Proper 27 – B

November 12, 2006

The Rev. Dorian McGlannan

 

Anyone who has read the Bible knows that Jesus presents great challenges to those of us with money and means. This includes most people who live in these tree-lined streets of Victorian and modern homes. Not everyone by any stretch, but enough of us that these stories should at least make us take notice. Perhaps I should speak for myself. These stories make me squirm.

 

 In today’s gospel reading, Jesus not only praises the poor widow’s gift because she gives of her poverty but because she has nothing left after placing her gift. This is the same fate offered to the man who asked Jesus how to get into heaven: sell all that you have and give it to the poor. Jesus makes it clear that the way of assessing the quality of a gift is not the size of the gift itself but the amount left after the gift is given. The scribes give of their abundance and still have abundance left. The poor widow gives out of her poverty and has nothing left. 

 

Sometimes it sounds as though Jesus romanticizes the poor but the poor would be the first to tell you that there is nothing romantic about their plight. There is nothing romantic about not knowing where your next meal is to come from; there is nothing romantic about not knowing where you and your children are going to sleep; there is nothing romantic about not having health care or clothes on your back.

 

So in our world today, how does this story of the widow’s mite inform and shape our spirituality. We first thing we need to understand that the widow was poor because she was a widow. She was not a poor widow as if there were rich widows. In first century Palestine, rich widows did not exist. In that culture, women were totally dependent on their male relatives. To be widowed meant not only losing your husband, it meant losing your livelihood. A widow was flat out dependent on the community for her existence. She was dependent on God and the good will of her neighbors.

 

Most of us cannot imagine this. Most of us are financially independent and most of us like it that way. Many women and some men may be financially dependent on their spouses but when their spouse dies, they will inherit what remains. How can we read this story in a culture that is so vastly different from the culture that gave birth to Jesus’ words?

 

For us the message has to be about the role of money in our lives. How do we feel about money? Do we have a good grasp of our level of attachment to money? Do we live with a mentality of abundance or do we live in the shadow of scarcity? Are we grounded enough and spiritually secure enough to be able to joyfully surrender a significant portion of our wealth? I sometimes ponder the fate of those who lost fortunes when the market crashed in the early part of the 20^th century. I sometimes try to get into the minds of those who chose to jump rather than begin again. In that context, Jesus’ words begin to make sense. In today’s world, Jesus’ words speak to us about attachment. It’s not just a matter of recognizing that most of us are very wealthy by the world’s standards. It is more importantly having a good grasp on what money and material goods mean to us. How would we respond if we had to deal with a radical downward shift in income?

 

From my short time in this congregation, I would venture to say that many members of this church have work to do in terms of examining the role of money in their lives. If the financial stewardship of this congregation is any reflection, we have a long way to go. The truth is our church should be overflowing with money! What is stopping us, what is holding us back? 

 

Let me say a couple of things. One is that everyone, everyone needs to either make a pledge or be a giver of record. I know there are people who object to the whole idea of pledging for theological reasons, typically something such as “my gift is between God and me”. While that kind of thinking makes it a bit difficult to plan for the future, those of us who work on the budget can deal with it. What is far more disconcerting is the number of people who simply do not give, anything, ever. Those who are working on financial stewardship are working hard to change this pattern of behavior because the number of pledges as well as the amount pledged makes a huge difference. 

 

If the whole idea of financially supporting the church is new to you, then start small. Start with $10 a week. Sometime life circumstances prevent us from tithing. Our family pledge of $40 a week, in my mind, is a small pledge. Historically we are much stronger givers than that. It is only because we have still not sold our property in WA State that our pledge is not a tithe. But I would never dream of simply not giving to the church. Sometimes our life circumstances limit our ability to give. Unsold homes, unemployment, reductions in income because of retirement, medical expenses and so forth can all have an impact on the amount we give. But if we are employed and able to put food on the table and have a roof over our heads, there is no reason not to support the church with some sort of financial gift.

 

All the stewardship gurus claim that guilt is not the way to go when talking about stewardship. And truly they are right. When people really get the whole message about the joy of giving there is no going back. However, until the time when everyone in this congregation understands that their lives will be better when they loosen the purse strings, until everyone in this congregation goes through some sort of Scrooge conversion and starts running down the street toward Tiny Tim’s house, I am going for the guilt! Having a daily mass Roman Catholic father and having attended a Catholic seminary for three years, I have enough of an understanding of guilt to know that it is not all bad.

One of the people in our Wednesday night Biblical Milk Bible study told the story of her son collecting canned goods for a food drive in which he was participating. He had distributed fliers to all of his neighbors including those who lived in a nearby sub-division that had much larger homes than the modest homes in his sub. On the appointed day, with great anticipation the young man went out to collect the canned goods for people who were in great need. The people in his own modest sub-division were very generous, leaving significant amounts of canned food for this worthy cause.  However, when he went to the homes in the far wealthier sub, very little had been left out. Were the people in the large homes too busy and stressed out to leave a donation? Had they become so pre-occupied with the demands of their own lives that they forgot? Did they think that the poor got what they deserved because they were too lazy to work? Were they unable to give of their own because they were so accustomed to holding onto to what they had that it was just complelty beyond their imagination to let go of even a small portion of their material goods? This young man will never know for sure but what he is not likely to forget is that the residents of these big houses simply did not give. The reason doesn’t really matter. They just didn’t give.

 

There are so many exciting possibilities for ministry surfacing in our congregation. We have rescheduled our Visioning Day for March 3 and at that time we will be able to have an exciting and energetic dialogue about the future of our church. The possibilities are as endless as the stars in the sky. The truth is that almost anything that we do is going to require money. For that we need your support. When you give, you are invested both financially and spiritually. Remember the widow. She had nothing to lose and everything to gain.