Tim Reardon introduced PMC’s Consecration Sunday — the time when the congregation makes commitments to carry us through the coming year. As a lay-operated and lay-lead church, if we don’t do the things we think are important, they won’t get done. We try not to be a community of passive spectators but active participants. We have to do more than just say that it’s a value. We have to continue to act, to tell that story, and to reinforce that value, because it is easy to lose. We participate, we make this church, as an active community.

Though we’re all at different places on our journey, and it’s important that we’re a place of healing, refreshment, and restoration — this focus on how we contribute to our mission is important formationally and conceptually. We commit to this identity of an active body. Consecration Sunday is like our own yearly first fruits offering. We come first with what we have to offer to God and community before we do anything else. This will mean different things for different people, but this attitude and posture of determining first our contribution to God and community is a lot different than sitting back after and determining what is left for God and community in retrospect.

Tim confesses that he doesn’t like talking about money — about how people “should” contribute to the church. But one passage that he does return to is the story of the rich ruler. At the end of this story Jesus tells those who have left everything, not that they will receive cars, money, and other material reward. He says they will receive mother, children, households… they receive family, and they participate in a different economy of care, fellowship, and love, and in the age to come eternal life — a continuation of this family.

We give not out of simple obligation, but because we are part of a community, part of a family, and we believe in what we are doing together, that we have a common mission and we wish to contribute to it, to do our part, whatever that is. We are not giving to someone else or a faceless institution, but we are participating in our common mission — we give to ourselves.

Tim goes on to reflect on the Israelite rite of first fruits from Deut 26 — as just a beginning point as we consider our own practice of giving.

In Deut 26, the Israelites have been wandering the desert for years, a generation after having been delivered from Egypt. They are given instructions for the rite of first fruits which they are to perform when they come into the land.

Though certainly this is something that they should do, the posture is one of thanksgiving of gratefulness. We see words like celebrate and rejoice! They are thankful because of the land, and they are thankful for God’s providence, of which they return a portion to God. Perhaps they are thankful because they realize their dependence on God, that all good things come from God.

Their thanksgiving is tested and remembered. It comes both from receiving the land and in remembrance of what God has done that marks who they are. These Israelites recite their history whenever they give thanks. They tell the story of a wandering Aramean, who lived as an immigrant in Egypt. This is the story of God’s people, marked as immigrants in the world, oppressed by the Egyptians, but liberated by God.

Yet this remembrance has consequences. If they were oppressed, they are called to remember and live another way. God’s people are redeemed by God, brought up out of oppression and are no longer to repeat it. What is our story? What story do we tell about ourselves as we come to God and community to offer ourselves? How do we live out that story?

In our first fruits offering, we remember that all things including ourselves belong to God, that there is a freedom in understanding our utter dependency on God.

The spirit of first fruits is at its roots a mindset that challenges the exploitation of the world, crippling debt and upwardly redistributive economies concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. Our critique of this is very Anabaptist!

When Israel is called to remember how they were oppressed in Egypt, a remembrance that calls them to act differently, they are called to create, out of gratefulness and God’s abundance, a life together that counters the exploitive economies of the world, that functions other than the oppression of Egypt.

This is not an individualistic ethic. It is about a community, and forming a kind of community that remembers and shapes how they live together.

Every third year, they are told not to bring their offering to the temple, but to celebrate in their home towns, where they share with Levites, immigrants, orphans, and widows—those who are without different things: possession, land, and security. They will eat in every city until they are full.

So how does this relate to our first fruits? At the very least what we have are pieces of a framework to work from, of a lens to look through, and we have time to think and reflect. What does it mean for us to be first fruits people? Thanksgiving? Gratefulness? A liberating sense of dependence on God? An other economy? A call to create eternal homes based not on productivity and merit, but care, gratitude, love, sharing, and however else we might define it?

• What are we thankful for as a community? How does this gratitude and thanksgiving inform our giving?
• What is our story that informs our community life and sharing together?
• Why is first fruits giving important for us (you)?

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