Scripture: Mark 12:38-44
I know not all of you were here to hear what Dawg Strong had to say in his words about stewardship last week, but my thoughts for this morning were set in motion by what he said then. What Irving Jones had to say this morning might have inspired a sermon too, but there wasn’t enough time between when he finished and when I have to begin for him to help me very much.
In my mind I had two obvious choices to pick from so far as a preaching theme for this morning was concerned. It’s the Sunday before Thanksgiving, so that’s one possibility, except that this year I’m the designated preacher for our joint Thanksgiving service and I already have a thanksgiving-themed sermon ready to go for tonight, so I figured I wouldn’t double up on that one. One thanksgiving sermon is enough for me to give and for anyone to hear, so I figured I’d stick with the other option: stewardship. Since, as you’ve heard, today is pledge Sunday, it also seems like that would be an occasion for a sermon of some kind, of what kind I wasn’t sure, but of some kind related to that. So this will be a stewardship sermon…sort of.
Let me take you through my thought process on this. I was sitting there listening to Dawg last Sunday and he brought up the story of the widow who, as she was entering the temple, dropped a couple of coins into one of the receptacles that were placed strategically around the court, the large area people gathered in and passed through as they were entering the temple proper. Dawg was saying, as I recall, that God does not despise, and the church if it is being the church, does not despise, and most of all we ourselves, the givers of such gifts, should not despise gifts which might seem small, small in relation to what others maybe are able to give, or small in relation to what the total need is, but not small at all from the perspective that ought to prevail in the church. Jesus clearly tells us that there is this different perspective when he praises the woman for what some might consider a meager gift, saying that she had actually given more than all the other people casually dropping in their gifts because she had given all she had.
Well, I was listening to Dawg talk about this story and about the idea of a different standard by which we value our giving and I have to confess my mind started to drift. I’d feel bad about this except that I know minds do tend to drift while people are talking sometimes, my own included, and I was drifting because of something Dawg had said. I was thinking that this story Dawg was referring to would probably qualify as a teaching of Jesus and since pledge Sunday was coming up this week, maybe I should use that as my scripture instead of what I had been planning to do, and I wonder if there’s any more to say about the scripture than what Dawg has already said. Of course by that time I had missed some of what Dawg had already said, so I couldn’t be sure of whether what I might say would be a repetition or not.
In any case, obviously, I decided to go with it, this scripture. And I think I do have a few additional thoughts. One of them has to do with why Jesus would say that the widow had given more than all the other contributors, why he would single her out as someone who should be praised for her giving. I’m thinking it’s not quite what he said, or rather that it’s more than what he explicitly said. What Jesus said was that she should be considered as having given more than all the others, because they had given out of their abundance and she out of her poverty had given everything she had, all that she had to live on. She could be thought of as giving more because percentage wise she had in fact given more. One hundred per cent. You can’t give any more than that. The others had given out of their abundance, we are told. Maybe ½%, or 1%, or 5%, or even a full tithe, 10%, but a ten per cent they could easily afford and would hardly miss because they had plenty. Clearly if you measure things by percentages, which would seem a fair way to measure things, there’s no contest. The widow is by far the more generous giver.
But I just have this funny feeling that this is not exactly what Jesus meant to say. I have this funny feeling that this different standard that Dawg was on target in referring to last week, is not just measuring giving by percentages rather than absolute amounts. That’s an easy switch to make and most everyone would agree that that’s a fairer way to measure things than just the size of the gift.
But reading between the lines, I sense it’s not just a matter of mathematics and how you calculate the size of the gift. What Jesus meant to say, if I may be so bold as to act like Jesus needs me to tell you what he meant to say, but reading between the lines I believe what Jesus meant to say is that this woman’s gift was more than the others, so to speak, because it came from the heart, as opposed to those casual gifts that were given from a place of abundance that required little thought from the giver, little sacrifice, not so much as the giving up of a show at the Paramount, or whatever. Actually, the idea that what Jesus was saying had to do more with attitude than with percentages is not just a matter of intuition. You don’t have to just read between the lines. You can read the short paragraph that comes just before where Jesus has harsh words for the insincerity of those who like to be recognized for their faith, who as he puts it “devour widows’ houses” (sounds strangely contemporary) all the while saying long prayers in church. It is the sincere, heartfelt nature of the woman’s faith that stands in contrast, not just that her gift was so large, even in terms of percentages.
I was paying attention again to what Dawg was saying—I think it was just a few moments later—when he was talking about gifts not of money, but of time, time also being something that either actually is, or certainly can feel like, is in short supply, something else we don’t necessarily have a lot of to give. And again, thinking of the story of the widow’s mite, as the story has sometimes been called, one point to be made certainly is that how a gift of time is to be measured is also not a matter of the absolute size of the gift, and in fact measuring the gift at all is not quite to the point. But even more than that, I was thinking, with the Biblical story in mind, that there is a further point to be made.
Jesus said the woman gave what she had. Ideally, that is what all our gifts to the church consist of, what we have to give. Not some portion of the time we have to give but what we as individuals, because of our being who we are, have to give. Our gifts ideally are determined not by what the church needs, though we all know the church does have needs for the time of its members as well as their money, there being positions to be filled and jobs to be done, but ideally our gifts are determined not by those various needs of the church but by what we have to give.
This falls into the category of things we know but that need to be said from time to time anyway. With only a little reflection, I think we would all agree that every person who is part of the church community is a gifted person, because gifts in their essence do not come from some special talent that one person may have in abundance as compared to others. In their essence gifts come from who we are. They come from the journeys that are ours, the way we have traveled so far, the very particular child of God each of us has become and is becoming. This too is a different way of understanding gifts that the church, if it is being the church, will have. Not a list of skills a person has to offer or hours they have to give, but a giftedness that comes from who they are. I’m sorry if this sounds a bit sappy, but I’ll say it anyway because I believe it to be true, sappy or not, that each person’s presence here is a gift, and coming to church is not duty, and is not only a time when our spirits may be nourished and recharged, if you will, though of course that may be true too, but it is an offering. We come, in the nature of things, bearing gifts.
Ideally, the gifts we have to offer because of who we are would find their way into the life of the church. Ideally, the gifts we are able to offer would be gifts that came from the heart because they would come from inside us, not from a list of organizational needs. They would come from our various wrestlings with God or with faith or from our successful or failed attempts, our successful and failed attempts to live lives of faith or of just plain humanness and where we have stumbled and so on. Ideally we would find ways to turn all of that or some of that into gifts to the church.
Just one specific comment in this regard. The woman in the story is referred to as a widow. I’m going to assume that this means she was carrying a major grief with her as an everyday part of her life. She had lost her partner at some point. I don’t know that for sure, that that was a grief. Maybe she was glad to get rid of him. But I’m choosing to think it was a grief, a lasting grief in her life. And I’m thinking that that grief was the source of the most valuable of the gifts the woman had to offer. If she gave what she had, as Jesus describes her doing, she gave from the well of her grief. She turned her grief into a gift, as we all have the opportunity to do. And indeed the gifts that come from our times of grief are almost always the most valuable gifts we have to offer. It’s only a matter of not hoarding them, a matter of not keeping them to ourselves.
Ideally, we would find a way for these gifts that come from our hearts, from who we are, we would find a way to share these gifts in the context of the church, sharing our stories, gaining and giving strength to each other. And of course in both quiet and public ways that does happen. One to one, in small groups, in public worship we make ourselves vulnerable to one another. At the same time we don’t live in an ideal world and we don’t belong to an ideal church and in the real world we sometimes settle for giving a gift that doesn’t particularly come from the heart but that does serve some particular need or purpose. None of what I have been saying this morning has much to do with pledges or committee work or the like, not much to do with it in a direct sense anyway. But it is the context for the pledges of money and time we bring today, because really we do not settle for gifts that don’t come from the heart. We may be only partially successful at it, but we continue to try to build a community of faith where there is a place for the gifts we each have to offer and where all gifts come from the heart. So long as we do that, we’ll be all right. Amen.
Jim Bundy
November 23, 2008