From Sunday’s message:

Most of us have our little routines – we take the same route to work or school each day, go down the same roads, take the same left turn, turn into the driveway exactly the same way every day. Sometimes you can drive all the way home without even thinking about how you got from one place to another.

But then, occasionally, you take a detour for whatever reason – the road was closed or you made a wrong turn – and you find yourself on a different road entirely. You discover things you didn’t know were there, maybe a little park just a few blocks away from your house, or a flowering tree you never noticed before. Sometimes it’s good to get out of our routines and see something new.

That’s what happened when I started looking at the scriptures for this Sunday. We’ve been off the lectionary this month as we’ve been focusing on our Growing Together campaign. I usually preach from the lectionary – that’s the order of scriptures that is laid out in a three-year cycle that covers a variety of New Testament and Hebrew scriptures. I generally like to use those scriptures because I like the idea that Christians all over the world are hearing the same scriptures on any particular Sunday, and I like how it tells the story of the church year. But sometimes, it’s like driving the same road to work and back every day; sometimes you miss things on the side streets, little gems that you didn’t even know were there.

Which is how I felt when I came across this little story about King David in the book of 2 Samuel. It’s tucked in here right at the very end of the last chapter of this book, and it’s a wonderful little story that has a lot to say to us.

A little context always helps: 1 and 2 Samuel tell the story of the beginning of the kingdom of Israel. After they’d left Egypt, wandered in the wilderness, and come into the promised land, they struggled for awhile trying to figure out how to live together. There’s a period when they are led by judges, instead of kings, and depending on who’s writing the stories, that worked out with variable success. But eventually they decide they do want a king, and eventually David is crowned. David’s administration is not without controversy, but he’s remembered as a great king, this was the golden age of Israel’s history.

2 Samuel 24 is an odd little story, but where we pick it up is when the plague settles over Israel. There’s this major medical disaster – people are dying, there’s no end in sight. David has to do something. The prophet Gad comes along and tells David to go and make an offering to the Lord.

So David goes to see Araunah, who owns a threshing floor on a hillside just outside the edge of what were then the city limits of Jersusalem. A threshing floor was a large flat parcel of land, usually a flat surface of rock or pounded earth, where the grain was brought in from the fields to be processed. The threshing floor would have been several football fields in size, so it was no small matter to be the owner of a threshing floor.

When Aruaunah hears what David has in mind, he offers to just give him the land, with the oxen and all the equipment thrown in for good measure. Now, it’s possible that he was intimidated by the presence of the king, or maybe trying to win some royal brownie points. But I kind of like the idea that he saw what David was doing and was inspired by it and wanted to be a part of it.

Generosity is contagious, isn’t it? How many times have you seen somebody doing something generous – with their time or their money – and you thought, “I want to be a part of that.”

Hasn’t that been true during this Growing Together campaign? I know I’ve been inspired by the commitments many people have made to making the campaign happen, and by the generosity I’ve already seen; I’m sure you have been too.

So, I’d like to give Araunah the benefit of the doubt here and assume that he was inspired by David’s generosity and wanted to give of himself as well.

But David doesn’t take him up on it. That’s not why David has come – the prophet didn’t tell him to go get somebody else’s stuff and offer that to the Lord. No, David refuses Aruanah’s offer because he knows it has to mean something to give it. He says, “I will not give offerings to the Lord that cost me nothing.”

“I will not give offerings to the Lord that cost me nothing.”

So David buys the threshing floor for 50 shekels – the equivalent of several year’s wages, a huge amount by anyone’s standards. He could make a gift that big – he was the king, probably the richest man in the country.

But it wasn’t the only gift. I imagine that other people were doing what they could in the face of the plague around them – they were feeding orphans, taking food to the sick, collecting money to pay for funeral expenses… They couldn’t have made an offering as big as David did, but that wasn’t what was important. What was important was that they were giving at their own ability, and their gifts didn’t cost them nothing.

I’ve heard our stewardship consultant, Zip Long, talk about this in terms of your phone bill, or your cable bill. It doesn’t cost you nothing to have a phone in your house, or to run cable to your TV, right? And isn’t the church worth that much at least?

So David – maybe inspired by the generosity of the people around him – buys the land, and builds the altar and makes the offerings – and as the story is told, God receives the offering and the plague ends.

And this, friends, is where I shake my bible and say – what? What did David know that we don’t? What magic words did he say with that offering to make the illness go away?

It would be tempting to draw an easy parallel between this story and our lives and suggest that if we could make a big enough offering, then God would put an end to all the disasters in our own lives. But of course, we know the world doesn’t work that way. We know that next week, when we bring our own pledges to the Growing Together campaign – even when we make our offerings that cost us something – it’s not going to be the end of all the bad stuff. There will still be oil spilling into the gulf and there will still be friends who are sick, and people without jobs.

But I think – and I really believe this, which is why my family will be making our own commitment – I really think that the offerings we make next week will help this church touch people’s lives and give them strength to live in this world that is still full of disaster.

Sometimes, the church does big, amazing, visible things. But most of the time, the church is simply the place where people connect with each other, and pray with each other, and share their lives and help each other through. Hasn’t that been true for you?

And I think the projects we are planning to do with the money we raise are going to help us do that.

Our new boiler will help us walk a little lighter on the earth, make our building more comfortable for people who meet here, save us money that we can put to other uses. The renovated kitchen will be a place where we serve one another and show hospitality to our neighbors. The new entryway and gathering space will help us make those connections with each other that are so important to each other.

And that steeple. That steeple points us to the glory of God, reminds us of why we’ve come into this building in the first place.

I love the story of Lib Murray bringing her kids over here to watch the first steeple being built, when this was a brand new building. I want to bring my daughter and to watch the new steeple going up. I want her to tell her grandchildren about that someday. I want that boiler to still be pumping away when she goes to college. I want her to run around at potluck dinners served out of the new kitchen, and I want her to hang out with her friends in the gathering space out there. I want her to tell people she was a part of this church that gave an offering that cost something so that God could be glorified here.

Let me tell you something else about that threshing floor that David bought. Remember I told you it was on a hillside just on the edges of Jerusalem? Well, it wasn’t too long before that threshing floor became the site of the new temple that Solomon built. That threshing floor became the temple where centuries of God’s people came to worship and give thanks to God. That offering of David’s was just the first of millions of offerings given there over the centuries….

Isn’t that incredible, what one gift can do?

The letter to the Romans says, “Make of yourself a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.”

Imagine what our gifts can do.