Christ the Widow

1 Kings 17:8-16
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

O God, you show forth your almighty power chiefly by reaching out to us in mercy. Grant us the fullness of your grace, strengthen our trust in your promises, and bring all the world to share in the treasures that come through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.

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This story from Mark's Gospel is one of those Bible stories we use over and over again for stewardship campaigns. If the widow, we say, can put in so much of her offering that she has nothing else to live on, what are we waiting for? Indeed, it’s a good question: what is there to keep us from giving all that we have, instead of working so many hours to hold onto it that we don’t even have the time left at the end of the day to enjoy it? What sort of giving - what sort of faith - are we part of if, like the rich who made offerings out of their abundance, we hardly even notice the giving? It’s a bit like a man getting a pay raise and buying his wife flowers for his anniversary so he can stay extra hours at work to make even more money, or like Santa giving the kids bigger toys each year even though mom and dad are working too hard to play with the kids. When we talk about stewardship, we either narrow it down to only talking about giving money until it hurts, or we talk about our struggles with the budget and paying the oil bill, or we hem and haw and don’t want to offend anyone by talking about money at all.

However, I want to say this morning that the story of the widow giving away all she has to live on is about way more than just money. First of all, let’s take a look at the obvious injustice: it was the job, the calling, the express purpose of the temple, second only to reminding people of the covenant God had made with them, to take care of the widow and the orphan. There are two laws that sum up the purpose of being God’s chosen people: love God, and love your neighbor. In order to be a light of any value to the nations, God’s people have got to take care of widows and orphans. It’s stated pretty clearly in the prophets that this is the will of God. So how in the world did this temple fall so far from that simple, basic commandment, that this widow ends up so completely destitute? Or had she been so uplifted by the temple that she knew she didn’t need those two copper coins because meals on wheels was going to show up again tomorrow? I’d like to say it was the latter, that she had been taken care of so regularly she knew she didn’t need even a penny, but I know God’s church is made of people, and that people have been falling short of those basic two laws of love since the beginning. So that’s a pretty big problem. God keeps choosing broken people to take care of broken people. The rich who don’t understand how to care for the poor, the poor who can’t take care of themselves, everybody in between on that spectrum, each in varying degrees of denial about how bad things are, somehow God makes a kingdom out of broken people. Which is pretty important, because there isn’t another kind of person on the planet. We’re all broken, broke, and poor, in one way or another.

In comparison with the high and mighty religious rulers of the day, too, it’s almost humorous how absolutely clueless those men in long robes are. And it’s not lost on me that I’m in a long robe when I lead worship. We like our privilege and our power whenever and however we can get it. Sometimes we’re born to it, like the priests of the ancient tribe of Levi, or the upper classes who inherit wealth and position just by accident of birth, and sometimes our hard work actually pays off and we get that promotion or make all the right connections in just the right way to climb the ladder, and often it’s a mix of the two. But then, like the scribes and the crowd gathered in the same space as that poor widow, we suddenly forget how to see one another as human beings, so completely taken in by gold stars and entitlement that we build walls around ourselves and our stuff so that nobody can threaten our status. It’s not healthy, but it’s certainly bought and sold as the new measure of success on nearly every television station and in every game of comparisons that we play.

So beware the celebrities and learn from the destitute.

But if it were even that easy. Of course, the way of human nature is that, even if we decided it was that easy, we’d soon make a contest of that, announcing who was most destitute and proclaiming most righteous those who gave the most money to the poor, while demonizing the celebrities for simply having any wealth, and again we’ve gotten lost in that trap of labels and expectations and stereotypes and human judgments. I’m of course not saying we shouldn’t lift up acts of charity, just that we can’t judge ourselves by what we see.

Jesus sits down opposite the treasury, after we have had a few weeks of hearing him talk about being handed over to death, and we can finally rest in the beautiful temple and watch the work of worship take place, instead of thinking about sacrifice. Maybe Jesus hasn’t really stopped talking about his death, though. Maybe this is just one more way for him to foreshadow what is to come. We talk about stewardship and offering as though it is money we give to God. But nothing we have comes of our own work or even luck. It all, the whole world, comes first from God. Stewardship and offering starts with our creator God who has made the world and everything in it. The God who alone is able to say what anything is worth, who started off the world by saying it is good, who has watched us spend generations destroying the world (including each other!) and has rescued us time and again from ourselves, from our despair, and from our anxious clutching at life to tightly we’ve strangled it to death.

Jesus sits down opposite the treasury and shows us the image of God, created in all of those people, made most evident in the trust and the generosity and even the foolishness of that widow who gave out of her poverty, her last penny, all that she had to live on. We have said it’s a good model, a showing of two extremes of giving, that we can learn how we ought to give to be really faithful Christians. Jesus talks a lot about money, so we can’t just ignore it. More than that, though, is the reality of who it is who is watching this and pointing out the widow to his disciples: Jesus Christ, in our confession of faith, is God incarnate, God with us, God with skin on walking in the world. And if God - who alone has the power to ultimately create and destroy and judge, took on flesh and blood and bone, lived through stubbed toes and puberty and the Roman occupation and threats to his life from his own people - this very God has come to us in our dirt and mess, what else can we say God is like but this widow? “All she had to live on” is all that she gave. To a temple that was failing miserably at taking care of her. Yet she gave anyway.

Jesus sits down opposite the treasury and tells his disciples again, by way of another living parable, what he is about to do. Here are the scribes and priests who claim to know God, who have left God’s commandments in favor of being popular. Here is a widow who is the bottom of the social barrel and not even worth a second glance from anybody who’s got a reputation. Here are people who have forgotten God, and here is a widow who foreshadows what God is up to. Jesus is, after all, about to give us all that he has to live on. He’s already at the mercy of strangers as a wandering Rabbi - though those strangers soon become either followers or adversaries. He’s put himself entirely into the hands of the people who will kill him, disregarding their malice and hypocrisy, out of his love for them. His love for them is also his love for us, no matter how often we ignore or make mockery of him.

Widows in Jesus’ day weren’t seen as much, if they were seen at all. But God became weak and powerless just like that widow, in order to save us. The widow didn't hold back, but gave everything she had to live on. Jesus didn't hold back, either, but he gave his entire life. For us.  Just as God is always giving, always pouring God's whole self into us, always emptying out for us, given and shed for you. It's how this whole creation got started, after all. And if God can create a world out of a mess of darkness, or make a garden grow where there hadn’t been one before, or use a widow to feed Elijah the prophet during a famine, or bring Lazarus back from the dead, or let us kill him while he pours out forgiveness from he cross, or rise to new life on the third day and bring us all with him through death and on to the other side… if God can be seen in the life and meager gifts of a widow, what do you think God can reveal in your life, in your gifts, in your emptiness and weakness? Maybe an example for others. Maybe foolish and extravagant love. Maybe even resurrection and new life. May it ever be so.