SunNov82009
Scripture: MARK 12:38-44
How crazy is this, that the lectionary, the church’s series of Bible readings, gives us this well-known story of “the widow’s mite” on the Sunday after our Stewardship Sunday? Wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense if it had come up last week, or if we had taken some slight liberties and read this story last Sunday, a week early? It’s just kind of a slam dunk to read that story of the widow’s gift on a day when we’re focused on what it means to give. The widow gives everything she has. Jesus thinks it’s fabulous. We’re to do the same. End of sermon. Time to go home.
Well, perhaps. But let’s not be too quick about this. As with most of you, I look at that passage, and I’m immediately sure what it means. No need to fret and stew over it: give yourself wholly and completely, and God and Jesus will approve. Case closed.
Except that maybe there’s something more to it than that. The context of the story forces us to take a closer look. Remember what we read just before the account of the widow’s visit to the temple. It’s Jesus’ criticism of the arrogant, power-hungry, show-boating scribes, who parade around in their fancy liturgical vestments and make sure that everyone notices them. They’re guilty of more than just egotism, though. “They devour widows’ houses,” says Jesus (Mark 12:40). They apparently take advantage of poor widowed women, and claim those bereaved women’s houses for themselves.
That’s what comes before the story of the widow’s mite. Right after that story, Jesus launches into a diatribe about how the end of the world is coming, and the temple is going to be destroyed (13:1-2). So here’s the question: if temple leaders are taking advantage of poor people, and if the temple itself is soon going to fall, does Jesus really think it’s a good thing for the woman to give to the temple? What’s really striking about the story itself is that nowhere in it does Jesus actually commend the woman. He doesn’t say to the disciples, “Do you see that? What she’s doing is incredibly cool!” What Jesus says is: the woman put more into the treasury than anyone else, that she in fact put in everything she had to live on. We assume Jesus thinks that’s a good thing. But Jesus never actually says it’s a good thing. He never says, “I like that. You ought to do that, too.” It’s as if I come to you and say, “Do you like my coat?” and you respond, “What a coat!” I think you love it, but all you said was “What a coat,” and you really can’t stand it!
We assume Jesus was commending the poor widow, but there’s no way of actually telling. What he may have been saying is something much more like, ‘You know, the religious establishment has become so corrupt, and its leaders act so unconscionably, that they’re stealing what this woman has. She keeps putting more and more of her money into a temple which isn’t going to survive the decade. They’re taking advantage of her. And it’s not right.’
If that’s what Jesus is saying, then what are to make of this passage? That nobody should give to the church? That the church is corrupt? That any God or person or institution that asks everything of us is misguided?
It’s possible, of course, but I hardly think so. I suspect what Jesus might say is that there’s something wrong with any system in which we expect more of people who are poor than we expect of those who are rich. I suspect what he might say is that there is something immoral about squeezing everything out of this woman in order to support pomp and circumstance and increased privileges for those who already have more than they need. I suspect what he might say is, ‘Don’t let her bear the brunt of supporting your society. Don’t suck her dry.’
Churches and societies continually have to be reminded of their tendency to take advantage of some of their members. We have to be reminded that poor people in the inner city shouldn’t be allowed to wallow in their poverty, that widows and orphans shouldn’t be bankrupted by health care, that each troubled life lost at the hand of Cleveland’s serial killer Anthony Sowell matters infinitely, that for those of us to whom much has been given, of us much is expected (Luke 12:48). I expect at least part of what Jesus is telling us is: that poor widow is not to be allowed to fall into utter poverty. Giving is only a virtue when everybody does it.
I don’t actually think Jesus minds the widow’s giving. What I think he minds is everyone’s self-centeredness. For Jesus, giving is still the greatest of all goods. It’s still the best thing a Christian can do. For Christians life begins with what God has provided to us, and it bears its fruit in what we freely offer to others. So maybe we shouldn’t expect the impoverished widow to underwrite our own comfort. What we should expect instead is our own increased generosity and self-giving.
Giving is something we can do in every dimension of our lives. It’s at least partly a matter of what we do with our money. The old saw reminds us that if you want to know a person’s priorities, look at their checkbook. What do we see there? Basic expenses of living, of course. And a degree of pleasure, we hope. Is there also, though, a substantial dose of giving to people and institutions beyond ourselves? Is there a considerable reaching out—to church, first, but also to people and organizations that teach and relieve suffering and work for justice?
Giving is at least partly a money thing. But it’s also much more than that. If you and I don’t find ways to invest in people and causes larger than ourselves, we’re doomed to a kind of wilting away, a shriveling up. Something at our core dies.
Some of us learn the richness of giving when we have children. I regularly hear people say that parenting is the hardest thing they’ve ever done, but it’s also the most rewarding. When you’re a parent, you may be challenged beyond belief—by your child’s illness or loneliness or depression or addiction, by their heading off to the military or some other dangerous profession. You may struggle with developmental difficulties, with a child who’s gay when you wish they’d been straight, or straight when you wish they’d been gay. You may see your child involved with a partner or friend you think is wrong for them. There are endless issues, and the thing is, those issues never go away.
And in the midst of all that anxiety and strain, we have the opportunity to love that child—to support them, to offer them an ear, to give our very selves to them. There may be nothing that takes us out of ourselves more than those precious, exasperating, vulnerable, beautiful children given to us for their safe-keeping.
I sometimes wonder if what Jesus is asking of us is something pretty simple—that we seek to broaden the way we are with our own children to a wider swath of the world. There’s a sense, of course, in which our children are unique; we’re never going to feel about everybody else the way we feel about them. But Jesus is talking about more than feelings when he talks about giving. He’s focused on extending the range of our care so that it widens our circle. When I remember that everybody is somebody’s child, when I remember that everybody is God’s child, it comes clear what my role is. It’s to offer myself as what might be called God’s “vicar”—to act as the agent of God, in every encounter.
Giving really has to do with investing ourselves for the sake of someone else. It may be caring for an aging parent. It may be coaching a soccer team and teaching the basics to the least skilled player on the team. It may be taking the time at the end of a busy work day to shape a church’s mission program. It may be visiting a dying and neglected church member in a nursing home. It may be, as my mother did in her visit here this week, baking my favorite chocolate birthday cake—even though it’s not my birthday—the one she made every year when I was a child. There are all kinds of ways to invest ourselves in others.
Giving has to do with passion and energy and generosity. It has to do with making room for something other than escape and lethargy and rotting on the couch. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the runaway best-seller Eat, Pray, Love. A church member sent me a speech this week of Gilbert’s. In the speech, she wonders how in the world she can ever follow up the phenomenal success of that book. She knows that, in her thirties, she has probably already had her greatest success. ‘Isn’t it all going to be downhill after this,’ people ask. ‘Aren’t you just going to be a bitter failure from here on out?’
Gilbert acknowledges that she has those feelings. And she feels a huge pressure to duplicate that earlier success. She goes on to talk, though, about the way genius has been understood over the centuries, and how that has helped her deal with the anxiety. Bear with me on this, because she makes what I think is a crucial point. This will eventually come back around! In ancient Greece and Rome, it turns out that “genius” was not something you were. It was, instead, something that you had. Or to be more precise, genius was something that came to you, as a gift. So when you achieved something really spectacular, it wasn’t so much something that you accomplished. It was, instead, something that the genius accomplished through you. Genius was what was called a “daemon,” or something like a good demon. It visited you, or not, and you were simply the beneficiary of something that you couldn’t control.
Then in the Renaissance, the whole notion of genius changed. Now, instead of “having a genius,” people “were a genius.” This, she says, is why artists came to be manic depressives who were prone to drinking gin before breakfast. Because now the pressure was too great. If what I do isn’t a raging success, it’s my fault.
Gilbert says it’s time for us to go back to that earlier understanding of genius, and to realize that our greatest successes may not really be ours at all, but the genius who has visited us. And our greatest failures may not really be ours either, because the genius simply didn’t show up that time. Sermons may be a good example of this. I may work really hard on one and have it bomb. Or, for reasons beyond anything I can figure out, it takes off and soars. Whatever it was that made it work came from beyond me.
Maybe you’ve had moments like that at work, or with friends, or as a parent. I think my finest moment as a parent came the day our older son Alex rear-ended another car on Orange St. a few years ago. When I arrived, he and he and his brother were in the car, which was still in the middle of the road. They looked like death, both of them. And I went up to one of their windows—they couldn’t even look at me—knocked on it, and said, “Hood’s up.” And they both burst out laughing. They didn’t need me to tell them what they had done wrong. They were perfectly aware of it. What they needed to know was that it was going to be alright. Thankfully, some visiting daemon let me know that. And I just let the daemon’s words speak.
Gilbert found the same thing. As she was working on the book after Eat, Pray, Love, worried that it was going to be the worst book ever written, she said aloud, to whatever spirit might be present, “‘Listen, you and I both know that if this book isn’t brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don’t have any more than this. So if you want it to be better, then you’ve got to show up and do your part of the deal. OK? But if you don’t do that, you know what, the hell with it. I’m going to keep writing anyway because that’s my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.’
“Because—in the end it’s like this—centuries ago, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And they were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I’m talking about, because I know you’ve all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn’t doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.
“And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, ‘Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God.’ That’s God, you know. Curious historical footnote -- and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from ‘Allah, Allah, Allah,’ to ‘Ole, ole, ole,’ which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, ‘Allah, ole, ole, Allah, magnificent, bravo,’ incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.
“But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it’s Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he’s no longer a glimpse of God. He’s just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he’s never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God’s name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you’re finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything.
“This is how I’ve started to think, and this is certainly how I’ve been thinking in the last few months as I’ve been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly overanticipated follow up to my freakish success.
“And what I have to, sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that, is, don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. [And this is where we come back to that notion of how important it is to give your all.] Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Ole.’ And if not, do your dance anyhow. And ‘Ole!’ to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ‘Ole!’ to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up” (TED.com), to keep giving.
God has given us more than we could ever ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20). What Jesus commends is our showing up—showing up to do our part: to love our children and our families, to give joyfully to the church and the world, to be God’s vessels of peace and love. Ole! Thanks be to God!