A Prayer for the Offering

I was putting together my notes for Sunday morning and, wanting to say something more than the typical "bless the gift and the giver" prayer for the offering, I started writing out some thoughts. As I wrote, it struck me how radical an act of worship the offering is, and how lightly we take this theologically weighted moment in the Sunday morning service, and how so often the spirit with which we give says much about what kind of god we think we're giving to.

A half hour of wrestling with the right words later, here's the prayer I came up with (who says written prayers are less spirit-directed than impromptu, "we-just-want-to-say" kind of prayers?):


God: You're Lord of all creation (of water, earth and sky). It’s not like you need anything from us. And everything we have is actually yours anyways: it came from you and it’ll go back to you; we’re only holding it in trust.

So God,
can you deliver us today—in this moment of offering— can you deliver us from seeing you as some needy god who’s just after our wallets...

Deliver us from seeing you as some hard-up god who’s short of cash and’ll just take what he can get...

Deliver us from seeing you as some stingy god, that we could buy off, or bribe, or impress with our money...

Deliver us from seeing you as some vending-machine god, who's just selling us religious goods and services at fair market value...

Because in Jesus we’ve discovered that the stingy god, the hard-up god, the needy god, the vending-machine god—that’s not you. That’s an idol. And if we give right now with any of those pictures of you in our hearts, we’d be worshiping an idol.

Instead, can you help us to see you as you really are? The God Jesus showed us and taught us to worship: the Father of lights, the generous giver of every good and perfect gift, who gives graciously and wisely to those who ask for His will to be done.

And then, can you help us to see this moment of giving now as the rich gift from you that it actually is: a generous invitation to join with you, through our giving, in what you’re up to in the world, a rich moment to be delivered from our petty visions of you, and a chance to be caught up in your purposes for us.

For Jesus’ sake make us into the cheerful, adventurous, Spirit-filled givers that he taught us to be and that you delight in. Because it’s in his name we pray.

Amen.