Here is the text of a sermon I gave at John Knox on December 28, 2008.  The text was 2 Corinthians 9:1-15.

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God’s indescribable gift is especially near to us during this Christmas season. As we witness the birth of Jesus in the manger and wait on the epiphany, 12 days later, during which the wise men arrive bearing gifts of their own, we recognize that God’s gift is the gift of life, precious and vulnerable in a world obsessed with death and violence. It is the gift of forgiveness in a world bound up tightly in ancient, self-woven bonds of hostility and revenge. It is the gift of grace in a world in captivity to shallow, oppressive definitions of success, worth, and happiness.

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Read below for more.

On Giving and Receiving
John Knox Presbyterian Church, Dec. 28, 2008
Bryan Bibb

I.  Introduction

Was Santa good to everyone?  Did you all get what you wanted for Christmas?
Giving and getting gifts is a lot of fun, isn’t it?  Now that the 25th has come and gone, let’s take a look back at the gift-giving season.  I really don’t want to sound like Scrooge, but allow me to ask a couple of possibly hard questions.  Do you ever grow weary of the whole process of shopping, picking out, and giving gifts to people, or even with receiving gifts from colleagues, friends, or family?  Have you felt yourself this Christmas, or perhaps seen in others, a tendency to see gift-giving as an inconvenient ritual, or maybe as a means of getting stuff, a way of getting what we are entitled to, what we deserve?

II.  Giving and Receiving

It seems to me that children are set up for this shallow or self-centered view of Christmas through their experience of Santa Claus, someone they do not know and to whom they owe nothing, who brings to them objects they desire while they are sleeping.  They just wake up and whoa, lots of new stuff.  How cool is that?  They don’t interact with the giver in the act of giving, they are not bound to Santa in a relationship that requires them to do anything in return (with the possible exception of a few cookies), though they are encouraged to “be good” if they want Santa to bring them anything (an empty threat by the way, right?  Have you ever cancelled Santa because your kids didn’t clean their rooms?).

We often hear people lament our society’s “commercialization” of Christmas, but I am bothered even more by how we get caught up in the mechanics of giving and receiving, the gerbil wheel of Christmas parties, Christmas cards, Christmas decorations, Christmas dinners.  Christmas has a danger of becoming meaningless ritual and the hollow exchange of stuff.  The passage this morning is all about the dynamic of giving and receiving in the Christian life and within the Christian faith itself.  Paul helps us re-center our understanding of what it means to give and to receive among each other, and more important, to receive the gifts of God in the best, most meaningful way possible.

We see in popular religious teaching in churches, in Christian bookstores, and heaven forbid, on television, that Christians are tempted to view God as a cheerful, generous Santa Claus who always keeps an eye on our list of desires and who is eager to give without obligation to those who have made the “nice” list, rewarding the obedient and leaving the naughty out in the cold.  This view of God and of his gracious relationship with humanity is a subtle and attractive distortion of the gospel.  God’s gift of Jesus Christ to us is radically free and universal on God’s part, and totally undeserved and unmerited on our part.  At the same time, God’s unspeakable, indescribable gift enables a renewed creation, a new reality in which we are all, with God, bound together through the Holy Spirit.  In this context, giving and receiving gifts can never be hollow, self-centered, or tiresome.  Rather, giving and receiving is the central metaphor through which we understand our relationship with God and with each other.

II. The Text

Let’s look at Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians.  The chapter addresses a matter of deep concern to Paul, his efforts to collect money to help poor Christians back in Jerusalem.  This collection is actually central to Paul’s mission and even to his gospel, as we learn in Galatians 2.  In that letter, Paul works to convince the Galatians that his gospel message and ministry is authentic and original to him as an apostle.  He says that although he didn’t need to, he traveled to Jerusalem to meet with the original disciples in order to explain his gospel, not for their approval but for their blessing.  He says in verses 9-10, “When James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.  They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.”

We read about this offering to the poor also in Romans 15:25-27, in which Paul says that he is “going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem.  They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things.”

These passages show that this collection for poor Jewish Christians in Jerusalem is at the heart not only of Paul’s ministry but also of the Gospel itself.  In 2 Corinthians 9, he uses a variety of rhetorical techniques to convince the Corinthian church to do its duty in contributing to this offering.  He begins by pointing out that they already want to give so keenly that he doesn’t even really need to mention it.  Furthermore, churches in Macedonia are expecting the Corinthians to give a lot, so they really should be careful to not be embarrassed or indeed humiliated by not giving enough.  The Corinthians had already promised to collect a bountiful gift, so Paul is just sending along this note to make sure they remember what they promised to do freely, without extortion.  Paul is a master of using persuasive techniques to convince someone that already agree with him and don’t really need to be persuaded.

Starting in verse 6, Paul outlines a theological argument in support of giving generously, saying: God gives abundantly to us and so we should also give abundantly and cheerfully to others.  Verse 8: “And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that by always having enough of everything, you may share abundantly in every good work.”  The basic metaphor is an agricultural one.  Consider verse 10: “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness.”

This metaphor emphasizes that we, as sowers of seed, are merely the ones to scatter what has been provided to us by the maker of the seed.  That seed has been produced by God for the purpose of producing a harvest of righteousness.  Why then would a Christian not be generous?  Our job is to spread seeds of blessing all around and then to participate in the bountiful harvest.  A sower who clings to his or her seed is not going to see much harvest, right?

Paul finishes by saying that when the Corinthians give to this offering, they are in the process offering up thanksgiving to God for his generosity to us.  Those who are to receive their gift will offer up prayers in honor of the “surpassing grace” that God has given the Corinthians.  He finishes with the ringing refrain: “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!”

III.  Giving, Receiving, and Having

This passage brings to mind those buzzwords of popular media-oriented Christianity: “harvest ministry,” “Word of Faith,” the “Prosperity Gospel,” the Prayer of Jabez, etc.  The central issue raised by the passage, and the thing that I think the Prosperity Gospel gets wrong, is the reason why a Christian would be generous in giving gifts.  This passage, along with a few others in the Bible, is read out of context to say that God gives in proportion to how much we give first, and that by being faithful, by asking God directly, and (especially for TV preachers) by giving to a Christian ministry, we can prime the pump.  Showing generosity is like putting a quarter in a bubble gum machine and turning the handle – that act of  so-called faith will put into  motion a mechanical process that results in us getting a sweet treat.

This kind of teaching distorts the gospel in two specific ways.  First, it creates the “God as Santa Claus” illusion in which we can manipulate God to deliver presents to us on a set schedule just by making sure we are on the “nice” list.  You could interpret the metaphor this way, seeing the seed and its maker as largely external to the process of sowing and reaping: God gives seed and it is our job to sow it; in as much as we sow we will reap, and if you are not reaping a great harvest of blessings (interpreted invariably as money) it’s your own fault.  Why would someone be generous?  So that they can reap even more money than they gave.  The Christian faith becomes a giant pyramid scheme.

The point, however, is that Paul is not talking about receiving in this passage, but giving.  Why give?  Not to receive later on, but rather because we are bound together by faith and concern for one another, and we have received such blessing from God it would be narrow-minded to hold on to it.  Paul is not promising any particular monetary blessing for Christians, but laying out all of the reasons why we ought to be focused much more on giving than receiving or having.

IV.  God’s indescribable gift

The second way the “prosperity gospel” distorts the gospel is that it trivializes God’s gift of his son Jesus, turning Christ’s life, death, and resurrection into an advertizing slogan.  Everything that we as Christians are, or have, or give is made possible by God’s prior gift of grace through Jesus.  But if this gift is not the cheap grace or road to riches that some religious leaders promise us, what is it?  What is God’s indescribable gift?

I should say, it is a preacher’s conceit to end a sermon by trying to describe something that Paul calls “indescribable.”  The KJV uses an even stronger term, referring to God’s gift as “unspeakable.”  A normal person would leave it at that, perhaps, but let’s give it a shot.  What is God’s unspeakable, indescribable gift?

God’s indescribable gift is especially near to us during this Christmas season.  As we witness the birth of Jesus in the manger and wait on the epiphany, 12 days later, during which the wise men arrive bearing gifts of their own, we recognize that God’s gift is the gift of life, precious and vulnerable in a world obsessed with death and violence.  It is the gift of forgiveness in a world bound up tightly in ancient, self-woven bonds of hostility and revenge.  It is the gift of grace in a world in captivity to shallow, oppressive definitions of success, worth, and happiness.

God’s gift is freedom for us: freedom from the law of sin and death, freedom from the shackles of politics, of money, of shame, and of fear.  And, as Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 9, God’s gift is the free blessing that makes possible our mutual love and generosity, a radical grace that binds us together as a redeemed people in the power of the Holy Spirit.

May you and your families experience the truth of God’s indescribable gift, his son Jesus, even as the world seeks to distract you with images of money, wealth, and superficial happiness.  As we move into the new year, may we sow and reap together in the God’s harvest of righteousness.