Sunday, November 8, 2015

November 8, 2015 - Proper 27B


In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What would a stewardship season be without the widow and her two coins? It would be Thanksgiving without the turkey, Halloween without the candy, or St. Luke’s without the birthday prayer. It’s a fairly well-known passage: a widow puts in the only two coins that she has to rub together and Jesus lifts her up in comparison to those who give out of their abundance. In the context of stewardship and trying to raise funds for the church, we preachers often use this widow to encourage you to give more. But if you’ll recall my first sermon in this stewardship season, I made it clear that I don’t do guilt and I don’t do shame. We’ve taken the passage from St. Paul as our central message this year: Everyone should give whatever they have decided in their heart. Not because of guilt or obligation, but because God loves a cheerful giver.

This story isn’t in the Gospel because Jesus wanted to help the disciples with fundraising. It’s a fairly short narrative, and the danger in short passages from the Bible is that we too often assume that they have a simple and straightforward meaning: be like the widow and give all that you can to support the Church. But as we will see, the text actually has a lot more to say than that.
What Jesus does in this passage isn’t actually to recommend that we follow the widows example. Nowhere does Jesus say “do the same.” What Jesus does though is to notice the widow. Everyone else was likely looking at those scribes walking around in their long robes, saying their long prayers. They were dignitaries, and so everyone took notice when they came in. But Jesus notices the widow instead.
Scholars tell us that in the Treasury there were a series of funnel-like tubes in which you could place your offering. The more coins you put in, the more attention you’d attract to yourself as the coins clattered. But the widow’s two copper coins would have hardly made a noise at all. When they counted the money, no one would have paid any attention to the two coins; after all, they were just worth a penny. And the widow then would have returned home without any fanfare. She was invisible to everyone; everyone, that is, except for Jesus.
The Kingdom of God is not built with money, it’s built with our lives. As I said last Sunday, stewardship isn’t about amounts, it’s about intention. Jesus notes that the widow “put in all that she had;” that is, she gave all of herself. There’s a line from our Eucharistic Prayer in Rite I that is illustrative. In it, we pray “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.” The word “sacrifice” is about devotion and giving all that we have. The widow does that, and Jesus notices it. Jesus probably notices it because he knows that soon, he will sacrifice all that he has. This passage takes place just days before Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution. Jesus notices the woman because he saw himself in her.
And in that sense, the widow does become a model for us, but the example isn’t draining our bank accounts, it’s devoting ourselves, all of ourselves, to God. It’s about money, but it’s also about a lot more than money. It’s about our time, our energy, our talents. The widow prefigures what Jesus will do: living a Eucharistic life. A life rooted in the Eucharist is one that is rooted in gratitude. It is one that involves brokenness and Resurrection. A seminal book in my theology is Resident Aliens, and in it the authors say “The most credible form of Christian witness is the creation of a living, breathing, visible community of faith.” That is what this widow is doing. She shows us what it means to be faithful. That is what Jesus shows us on the cross. And that is what Archbishop Curry has been talking about over the past few months, and we need more of it.
If you haven’t yet watched his sermon from last Sunday’s Installation service, I highly recommend it. He speaks powerfully about the Jesus Movement. The Jesus Movement is more than a confession of faith, more than identifying as a Christian, but rather is about being a part of God’s dream for this world. It’s about giving all of ourselves to the Gospel. The Jesus Movement is about loving our neighbor, it’s about sharing the love of Jesus, it’s about working for reconciliation and peace, it’s about giving all that we have to God because God has given all that God has to us.
The thing is, our society is hungry for something. We want acceptance, and joy, and love, but there aren’t many places to find it, sometimes not even in the Church. Church can sometimes become a burden when we approach it from a place of obligation. The text doesn’t tell us much about the widow, but I really do think that she was a cheerful giver. I don’t think she begrudgingly gave those two coins, I think she rejoiced in doing so.
It’s the difference between giving to a need and needing to give. There’s a syndrome called “compassion fatigue” that people can feel when they are asked to contribute to too many organizations. Your church asks for money, your child’s school is doing a fundraiser, there’s a natural disaster and the Red Cross wants a donation, you check out at the grocery store and are asked if you’d like to make a contribution to some charity, someone on the street corner asks for a dollar. And you get burned out. It’s not that you don’t have enough money to give to them all, it’s that the need becomes overwhelming, even depressing. It begins to look like there just isn’t enough to go around.
But the widow doesn’t seem to be suffering from compassion fatigue, and she doesn’t seem to be giving to a need. The Temple didn’t need her two coins, and God probably would understand why she would have been reluctant to give them away. But she does just that because she has a need to give. Sometimes people, incorrectly, label this widow as a “sucker” for giving to a corrupt institution. They say that the Temple was “devouring her house” and she fell into their trap. But that’s not the way it is. If Jesus thought it was wrong for her to give, he could have stopped her or he could have given a lesson about checking out the charity navigator website before giving a donation. But he doesn’t, because she wasn’t giving to a need, she had a need to give.
She had made the decision, like Jesus, to be a part of God’s dream instead of the nightmares of this world. She knew of God’s grace, and could do nothing but respond with grace. She was an early part of the Jesus Movement when she decided to devote her life to God. And so Jesus lifts her up, making an invisible woman into the model for discipleship. This passage isn’t about how you give as much as it is about how you live.
There is a reason why Jesus preached more about money than nearly any other topic, because he knew the dangers of money. And if you look at all of the examples of injustice in our society, you can easily find the common thread – you just have to follow the money. Why are school systems failing: partially because standardized testing companies have a financial interest in keeping a system in place that doesn’t work. Why is our criminal justice system broken: because many jails are now run by for-profit companies. Why are there so many examples of corruption in pharmaceutical and insurance companies, defense contractors, and financial institutions? Money. Now it’s not so much that we love pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, but rather that money is a false idol, a clear violation of the commandment that we are not to have any idols before God. Jesus prophetically said that we cannot be fully dedicated to God and money.
            The question is: do you operate out of a theology of abundance or a theology of scarcity? That is, will God and the community take care of you out of our collective abundance, or do you need to stockpile all that you can get your hands on to make sure that you’re okay? Money isn’t the problem, it’s just a symptom of the problem. The problem is that we’re not really a community anymore, and in that context, hoarding makes sense. This is why the widow is poor and vulnerable, she had become invisible to the community. What is dangerous about this is that this widow is an image of Christ, and so when she becomes invisible, we see less of Christ in our world.
            What happens if someone falls ill and can’t make their mortgage payments? Normally, they end up losing their house and may end up homeless. When we retire and end up on a fixed income, we don’t reasonably expect people to make sure that we’ll be taken care of. We’ve become so individualized and isolated from each other that for our own survival, we are often forced to choose between our own well-being and that of others. And let me be clear, I’m as guilty of this as anyone in this room. The model that we have in this widow and in Jesus is giving all of ourselves to God. The problems of sin, jealousy, estrangement, poverty, and greed come about when we don’t fully invest in the Kingdom of God. When we give all that we are, we get closer to that heavenly vision where no one has too much and no one has not enough.
            The good news is that there absolutely enough: there is enough love, there is enough space, enough money, enough food, enough medicine, enough housing. God is a God of abundance, we need to put our faith in God’s abundance and in each other. But our fears sometimes restrict us in fully devoting ourselves to God. We can’t rely on each other, so we hoard. As the widow was ignored, we sometimes ignore the grace of God, so it seems that God isn’t around. Maybe we don’t trust ourselves, so we have trouble trusting others. The widow’s giving says that she is devoted to God; what does your giving say about you?
            It really all does come down to what you focus on. Jesus chooses to focus on the widow – that wonderful, cheerfully giving, generous, blessed widow. May God grant us eyes to see examples of Christ-like devotion, sacrifice, and abundance in our world. May God grant us the hearts and hands to serve in the Jesus Movement. May God grant us the courage to give all of ourselves, as the widow and Jesus did, and in doing so, transform this world from the nightmares of sin into the Dream of God. Amen.