Nov. 8, 2009: THE KING WHO PROTECTS: The Best of Everything is Abundance
Mark 12:38-44; Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17; Psalm 127
Eileen Parfrey -- Springwater Presbyterian Church
When one preaches from the lectionary, this is the curse of having stewardship season in November: you end up with the story of the widow’s mite, and everyone thinks you are trying to guilt them into giving their last penny to the church. These are the “Blood Out of a Turnip” sermons. Today’s sermon title, however, does not mention vegetables, although it does mention abundance. Which must mean that she’s going to tell us we’ve got more than we think we do, so fork it over, folks. Before you leave (literally or figuratively), I would like to propose that we check out the texts. After all, it’s probably not a coincidence that they both have widows in them.
The earlier story has two widows—Ruth and Naomi. It’s a story with an axe to grind. David, Israel’s favorite king, is the great-grandson of a foreign woman. These are dangerous credentials, because Israel had been taught that holiness required separation from foreigners, especially foreign wives. Jewish ethnicity is transmitted through the mother, so either David is not legitimately entitled to be king of Israel or God is up to those old tricks of divine preference for the outsider. Here are two vulnerable women, with Boaz acting as a stand-in for God by sticking up for them with abundance.
Foreign women may have represented all that was unholy, but widows represented the vulnerable and oppressed in Judaism. That Jesus would critique the scribes for mistreatment of widows was a painfully sharp criticism. But pairing this gospel story with Ruth’s story invites more than our criticism. Boaz behaves the way the scribes are supposed to behave, providing for the poor and vulnerable. Ruth behaves the way Israel is supposed to in relation to God, with full reliance on abundance and trust in God’s integrity. You’d think the hyper-educated scribes would have remembered Naomi and Ruth and Boaz and that it would have influenced their choice as regards widows. It takes the example of another widow to point out the futility of their thinking they can earn God’s grace while dissing widows.
If you think about it, it’s kind of ironic that it takes one of the victims of the scribes to point out the error of their ways. I’ve got to admire the widow for even coming to the Temple. She comes to the very place of origin for the subjugation of women to men. Ancient Israel’s religious practices decreed that a woman without a husband or a married son didn’t exist, and not just because she had no means of earning a living, no place to live. In Hebrew, the word for “voiceless” is “widow.” Here comes a widow to offer her entire living, for the love of God, into the laps of her oppressors. She must have identified with Ruth rather than Naomi. She must have associated Boaz with God, rather than the scribes. The others that day give from their own abundance—self-generated, not enough, gotta get more. The widow gives out of her poverty, out of God’s abundance. Why else could she pour out her whole living, if she didn’t know that, apart from God, no matter what you do, you will never feel you have enough. The scribes, bless their hearts, operate from a zero-sum mindset that says, “There is only so much, and I’ve gotta get mine (and keep others from getting more), or there won’t be enough for me.”
Set your minds at rest, I’m not going to try to guilt you into making big pledges next week. That never works, but in this economy it works even less. I am going to challenge you to step away from the scribes, though. Abundance isn’t what you think it is, and money is more than simple economics. Ostentatious large offerings to the Temple (or extravagant pledges to the church) won’t earn any points. For one thing, God doesn’t work on a point system. One way to understand money is to see it as the visible evidence of how we invest our time and energy. That’s it literally—you paycheck is evidence of the time and energy you spent at work, dollars are a convenient way to get goods and services you don’t have time or energy to invest in getting in other ways. That’s a neutral statement. Where we get into trouble is when we get money confused with our sense of worth and value to others. For many of us, money can come to represent possibilities, security, alternatives, power, prestige. Money is emotionally-charged, and Jesus knew it. Most of us would rather talk about sex than about money. Jesus just skips the sex bit entirely and goes straight for the money. It shows up in the gospels more than any other topic. To put it into perspective, believing or believers shows up 272 times, pray or prayer shows up 371 times, love or loving 714 times. But possessions or giving appears 2,172 times. Seventeen of the 38 parables are about possessions. What we do with our money reflects our spiritual priorities. Think of the widow in the Temple.
We do ourselves a disservice when we think the widow’s gesture is the only point of our lesson, however. She doesn’t even get praised. Jesus makes a simple statement of fact: this is what she does. What he reserves his evaluation for are the other folks, the ones so busily accomplishing righteousness. What they are doing is about as useful as re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. There they are, flowery public prayers, large checks to food banks, active service on all the right committees, financial endowment for lecture series on the topic of their generosity. These are all futile gestures to ward off the impending disaster of their own sense of guilt. Based on self-reliance, these gestures of piety simply ignore the abundance of God. The Titanic, if you recall, went down anyway, despite how the deck chairs were arranged.
Jesus’ critique of the scribes is their obsession with the Titanic. Oddly enough, God doesn’t think we need the Titanic. The scribes’ posturing and sacrifice, their obsession, focuses on “paying the price for sin.” What God wants is us—relationship. If we’re as hell-bent as the scribes on looking good religiously, that’s about what we’ll get: hell-bent. The nameless widow looks past the Temple-sponsored oppression of widows, to see God. Her confidence in God allows her to rise above victimhood. How does she do that? She trusts God more than the institution, and then nurtures her relationship with God by giving what she can—all she’s got—to God.
Yes, this story is a condemnation of rich people—especially rich religious people who profit at the expense of the poor. None of us fit that description. But it is also an enacted parable that tells us God doesn’t want our accomplishments. God certainly doesn’t want our neglect, but God doesn’t need us to “get it right,” either. God already loves us and offers us God’s very self in relationship. The proof of this is the abundance with which we are surrounded. Do you respond like the widow, by letting go of the distractions?