How would we receive such an offering?  With scorn and superiority, or with humility and tears of thankfulness for the amazing goodness of God?  I hope it won’t surprise you terribly to learn that African churches are sending missionaries here to the United States, to proclaim the Good News.  Thank God, somebody is!

We get sensitive about our giving.  Paul encourages the faithful by telling them, telling us, not to let the amount of the giving become the main concern: “If you are eager to give, God will accept your gift on the basis of what you have to give, not on what you don’t have” (8:12).  Not how much you or I or all of us give, but how eagerly we give; that is, the spirit in which we give.  When we give from an eager and cheerful heart, God rejoices in the gift, because God loves a cheerful, a joyful giver (2 Cor 9:7).

Paul means to grow Christ in us so that we grow in Christ.  One of the best ways we can grow in Christ, apart from dwelling in God’s Word through the reading, hearing, and pondering of God’s Word—which is what we are doing right now—one of the best ways to grow in Christ is today set before us, on this table.  Here is food to grow Christ in us.  By faith, through the Spirit, here is Christ himself for us, spiritually: in the bread he calls his body, given for us, and in the cup he calls his blood, poured out for many.  As we receive Christ’s self-offering gift, as we make this gift a part of our life, as we have faith that comes to us from the Spirit of God, Christ does grow in us.  As Christ grows in us, we do grow in Christ.

Paul reminds those who listen to him that Christ, rich beyond our wildest imaginings, came to us, came for us, became poor for us by giving absolutely everything he had, all that he was.  He emptied out his life, for us, so that we could be full, through him.  He makes us rich by means of his freely chosen poverty.  Is this not shown to us from this table?  Christ’s life, poured out, liberally, willingly, poured out for us, poured into us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  As you place this bread in your mouth, and as you first taste the sweetness of this cup this morning, pause to ponder what Christ gives you, here, what you receive, from him, through his generosity, the abundant compassionate generosity of his generous heart, God’s generous heart.

And then consider how you do give, and how you might give, in the Spirit.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.