Making Gratitude Real

Stewardship season is one of the most theologically challenging times of the liturgical calendar. Most stewardship sermons confuse a number of laws and traditions codified for an ancient theocracy with commandments for the modern church. This year, the Stewardship Sunday sermon insisted on a mathematically calculated tithe resulting in automatic blessings. This caused my granddaughter (who has been in remote Africa and seen Christian tribal peoples breaking off 10% of their famine relief cracker* to put in the offering plate) to question the details of the message from the pulpit. She could not believe that God would legalistically require even a fixed percentage of the basic calories required to sustain life.

If I were to preach a sermon on the subject, I could not do better than Dr. M. Craig Barnes did below. I have kept a copy of this sermon for the last 18 years for that reason. In addition to years as a pastor, and professor, Craig served as a seminary president–and my friend and colleague.  I enjoyed the course we taught together on Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri.

Charles Partee January 2024

* These crackers provide enough calories to stay alive for one more day.

Making Gratitude Real

M. Craig Barnes

Shadyside Presbyterian Church

November 12, 2006

Hebrews 7:1-6

Reprinted with permission of the author (12/2023)

When I was a child, we were given our own Sunday School offering envelopes. On the back of these little envelopes, you could find half a dozen printed expectations listing things like Brought Bible to Church, Staying for Worship, and Tithing Today. Each of these expectations and a percentage attached to them, and at the bottom of the envelope was a blank where you could add up your total spirituality percentile for the week. This means you couldn’t get a 100% on being a young Christian without tithing.

We no longer attempt to measure the spirituality of anyone, young or old. That’s just the beginning of the good news I have for you today. But the designers of those old envelopes were not completely wrong in trying to teach us at an early age that giving is ingredient to the Christian life. If you were to do your own back of the envelope calculations of what Christians do, you would probably also include giving in the list. But what is tithing?

A tithe is an offering of 10% of one’s income. In the Old Testament, it was mandated that everyone had to give a tithe offering to the temple and the Levitical priesthood. Since this was the law, though, it really stretches the definition of “offering.” There has always been quite a bit of debate among Christians as to whether we are also obligated to give a tithe to the church. As soon as the debate begins, it is not long before someone asks if this is 10% of gross or net income after taxes. Usually someone responds by saying that it depends on whether you want gross or net blessings from God, and the debate always digresses from there.

Whether we find ourselves asking, “Exactly how much do I have to give to God?” we have already missed the point of giving. Tithing did not begin with the law. It began centuries before with an act of thanksgiving. Let me tell you a brief story about it.

You’ll remember that a time came when Abraham and his nephew Lot realized that the land could no longer sustain their growing flocks. So they decided to go separate ways. Lot chose to settle in the city of Sodom, which proved to be an unfortunate choice for many reasons. According to the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, one day the kings of four other cities marched on Sodom, defeated it, and carried away all of its riches, as well as Lot and his family. When Abraham heard of this he went charging after the four kings and their armies with only 318 men. Somehow he defeated them, and recovered Lot and all the loot from Sodom. As he was returning to Sodom, the grateful king came out to meet him. He wanted Abraham to keep the riches he had recovered.

Suddenly a stranger breaks into the narrative. He’s a man we’ve never heard of before named Melchizadek. He appears out of nowhere, but is introduced as the priest and king of Salem. That was a Canaanite name of the city that eventually became Jerusalem. We are also told that he was a priest of “The God Most High.” Although he did not have a specific name, The God Most High was the monarchical head of a pantheon of deities worshiped by the Canaanites. Melchizedek gives bread and wine to Abraham,and then he blesses him: “Blessed be Abram by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth. And blessed by God Most High who has delivered your enemies into your hand.” Abraham responds to Melchizedek as if he is his priest by giving him a tithe, ten percent, of everything he has won in battle. The other 90% he chooses to give back to the King of Sodom.

This is the first time tithing is mentioned in the Bible. Although it later becomes codified into law, originally it had nothing to do with obligations. It began as an act of worship when a grateful Abraham presents a thank offering. He wasn’t told to do it. He wasn’t asked for it, by Melchizedek or by God. He chose to do it in response for the blessings he had received.

Isn’t it interesting that he presented the tithe to a Canaanite priest, implicitly acknowledging that there is one God Most High? Abraham, however, does name this unknown God Most High by calling him Yahweh, God Most High. Did you catch that? He pulls together the revelation given to him with the revelation given to all.

I find this to be one of the most hopeful and world embracing passages of the Old Testament. It illustrates God’s ability to bless us from sources that are outside of our religion. It also illustrates that Abraham’s aspirations were never to create a religious subculture, but to honor God Most High, creator of heaven and earth who he knows as Yahweh, which is the name for God cherished by his descendents. Surely there is some word of hope in this passage for a world that is torn apart by those who are certain they alone understand God, and for a nation divided between religious conservatives and liberals who would not think of being blessed by each other as Abraham was blessed by Melchizedek. There is one God Most High, creator of heaven and earth, whose blessings keep breaking into the narrative of our lives – sometimes in strange ways. The blessings may just come from those outside of our religious systems.

When the author of Hebrews tries to explain Jesus Christ to his Jewish Christian readers, he seizes upon this forgotten story about Melchizedek and associates our Savior with him. Like Melchizedek, Christ was without mother or father, he says. By this, he doesn’t mean he didn’t have parents, but that they were parents without pedigree. Jesus was not a Levite, and thus ineligible for the priesthood. So salvation came outside of the institutional expectations. Also like Melchizedek, the author of Hebrews states that the Son of God has no beginning or end. He is a stranger who breaks into the narrative of our lives. And so like Abraham, we give to the work of Christ, our great high priest, as a way of contributing to The God Most High, the creator of heaven and earth who has blessed us all, and who we know and name as the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Today is Commitment Sunday in our church – a day when we present our pledges for the next year. I chose this passage to preach upon to make one thing clear; You don’t have to give; you get to give. You are not under the law and you don’t owe the church 10%, or even 1%. And if you think you are meeting your obligation to God by giving a certain amount you have missed the point of tithing. We give like Abraham, not because we have to, but because we are thankful. The reason we are thankful is because we have all been blessed.

Many blessings have come from Melchizedek sources that are considered outside of religion. We have health, cherished relationships, and we received success when the odds are against us, like Abraham. We have freedoms won for us by the blood of the veterans we honored yesterday. We have money, not as much as we want, and there are many expenses, I know. But we have income, and it is used at our discretion, which is an incredible blessing. By far, the greatest blessing is that we have a great high priest out of the order of King Melchizedek who has broken into the narrative of our lives to reveal the goodness of God to us.

You and I thought the narrative of our lives was just about our hard work, or how much we have to do, or how much we still have to get. It doesn’t matter if the currency you value is money or relationships or achievements, once you start thinking about needing more the narrative always reduces to our familiar little complaints about needing more. But Christ breaks into this sad narrative to give us a better story about the Great Faithfulness of God Most High.

Do you see how much God has given to you? The one God of heaven and earth gave you everything, everything that you really cherish, even the things you don’t think of as part of your religion. Best of all, he gave you himself in Jesus Christ who forgives your sins, frees you from crippling guilt, and opens for you a future filled with hope. In other words, he’s already given all that he has – 100%.

Church Stewardship Campaigns are about nothing more, or less, than deciding how we respond to such sacred love. How do you ever respond to someone dying to love you? It’s ridiculous to ask, “How much is this going to cost me?” It costs nothing, and everything.

Benediction : In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, there is no real worship without sacrifice. I think he is right, but it doesn’t feel like sacrifice. It feels like, “I love you too.” Amen.