The Offertory

     The offertory begins with a sentence of scripture. The celebrant has 20 different options that start on page 149. Many of these remind us that God is the first giver. Our offerings stem from his original generosity. “The offertory is composed of all those actions that represent the offering of the people.” This is when the collection is taken up. This is when a special song might be offered by the choir or by a soloist. This is also when the gifts of bread and wine are brought forward and placed on the altar. When we put all of these things together they signify our whole lives. They are our livelihoods and our talents and our sustenance. We offer to God all the first fruits of our lives. We give these gifts to Lord not because He needs them. Our God gave them to us in the first place! We give them so that we might be more like our Lord. Generous and selfless. 
    What the Lord does with our gifts is truly amazing. We offer the Lord the ordinary stuff of our lives. We offer Him things that we might not consider sacred. The money and the bread and the hands and the songs that are placed on the Altar would be in any other context simply common. This is the point. God makes our simple offerings of ourselves into something extraordinary. He takes our daily lives and breaths His own life into it. He takes fishermen and turns them into fishers of men.
     Sometimes it is hard to imagine this. The deep connection between our daily life offering and God’s work in the Eucharist has been strained with re-imagining of some of the symbols. The bread doesn’t look like bread or the offering is quickly taken off the altar. The wine isn’t made by the people. In the early church the congregation would bring the bread from their own tables and the wine from their own cellars to be offered in the Eucharist. “The problem is that most of us are so removed from bread baking and wine making that these things that were so ordinary in the ancient world are exotic to us and therefore somewhat unreal.”  When we see the unconsecrated bread and wine we are not thinking of all the labor and sweat and work that went into making something to offer the Lord. The bread and wine are hard to identify with our own work or our own table. Yet, this is what is represented in the offering. We give to the Lord our everyday ordinary selves and trust in His goodness.

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