Sixpence none the richer
When the offering is taken at my church, we say ‘All things come from you, O Lord. And of your own have we given you.’ Here, each week, in 15 words, is a comprehensive sermon on the theology of everything. It’s about wise living; about humility. And it’s a lesson taught by everyone’s favourite Texan pop/rock band.
Kiss Me is a fantastic song, but it’s the band name which interests me rather more. Sixpence None the Richer must be the first band ever to have taken titular inspiration from CS Lewis’ classic book Mere Christianity. It gave rise to a fantastic sentiment for them to carry for their professional career.
In one of his chapters on faith CS Lewis calls out as folly the idea that one could gain adequate marks in some cosmic exam room to earn God’s favour. That is the essence of pride before God, thinking one is good enough or has lived well enough to command credit from him. ‘One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits.’
When it comes to our offerings before God, we can only ever give him what was already his:
Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life to his service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to its father and saying, ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ Of course, the father does, and his is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.
God is sixpence none the richer, then, in the neat paraphrase of Lewis’ punchline. We don’t give God value added. We don’t complete him. Or in some way give him something which he was lacking. Of his own have we given him.
Some see this as hopelessness – the ‘tyrant God sets unobtainable targets and thrives on our failure to meet them’ routine. It is nothing of the sort. Instead, it is a thoroughly liberating, life-bringing theology of everything.
Take Lewis’ father and child illustration in the other direction for a moment. Imagine the father demanding a present to the value of a sixpence from his dependant child without giving the means to meet his expectations. Or perhaps giving out the coin only to ask for it back with interest. If God was like those fathers we would all be doomed. But because coin is already a present when the father gives it, he does not expect to gain. The gift is really all for the child.
In our strive for independence and self-sufficiency, we might wish to make God sixpence to the good on the transaction. But his gift of grace removes any fear of falling short in the divine exam hall, and the slavery to guilt and worry which come with it. Instead, it invites a life of humility lived in loving gratitude to the father who has given us all we have ever known.
That is quite a name for a band – and quite a motto for life.
Posted in Christianity