Mark
12:38-44
November
11, 2012
William G. Carter
As Jesus taught, he said, ‘Beware of the
scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect
in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and
places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake
of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched
the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A
poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then
he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow
has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For
all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty
has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’
This weekend marks the 27th
anniversary of my first major failure as a minister. I preached a sermon on
this Bible passage and it didn’t go well.
It was my first-ever stewardship
sermon and I did the best I could. Four weeks after my ordination, I pointed to
the widow who gave her last two copper coins to the Jerusalem temple. I praised
her sacrificial contribution and declared it was a generous example. I quoted a
famous preacher who once declared, “The Lord can do a lot with a little when he
has it all.”
The church members sat with their
arms crossed. Nothing that I said seemed to register any emotion. The offering
plates were as thinly covered as usual. It was completely flat experience. When
I walked into coffee hour a few minutes later, the people looked up, smiled
benignly, and went quickly back to their conversations.
I turned around and standing in
front of me with the church treasurer. He was a retired Air Force colonel and
he was not happy. He proceeded to unload in me in front of the coffee hour
crowd. “That was the worst excuse for a stewardship sermon that I have ever
heard,” he said in a voice far too loud. “What do you think you were trying to
do?”
People began to shuffle away awkwardly.
I stammered out, “I was talking about the generous widow as a good example for
Christian giving,” I said. He bellowed back, “I thought that’s what you were
trying to do. What a stupid sermon!”
I stood shell-shocked. I didn’t know
what to say. So he filled in the gap. “What you should have done is lay on some
guilt, and make these people feel guilty for the pitifully small contributions
that they make to this church’s budget. We will never make it on two pennies per person.” Then he spun around and stomped away. That
was 27 years ago today. My first ever stewardship sermon.
I realize that whenever scripture
gets read, people often hear whatever they are prepared to hear. That guy
wanted his pastor to shake down the congregation by laying a big guilt trip. As
he heard the story, the widow wasn’t giving enough. Two small copper coins,
equivalent to one of our pennies. He wanted me to yell at them, and when I didn’t do so,
he yelled at me.
And the fact of the matter is, Jesus
is watching the whole line of donors as they make their offering to the Temple.
The rich people put in large sums (you see, back then, they didn’t have
offering envelopes!). Even so, they were contributing their leftovers, said Jesus. But
the widow put in everything that she had. Everything! She had no public
assistance, no welfare or survivor’s pension, no official means for making an
income – and she put in her last two cents. That is sacrificial giving. Jesus
points her out, and she has been immortalized in countless stewardship sermons
over the centuries. That’s how most of us have heard the story.
But did you hear what comes immediately
before that brief vignette? Jesus is hammering away at the religious leaders of
his time. He’s going after the scribes of the Temple. They preen around like
they are important. They call attention to how they look and where they sit.
When they pray, he says, they go on far too long – and God gets bored by their
heaped up words. And what else do they do? “They devour the homes of widows.”
Now, that puts a new frame around
the picture. Step back a few paces, and get a bigger view. Jesus denounces the
scribes for pillaging the livelihoods of widows, demanding the money of those
women who lost their husbands and had no other legal means of support. He
criticizes the whole religious establishment. And then he points out this one
woman, a widow, who gives generously to the very institution that plunders her
life.
It’s disturbing. Why does that
temple exist? To maintain the relationship between God and God’s people. How
does the temple function? By teaching the scriptures and following what they
teach. And what do the scriptures say? “Doom to you who legislate evil, who
make laws that make misery for the poor, that rob my destitute people of
dignity, exploit defenseless widows, and take advantage of homeless children!”[1]
Isaiah, chapter 10. “Do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the
poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.” Zechariah,
chapter 7. [2]
Over and over in the Jewish
scriptures, the word “widow” is more than a description of a woman who lost her
husband. It is a code word for those who have no voice in society, no means of
income, no protection or care. Take care of them, God says. Do not plunder
them. That’s the very thing Jesus warns about the religious scribes of his day.
And then he points to one of the very people who is being drained dry.
Institutions can lose their souls. An
institution gets bigger. More levels of management are inserted. It will do
whatever it can to maintain its authority, and sometimes it merely perpetuates
its shell. In the process, the heart decays. All of us have stories about this,
whether it’s a business, a school, or a government agency. Procedures become
fixed. The rules take over. The bottom line becomes more important than people.
I can’t speak about how this looks
in the business world. But I know how it looks in the religious world. When
I worked with alumni from my Presbyterian seminary, we regularly heard how students
are beneath the bottom rung of the ladder. The school administration refused to
hire a full-time counselor at the same time that the trustees were cheering on
the endowment to climb over a billion dollars.
Or just this week: my Presbyterian
minister health insurance company sent out a memo. Rates for clergy health care
are going up in January 2014. Sure, that happens everywhere. But here’s the thing:
if the minister has kids young enough to be dependents, the company wants the
church to kick in even more. This will push small churches to hire an old
minister who has no kids. And here’s the thing: that memo was sent out from a
corporate business meeting being held at a resort on Hilton Head Island.
Or I remember an Op-Ed column in the
Washington Post years ago. Somebody wrote that the average age of Roman
Catholic nuns is over sixty-six, and most nuns have no pensions. As the writer
said, “Unlike the male hierarchy who controlled the collection plate, the
sisters put neither their trust in money or their money in trust. . . they
worked for less than the widow’s mite. The church never offered to care for its
own nuns.” The vow of poverty has become a vow of destitution with few new
takers.” (Colman McCarthy)
Peter Drucker, the management guru,
did a study of non-profit institutions. He warned that every human organization
can decay from within, unless it keeps revisiting its mission statement. The
critical questions are these: Why are you here? Why do you exist? What is your
real business?
Maybe the best answer to such questions came from
Jacob Marley to Ebenezer Scrooge: “Mankind was my business! The common welfare
was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my
business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business.”[3]
My friend Carlos Wilton is pastor of
the Point Pleasant Presbyterian Church in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. He’s
the one who had the Weather Channel guy broadcasting live two weeks ago today. As many as a quarter of the five hundred Point Pleasant church members
have lost their homes or left the area since Hurricane Sandy. Today was
scheduled to be that church’s Stewardship Sunday, when they were to dedicate
their financial pledges to God and God’s church. It's hard to even imagine doing that, he said.
When we talked earlier this week, Carl
said, “For the last two weeks, we have been remembering about why we have a
church. We exist to pray together. We exist to worship God together. We exist
to care about human needs.” Today he tells people to come as they are, ragged
or intact, and to come forward after worship if anybody needs individual
prayers of healing. Tomorrow night and Friday night, his people will prepare a free
community meal for anybody who is hungry or needs a friend.
“There is a circle of service,” he
says in his sermon today. “There are times in life when we are able to serve,
and other times when – as uncomfortable as that may feel – there is nothing
else to do but graciously allow others to serve us.” Hurricanes do not
discriminate. Neither should our hearts.
Now, there’s a church with its soul
intact.
“Do you see her?” asks Jesus. “Do
you see that woman over there?” She was a widow, which meant she was poor. She
didn’t have hardly anything, but she gave freely of herself. We can speculate
about her motives. Did she give out of obligation? Perhaps. Was giving her
habit? Certainly. Was giving a spiritual practice? Probably so. She did not
give her money because the institutional temple was corrupt, selfish, or heartless.
She certainly did not give money out of guilt, or because the retired military colonel
serving as the institutional treasurer cajoled her into doing so.
No. She gave because she believed
God was in the middle of the whole thing. She gave because God is bigger than
the institutions that claim to do God’s work. She gave because she wanted to be
part of God’s great salvage operation to the world.
I believe she gave because she knew
the bedrock purposes of any temple are still essential: to lead people in
praising God, to gather around the sacred texts, and to listen when the
scriptures say, “The Lord upholds the homeless child and the widow, but the way
of the wicked God brings to ruin.” (Psalm 146:9)
“Look at her,” says Jesus. “Look at
her!” She believes God is bigger than the church. She believes God wants to
work through the church. That’s why she gives her all. That’s why Jesus gives
everything, too.
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