Sermon preached at Evensong on the Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2025

What is your ‘currency’? I’m not primarily asking whether you use pounds or Euros, Yen or dollars, more how you would describe how you relate distinctively to other people. What do you offer other people, and what do you most value? Our currency here at Westminster Abbey is our faith, our worship, and perhaps our history, the narratives we offer. I also hope there would be something about how we try to live; something about celebration, trustworthiness, kindness and integrity. The word currency derives from the Latin word currentia – which is a ‘running’ or a ‘flowing.’ A currency keeps things moving, keeps the life going.

And yet, currency is unavoidably related to money, and in the English language is most frequently used when discussing financial matters. Our second reading today somehow manages to capture both these senses, and poses some important questions across the millennia from the first century church of Corinth to the twenty-first century churches of our own day. The ninth chapter of St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians could be read as a bit of practical housekeeping. He refers to a ‘ministry to the saints’ and a ‘bountiful gift’ which the Corinthian Christians have promised to make. The context of this is a major collection for the church in Jerusalem, which seems to be a significant concern for St Paul across quite a few years of his ministry.

In part, this collection is intended to contribute, straightforwardly, to the relief of poverty. It appears that there was a famine in Jerusalem around the year 46 AD, which is alluded to in the Acts of the Apostles (11: 27-30), the effects of which may have been profound and long-lasting for the Christian community in and around the holy city. Paul encourages the Corinthians to be generous, and is clearly concerned for his and their reputation in the promises that have already been made. The gift should be made cheerfully and freely.

But there are other facets to this gift. Paul is not only discussing a financial matter. There are deeper concerns at play here, which themselves help to interrogate the meaning of money, what we do with it, and what it signifies. Some New Testament scholars have proposed that this collection should be interpreted as a kind of cultic offering to God, and therefore intimately linked to worship. Not just a practical activity, then, or mere human solidarity, but a deeply theological expression of identity and discipleship. This is a kind of religious obligation which has its origin in God’s own abundance which has been freely shared with believers. In other words, this kind of charity, or currency, is a response of grace towards God’s own gift of life in Christ. It operates, inevitably, in an economic model, but any sense that benefaction or patronage bestows an honour upon those who give is properly challenged. Instead, the offering is an act of worship, a form of thanksgiving to the Lord which has its origins in God’s overflowing grace.  

Towards the end of chapter nine, Paul speaks of this collection in terms of it being a ‘sharing’ or in the original Greek text a koinonia… This is the word that we normally use when we talk about ‘communion’ or ‘fellowship.’ The generosity which is encouraged and Paul’s writing to the Corinthians is not just about behaving well, it is actually a mode of life which reveals, builds and nourishes the gift of communion. So in this richer and broader context, what we do with our money, and how we think about it in relation to others, are not only questions which are not morally neutral, they will reveal something of our commitment to Christ’s identity and mission. Paul’s message here, has something to do with God’s economy, God’s way of dealing with the world, in a context where slavery, dependence, debt and inheritance were all ordinary features of daily life and economics. In the middle of this chapter, Paul draws on a basic image from rural life to illustrate his core theological point. ‘He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness. You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God through us…’ God’s abundance, given in Christ, is a generosity which leads to more generosity. The harvest, if you like, is unlimited. Christians should seek to exist and create cultures which are permanently attentive and renewing; never locking people into cycles of weakness or dependence, oppression or trauma, because the superabundance of God’s grace is at the very heart of the practical outworking of the Gospel. God’s generosity seeks more generosity as a sign of authentic Christian community.

This is not to argue for some kind of strange prosperity Gospel: the sense that if you only believe a bit better, this will cash out in material prosperity. This is not only demonstrably stupid and damaging, it is also a profound heresy. The grace given to us in Christ, is grace which we are to give away to others, because there is always more than enough. If we seek to hoard it, police it, or weaponise it, we are highly likely to have missed the point. God’s currency is grace, and it is a currency we receive through him ‘who though he was rich, yet for [our] sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty [we] may become rich,’ as Paul puts it so memorably in the previous chapter.

In his book, Grace and Mortgage, first published in 1997, and then again in 2009 after the financial crash, Peter Selby remarks that the language used in this chapter was able to operate successfully because it was directed to a culture which knew ‘both the poverty of a debt economy, and the superabundant outcomes of the new economy which the Church practised.’ It should be for this kind of generosity, this kind of economy, that the Church ought to be known. And not just in its financial dealings, but in how we manage our communities, how we approach issues of ethics and hospitality, and in how we communicate the Gospel of Easter. Paul’s letters in general, but this one in particular, do not allow us to take refuge in theories of doctrine as the only litmus test for an authentic, Catholic Christianity. Instead, how we live together, how we receive the gift of communion and share its practical implications, will also be an essential component in the extent to which we are truly faithful to Christ and his Gospel.

Our use of money, especially if we have more than we need, should reflect our priorities and the relationships we wish to nourish. And for Christians, that should be done in an attitude of gratitude and good cheer. The great twentieth century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, used to say that what makes thankfulness distinctively Christian thankfulness is fruitfulness. We can bear fruit because God has already planted the harvest with more than enough grace for all. The currency for Christians is an economy of grace, theological, pastoral and practical, which keeps the life flowing, which feeds all our energy. How our cultures and our churches need to hear this reminder from across the centuries, not as optional, but as a central tenet of authentic Christian belief and practice.