The Offering of Life
1993 (Year A), 26 September / Pentecost 17
The number of people attending worship week-by-week in this country is still declining rapidly. A whole variety of reasons are given as to why this should be. We can blame it on the hymns – that’s always a good one. We can say it’s the fault of the clergy – they don’t visit or they’re rotten preachers. That’s often true. Sometimes it’s the services. They’re either too modern or too old fashioned, too intimate or too distant. Maybe it’s the fault of the other people in church. The shops are open now so people choose to do their weekly shopping. There’s been a decline in standards. People have lost the habit. All these and more have been put forward at one time or another. The real reason is none of these. The real reason; the truth is much simpler. The truth is that the church has lost its way. It’s forgotten how to relate in any meaningful way what goes on here in this hour to what goes on during the rest of the week. People are unable to make connections between what happens here and what goes on outside.
Now there are parts in all of us which come to church precisely to forget what’s out there. We come to escape. To be transported to another place, maybe even another time, so we actually don’t want the two connected. It’s as if there are two worlds – the earthly and the heavenly and they’re separate. We move between the two, finding the one out there, on the whole, quite hard. We come into the heavenly whenever we worship and that somehow gives us strength return to that other world.
And the church colludes with all this. It has a different language. We use words here that we never use anywhere else. It has different clothes. People would look at me strangely, even in Dalston, if I walked down the road dressed as I am now. And unless you’re at school or college you’d never listen to someone speaking to you as I am at this moment. Nothing in the rest of our lives resembles what we do here. The temptation not just for those outside the church, but for us as well is to see these two worlds as completely separate entities. And if we do see them as separate then it’s not too long before one of them becomes irrelevant. So irrelevant that it’s treated like a second-class museum or only needs to be called on in times of extreme anxiety, at particular points in our lives.
Yet in Jesus the divine and this world meet. Not in some way abstract way which people couldn’t understand or in the sentimental way, which deep down people knew wasn’t true. The divine and this world met together and touched people. Remember the sayings, ‘The Kingdom of God has come close to you’, ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God.’
In Jesus as Austin Farrer said, ‘Heaven embraced earth’.
We’ve lost this vision of heaven embracing earth and with it the nearness of God. We’re left with a sense of separateness, an often unconscious notion of these two worlds. A lack of connections. A feeling of irrelevance. It permeates our thinking in church. The theme of this morning’s readings are a case in point, the offering of life. I bet in sermons up and down the country today, all kinds of efforts are being made to bring the two worlds together in an attempt to make the theme in here connect with what goes on out there.
Some will work better than others but many will fail. They will fail because we continue to see two worlds. And just like Lazarus we experience a great divide between the two. We don’t feel engaged with what’s being said and if we’re not engaged then we’re not touched and if we’re not touched then as sure as eggs are eggs then we won’t be changed. And that’s a tragedy because offering is divine.
When we make an offering, any offering, in our lives, of our lives, then we mirror a divine action in this world, not in some other. It is after all what God’s been doing since the beginning of time.
And when we offer something, we give what we feel to be good, the best. Only the perverse offer something bad, something second rate. Yet here’s another problem – many of us feel that we have no gifts to offer. Wen that’s clearly untrue. Everyone here has so much to offer. And when we make an offering it transforms us and it transforms the person who receives it. It does it because the action is divine. Spirit touches spirit.
What have we to offer God? Well we have our relationships and we can offer them. We can offer them and in the offering they will be transformed. Just think if we offer our relationship with a friend or someone we work with to God. We’d hardly offer something second best. We’d want it to be good, to be right. Changes would have to be made, things put right. It has tremendous implications for how we behave towards our parents our children our partners and our friends. The relationships would become much more precious, so much more valuable. And that is how it is.
The relationships are transformed in this world. This world which is embraced by God. Not in some other. Connections are made because now there is nothing to divide. In the offering they’re transformed and what’s more in the offering they’re blessed by the creator and saviour of us all. AMEN