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.
