II Corinthians 8:1-9, 9:6-15 "Grace All Around" Scott Hoezee

Ten days ago the New York Times published a 36-page special section of the newspaper titled simply "Giving." This section was devoted to encouraging charitable donations and it included 35 articles as well as over 100 advertisements promoting a vast array of charities ranging from the United Way to the AKC Canine Health Foundation, from Easter Seals to any number of organizations soliciting donations to help Israel. The feature articles themselves were very interesting and reported on things like what happened to all the monies donated last year to various September 11 funds, on how charities have been coping with the sluggish economy, and on any number of other laudable charities that are combating the spread of AIDS in Africa or trying to feed hungry children right here in America.

All in all this was a noble section to publish and probably did a lot of good in terms of raising awareness as well as generating actual funds for any number of worthy groups. Yet in all those dozens of articles and scores of advertisements, there was one thing I searched for but did not find: namely, any hint as to the reason why people should give generously in the first place. Perhaps this is thought to be simply too obvious: you give because there are all these various needs and so we simply must try to address them. But I didn't want to settle for any tacit or quiet assumption as to the rationale behind giving, I wanted to find someone articulating a reason. I didn't fine one.

True, an advertisement from Charles Schwab proclaimed, "The Philosophy behind the Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving is Simple: More Giving, Fewer Taxes." The fine print of the ad then went on to detail how charitable giving is a key component in the portfolio of every wise investor. So I thought that perhaps one of the Catholic organizations promoting themselves would do better, but unhappily they didn't (although the Catholic Communal Fund does promise to help you give significant monies away without going through the hassle of setting up your own private foundation).

Finally I ran across a promising looking article: an interview with a charities expert from the University of Wisconsin. The article said it would provide "clues to a donor's heart" by getting at the why of giving. But even this didn't help matters. Instead this financial expert said that he couldn't say precisely why people give. He did note that people who have more money tend to give more (a fact I found something just less than startling), that men and women tend to be about equally generous, and other such rather bland observations. In the final question of this article, the interviewer asked exactly what I had been looking for, "Why do people give away money?" The answer: this expert wasn't sure but he suspected it had something to do with emotions, empathy, social pressure, and sometimes just because people like seeing their name printed in opera programs as big-time underwriters of the arts.

Reading all that, I found myself experiencing a kind of reverse Wesleyan conversion: my heart was strangely cooled. But perhaps we should not expect the average person to be more articulate on this question. We should expect, however, that Christian people will be more articulate, and that's why we read Paul's words from II Corinthians this morning. In some ways you may think this passage an odd choice for Thanksgiving Day. Paul, after all, is hardly composing some lyric psalm of praise in chapters 8 and 9 but is instead making a rather high-pressure, salesman-like pitch to goad the Corinthians into being more generous in their contributions to the Apostle Paul Charitable Trust.

Probably at some time or another we've all seen a minister on TV making a full-court-press plea for people to phone in their pledges now. Some try to be cute about it. "Do you believe in the hereafter? Well, we're here after a good offering!" "Do you believe in Jesus? Then raise your hand up high. Now, take that hand you've extended to God, reach it down into your pocket, and pull that wallet out!" Mostly this is the kind of thing that makes you sing a doxology in praise of TV remote controls. Manipulation is still manipulation even if done in the name of God.

So it is rather startling to see no one less than the blessed apostle Paul himself engaging in tactics that were, in their own way, a pretty high octane attempt to get the Corinthian Christians to cough up some big bucks. From the looks of things, the Corinthians were a comparatively well-to-do group of Christians. True, not every member of that congregation was wealthy, but there is evidence to suggest that on the whole, their financial situation was on the comfortable side of the ledger. The problem, from Paul's perspective, was that the level of their giving to Paul's missionary fund (by which he helped out poor congregations) didn't come anywhere close to where Paul knew it could be.

So starting in II Corinthians 8 Paul lays it on pretty thick. "I just got back from Macedonia. It's a crime how poor those folks are. The church roof leaks and they can't patch it. The pastor is on food stamps. At the Lord's Supper it's just one piece of bread per household. But, my oh my, the way they gave with such rich generosity!" Well, there's nothing too subtle about all that. So a bit later in verse 8 Paul says, "Now don't get ornery: I'm not ordering you to do anything you don't want to do on your own. You have to do what you think is right. I just thought you might find it interesting to compare yourselves to these other folks. And anyway, I don't want to say you Corinthians are stingy, just that your love isn't terribly sincere, that's all."

If II Corinthians 8-9 contained only this kind of guilt-inducing rhetoric, then it would be difficult to swallow perhaps. Happily, that's not the case at all. Instead Paul's strongest and most enduring line of argumentation here ties in with the single most beautiful, most lyric fact of the gospel: grace. In more ways than you can detect in the English translation, Paul makes grace the theme of this passage. If this were a musical composition, it would have been written in the key of G, G for grace. Grace is the keynote, the major chord, sounded over and over and over again, and sometimes in quite startling ways. By the time we are finished taking a tour of this passage, we will have found our Christian answer to the question of why we are to be generous givers. We will also have found something that, more than anything, helps us to understand not just this Thursday in November called Thanksgiving Day but also why precisely such a sense of thanks-giving sets the holy tone for our everyday.

We will begin our tour of these verses in chapter 8:1. As we proceed from there, pay attention not only to the places where the Greek word, charis or "grace" pops up, but how with each successive use of that term, Paul freights it with ever-greater meaning and ramifications. In 8:1 Paul says that what enabled the otherwise impoverished Macedonian churches to give so generously was because God had laden them with so much of his grace. "We want you to know about the grace that God has given to the Macedonian churches."

Why is Paul saying that? Paul, after all, is the apostle of grace, the one who composed long, purple passages that made it clear no one is a Christian without having first received God's gift of grace. So seen from one angle, making a big deal out of the grace in Macedonia was a little like pointing out that a famous opera singer actually has vocal chords. If someone can sing, we already know she has vocal chords, so why point it out? If the Macedonians are Christians, we already know they have received God's grace, so why point it out?

Because Paul is going somewhere with this. Paul is not talking about just the grace that saves us in the first place. This is the "grace upon grace" idea we read about in the gospel. The grace that saves us is just the first installment in what is supposed to be a lifetime of receiving God's mercies and goodness. In this case, Paul is pointing to one of these extra charisms, one of these extra gracelets that is an overflow of big-time saving Grace. It is this additional, extra grace of God that motivated the Macedonians to be so generous. Divine grace has its own kind of good momentum--once it gets rolling, it's not supposed to stop. That's why in verse 4 Paul says that the Macedonians got so caught up in these waves of grace, that they pleaded for the privilege of being able to share in the grace of giving to others. You can't see that in the translation, but the word "service" in verse 4 is in Greek once again the word charis. So first the Macedonians were given an extra grace from God. This, in turn, made them want to grace other people with their own generosity.

And so then in verse 6 Paul invites the Corinthians to hop on board this grace juggernaut by giving more copiously themselves. Indeed, he says in verse 7, they were perhaps in a position to excel in this grace of giving. Why? Because it's the Christian way. Jesus set the tone, blazed the trail, showed us the way we should go. In verse 9 Paul says that once upon a time, God's grace was lavished on Jesus, too, and just look what it led him to do: Jesus who was rich in glory gave it all up for our sake. He who was rich made himself poor, he who was resplendent in glory made himself tawdry, he who knew no pain let himself be killed for our sakes. Verse 9 is not just one of Paul's many New Testament summaries of the gospel, it was his none-too-subtle hint as to what God's grace is supposed to do. It is supposed to make us generous givers--generous self-givers like Jesus.

Shifting now over to the portion of chapter 9 that we read today, we can see in verse 8 that Paul is still tugging on this thematic thread. "God can make this same grace flow down all over you, too," Paul says. And since we've already seen the effect such grace had on the Macedonians and on our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, it's obvious what effect Paul wants it to have on the Corinthians. In verse 14 Paul is nearing the peroration or climax of his plea here and so lets his rhetoric soar into the stratosphere.

Paul says in verses 12-13 that the service they render to other people and to fellow Christians in this world is itself the finest testimony of their own thanksgiving. What's more, that form of thanksgiving elicits still more thanksgiving from other people. It builds and builds and builds into a crescendo of thanks to God--to the God who, Paul finally claims in verse 14, will lavish the Corinthians with even more "surpassing grace." In Greek the word used there is hyperballon from which we get the English word "hyperbole." Once we join God's grace juggernaut, eventually this grace can become almost sheer hyperbole in the sense of being exaggerated, almost ludicrous and lavish in its stunning generosity.

This is what true thanksgiving is all about. In fact, the Greek word for "thanks" and "thanksgiving" that Paul uses here, further cinches his motif on God's grace setting the tone. The Greek word for thanks is eucharis, which is itself a variation on charis or grace. The grace of God flows from the top down. The grace of God in Christ first saves us despite how unworthy we are. That grace then starts to multiply and build and overflow in our hearts. Drippings of grace spill out all over and somewhere in the midst of that "grace upon grace" style of living, thanksgiving to God pops out all over and takes all kinds of forms, not the least of which, Paul suggests in these two chapters, is in lives marked by generous donations to those in need, to the church, to the kingdom of God generally.

Why be generous? The New York Times can't finally answer that question and no amount of psychological scrutiny or crunching of statistical data will help us, either. Maybe some people out in the world give without really knowing why they do it. Not everyone out there is looking for a tax break or adopting the Charles Schwab philosophy. Millions of good people give quite wonderfully, and we should not disparage that just because it's not anchored specifically in Christian faith. Remember, our particular branch of the Reformed tradition has a ready-to-hand explanation for what motivates non-Christians to do Christian-like deeds: we call it common grace. If we're right about that, then even so-called "secular" generosity may well be traced back to some kind of divine and grace-filled influence after all.

But whether or not you buy that idea, there is no missing the grace-connection for us as Christian people. Today is Thanksgiving Day and so people of all faiths or of no faith are trying this day to take stock, to be grateful, to murmur some appropriately appreciative words heavenward. As believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we can do better than being just vaguely grateful today alone. We can also be more articulate as to the reasons for not only our gratitude but for expressing that thanksgiving through generous giving all the time. It's simply the gracious, grace-filled, grace-motivated thing to do. That's why in verse 15, as Paul concludes this passage with a doxological bang, he writes something that you find nowhere else in the Bible. The translation of that verse has Paul saying, "Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift." But literally, as Paul's arpeggio of hyperbolic grace concludes, he writes, "Grace unto God for his indescribable gift." He doesn't use the typical form of the phrase "thank you" or "thanks" but uses charis in its noun form. That sentence doesn't even have a verb in the original Greek.

Translators and commentators are quite certain, and are probably correct, that the sense of this is giving "thanks" to God and so it gets translated this way. But given the sheer number of times Paul has peppered these chapters with the word charis, it is no accident that he throws it in one last time. This is the final tightening of the knot in this argument, the cherry on the top of the cake, the grand finalé of this grace-filled fireworks display.

When we live grateful lives that are marked not just by how often we verbally say "Thank you" to God but that are characterized also by how freely and generously we give of our time, our talent, and our treasures, then we are completing a circle. God began this circle by dispensing his grace to us. Grace saves us, grace keeps us, grace overflows in our lives and so creates many other streams and rivulets of grace all around us. When we live grateful, generous lives of service and copious giving to the church and kingdom, what we end up doing is giving grace right back to God. "Grace to God!" Paul says. When God sees us living that way, then he knows for sure that we "get it." We understand, we're going with God's flow and so are, in essence, returning to God some of the same grace he has lavished on us.

It is right and fitting to give thanks to God today, but only in the sense that it is always right to give thanks and if today happens to succeed in helping us give a little extra thanks, then so much the better. But it must not be the exception of our lives to do this. And just to gather around a food-laden, Norman Rockwell-like dinner table this afternoon where we will offer some thoughtful prayer of thanksgiving is also not enough if we do not also see as an extension of our grace-filled, grace-motivated thanksgiving things like giving generously to this church and the ministries it supports here and all over the world. Saying thanks today is not enough unless we continue proffering that thanks in reaching out to contribute through money donated or volunteer time given to programs here and elsewhere that aim to help those around us in ways similar to what we thought about last Sunday morning.

In all these ways and thousands of more besides, we essentially return some grace to God. Of course, someone could wonder why God would want our grace. Since God is the font and source of all grace, giving grace to God could seem like the ultimate example of bringing coals to Newcastle (or banket to Friesland). Apparently, though, God loves receiving grace from us even as he takes joy in seeing his grace in action in us. When there is grace all around, swirling upward in ever stronger waves of generosity and gratitude, somehow we do manage to bring grace back to the source of it all, and the very precincts of heaven are adorned and so made the more lovely as a result. Amen.