Hearts on the Altar [Proper 28B]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

1 Samuel 1:4-20

Hearts on the Altar

The flickering flames of the holy place gave her away.  The way they exposed her silently moving lips, the way they caught their reflection in the tears that she could not control.  She wasn’t looking for an audience; she wasn’t trying to attract the attention of the cynical priest.  The flickering flames did that.  She was simply there to pour out her heart before God.  On this day, in her pain, that was the truest offering she could bring. 

The silently moving lips, the tear stained face, they were part of that offering.  They were signs of the prayer that rose up from the deepest well of Hannah’s soul: both complaint and vow, lamentation, tinged with as much hope a shattered woman could muster.  You don’t show up if you don’t believe at least a little bit. 

It wasn’t just that her pride was bruised by the constant taunts of the other wife in the house, the one who could never understand the pain of her barren womb, the one who could never understand the devastating whispers she pretended not to hear as she walked through town, it was also that she looked into the future and there was nothing there for her.  She loved her husband, Elkanah, and wanted desperately to project his proud line into the future, I mean that was a part of the pain.  But it was more than that.  There was also the way in which her body stoked the desire of her soul, told her to do something she could not do. There was also the reality of her world, of that world: without a child, without a son, her husband’s eventual death would leave her utterly exposed and instantly desolate.

Her lips moved and her tears stained her cheeks because she was desperate.  Hannah was desperate.  And there was only one thing in the world for which she longed because that one thing would change everything.  On this day, in that holy place, the tears, the prayers, the vulnerability, her broken heart, that deep longing: that was her offering.

I’m thinking about offerings today – Hannah’s, ours’ – because today is the day we offer our pledges to God, here, in this holy place.  At its most basic level the offering is money – present money and future money.  Big surprise: a church talking about money.  But of course it is much more than that.  Because money is never just money; just like tears are never just tears.  It is also all those things that money means to us, what it represents to us: a complex relationship that is wrapped around our hearts, our minds, tied up in our memories.  We don’t talk about money because talking about money is like telling our precious secrets: it exposes us, our values, our desires.  Like a flickering flame, it gives us away. 

Growing up, there was a lot of tension in my house around money – mostly because there wasn’t much of it.  My parents weren’t military, but we moved around a lot when I was a little kid; because people without money do that too.  My parents twice filed for bankruptcy due to circumstances not entirely within their control, which meant losing home, starting over.  And so money is never just money to me; it is security.  No matter how much I have, I have always been afraid to run out of money.  That fear is always there, like a tattoo on my soul.  And that is why for me my pledge, my offering to God, always feels like a kind of vulnerability.  I write the number down, on the pledge card, on a check, and it feels risky; if I think about it, it makes me uncomfortable. 

Which, of course, is exactly why I have to do it.  I know myself.  I need to bring my offering to God.  It is good for me, “saving-my-soul” good.  Because I hold too tightly to the things that are passing away.  Because I do not trust God as much as I should.  Because, left on my own, I would store up treasures on this earth, when I should be storing up treasures in Heaven.  Because I know myself.  I know my relationship with money is complicated, potentially spiritually dangerous.  God knows I need to give my money away, return it to God, invest in something beyond myself, bigger than myself.  And so do I.

I’m always interested in why people put their money in the offering plate.  I once asked a man at my last parish why he gave.  And he said to me, “I think about all the things I could buy with my offering, I fantasize about it: a new car, maybe a boat, all kinds of stuff, stuff that I don’t need.  And that is why I give.  I invest in God’s Kingdom so that I don’t spend all my money on myself.”  I’m sure he has no idea how profound I found his simple statement.  But it changed how I looked at giving.  Giving is not just about the money; it is about all the money represents.  The gift is an extension of the giver.  We’re not putting our money or a pledge card in that plate.  We are putting our hearts on the altar – desperate for God to honor our offering.  In some strange way, we’re the offering.

A few years back my bishop in Ohio wrote, “[G]iving, first and foremost, is a spiritual discipline for the giver.  It is an essential element of how we learn to give ourselves completely to God, which is, of course, the goal of our journey in faith....  [G]iving helps us surrender ourselves to God with the same generous abandon with which Jesus surrendered himself so that we might be safe and saved.”

The Bishop is right; giving is more spiritual than material.  It is a spiritual discipline.  Now, I know discipline often has a negative connotation in our world.  We often associate discipline with punishment, the authorities' response to our bad behaviors.  But spiritual disciplines are those things which drive us more deeply into God.  They are, of course, sometimes tedious, sometimes difficult, sometimes downright painful – and always exactly what we need.  The spiritual discipline of giving changes us, teaches us what it means to surrender our lives to God, to trust that God can and will supply all our needs.  Giving is the road to salvation.

God honored Hannah’s offering: her tears, and prayers, her vulnerability, her broken heart, her deep and honest longing.  God received her offering and offered back to her the very thing for which she longed.  And then Hannah offered that son back to God.  It is a shocking thing to even ponder.  The son was more than just a son to her.  She placed her hopes, her dreams, her future, her heart on the altar.  And that offering became salvation – for her, but also for an entire nation.  It wasn’t easy.  It’s not supposed to be. 

Today we offer our gifts.  And of course, God doesn’t need our money.  The church does, but God doesn’t.  And yet here we are, considering the gifts we will offer God, the creator of the heavens and the Earth.  And still, God longs to receive what we offer, delights in our offerings.  Our pledges and our offering of thanksgiving, the gifts we give: they are a way in which we show God that we value the relationship, that we long to go deeper; they are tokens of our love.  The money is never just money; it’s our hopes, our dreams, our future, our security.  What we bring to the altar is our hearts; we place our hearts on the altar.  The offerings we place in the plate, they teach us how to offer our lives.  And no gift you offer delights God more than the gift of you.