The Might of the Mite (Mark 12:38-44)

The “widow’s mite”—it is a fairly well known story to long-time Christians.  The old widow joins the crowd standing underneath the banner “Sunday School Stories Annual Reunion”. It’s that place within our memory where we keep those beloved stories from religious education and Vacation Bible School long ago.  The guest list is a veritable “who’s who”: the Prodigal son looking sheepish after hitting rock bottom and starting his career as a feeder of pigs, the rich young ruler still hoping he can bend the rules and still take his overstuffed backpack wedged somehow through the Pearly Gates, and just for old times’ sake, the shepherds from the Nativity narratives turned up, bleary eyed from staying up to watch their flocks by night.  (Conspicuously missing are the three kings.  They said they were coming, but they’re running late. You know what they say, wise women should have been sent out to seek the baby Jesus.  After all, at least wise women know how to stop and ask for directions.....).

            The widow’s mite doesn’t sound that exciting of a story. A poor woman gave two coins, which does not sound like much, yet it is said these two coins are the sum of all she owned.  Standing there at the annual reunion of the stories learned in Sunday school, the rich young ruler sees the widow with her two coins and looks away.  Doesn’t look like much, what she has there, just holding the coins.  Why, money should have a fine purse if you’re going to carry it around!  He shifts the weight of all he owns on his back and wonders why he has yet to find the path to eternal life.

The prodigal looks at the two coins and starts weeping.  He had great wealth—half his father’s estate and yet he spent it all living the high life.  He ponders whether he’ll ever be welcome at home again…. (For the record, remember, the prodigal is always to be welcomed home.) 

The shepherds look at the widow and nod.  They understand her predicament.  More often than not, shepherds are lucky to have much money on them.  You don’t make much working the shepherd third watch shift.  You’re more likely to be serenaded by angels than make a decent living in this work….

            As grownups, the widow’s mite is heard around stewardship time. The widow is celebrated as a sign of all that is good about giving to church:  give with a sense of sacrifice, give to God with glad hearts, and the like.  The “Widow’s Mite” becomes a phrase, sort of churchly “code language” for someone who has given generously, sacrificially even, “out of very little”.

            For American Baptists, the “widow’s mite” is recalled by our denomination’s pension board.  Each year, churches give to a “thank you!” offering to retired ministers and missionaries and their spouses who have served our denomination.   The American Baptist congregation that gives the most, despite being one of our smaller churches, receives an award for their generosity.  The award remembers a time back in the early days of the Retired Ministers and Missionaries Offering (RMMO), commemorating

the anonymous gift in 1981 of a Vietnamese refugee woman worshipping with the First Chinese Baptist Church in Fresno, California.  Not knowing the full intent of the offering, but understanding the words ‘thank you’ printed on the offering envelope she slipped off her wristwatch, her only possession of value, and placed it in the envelope”.  (MMBB press releases)

            A wristwatch does not sound like much, yet it serves as a reminder of the sort of generosity that has made many of our denomination’s institutions possible.  Over the years, American Baptists have supported seminaries, care homes, neighborhood centers, and regional and national programs, thanks in part to donors who give out of their love for Christ and their desire to promote the gospel.  Our denominational history sometimes gets told as a cavalcade of the big name donors, yet a true history also remembers the witness of the multitude of donors who have made our denomination’s past possible and provided for our future through their generosity. 

Recall the witness of the Love Gift, a historic ABWM initiative, started out when the Great Depression was underway and our denomination’s national offices were in critical need of financial support.  To this day, the Love Gift boxes are still providing to help our denomination.  In 2009, the Love Gift, again just from the “spare change” and devotion of ABWM groups and individuals nationwide, provided over $400,000 as of September 30, 2009, to United Mission support—pretty impressive feat for a little cardboard box that sits on the end table, collecting coins one by one. Indeed, before the name “Love Gift” came into widespread use, the little boxes were called “mite” or “might” boxes, recognizing the humble gifts making big things possible.

            I note these stories of “the might of the mite” with due thanksgiving.  I also note that the story of the widow’s mite often gets taken a bit out of its context.  While upheld as a model stewardship lesson, the actual story within Mark’s gospel has a rather disturbing “rest of the story”.  The story appears in Mark and Luke as part of Jesus’ criticism of the corruption within the Temple.  Reading the story in the midst of its appearance within Mark’s gospel, one realizes the story has a tragic dimension.  As one scholar notes, “Although Jesus praises [the widow’s] generosity, the tragedy of her desperate situation remains. Her house has been completely devoured [by the scribes].”  (Harry Fleddermann, “A Warning about the Scribes”, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 1982: 67)   

The widow comes to the Temple treasury and gives her two coins. Jesus observes this act and recognizes her devotion. He extols her faith while exposing the corruption of Temple.  Reading Mark’s gospel, the reader discovers that Jesus sustains an ongoing critique against the religious establishment.  Read onwards in Mark as the religious establishment will collaborate with the Roman local government to get rid of Jesus.  This story of the widow’s mite comes after the “cleansing” of the Temple, where Jesus declares the commerce of the Temple improper worship.  And just after the teaching about the widow’s mite, Jesus claims the grandeur of the Temple will not last, predicting its destruction later in the first century.  The widow is a model of faithfulness in the midst of a place where organized religion has become a racket.

            Here Jesus singles out the scribes, religious authorities Jesus describes as the well-dressed, pious, high society types. Throughout Mark’s gospel, the scribes appear as the challengers to Jesus’ authority.  When Jesus begins his ministry, it is said he taught “as one with authority”, affirming Jesus’ status as teacher and healer. In the same breath, Mark notes that as Jesus is recognized, he is not decidedly nothing like the scribes.  Jesus criticizes the scribes for the limelight yet keeping some pretty shady practices.  The scribes are unveiled as pious and predatory. 

            Read any passage in Mark where the scribes are mentioned, and you find in the scribes’ behaviors and practices the opposite of Jesus’ teachings on discipleship.  Jesus tells his disciples to be servants, stating the first is last and the last is first.  The scribes maneuver for “first place”. The disciples are told to go out with few supplies and clothing to proclaim Jesus’ word.  The scribes wear long robes to signal their status to any onlookers. The scribes pray and then prey on the vulnerable.  Jesus’ prayers turn his followers back to the needs of the marginalized.  The widow gives modestly, the scribes devour immodestly.  (I am indebted to the Fleddermann article for his reading of the contrary witness of Jesus’ way versus the scribes’ ways.)

How do we rightly read sacred text?  The same scriptures that Jesus stood upon, those we call the “Hebrew Scriptures”, called for the faithful to protect “the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner in your midst”.  The scribes claimed expertise in these same texts while creating exploitative systems of religion. Standing upon the prophetic tradition, Jesus envisioned an alternative to the Temple, a community of humble servants given to a new understanding of authority and abundance where the widow is not least.  In her, the fullness of the gospel is made known.

From time to time, I recall in my sermons the witness of Baptists who identified strongly with this facet of the gospel.  I note that the great “social witnesses” of Baptists (folks like Walter Rauschenbusch, Clarence Jordan, Martin Luther King, Jr.) heard the clear call of Jesus to wed “gospel” with “justice”, only to experience many a cold shoulder from other Baptists who considered work among the poor and advocacy for social concerns to be less important, if at all, to the “real” work of the church. Jesus cared passionately about those who were forgotten, and yet the Church tends to keep the fuller gospel at arm’s length.  The widow’s mite challenges us to speak with humility about our stewardship and our religious ideals.  How do we live out the ways of Jesus, given as they are to humility, service, and care for the least of these? 

The widow walks through the midst of the Church. Some look at her with nostalgia, fondly remembering her giving but neglecting “the rest of the story” of the harsh life she lived.  Others yearn for her to tell us anew the might of the mite, how to give to God with integrity and hearts open to the gospel. What lessons still await us in the pondering of this teaching about the widow’s mite?

      Old widow, take us by the hand. Teach us your ways. Show us in the midst of the hardships of life the faithfulness that keeps you close to God.  Help us give of ourselves, so that we might draw closer to the One who gave away his very life.

A People of the Last Word (Revelation 21:1-6a)

A People of the Last Word

        The book reviews keep coming in.  Reviewed in last weekend’s Bennington Banner, or perhaps you read about it in the New York Times, Slate.com, or on NPR.  A “graphic novel” (comic book) of The Book of Genesis, readers might be surprised to find out the illustrator is the “underground comic” artist R. Crumb, whose body of work makes an odd statement indeed to add the title of “bible illustrator” to his resume.  Crumb spent the past four years drawing the book of Genesis, taking care to read biblical scholarship to develop his take on Genesis.  Surprisingly, for such an iconoclast, Crumb offers a fairly earnest depiction of Genesis, demonstrating his skill as an artist as well as the complexities of the actual text of Genesis.  For a book about God, creation, and humanity’s “origins”, Genesis does not R. Crumb’s help being controversial.  On its own, Genesis is a challenging set of tales replete with human failings, violence, and an “R” rating.  Sacred stories are closer to our lives than we sometimes want them to be.

        On the other end of the Bible, we encounter a story of “the End”.  Ironically, some folks tend to sugarcoat Genesis, yet people tend to remember the Book of Revelation more for its violence than its scenes of great hope.  I grew up in Kansas churches that loved the rainbow over Noah’s ark yet lived in fear of Revelation’s scenes of “the End Times”.  (You would not believe some of the books I found in shopping mall Christian bookstores growing up out in the Midwest….)   The book of Revelation is filled with stories of the nations of the world going into disarray, armies battling, and Evil’s forces battling it out with the heavenly powers.  To say the book of Revelation tends to be inscrutable and difficult to understand is an understatement.  Nonetheless, if you read the whole book, you see a different story at work, not like the version of Revelation you might hear preached about on many AM radio stations in parts of the Midwest and the South.  The violence, the battle between forces above and below, all of this is in the text, yet a powerful theme resounds throughout: not of fear, but of hope.

        The end vision of Christianity is hope.  In the End God shall have the last word.  After much tumult, suffering and pain, the world described by Genesis shall pass away and a new heaven and earth, a new frame of reality, shall take its place.  Reading Revelation, the careful reader recalls T.S. Eliot’s poetic line:  “In my end is my beginning”.  The book of Revelation unveils the brokenness of our world and the transformation, the magnificent future, God alone shall bring about.  Revelation is a passionate book, calling the reader not to live in fear or speculation.  Rather, the Christian is encouraged to live in anticipation and hope.   We live as a people who already know what the last word shall be.  It will not be “anxiety”.  It will not be “fear”.  It will not be even “death”.  In the end, we shall hear “Behold, I make all things new”.  This is the story that Christians live by.  You cannot understand us without it.

        Stories have a powerful way of shaping our lives.  Over the years, I still remember my Grandmother Hugenot reading the story of “Stone Soup”.  I have the book among my books, and I will never part with it.  The physical book is precious to me.  The story of “Button Soup”, a tale of a miser who learns to be generous by sharing of his abundance with his neighbors, is one that I claim as a “core story” I retain from my childhood.  I remember with great fondness my grandmother reading me many stories over and over, yet that particular story, a variant of “Stone Soup”, is the one that nestled down deep within me.  The story makes sense of the world, or the way the world ought to be.

        As a grownup, I find myself telling people another story, one that I find deep down in my bones just like “Stone Soup”.  You heard Marion tell that story to you a bit earlier, as told by the book of Revelation.  Where I tell this story is less a matter of standing in a pulpit and more when I stand on a hillside.  It’s a quiet time when I tell this story.   It’s time for that final ritual up there among family and friends.  We have been telling stories already, sometimes told with rollicking detail during an eulogy delivered by a friend (clergy sometimes blanche at the stories of the deceased that get told at funerals).   Now it’s approaching time for that last word.  What will it be?

At the graveside, I tell one story.  It’s really the best one for times like these.  As the liturgy draws to a close, I am nearing the amen, but I still have this story to tell.  I say in the midst of the sadness and as that sense of finality hangs a bit thick in the air:

“We look forward to that time, when the one who has made us shall not leave us in the dust.  For as scriptures promise, there shall be an end to death, and to crying and to pain, for the old order has passed away”.

The Christian cannot speak of any other last word.  We sometimes forget when the anxieties of the day make us think things are otherwise contrary to our knowledge of the promised End.  Indeed, there are times when we lose sight of that which is promised, or we let another story take precedence.  Those who are able to stay the course, those who are able to keep “their eyes on the prize”, we have a word for these sort of folks:  saints.   The book of Revelation mentions saints quite frequently, the people who live a faithful witness on the earth, even in its broken down state, and once up in the heavenly choirs, just can’t stop praising the Lord. 

The saints are those who live in this world with the same frailty and fallibility as any other human being, yet they are able to live a faithful and unshakable witness to Christ.  It does not happen overnight for these folks: the process varies, yet the result is the same:  people who are able to be the faithful and beloved of Christ.  They take the long view, knowing that God will have the last word, not the powers and ideologies of the day, or the belief that things will end in disarray or without meaning.  They see the world as a place where the gospel can indeed take root, no matter how tough and stubborn the soil appears to be.  The Baptist saint Clarence Jordan lived through the difficulties of mid-20^th century racism as a witness to racial reconciliation and peace.  Only a saint could take the long view, despite the many forces against him.  Jordan spoke prophetically when he observed, “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence and watching the evidence change”.  In other words, God shall have the last word, and it shall be one that is glorious and just.

Now the Church has various traditions and practices about counting the saints.  Some parts of the Church have quite a process to declare a person officially a “saint” of the Church.  The New Testament, though, takes a fairly broad definition of the term, depicting the saints of the Church as those who live a faithful life, one testifying to the gospel.  In other words, no list shall be ever exhaustive of the saints.  Saints are great and obscure alike.  Saints are plentiful, yet not all of them can ever be named adequately.  So, I want to make sure that we remember “All Saints” aright this day.  We are not just looking at the people known far and wide.  I ask us to enter into a time of recalling those saints who made the gospel come alive in your witnessing of their lives.  Let us remember “all saints” this day, those who know how the story shall end, and remind ourselves that we are likewise called to be a people of the last word.