Monday, July 2
Scripture Reading—II Corinthians 8:16-24
This
passage picks up the theme from Friday’s reading about Paul’s efforts to
collect funds from the Christians in Corinth (and elsewhere) for the struggling
Christians in Jerusalem. I’m grateful
that Paul wrote about these fund-raising efforts so candidly. Sometimes, many of us involved in the
everyday life of the church, whether as pastors or as committed laity, become
weary with the mechanics, the nuts and bolts of church life. We can all become quite critical of the seemingly
inordinate amount of time we spend on the mundane tasks required to keep a
church going—meetings, recruiting and training leaders, cleaning, maintaining,
and repairing aging facilities, scheduling people to be ushers, greeters, and
acolytes, and on top of all these things, trying to raise and manage the money
needed to make it all possible. Many of
us would prefer to focus our efforts on more noble tasks like prayer and
meditation, study and discussion of Scripture and theology, developing
beautiful and moving services of worship, reaching out to people in need,
offering compassion to people in times of loss and sorrow, sharing our faith so
that those who’ve never heard the good news can respond to it. But the two things are related—the mission to
which we’re called and the sometimes messy and laborious tasks that make the
mission possible. Here we see that Paul,
the great apostle who had developed a profound theology of God’s grace and
mercy for Gentile as well as Jew, is not above worrying about doing the little
things necessary to make the mission of the church possible. He writes letters pleading for support. He develops a system for sharing the
need. He recruits and trains leaders
(Titus and others) who can go and ask for money, collect it, and then
distribute it. In all of this, Paul
keeps his focus on the greater purpose these intensely practical matters are
intended to serve. All these are “ . . .
for the glory of the Lord himself and to show our goodwill.” (vs. 19) The next time you’re asked to make a
contribution, serve on a committee, assist the church in planning, or raising
funds, I hope you (and I) can remember
that though many of these tasks can be tedious, and though we can always strive
to find simpler and more efficient ways to do such work, such things are
necessary if we are to faithfully make God’s love known in our time and place!
Thought
for the day: Though often tedious,
faithfulness to Christ’s mission calls us to roll up our sleeves and do the
small, often unseen, things that make that mission possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment