The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
November 12, 2006
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture:
Mark 12:38-44
Jesus Denounces the Scribes
As he taught,
he said, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to
be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the
synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for
the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater
condemnation.’
The Widow’s Offering
He sat down
opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.
Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small
copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to
them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in
more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have
contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty
Sermon:
This passage is often referred
to as “widow’s mite.” That’s not “might,” but “mite,” as in the small offering
she put in the plate. But, it might as well be “might,” for the one who appears
to have the least ends up being the most powerful actor in the story.
Jesus was often setting up
scenes like this, where the person at the bottom of the power structure
suddenly ends up as the one at the top. It’s the way many of his parables work.
In addition, the person who usually is at the top,
often ends up at the bottom. The one the world around Jesus might admire, ends up as the buffoon of the story. That’s
certainly the case here.
He begins by going after the
religious hypocrites of his day. They were the scribes, educated, erudite
people who knew the right things to say, but did not really live it out.
‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be
greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the
synagogues and places of honor at banquets!”
In other words beware of the
respectable people, the ones who put on charity dinners, and donate to good causes, but in their business practices do not live
it out.
Beware of the people who do good
deeds but want to get credit for it. The ones who put on a big show of caring
for others but who expect something in return. Beware of people who give gifts
with strings attached. Some gifts don’t come with strings, they come with tug
ropes. These are the people who want the status that comes with giving. Beware
of the large donor to the religious organization.
Now, this may be a strange
message to hear from the pulpit as we enter into stewardship season. But
actually, it’s not. This parable gets to the heart of the matter like no other.
And it begins with the fact that in the world of giving, there are good ways to
give, and bad ways. Giving, this story tells us, is not neutral. Our intention,
our motivation, matters.
Back before I became a minister,
I worked at a non-profit agency that aided homeless and troubled teens in
The problem was that usually what
they had in mind was a one-shot deal. They wanted to come in to build
something, and while they did it, they always wanted to “interact with the
kids.” But they wanted to do all that in a day.
What these kids needed more than
anything was a long-term committed relationship with an adult, not a one-shot
event. You know what? The kids also
needed the money. By that I mean, the under-funded
program needed the money. We needed to be able to hire the staff and provide
shelter to homeless kids and that cost money. So the needs of the givers and
the receivers were very different.
As much as I appreciated the
conversations I would have with those groups who wanted to come in, as much as
I appreciated the spirit of not wanting simply to write a check, I found myself
wishing, “Well, that’s all very well, but couldn’t you just throw a little
money at the problem?”
Often that was the compromise we
reached. The one-day event, that often gave more to the givers than the
receivers, but we also said, “Let’s try throwing a check at some of these
problems as well, because it will be well used.” And then a remarkable thing
would happen. Out of those events, and out of writing those checks, people
really started to care about that organization, and then they really started to
care about specific kids. We got some amazing mentors that way, who came back
not for another day but for years, and really invested in these kids lives, and
there were checks involved with it that made a real difference. What makes
throwing a check at something OK in some cases and hypocritical or counter-productive
in others? Motivation.
First, it matters spiritually. When you are giving for the right reason, you
experience a different kind of joy, the real spiritual growth that reorients
your life, and reminds you that money has no power. It is generosity and
kindness that have power. That, in turn, changes how you live. Oddly, when you talk to people who give
generously, it’s a spiritual practice. They, having less to hold on to, don’t
just let go of money. They let go of anxiety about money.
People who give out of corrupt
reasons, like those scribes, are corrupted internally. They are the people who,
for instance, give to charity but shut down any serious discussion of the
causes of poverty. The scribes engage in policies and habits that hurt the
poor, but then hope to distract people, and perhaps themselves, by tossing a
coin around here and there. Jesus is really tough on these folks. “They devour
widows’ houses and, for the sake of appearance, say long prayers. They will
receive the greater condemnation.”
What does that condemnation look
like? I tend to see this not in terms of the afterlife, but in terms of this
life. Jesus says these people are condemned in the here and now because they
are living spiritually shallow lives – and they will feel it.
When the motivation is not
generosity in the spiritual sense, there are spiritual consequences. These
people give money away, but they keep all the anxiety about it – because you
can’t hide from an internal spiritual problem. So to live as someone who is
obsessed with putting on a show of generosity, and what others think about you,
that is a great condemnation. Not only
is it not particularly good for the world, it hurts the person who lives that
way.
Your motivation in giving
matters spiritually. It also matters pragmatically. At the non-profit agency
where I worked, sometimes the motivation didn’t get straight until later.
Sometimes people may have approached us with the wrong notion; but where their
hearts were open, God used that confused motivation to do a new thing. As their
motivation got more focused on giving for the sake of giving, not for getting
credit; on sticking with an issue over the long haul, as opposed to doing a
good deed as a one-shot deal; on building an institution that could work over time
instead of simply building a fence in a day, they became people who really
cared about the issues. Charity became too easy for these folks. They had to
think seriously about the big questions of how to organize society. They didn’t
all agree, of course, but they thought deeply about it. All that began with a gift or an experience
that God used to shape the giver more than the receiver.
These people entered into the
process with open hearts. They were not the scribes, who Jesus describes so
cynically. They weren’t the widow either, in that they certainly didn’t have nothing, and then hand all that over. Most givers, we, are
somewhere in the middle of this story. We’re not gross hypocrites like the
scribes, but we’re also not entirely selfless like the widow.
That’s the point, I suspect, that
we recognize our own human weakness. Imagine a scale, a long line, with the
scribes who throw their money around for show on one end, and the widow who is
willing to give away her last penny on the other. If we’re honest, most of us slide around
between those two points. The story with its two almost ridiculous extremes, helps us to recognize that, and to realize which
end of the scale we want to lean toward.
I’m not the widow and I’m not
the scribe, but I know which end God wants me to move toward. If I move toward
the widow, it’s not a move of powerlessness, it’s
actually a position of power, but not worldly power – spiritual power. At the
beginning of the sermon, I told you this was a story about the reversal of
power relationships, and so here it comes. The widow holds all the power by the
end of the story.
You see, the scribes were
desperate for attention, but the widow was not. She quietly came forward, as
people do all the time, to be generous – not for the sake of attention, but for
God. In doing that, she was so much more confident than those scribes. She
could give without being noticed, out of poverty or out of abundance. While the
amount she gave was small, the percentage she gave was massive. In that, it
exposed the smallness of the percentage that had come from the others.
In the end, hers was an act of
bravery. It was a piece of drama, and a moment that was noted by the son of God
himself. Now we don’t read the stories of the scribes and their
accomplishments, but of the widow who, two thousand years later, still lives in
our imaginations.
As my imagination lingers in
this scene, I picture it like this: The widow, whose motivations were good,
pure and better than anything I’ve ever done, was being used by God that day.
She was not being used by God to teach the world: the smaller your gift the better. No, she was
being used to teach the world: if you give a bigger piece of what you
have to give, the more you will be free.
I don’t think this story ends
with the humiliation of the scribes, but rather with their education. I imagine
that in seeing her go forward, then seeing that crowd of disciples sitting
around Jesus that day, some of them, in their long, fancy robes, got drawn in.
I imagine them putting aside their pride for a moment, and actually sitting
down with Peter and James, and probably that widow and her friends. I imagine
them sharing food, eating and talking. The scribes realized that their joy in
giving had not been complete – not because they had too much, but because they
hadn’t given enough – and they hadn’t given it for the right reasons. I imagine
a conversation in which the masks came off. I have this image of their faces
when they stopped acting aloof, instead looked at the rag tag group of
disciples and the widow like real people, really no different from them.
There the body of Christ did
what we continue to do now. In the midst of a culture of scarcity, we instead
exercise our holy imaginations – to consider what it would mean if everyone
could be as generous as that widow; if everyone could give at such a percentage
that we could all know that freedom.