A parishioner approaches his priest. “I have some bad news. My old car finally gave up the ghost and
yesterday I went to buy a brand new one.
The problem is my car payment is the same amount as my monthly pledge
and I can’t do both. I really need a new
car and I hope you will understand.” The
priest, very excited, says, “I think I’ll go down to the dealership. I didn’t realize you can buy a new car for that
little.”
The Widow’s mite. It is an enduring phrase that survives in our
contemporary lexicon even though most people don’t know its origin in the
bible. If I had a penny for every stewardship
sermon ever preached based on this story I would have a whole lot of
mites. I have some good news and some
bad news. The good news: I am not going
to preach another stewardship sermon based on this text. The bad news: by the time I am done, you just
might wish I had.
Let’s put this story into context. It is Tuesday in the week of the Passover
celebration in Jerusalem. On Sunday
Jesus entered the city riding a donkey – a very intentional act with messianic
implications. Mark tells us Jesus enters
the Temple and takes in the entire scene, but because it is late he leaves for
the evening.
On Monday he returns to the Temple. Normally a busy place, during the Passover it
resembles Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Perhaps more than a million people have poured into the city for the
festival. They are obligated to offer
various sacrifices while there. Many
have travelled long distances, making transporting the various animals required
for these religious obligations quite difficult. Over the years the Temple has developed a tidy
way to deal with the problem. They have set
up a system that allows pilgrims to offer money rather than animals.
Now, the most common form of currency at the
time was a Roman coin that bore the image of the emperor, who claimed to be
divine. Temple officials held these inscripted
coins contained a graven image and thus were unsuitable as an offering. No problem, money exchangers set up shop in
the Temple courts so pilgrims could trade Roman coins for currency acceptable
as an offering. Of course there was a
cost for this service and moneychangers were notorious for exploiting a profit
any way possible. Jesus’ first act in
the Temple is to turn over the tables of the moneychangers, claiming God’s
house should be a place a prayer, not a den for thieves and robbers. His act does not bring an end to this
process. It only disrupts it
momentarily. Still, it makes a statement
and reveals Jesus’ deep dislike for what God’s Temple has become.
Now it is Tuesday and Jesus has returned. If the Temple officials were leery of him
before the incident on Monday, imagine their concern now. A group is sent to confront him. They demand to know by what authority he does
what he does. They challenge Jesus with
a serious of questions, aiming to discredit him or, even worse, to find legal
grounds on which to arrest him.
Once this confrontation ends, Jesus is sitting
in the Temple courtyard women were allowed to enter. It was sixty feet square with a colonnade
running along its interior walls. Thirteen
wooden boxes known as Trumpets were located in the colonnade. Each box had a trumpet-shaped funnel mounted
on it. Wide at the top and narrow as it
came to the box, it was designed to catch coins pilgrims dropped into the
various boxes. Each box was designated
for a specific purpose or sacrifice.
Worshipers were obligated to contribute to the first nine boxes while
the last four were strictly voluntary.
Jesus is watching masses of people drop coins
into these various boxes while at the same time scrutinizing Temple officials as
they glide around in fancy cloths. They
are pompous figures who feed on the respect people must offer to them. Their prayers are long and elaborate and
intended only to impress those who are listening. Jesus is absolutely disgusted with the entire
scene. The hypocrisy of it galls
him. He comes from humble roots and
knows first-hand the toll these taxes take on the poor. He knows what it cost his family and people
in his community to feed this religious machine. What sense does it make for a widow to be forced
to liquidate her home in order to pay the Temple? Whatever the original intention for the
Temple was, what it has become by Jesus’ day is just plain appalling.
He notices a poor widow drop two coins into one
of the thirteen treasury boxes. He reckons
it is all she has to live on. Based on
his observation, Jesus must wonder how or even if she will survive. He will be dead on Friday. Will she even make it that far? He points out to his disciples the egregious nature
of a system where some people can afford to pay the Temple tax out of their
abundance but the widow has to surrender everything in order to participate.
Her act is not an example for us to
follow. She is a victim of a very
powerful and deeply corrupt system. We
should not feel ashamed that our pledge to the church is not as costly as
hers. We should feel anger at a system that
treats people this way.
And, as Jesus points out, a system is not some
anonymous entity, it is a collection of people who benefit personally from the
way things are. This privileged group
oversees a structure that uses religious pretense to take from the poor their marginal
resources in order to perpetuate their own lifestyle of prestige and lavish
living. How desperate are these people
to protect their system? Well, about the
same time this widow turns over all she has to the Temple treasury, Temple
officials take thirty pieces of silver out of it to pay Judas to betray Jesus,
whose teaching and actions are a major threat to the racket.
For centuries this story has been used to teach
something important about Christian stewardship, but I think we have gotten it
wrong all along. Why would we applaud a
destitute woman who was obligated to give her last two pennies to the Temple
and then slipped away to starve? Jesus
is not calling us to emulate her example.
He is calling us to weep. And to
rage.
And maybe, just maybe, Jesus is calling his
followers to give their lives to expose injustice in any and all forms we
encounter it. “Do you see what she has
done?” he says to his followers. “She
has given all that she has, her very ‘life’ (bios in the Greek, a part of the root of our word biology – the study of life). We will never know to what degree her example
solidifies in Jesus’ mind what he must do, but in three days he too will give
his bios to expose the Temple system
for what it is. As such, she is not a
model for parishioners to follow at pledge time. Rather, she is a courageous, prophetic figure
more akin to Rosa Parks than a generous giver.
Well, I said earlier
you might end up wishing this was just another stewardship sermon. It seems to me what is difficult about what I
have said is figuring out what to do with it.
Many preachers and many listeners might go from this point into the
waters of politics; focusing on particular candidates or specific policies that
promise to obliterate unjust systems and champion the cause of the
oppressed. This tact reduces your
Christian obligation to walking into a voting booth and pulling a specific
lever. Even worse, it reduces Jesus’
glorious vision of the kingdom of God to support of one political party or the
other.
For me, I take away
from this a mandate to reform and transform.
Neither is easy or clear. It
calls us to shift our charitable mindset from “doing good” to fostering new
life. Again, easier said than done. Bill and Dixie Peachy have a vision of this
through their support of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Suffolk. It is an organization that seeks not to give
‘things’ to ‘needy’ people, but to foster life-changing and life-enhancing
relationships transforming our community.
I would life to think
that our Christmas Giving Opportunities are cut from the same cloth. Boys Home of Virginia in Covington and
Jackson-Feild Home in Jarret touch the lives of teenage boys and girls who are
alone, disadvantaged, at risk, or who have struggled to find a way through our
traditional educational process. Our
project will provide a modest Christmas for five youngsters at each institution
and, through the grace of God, will encourage them on their path to a better
life.
What we contribute to
Episcopal Relief & Development will provide a wide array of resources to
elevate the lives of a few specific people in a particular community:
· 100
trees for reforestation of a devastated area.
· A
micro-credit loan that will engender economic opportunity.
· Three
goats that will provide milk, cheese, manure to improve farming, and will
reproduce quickly (everything on most of our Christmas wish lists, I’m sure!)
· A
clean water source for three people.
· A
care package for three newborns to improve health and quality of life at a time
when infants are most susceptible to malnutrition and disease.
“Do you see that poor
widow over there?” It is a question
Jesus asked of his disciples and asks of us.
It is a great paradox in our time that we have the ability to see people
scattered over every corner of our planet while at the same time feel so helpless
to make a difference, even though we have more resources and opportunities at
our disposal than ever before. I invite
you to join me in noticing the ‘poor widow’, in being aware of how systems and
structures perpetuate hopelessness, and doing what you can to make things
different.
