Consecration (Trinitarian Article)

 

Fr. Tony’s Letter to the Trinitarians

October 2017

Consecration

Often when we offer the gifts of bread, wine, and plate receipts in Eucharist, we recite together a line from 1 Chronicles 29:14 (and the 1928 Prayer Book), “All things come of thee, O Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”  The idea is that whatever we offer as thanksgiving gifts to God are in fact already God’s, since God gave them to us.  The more general idea upon which it is based is that all things belong to God already, including us.

Jesus tried to make the point clearly when he taught the rich young man to go, sell everything (not just some) of he had and give the proceeds to the poor.  Jesus lived what he taught.  He perfectly submitted to God, and wholly aligned his will and actions with God’s ultimate purposes and love.   In the words of Celtic spirituality, he was the thinnest of “thin places” between our world and the Ultimate. In “emptying himself” to God (Phil 2:1-13), and submitting fully to God, our Lord is an exemplar for us.

Seeing such emptying of self as the heart of growth toward God, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of The Society of Jesus, wrote the following prayer as part of his Spiritual Exercises:

“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. All I have and call my own, you have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me. Amen.”

This expresses clearly the Christian spirituality of offering and consecrating our lives and labors to God.   It is the polar opposite from the trope popular a few years ago among detractors from Barack Obama: “I built this!”   Loyola teaches that we ourselves are the product of God’s creative work, and all that we create and produce thus ultimately come from God.  There is nothing that we and we alone built ourselves, because we ourselves are not our own.   

Returning God’s gracious gifts to God, through generosity of time and wealth to God’s other creatures who happen to stand in need, or to God’s Beloved Community, is at heart an act of offering and an act of consecration.  Offering is giving up what appears to be ours and renouncing further claims to control it.  Consecration is taking the ordinary, the daily, and pedestrian, and making it holy by putting it to God’s purposes. 

The prophet Malachi too teaches the blessings of the spiritual practice of offerings and consecrating our labor and its fruits: “‘Return to me and I will return to you’ says God  …  Bring your full tithe to the Temple treasury so there will be ample provisions in my Temple.  Test me in this and see if I don’t open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you won’t have room to store it” (Malachi 3:7-10). 

Despite its agricultural imagery of adequate rains for a bumper crop, I wonder whether the promise here is more about our sense of having enough when we consecrate than it is about gaining wealth per se.  The point is that if we exercise faith in being generous, we will be blessed with a sense of gratitude and sufficiency in God. 

The idea is also expressed in a poem by Frances Ridley Havergal, the text of number 707 in the Hymnal 1982:

Take my life and let it be
consecrated, Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
let them flow in endless praise,

Take my hands and let them move
at the impulse of thy love.
Take my feet and let them be
swift and beautiful for thee.

Take my voice and let me sing
always, only, for my King.
Take my lips and let them be,
filled with messages from thee.

Take my silver and my gold;
not a mite would I withhold.
Take my intellect and use
every power as thou shalt choose.

Take my will and make it thine;
it shall be no longer mine.
Take my heart it is thine own;
it shall be thy royal throne.

Take my love; my Lord, I pour
at thy feet its treasure store.
Take myself, and I will be
ever, only, all for thee.

If we would be followers of Jesus, we must consecrate all we have and are to God.  Giving up all, intentionally getting rid of the attachment we have to things and placing them in the service of Jesus, is at the heart of Christian spirituality.  It is only by giving all to God that we find our true selves and anything becomes truly our own. 

Grace and Peace, 

Fr. Tony+