What It Means to Worship: Offertory

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

Maybe you have heard the old joke. An airplane is flying at a high altitude when suddenly it develops engine failure. The plane begins to fall. One of the passengers in a panic screams, “Is there a man of God on board!” One gentleman steps forward and says, “I’m a man of the cloth.” The passenger says, “We’re all going to die. We’re all scared to death. Can’t you do something religious?” The man says, “Certainly” and he takes up an offering.

It’s really not a very good joke but it does express some of the feeling that is attached to this business of taking up an offering in church. There are some people that believe that all the church wants is people’s money. Having an offering in every service just proves that to them. There are some who feel that the offering is not sinister but they do experience it as a kind of semi-tacky interruption to what would otherwise be an uplifting occasion. And I’ve met people who take very business-like approaches to the offering, “Got to pay the bills, have to take an offering.” Enough preachers and enough churches have done enough terrible things with offerings to justify anybody’s bad attitude about church offerings.

But the truth about the meaning of offering in worship is a far cry from its reputation! In fact, the truth about offerings is surprising. Here it is: The whole reason we are here week by week in worship is to make an offering. Passing the plate is not the main event in worship, but passing the plate is a symbol. It enacts the main event in worship. Why? Because worship is our answer to the God who has given everything to us! How can you answer the One who has given everything to us without giving everything back to God? There is one moment in worship designated offertory, but if it is real worship every moment is an offertory moment.

When we praise, that is an offering. Every kind of music we make in the sanctuary is offered to God. When we pray, our confessions, our petitions, our intercessions are all an offering of our heart’s desires.

I’ll even tell you that the sermon is an offering. Week by week, when pastors preach, they are conscious that the words are not just something they are giving the congregation. Those words are something the pastor is giving in the presence of God as an act of personal worship. It is the hope of the pastor that the thoughts of the congregation, their hearts, and their lives will be offered with those words of the sermon in worship to God.

Then there is that moment in worship when plates are passed and money is placed in them. If you ask, “What is this money for?” We answer on one level saying that it is for the support of the work of the church and elsewhere. It keeps the building open for many, many purposes. It provides for a pastor, church staff, Sunday School literature, supports missionaries all over the world, helps feed the hungry, helps in healing the sick and on and on. At one level that is what the money is for.

But at a far deeper level it is a symbol of us. One of the saddest things that has happened to the western mind is our tragic loss of the sense of symbol. Heaven help us, most of us actually believe that things are only things. The truth is a thing is never just a thing. It always stands for something else. This is why things can be so dangerous and why they can impart such power. Our things are powerful things of deep meaning.

So, from the beginning when the faithful have worshipped the living God, they have always brought things that express their worship toward God. Scripture says a great deal about our need to bring such an offering. The offering is our answer, our symbol of us.

Scripture advises that if you bring a sheep, don’t bring a lame and ugly one. Bring the healthiest you have, because it is telling your life. And if you bring grain don’t bring left-overs, bring the first and the best. When we bring our money in worship it is telling something about our lives. It is telling of great love or telling of marginal love. It is telling joy and delight, or it is telling calculation and fear. It is telling of an open life to God, or it is telling of a life that is guarded, fisted and closed to God.

Here is the thing; our symbols always work back on us. A proper offering not only expresses the soul, it leads the soul to take the shape of the offering. It’s too simple to say, “If I had a better faith I’d bring a better gift.” It is more often accurate to say, “When I bring the better gift something in me will find the better faith.”

Let me tell you about the most cheerful giver I ever saw. With my own eyes I saw Sarah, a three-year-old, bring a little money for the offering plate. Somehow the plate got by her before she was ready. But she would not be denied and began chasing the plate down the pew as it was passed. All the grown-ups she passed smiled at her and tucked in their knees but they didn’t know what she wanted so they kept passing the plate ahead of her. The plate came out to the usher who passed it down the next row behind her. She was not to be denied. She swung out into the aisle and swung back into the next pew, crawled over everyone on that pew in the “Great Plate Chase.”

Her mother, in the meantime, got up and stopped the other usher who held the plate when he got it. When Sarah got there, she slammed dunked her offering and went back to her pew out of breath and triumphant.

If we knew half of what our gifts mean we’d be just that eager to give them. We would be just that relentless to let the gifts tell who we are and what we love.