"Widow Watch" (Mark 12:38-44)

A Sermon Preached By

Rev. Peter W. Shidemantle

32^nd  Sunday in Ordinary Time, November 9, 2003

PEBBLE HILL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

5299 Jamesville Rd., Dewitt, NY  13214  Phone:  446-0960

phillchu@twcny.rr.com

When two of the young men from the Sudan whom our church has been helping to resettle here decided to unite in membership with our church, one of them (I don’t remember if it was Machar or Mathiang) asked, as they were meeting with our session, how much it cost to join. Now we were all aware that these guys, particularly at that point, were just scraping by. The initial reaction around the table was to minimize any sense of financial obligation to the church. We wouldn’t expect that! Fortunately, as we continued to discuss it, we realized that reacting in the way that we did to our new brother’s question was to discount what he needed to do to express his discipleship, his need to give. To say that we did not expect a financial commitment to the church because, we assumed, it would be too difficult for him, would be to say something way more about our sense of what constitutes Christian discipleship and membership in the body of Christ, which is the church.

Money gives us freedom and independence so we don’t have to live like the poor widow depicted in our gospel reading this morning. We like it that way. Our families like it that way.

The freedom and independence that money affords us is something we aspire to - not to be dependent on others, being able to make your own way in the world. Surely the poor widow did not aspire to poverty. She didn’t dream of growing up poor, just so she could be memorialized for all time in the scriptures as one whom Jesus invited his disciples to "watch" as she deposited her last two coins in the temple treasury. She has been romanticized and sentimentalized, and so sufficiently distanced from us, that she is made into a kind of icon - her act of sacrifice being out of reach of the rest of us mere mortals.

Just so we’re clear here - Jesus didn’t romanticize or sentimentalize poverty. In the first part of our reading Jesus unleashes a scathing attack on the practice of some of the clergy of the day who wore long flowing robes, having the respect and admiration of the people, taking advantage of women like this. She wasn’t just a "poor widow." She was poor because she was a widow. There was no such thing as a rich widow in that culture. To be widowed didn’t mean just that you lost someone you may have loved, but also that you were losing the one on whom you were totally dependent. Widows were forced to live off the good graces of other male relatives and anyone who might provide a meal here, a little money there.

So what is it about her, about her offering, that Jesus wants us to watch? Well, the first thing to be said is that she should be seen at all. Jesus had to call the disciples’ attention to her. Like them, we tend to watch the main act, follow the important action. Jesus watches the margins, notices the unnoticeable. The widow stands there on the margins, on the margins of the society of her day, and on the margins of all we hold dear - our freedom and independence, yes, our security, the things that get us noticed by others. We’ve earned these things, deserve them, even. But we are to watch her because in some essential way she is a spiritual mentor to us. It has to do, somehow, with her freedom - even though she is so dependent. Those two coins weren’t going to buy much, weren’t going to change her life. Poor people know that when you’ve got so little, a penny or two isn’t going to move you from welfare to work. She could be at peace and joyful in knowing she was able to give to the temple treasury. She was a dependent person before she gave the coins, and that didn’t change once she let them go. It wasn’t money or status that she was dependent upon - she had neither. She didn’t even have bootstraps to pull herself up by. She was dependent upon God and her neighbor for everything.

I think Jesus wants us to see as we watch her - and her poverty helps depict it in bolder lines - that this is what we are to be like before God, dependent upon nothing but the grace of God. We are to be people without any resources except the riches of God’s mercy. This changes our relationship to all that we consider to be "ours," and it helps us to understand how it is true that what the woman gave, as small as it was, far outweighed the much more the others gave from their abundance. When you give out of your abundance you still have abundance left. Jesus makes it clear that the standard measurement for assessing gifts is not how much we give to the work of God or how much we put in the offering plate, but how much we have left for ourselves - not how much we have in the bank, but what money is for us.

We usually think of giving to the church and to charities as an option. It comes out of whatever surplus is left after personal expenses have been met. "Disposable income," it is called in some quarters. That’s not a bad name for it, I think, except that much more of our income is probably "disposable" than we are generally willing to concede. What is included in "personal expenses" relative to our giving to God’s work? If your family is like ours, it probably includes quite a few extras. To the degree that our giving to God’s work becomes less of an "option" for us, and more of a personal requirement of our faith - to that degree, I suspect, is how much more of our income becomes "disposable." This pushes us toward considering what we are called to give as coming not off the bottom once everything else is factored in, but right off the top. It becomes essential to our peace and joy.

What does it cost to be a member of the church? Well, it costs nothing, and it costs everything. As to the particular amount - well, that’s for each of us to discern, but in our discernment we’ll arrive at a figure that represents where we are along the scale between the personal freedom and independence we’ve been taught to value so greatly as good Americans, and our great dependence on God alone. Our culture counsels us to become like the honored scribes, but Jesus counsels us to become like the dishonored widow, to model our lives on one we would normally overlook.

I hate it when someone in our family, and sometimes it’s me, rents a video at the video rental store, and forgets to take it back in time - sometimes for a long time - and we owe that much more in rental fees while the thing just sat around under a newspaper or behind the TV. We might as well, I’ll say, just drive down the street and throw money out the window. But there is a sense in which our giving to the work of God in the world is to be like that. We are used to paying for services rendered or products obtained - and we often do so begrudgingly, wondering if we are really getting something that is worth the price. But our giving to God’s work in the church and in the world cannot be bound so tightly as that, but given from the heart that is becoming freed from its connection to what is "mine," a heart that is coming to know the joy of dependence upon God alone, the joy that leads to great thanksgiving.

I think it is true that the less you have, in some ways the easier it is to let go of it. I remember early in my freshman year in college I went to church with a friend of mine. When the offering was announced I rooted around in my pockets and realized I didn’t have any money with me. Just as the offering plate was about to reach us I asked my friend for a quarter, which he gave me, and it barely grazed my palm as I sort of nudged it into the plate. He laughed, and so did I, and so did the lady who saw us. First it was his, then so briefly it was mine, and then it was God’s!

Things get more complicated when you’re dealing with more than quarters and more than yourself, but the same order applies - the proper order, I think, of our stewardship. Life is a gift, and all that is in it, including all that we earn, comes from the hands of God. You and I are the work of God’s hands. We rest and work in those hands and we shall die in those hands. I don’t want to be free of those hands - for that would be death to me. In those hands is life abundant. In those hands we are free indeed.

Amen.

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