Brothers and sisters, we want to let you know about the grace of God that was given to the churches of Macedonia. 2 While they were being tested by many problems, their extra amount of happiness and their extreme poverty resulted in a surplus of rich generosity. 3 I assure you that they gave what they could afford and even more than they could afford, and they did it voluntarily. 4 They urgently begged us for the privilege of sharing in this service for the saints. 5 They even exceeded our expectations, because they gave themselves to the Lord first and to us, consistent with God’s will. 6 As a result, we challenged Titus to finish this work of grace with you the way he had started it.
7 Be the best in this work of grace in the same way that you are the best in everything, such as faith, speech, knowledge, total commitment, and the love we inspired in you. 8 I’m not giving an order, but by mentioning the commitment of others, I’m trying to prove the authenticity of your love also. 9 You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Although he was rich, he became poor for your sakes, so that you could become rich through his poverty.
10 I’m giving you my opinion about this. It’s to your advantage to do this, since you not only started to do it last year but you wanted to do it too. 11 Now finish the job as well so that you finish it with as much enthusiasm as you started, given what you can afford. 12 A gift is appreciated because of what a person can afford, not because of what that person can’t afford, if it’s apparent that it’s done willingly. 13 It isn’t that we want others to have financial ease and you financial difficulties, but it’s a matter of equality. 14 At the present moment, your surplus can fill their deficit so that in the future their surplus can fill your deficit. In this way there is equality. 15 As it is written, The one who gathered more didn’t have too much, and the one who gathered less didn’t have too little. (Common English Bible)
“Gifts Given and Received: Cultivating an Advent of Generosity,” Week Four
The image of the fellow standing next to the smoker brought back all sorts of memories for me—being from Kansas City after all, a smoker is sacred, and I even found our favorite barbeque place in Portland because they kept their smoker right there on the sidewalk. But the context of this particular smoker brought back another childhood memory from Kansas: tornado season, which I know y’all know well here too.
Jim Finch isn’t even from Kentucky—he lives in Tennessee—but in the wake of the supercell of tornadoes that devastated western Kentucky and the surrounding areas, he hitched a smoker to his truck with all the meat he could get his hands on, and left his place at 4:30 am to arrive in Mayfield, Kentucky, where the people who had survived were surrounded by sheer, unadulterated devastation.
And he cooked. All day, for anyone who came to him needing a hot meal. Because then, in that moment, that was what he could do. It was a moment of pure selflessness, and precisely because we know well the devastation tornadoes can wreak, I hope we will recall Jim Finch’s generosity in the knowledge that next time, it could be us brought to our knees and in need of our country’s help.
For that is the sort of generosity Paul preaches of in 2 Corinthians 8—a generosity that extends through time, that remembers previous good done and is always endeavoring to pay it forward.
This is a four-week sermon series for the season of Advent—not the Christmas season, that will come later—but for the four Sundays we spent preparing for Christ’s birth. As a preparatory season, Advent has its roots in penance, in us being penitential. It is why Advent shares liturgical colors (specifically purple) with Lent, just as Christmas and Easter share liturgical colors as seasons of celebration of new life.
In twinning this sermon series with our Advent devotional theme for this year, “Gifts Given and Received,” I considered whether any of us might need to do penance for any of our past gift-giving. That isn’t an invitation for public confession or self-flagellation, but rather, to ask ourselves, are we good gift-givers? Do we give thoughtfully and generously, in ways that put the receiver before us as the giver? Our devotionals allow us to consider such things in relation to Jesus, and I want to invite us over the next four weeks to reflect on those questions in relation to one another as well.
Because this is a pretty common thing, really! You probably know someone who is a subpar gift-giver! Maybe you are one yourself! (Again, I am *not* asking for public confession here.) So lets talk these next few weeks about the faithful spirit behind gift giving.
We wrap up our series today, on Advent 4, the Sunday of Love. We began Advent, and this series, in Genesis 4 with the first gifts given to God by humanity: the fruits of Cain’s crops, and the firstborn lamb of Abel’s flocks before we read a similarly well-known story that both Mark and Luke convey: the widow giving two copper coins at the temple. Last week, we arrived at the letter of Jesus’s younger brother James, also known because of this letter as James the Just. And finally, today, we come to a passage on generosity and stewardship from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth.
Paul’s letters to the Corinthians are, by themselves, a useful illustration of the swings in Paul’s writing, from the highs to the low. In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes effusively on the nature of love and spiritual gifts, he exults in the reality of the resurrection, and more. While he has stern words for the Corinthian church in places, the first epistle contains many of Paul’s greatest hits. But 2 Corinthians, as is the case with so many sequels, does not quite offer such virtuosic heights, and is generally much more somber in its tone.
It is also practical, though, and Paul can combine practicality and theology well when talking about giving and stewardship. Here, he outlines what many of us take for granted as core Christian teachings around giving: that it should be voluntary, and it should be sacrificial. Paul is a master of exhortation and is not above using guilt as a motivator, but he is clear that the decision to give must be the Corinthian church’s alone.
Simple enough, but I want to harp on this point a trifle longer, for this is why Paul famously says that God loves a cheerful giver. Sometimes our giving is not so cheerful, even when it is a vital part of our social contract. Sacrificial giving pinches us, yes, but we are not to resent it because we are giving of ourselves to the common good, to the advancement of both society and the kingdom. For Paul, that is always going to be a worthy goal.
What sacrificial giving means can vary widely, though, and this is really where I think Paul’s teaching on giving shines. Remember the story of the widow giving her two copper coins from two weeks ago, and Christ’s pronouncement that she gave more than any of the wealthier people who donated vastly bigger sums precisely because unlike those wealthy donors, she was giving sacrificially.
For Paul, sacrificial giving is not an ends in and of itself—it is a means to an end, and that end is equality among the believers. There are two ways in which this happens, and Paul mentions them both in verses 14 and 15. In verse 15, Paul actually cites the Tanakh—Exodus 16:18—to argue for sacrificial giving as a way towards equality in the present moment: so that those with much do not have too much, and those with too little do not have too little. It isn’t a flat, across-the-board, one-size-fits-all approach, it’s a everyone-has-their-needs-met approach. That’s the first part of equality.
The second comes a verse earlier, in verse 14: in the present, your surplus might make up for someone else’s deficit, and maybe in the future their surplus might make up for your own deficit. It’s equality that is meant to extend from the present into the future. If you have much now, you sacrificially give it up in faith that if, in the future, you find yourself without, others will in turn lift you up just as you have lifted up others. For Paul, there is equality in that reciprocity.
Reciprocity governs much of Paul’s outlook on human relationships—not our relationship with God, that is far too lopsided a relationship simply on the basis of God’s infinite goodness alone. But between you and me, Paul seeks an equilibrium of reciprocity. It is why he writes in 1 Corinthians 7 not simply that wives belong to their husbands, but that husbands belong in exactly equal measure to their wives, and that their bodies are not their own, but belong to their wives. Which was a pretty radical thing to say in a mostly—not entirely, but mostly—patriarchal Greco-Roman culture.
But the intervening centuries sanded off Paul’s commitment to reciprocity, and successors writing in his name made him out to be much more committed to hierarchy than he probably was. For in how we give to each other, in how we give of ourselves, Paul is seeking true and full equality, both individually and collectively. Because equality is inherently relational—a person by themselves, in a vacuum, has no one to be equals with—we are not equal until we all are equal.
That sounds a bit circular, I realize. And it is why that progression through time is so important to Paul—we may not all be equal in this exact present moment, but by dedicating ourselves to the Gospel and its message over time, we can create a world of more equality. In this, Christ is our moral example—as Paul says, Christ was rich, but became poor for our sakes. It echoes what Paul teaches in Philippians 2, that Jesus did not see equality—there is that word once more—with God as something to exploit, but rather emptied Himself of divinity to take human form. Sacrifice is not limited to the crucifixion—the incarnation is the sacrifice of Jesus’s own divinity for our sakes. It made Jesus much more like the widow with the two copper coins than like God.
Paul’s outlook on giving is meant to address the circumstances of Jesus’s occasion to teach about giving two weeks ago in Mark 12. If we deeply and truly adhere to Paul’s advice, we as a society will create fewer widows and orphans with only two copper coins.
We can create a world with fewer widows with only two copper coins, a world with fewer children orphaned by covid, a world with fewer homeless veterans, a world with fewer hate crimes and mass shootings, a world with fewer lives lost to natural disasters like the supercell tornadoes, and we can create a world with more Jim Finches, more generosity and compassion, more selflessness and benevolence, and more of a kingdom of God than a kingdom of Babel that is impressed with itself but ultimately falls far short of God’s own glory.
We, by giving of ourselves, can do all these things. They are all within our power because God so created the world—and created us—that this might be the order of things. And then, as though that were not enough, God sent to us a Son to demonstrate and incarnate that ability to give so sacrificially for humanity’s sake.
What we do with that divine ability, well, that is up to us.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
December 19, 2021