Pursuit of Excellence - The appeal for receiving a what appears to be a special needs offering is couched in an appeal to the Corinthians value-their pursuit of excellence: "as you excel in everything-in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness . . . " This, however, may be a back-handed compliment: their zeal for excelling has also led to a spiritual hierarchy that had at the top the pneumatakoi, or "spiritual ones." So Paul teaches about spiritual gifts, but sandwiches within the gifts teaching "a more excellent way" (1 Cor. 12:31). [1]

A Comment From NIB:

Paul’s notion that we, recipients of God’s grace, must pass it on, that we must finish the circle by redirecting it through us to someone else, is awesome. Think about what it says about human life in its daily routine: It says that every encounter with another person is an opportunity to be a channel of God’s grace. In fact, not to think of grace that way is probably to cheat God and certainly to cheat others, because it arrogates grace to us as a sort of possession whose goal and end is us as individuals and not us as community. God’s grace is not to be trifled with or to be taken lightly. It comes into the world, finding expression through people. Grace achieves its goal, it becomes the grace it was intended to be, only as it reaches ever more and more people. That is why the collection for the saints was not just an option that the Macedonians or the Achiaians might choose to engage in; it was a joyful obligation (as Paul expressed it in Galatians 2:10). [2]

Recall associations that you have of that particular part in the worship service when the ushers are called forward. What is the general assessment of offerings-free-will, special offerings, funds, etc.?

In the quote above, the commentator indicates that grace gets bent or preempted when self-possessed rather than passed on. Do you agree with that notion? Have you experienced grace in that way? "Us" as community rather than just us?

Describe a situation when you were part of the conduit through which grace flowed on its way to someone else.

 

So much of Christian thinking has as its end the individual. WIIFM me is not longer a country music station, but What’s-In-It-For-Me. The self-help market certainly adds to the individualized conception of life-is-me. But what about community? According to Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, community has suffered as the focus has shifted to the individual. You might spend your proclamation time simply with the biblical idea of grace-as-community vis-à-vis grace as individualized.

You may want to focus on the idea that "our patterns of doing and spending are maps of our value systems." According to the NIB, "we casually talk about how we "spend" our time. What are we spending our limited resources on as individuals, as faith-communities? Might make for an interesting, reflective proclamation that could draw deeply from the lesson in 2 Corinthians 8.

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[1] The New Interpreter’s Bible XI (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000), page 122.
[2] Ibid, page 1208.