Eucharistic Emulation

I went to a church service this weekend, and like all good Church of Christ services, the contribution was preceded by a short speech that outlined why we should put our money in the plate.
There is a phrase that is common to the pre-contribution speech; You've all heard it, maybe you've said it, maybe I have, but this week, I just couldn't stand it.

"It's God's money anyway, so why shouldn't we give? We are just giving that which isn't ours in the first place."

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I mean come on, that's ridiculous! Okay, so technically it is good theology. Yes, everything belongs to God, so we really are just giving what doesn't really belong to us anyway. But tell this to a father with 4 kids and is struggling to make ends meet, tell him that it is God's money so he should just give it up, but be prepared for a fist fight.

I often wondered why we had a fascination with the phrase "seperate and apart". I mean, I understand that collection was not a part of the Eucharist, so we use those words to save our butts, but why didn't we just put the collection at a completely different part of the church service? I was often told the rote answer: "It's convenient to do it all at once." But that argument doesn't hold water for me, perhaps there is something more.

After thinking about it for the past 20 years or so, I finally have an answer that I find to be satisfactory; According to Church of Christ tradition, the Lord's Supper is a time to remember the life-saving actions of Jesus on Gethsemane. But it is not simply a mental assent to the fact that those actions took place, but something much deeper.

The Lord's Supper is a time to step into the world of Jesus, to experience again the sacrifice of the cross. We do not step into this world to simply remember with our heads, but to remember with our hearts. This type of remembrance is not simply to know what happened, to encourage us to emulate that spirit of Christ which was self-sacrificial. Emulation is the point of the Lord's Supper, not simply knowing.

So then, if the Lord's Supper is meant to draw a response out of us, in response to, and emulation of the sacrifice of Christ, maybe, the collection has been placed in the correct place after all.

"We are just giving to God what is already his", how trite and small that makes the offering, how devoid of theological and personal significance! The offering is not, should not, and can not be an easy thing, it is precisely the opposite, it is a sacrifice!

In the past we have, in attempts to make it easier for people to give, reduced the sacrifice required of us to "It's God's anyway, right? So we might as well give it to him, cause it's not ours."

Following the Lord's Supper with the collection is a beautiful, appropriate, theological progression. We move the Church from remembering what Christ did, to experience and emulate the concept of sacrifice. The collection is not a time for us give to God what is already his, it is a time to practice and begin entering into a Christ-shaped life: a life of sacrifice.