Of Mites and Millions
Mark
12:38-44
First
Presbyterian Church of Batesville
November
14, 2010
Dr.
Robert Wm Lowry
Mark’s
gospel is meant to be read theologically rather than historically or
biographically. He seeks to provide a
theological account of Christ the worker of great miracles rather than the
great teacher of Matthew and Luke or the philosopher of John. For Mark, Jesus’ ministry is in many ways
itself a theological interpretation of the covenant between God and
humanity. In this short story, Mark
seeks to show a Christological interpretation of the enduring theological concept
of the righteous.
Now
that word, righteous, gets a bad rap in our contemporary minds. When
we hear it we think “self-righteous” or “arrogant” or even “intolerant.” In biblical terms, however, the term means
something altogether different. To be
righteous means to be anything but those things. It means to be self-giving, to be humble
before God and to be welcoming, especially to those who are among the least
powerful in the community. In the case
of the biblical world, that meant widows and orphans and immigrants from other
places. To be righteous is to look out
for their well-being and to put your trust in God and God’s work.
For
those of us reading biblical commentaries and the notes in the margins of our
study bibles, all that seems well and clear.
In Mark’s time, however, it was anything but. Writing only a few years after the resurrection,
Mark is sharing the story of Jesus in a world still reeling from the titanic
shift that he brought to church and society.
Imagining what it must have been
like in those earliest years of the church, I do not have too much trouble
imagining the kind of anxiety it must have produced to experience such a
radical shift in thinking and theology within the community. They knew what the law said but Jesus kept
saying that he came to fulfill the law and that there was this new law about
loving God and your neighbor. So what
were they supposed to do now? What was
the measuring stick? “What does it mean
to be righteous now?” they must have been asking.
According to this parable, the short
answer is simply this: if you are like the widow who gives all she has, you are
righteous. If you are like the scribes
and Pharisees, well, you better watch out.
That reading is certainly easy, but
it is also misses the point. You see
this story is not actually about money.
Well, let me restate that, it is not entirely about money. It is about trust.
Unfortunately for much of the
church’s history, this text has been reduced to a morality tale about money and
used as a tool to pick many people’s pockets.
This text is half of the formula for the phenomenon of Prosperity Gospel
preaching. You know that kind. Those are
the preachers who assure you that if you will give your last two copper coins
to the church, God will reward you with riches in this life. It is the gospel of quid pro quo. God will prosper you if you will only follow
the example of the widow and bankrupt yourself by giving all you have to the
church first. Under this formula,
righteousness is defined as sacrificing all you have to the church in the hope
that you will be rewarded with even more later on.
Jesus, in this account from Mark,
does in fact lift up the importance of giving sacrificially but it is not part
of a formula for later riches. There is
nothing in the story to say that the widow gave so that later God would make
her rich. Her righteousness does not
come from the size of her gift but by what the gift means.
Now make no mistake, the money matters. It matters that the widow and we support the
church with our financial resources. It
is those gifts that make the ministries of the church possible. Those gifts keep the lights on, they pay the staff,
they buy the curriculum and fund the mission.
The money in the plate, whether the widows copper coins or the
millionaire’s whelming gift, are vital to the ministry of the church and we
would not be able to do much of our work without the generous support of our members.
What this story in Mark points us
toward, however, is something beyond the gifts themselves. Those coins represent more than money. They represent faith and belief. They represent hope and trust. Jesus illustrates in this parable the reality
that these things must be lived out in our lives in concrete acts and not
solely in religious rituals. By
contrasting the widow’s faith with the hollow faith of the scribes and the
Pharisees, Jesus recalls that powerless rituals do not call forth deep acts of
faith from our witness in the world.[i] Instead, these heartless rituals have become
pro forma ceremonies marking questionable status and fallow craven piety.
If we are not careful, a stewardship
campaign can become one of those fallow craven pious rituals. When our stewardship is a once a year hurdle
to clear so the budget can get made, we miss the point of the widow’s
gift. When she put those two coins in the
offering, what the English translation refers to as “all she has to live on,”
what she really puts in is a faith-filled offering of herself to the service of
God in the world. Perhaps rather than
“all she has to live on,” a better translation would be “all that she
has.” Because when she puts her worldly
wealth in the offering, she is also putting her trust and faith that it will be
used for the glory of God.
The act of giving in this story is
not so much about the doing of stewardship, the giving of the gifts like we
give today, but about being good stewards.
It is about being people whose faith is in the work of God’s church and
the work of God in the world.
In his compelling charge to
Communion, Augustine calls on us to take the grace and hope we find in the wine
and bread and make it live in our lives in ways that not only sustain us, but
model for others the enormous power of that offering for the world. That act of witness is not something we can
do at arm’s length. And neither is this.
Just as we have to experience the
table ourselves if we are to model in the world the hope that indwells the body
and blood of Christ, so too must we participate in generous giving to the work
of Christ if we hope to model that generosity to the world. Our stewardship is not merely about writing
checks to the church it is about writing the church into our lives. It is about grafting the trust and hope of
offering into who we are, not once a year when we make a pledge, but on a daily
basis. In this story Jesus calls the
disciples and the church to himself and points out this poor widow and her
manner of giving with such trust and hope.
It is that very trust and hope that followed her copper coins and today
follows our pledges of support.
It is one thing to say from the
pulpit that these are offerings of trust and hope that we should give and quite
another one to actually give them.
In recent time, this community has
experienced a sense of broken trust. For
some in our community, the church has not been worthy of the gifts of the
givers, particularly the gifts of those who felt alienated or
disillusioned. It is difficult to give
over our trust and hope when that trust and hope has been shaken.
Last
week Max told us that the officers of the church had all made a commitment for
the coming year. Those gifts were
pledges of money, but more importantly, they were pledges of trust in the
future of this congregation. Today, you
are invited to follow suit. You are
invited to make your pledge of money, yes, but more importantly of faith and
trust in the future of this place. And
whatever may rest in our past, our vision in this place is of the future. It is a vision of the possibilities found
only in Christ’s covenant community and the power of the people of God to bring
healing and wholeness to a broken world.
Even to a broken church. Our
gifts of faith and hope and trust align us, not with the troubles of the past,
but with the promise of the future.
That widow so long ago gave all that
she had in trust and we are invited to do the same. Whether that trust is measured in mites or
millions, it is another step in the direction of righteousness; the
righteousness that comes from putting our whole lives, from the coins in our
pockets to the hope of our hearts and the trust of our souls, in the hands of
Christ.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Ghost. AMEN.
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