Offerings
In our last post, we talked about how we bring all of ourselves to each and every Divine Liturgy.
Which sounds absolutely rapturous, but then the question quickly becomes: How?
What does that look like on an average Sunday morning, amidst all the wardrobe panics and family friction and general chaos?
Well, remember: when we bring ourselves before the Most Holy Trinity, what we’re really doing is making an offering. And if that’s not something that’s already a part of your life, let me share with you how I learned to do it.
If you’ve been a reader of Come See Something Beautiful for longer than a week, you know that I grew up attending Methodist congregations. All of those communities were what we would today call “low church”; the choirs and the clergymen sometimes wore robes, and there were candles up at the front, but that was the extent of our liturgical life.
Nevertheless, my family had a Sunday morning routine that would have impressed any member of the medieval Byzantine court.
It actually started on Saturday night when all the men polished their shoes with Black Kiwi Parade Gloss Wax that came out of a little metal canister; we used cloth rags; we left the shoes to dry overnight on newspaper spread out on the floor of the kitchen.
When we got up in the morning, our clothes were laid out for us: throughout most of elementary school, I was required to wear a pin-striped suit, which I absolutely detested. We also had clip-on bow ties; later, in the early seventies, we discovered clip-on neckties, which felt a bit more grown-up.
Once we were dressed, the guys reported to the bathroom—that’s right, there were six people in my family, and, for most of those years, we shared a single bathroom. My father would be doing this unbelievably manly and messy thing—he would be shaving—but he would pause to slather Vitalis through our hair and then comb it all back into place.
Vitalis was the worst part of the morning, but once you were through with that humiliation (though the smell followed you around all the way through Tuesday), you got to read the funny papers.
Which is what we called the comics. Sunday morning comics were all in color. There were always at least six pages of them. I was a Prince Valiant man. Generally, though, by the time I was finished with my weekly adventure from “the days of King Arthur”, it was time to go.
That means we all headed out to the car, and, as we trooped through the door, each child received a dime.
That was our offering. The girls put theirs in their purses; the guys shoved theirs into their pockets.
You could put your dime in the box during Sunday School, but I always hung on to mine until the worship service, and I would put it in the plate when it passed by.
And I did that just about every single Sunday for the first twelve years of my life. When I was twelve, I had my own money, and I started bringing quarters. When I got my first job at sixteen, I always made sure to put some cash in the offering plate.
That’s how I learned to make an offering.
And, sure, you can chuckle at that story or chalk it up to Old Guy Nostalgia or just roll your eyes, but, now that I’m just short of seventy, nothing has really changed.
Well, OK, a few things have: I don’t polish my shoes, and I don’t have a pin-striped suit (though I do have some pretty glam vestments), and I, for sure, don’t use Vitalis anymore.
But when I put my check in the offering bowl at the parish, that money has been given to me: just as my pop gave me all those dimes, my Father in Heaven has given me absolutely everything I have, and, each week, I express my gratitude by giving some of it back.
It took me twelve years to learn how to do that. You may very well by smarter than I am, so it may not take you that long. But I can guarantee you that the physical act of bringing your offering to the Divine Liturgy and actually placing it before the Most Holy Trinity is going to make the whole process easier.
That’s why we encourage everyone in our parish to always bring a gift with them on Sunday morning. Even if they make most of their contributions online, we instruct them to bring a little something with them to place in the offering bowl—because they need that tangible reminder; they need to know that gratitude is something they do.
And not only do their children need to see them do that, those kids need to have their own dimes and quarters to place in the offering bowl. All that loose change keeps our offering stewards busy after the liturgy, but how else will our children eventually be able to offer up all of themselves if they don’t start with those simple gifts?
Of course, being the insightful readers that you are, you’re already wondering: “Well, if tangible gifts are so dang important, what are you doing out here on the internet asking for all these online donations?”
Fair enough.
So here’s what we’re going to do.
Every Sunday, the offering bowls are brought into the Altar, and those gifts are blessed over the Holy Table. So, if you make a donation to our building fund, we’ll convert that to a check, put it in the offering bowl on a Sunday morning, and elevate it above the Holy Table.
Shoot, if you donate over $100,000, we’ll get that in cash, put it in the offering bowls (we’ll have to round up some extra altar servers), and bless it over the Holy Table.
We’re that serious about being thankful and about offering everything we have and everything we are to the Most Holy Trinity.
Which means, even if you’re not someone who can afford to give us 100K (or any money at all, for that matter), we’ve got a lot of other options for you:
you can join us in offering The Akathist for a New Temple (PDF/video) on a regular basis
you can upgrade your subscription to paid
you can buy a Come See Something Beautiful T-shirt
you can commission an image for the Calming Room of our new temple
and, when and if you can afford it, you can make always make a direct donation to our Building Fund.
And since this post is all about learning and growing, I can’t think of a better way to sign off than with The Lumineers