I hear tell that for a growing number of Christian congregations today money on the Altar is passé. Gone is the practice that I knew so well as a child: during the singing of the Doxology, the ushers carried actual stuff, checks and paper currency and coins from kids like me, up to the altar. The presiding Pastor or a lay assistant then would gather the offering plates, turn, elevate them, and place them on the Altar – which many today would prefer to call the Table.
This meant that back then the people in the congregation thereby had actually done something tangible and visible together! Their giving and their gifts were there for all to see in the holy of holies. But, overall, it appears that that kind of practice has increasingly fallen by our ecclesial wayside.
Church members nowadays can offer their financial gifts on their phones at any time they choose during the week, day or night, or even, perhaps fittingly, during the Offertory music on Sundays, although presumably not when they’re listening to the sermon (!). Be that as it may, there’s no-thing left, so-to-speak, to place upon the altar. The phones do it all.
This seems so “natural,” doesn’t it? Forget about writing a paper check or finding some paper bills before you leave for church on Sunday morning. Forget about later witnessing your own monies, along with others’ financial gifts, being carried to the Table by the ushers during the Liturgy. Rather, push, pull, click, click on your phone, whenever; and then it’s all done, that quick. Call this au courant spiritual efficiency. But there’s more here than meets the eye.
Who was it who first called money “filthy lucre”? After all, paper money and paper checks and metallic coins are so material – therefore, some seem to think, so off-putting, even disgusting – a theme that Sigmund Freud classically explored in his own visceral terms. Back home, my mother once told my brother and me when we were boys that we should avoid even touching paper money, since you had no idea of whose hands had touched it before yours. Money is crass, from many perspectives, it appears. So why set plates of that filthy lucre on the holy altar?
There’s a history here. From its very beginnings, Christians have struggled against the spiritual force of what was to become an enduring threat of heresy – the spirituality of what historically has been called “Gnosticism.” Early Christian leaders, like Irenaeus, contended with the influence of this spirituality as did Augustine later on (by then this spiritual movement had come to be called Manichaeism).
The key conviction of this perennial Christian heresy is that “matter,” physical stuff, like the human body or, say, the paper bills you carry in your wallet or your purse (if you do), isn’t really important for the Christian life. Indeed, in all likelihood, that stuff is dangerous, even disgusting. After all, doesn’t the Bible say that money is the root of all evil? (No, it doesn’t.*)
In contrast, according to this heretical perspective, the inner life, what goes on in your soul and mine, is what’s really important. External things like money, according to this kind of thinking, are merely materialistic, even – dirty. So let’s not bring that kind of messy stuff to the holy altar of the Church, right? At least: distance yourself from filthy lucre as much as you can, when you’re trying to worship.
But consider the counsel of Paul to the early Christian community: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice.”(Ro. 12:1) Your bodies! Your whole material selves! That physical injunction is liturgical language, rooted in the ritual practices of ancient Hebraic faith. “Clap your hands, O ye people!” (Ps. 47:1) is an expression of the same corporeal faith. It refers to whole, embodied persons offering their vibrant, enfleshed praises to God. It’s not merely a rhetorical description of some inner, spiritual state.
What have we O-so-phone-driven post-modern Christians lost, then, by the eclipse of the O-so-material Offering? A lot, I think. Why not, therefore, establish the following practice in all congregations, especially in those where the eclipse of the offering has become an existential fact, doing what for earlier church generations just came naturally: place the tangible, offered money on the Table, along with the tangible, offered bread and wine?** Make a visible point of it.
If you’re among those who don’t typically have cash on hand or don’t use paper checks, figure it out. This could be a spiritual discipline for you. In a word: if you need to, learn what it can mean to offer empirical money where your empirical altar is. Call it cash or checks for the incarnate Christ. Commit yourself to offer something material that you can hold in your hands on Sundays, the way Jesus held the loaves and fishes in his hands and gave thanks.
* Actually, even though many believers tend to take this thought for granted, the Bible itself says: “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (I Tim. 6:10) In a word, money itself isn’t really the problem, biblically speaking.
**This essay reflects a longstanding theological preoccupation of mine, expressed in words that I attach to all my online communications: “My Credo. Matter matters. All the creatures of God’s good Earth matter. The poor of the Earth matter even more. And the whole cosmos matters infinitely. Everything I do in my own pilgrimage of faith and my own ecojustice activism is driven by this earthly but cosmic theological vision.”
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