“Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and make good your vows to the Most High.” Ps. 50:14
This verse is one of the “Offertory Sentences” used in many of our liturgies at the point of shifting the focus from the liturgy of the Word to the liturgy of the Table.
Pointing the finger at myself and my Episcopal denomination, even though this is one of several choices of Offertory Sentences, it’s the one I hear 95% of the time. It’s the one most of us have memorized—and ramble off without thinking.
It’s almost used more as signal the ushers that it’s time for them to pass the plate and a half-hearted reminder that people are supposed to be generous, than as a verse with any real meaning or conviction.
How unexpected, then, to resurrect this sentence to its full impact by focusing an entire stewardship sermon series on just this one sentence!
The series’ title is “To Know God Is to Thank God.”
Week One: Offer to God
Week Two: A Sacrifice of Thanksgiving
Week Three: Make Good Your Vows
Week Four: To the Most High
Today I offer the first two weeks of the series, and next week I’ll offer the second two.
Week 1: Offer to God
Psalm 50 is a Festival psalm, perhaps composed for the Feast of Booths or Sukkot. This festival celebrated the harvest safely ingathered (depicted in the Book of Ruth).
Whether composed for this or another festival occasion, God demands (Ex. 23:14-17) that three times a year the people were to celebrate, and when they appeared before God they should not come empty-handed.
Moreover, when they gathered to celebrate, the people were also to be reminded of the covenant between God and God’s people.
Psalm 50 has three distinct sections.
50:1-6: God’s grand entrance (You may recognize this pericope as one of the readings for the Feast of the Transfiguration)
50: 7-15: God sets the record straight about the purpose of worship
50:16-23: God describes the behavior of those who forget who God is
For this first stewardship sermon in the series, make this sermon what we learn about God from the whole of the psalm, because what we have to offer God isn’t about what we have to offer, but about who God is.
Introduce the series
Read the entire psalm
Explore these aspects
Festivals and celebrations: Why does God not only delight in festivals and celebrations, but find them so important—even necessary—that God decreed that the people party at least three times a year?
God’s Entrance: Why does God think it was so important to design an over-the-top entrance for this celebration? What’s God’s point? What are we to know about who God is from this? What’s a contemporary equivalent when there’s no mistaking that “God has entered the building?”
Lest We Forget: Why would God want to mix pleasure with business? Why wasn’t celebration enough? Why mix them with a review about the covenant?
4. Conclusion: Who is God that we would want to give back?
Week 2: A Sacrifice of Thanksgiving
Important in this psalm is God making this point: God doesn’t need to eat.
In fact, God doesn’t need any kind of sacrifice that a human being could possibly offer.
God already owns beasts and forests, birds and mountains, goats and farms—so what would God need with a flank of over-done, charred brisket?
In fact (so this sermon could go), what is the nature and purpose of humans offering any kind of sacrifice to God who has everything?
A sacrifice (per its many depictions in Scripture) is an act of giving. Food is handed over to the priest to be poured out or burned.
The giver hands over something deeply precious: their very sustenance. It’s the source of their life. For people always a meal away from starvation and no safety net, that was no metaphorical gesture.
Moreover, the action of giving it over to God, through pouring out or burning, rendered the gift lost forever to the giver.
Once given, it was too late for bellies cramping from hunger to demand take-backs.
Thus trust, as weighty as any perfect goat, was handed over in equal quantity.
To make a sacrifice of thanksgiving was to hand over something of deepest value—the source of one’s life and one’s children’s lives—because one could trust and give thanks that what God has made available in the past would be offered again—and again, and again, and again.
Make this second stewardship sermon about the nature of making any kind of meaningful sacrifice to God.
God doesn’t eat, so why would people give God overcooked food?
Why is it important to God that we know that God doesn’t need our sacrifices?
What sacrifices do we make that are so deep, they put our lives on the line? Should we make that level of sacrifice? What would that kind of sacrifice be for us?
What does it mean to offer to God what can’t be taken back? And to offer it not out of what we might get out of it (eg., heavenly brownie points)?
Conclusion: What might it be like to be so filled with appreciation for God’s blessings that we can’t contain it?
Next week: Why does it matter that we make good on our vows?