Readings (click here for full text of the readings):
   1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

Today’s gospel reading is the famous story of the widow’s mite.  As Mark tells it, Jesus is sitting in the Temple, watching people make their contributions.  There were about a dozen or so boxes there for people to drop their bills or coins into, most which were big and fancy and in plain view. The rich folks usually made donations there, making sure the coins clinked extra loud so that people would see how much they were giving. But a few of the boxes were sort of off to the side, out of sight, so that more humble people could put in their gifts, whether large or small.

Then a widow comes along.  Now widows were about the most vulnerable and needy people in Jewish society. And there were a lot of them, because it was common for young women to marry much older men.  When the husband died, the Scribes were in charge of settling his estate, and they would typically commit a large amount of the widow’s fund to the temple for their own personal administration. As the organizers of temple worship, the Scribes didn’t technically make a salary, but they were able to keep large portions of inheritances that should have gone to widows.

The widows had no one to speak for them, or defend them; they were at the mercy of the religious authorities. Widows in that world would probably correspond with a variety of different people in our world: people addicted to drugs or alcohol; people who’ve been laid off; retired people who can’t afford to live on their fixed incomes.

But even though she was so poor, the widow in the story walks up to one of the boxes in plain sight of everyone and puts in two small copper coins, each of which was worth about a tenth of a laborer’s hourly wage.  In our world, she’d have put in about a dollar. Seeing what she did, Jesus calls together His disciples and points out that whereas all the rich folks gave whatever they could afford, this woman had given everything she had to live on.

So what does this mean?  There are a couple of obvious morals to the story.  The first is that God is calling us to give ’til it hurts. The absolute amount that people give isn’t the most important thing; it’s how much of what we have that we give to God, that really matters. Ten bucks from someone with that much in the bank means a lot more than ten bucks from Bill Gates.

This idea fits really well with the Old Testament reading, where we have yet another widow who’s destitute. She’s got just enough food left for one last meal for her and her son, and after they eat it, she believes they’re going to die, because there won’t be any food left and no money to buy any more. But then Elijah comes along and tells the widow to give him some food, and even after she tells him how destitute she is, he still asks her for a little bit of what she thought was going to be her last meal on earth.  She gives it to him, but the jar of meal never empties, nor does the jug of oil, and she and her entire household eat many more meals from it.

The take-home message? Give until you haven’t got anything left.  Because God is asking for it all, your last dime, your last meal, everything.

This is pretty darn good stuff for a stewardship sermon. Unfortunately, as those of you who were here a few weeks back will remember, we already had this year’s stewardship sermon. Or, as one parishioner called it, the “shake ’em up” sermon. So we’re going to have to find something else to say about this.

A second moral of the story that some people point to is the stinging criticism of hyperreligious people.  Beware of the scribes, Jesus says, who love to say long prayers and sit in the front pew in church (which proves, by the way, that they weren’t Episcopalian).  They wear long robes and know the movers and shakers of the world.  Yet at the same time they “devour widows’ houses” for their own gain. 

Unfortunately, it’s not too hard to figure out who the Scribes of our day are. An obvious one is the televangelist Robert Tilton, who invoked this very passage to entice people to contribute to his “ministry.” He was very successful, too, becoming a multi-millionaire through the humble donations of thousands of mostly poor people. One of his fund-raising letters exhorted recipients to “WRITE A CHECK FOR THE BEST POSSIBLE GIFT THAT YOU CAN GIVE!! Make it a widow’s step-of-faith and give the devil a black eye by placing the biggest, largest, most generous gift (that would defy natural reason) into God's work.” 

Tilton received stacks of handwritten prayer requests accompanied by contributions, but in 1991 was caught cashing the checks and throwing the prayer requests in the garbage without even reading them. He mounted quite an original defense, though, claiming that he’d spent so much time praying over those requests – even to the point of physically lying on top of them in various stages of undress – that he’d absorbed the ink into his bloodstream and had to be hospitalized for “ink poisoning.”  Few were convinced of his innocence, yet somehow he’s recently returned to television, albeit rather late at night on a few obscure stations, but his message remains the same, as does his blindness to today’s text.

So are we finished?  Is that it? The widow’s mite means that we should give until it hurts, and at the same time be suspicious of famous people who ask us to give to them?

In the time we have left, I’d like to argue that while both of those are valuable bits of advice, they don’t have anything to do with this story.  They should be heeded – especially the stuff about giving when those stewardship letters arrive in the mail this month – but they’re actually an easy way out of the harder message Jesus was trying to get across.

Let’s begin by looking at the context. In the verses that come before the story of the widow’s mite, Jesus teaches openly in the temple and criticizes the Scribes who worked there, whom He says will receive “greater damnation.”  Right after Jesus describes the widow’s mite, He proclaims that the temple will be destroyed, and not one stone of it will remain standing.

Since it’s bracketed by condemnations of the temple, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the story of widow’s mite has something to say about the way the temple worked. Which calls into question the central principle of the story itself. It’s easy to conclude the story is basically one of praise. “Look at the widow.  Look at her faithfulness. We should all be like her.”  Stuff like that.

But Jesus isn’t doing much complimenting here. Instead, he’s doing a lot of condemning, both of individuals (the Scribes) and the system (the Temple).  Look closely at His exact words: “This poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury; For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.”

Certainly Jesus respected what the widow had done; in no way was He criticizing her. But He wasn’t complimenting her, either. He wasn’t lifting her up as an example for us to follow. He was just stating a fact: that the Temple demanded the poor to give up everything they had, and didn’t ask very much of the rich at all. And the end result was that the widow didn’t have a cent left to her name, and was going home helpless, and exploited.

Given the way the system worked, the widow did the only faithful thing available to her. And it probably was important to her, as well. Gordon Cosby, now the pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., tells of his experience as a young pastor at a Baptist church in Virginia.  He found out that one of his parishioners, a widow with six children, was tithing on an income that wasn’t enough to put food on the table to begin with. Cosby went to talk to her, and this is how he describes what unfolded:

I went and told her of [my concerns] … I told her as graciously and as supportively as I know how that she was relieved of the responsibility of giving. As I talked with her the tears came into her eyes. “I want to tell you,” she said, “that you are taking away the last thing that gives my life dignity and meaning.”

It’s not our place to tell people that they shouldn’t give what they want. It’s not our place to overlook the selfless sacrifice of so many people who give and give and give, in order to make other people’s lives better. But it is our place, and our calling, to work toward a society that doesn’t ask the poor to forsake everything, and doesn’t let the rich slide by, self-righteous and untroubled.

To spend all our time praising the widow’s action is like applauding the guy who ran into a burning building to save the people sleeping inside, without ever asking why landlord hadn’t installed a fire alarm.  It’s like admiring the nurses who work in the free clinic down the street, without ever wondering why the U.S. is the only developed nation that doesn’t consider basic health care a right of all citizens. It’s like congratulating the soup kitchen for serving so many meals each week, without ever criticizing our government for shredding the safety net of the poorest of the poor, in order to cut taxes for the wealthy.

The widow Jesus talks about took a remarkable step of faith, that’s for sure, but it’s easy for us to praise her because that doesn’t ask us to rethink the way we live. We can talk about giving more money to charity, like she did, but if her story is just about her, then the society around us won’t ever have to change. We can go right on believing that economic prosperity is a sign of God’s favor, even though the Bible says exactly the opposite. The economists say you’re doing something right if you’ve got a lot of money; Jesus says you better watch out if you do, because if anybody else out there doesn’t have enough, He’s going to hold you responsible. And we can avoid all those difficult questions about the way our country works, the way our world works. We can stare right at the widow and talk about how holy she is, and never take the blinders off long enough to question the world that would ask her to give away everything she had, even if that means she has to go home to die.

It’s short-sighted to spend all our time praising the widow, never asking why Jesus was so angry about the way the Temple treated the poor that He overturned the tables of the money changers and repeatedly condemned the Scribes. But to hold her up as an example for the poor to follow, encouraging them to give part of their last meal away while the rich feast on, that is an abomination.

If we have any doubt of that, we need only look at the end of the Old Testament reading. Elijah made this stunningly bold request, and the widow obeyed: she gave Elijah a part of her last meal. But then, somehow, miraculously, the jar of food never seemed to get empty.  The jug of oil always seemed to be full. And she and her household ate for many days.

Elijah didn’t only ask the widow for a sign of faith; he asked her for food, because he was hungry; and then God provided her with ample food and drink, because she was hungry, too.  We must not let the widows leave the temple with only praise and admiration. God calls us to walk with them on their journey; to provide them with love, and acceptance, and food, and drink; and to indict and oppose the system that made them as poor and vulnerable as they are. Only then, when we’ve taken the hard step of calling into question all our assumptions and the way that we live our lives, will we have honored the memory of that widow, and learned the lesson Jesus was trying to pound through our thick, stubborn heads.

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