The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

November 12, 2006

23^rd Sunday after Pentecost

Scripture Readings:

Hebrew Scriptures – 1 Kings 17: 8-16¹

⁸Then the word of the LORD came to [Elijah], saying, ⁹“Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” ¹⁰So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” ¹¹As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” ¹²But she said, “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.” ¹³Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. ¹⁴For thus says the LORD the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.” ¹⁵She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. ¹⁶The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD…[spoken] by Elijah.

Gospel Lesson – Mark 12: 38-44²

³⁸As [Jesus] taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, ³⁹and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! ⁴⁰They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

⁴¹He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. ⁴²A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. ⁴³Then 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. ⁴⁴For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

“Will We Have Enough to Go Around?”

When someone whom we dearly love dies each of us experiences that profound emptiness that comes with such a loss. The death of a spouse, though, might be the most painful trial that anyone in a happy marriage will ever endure. Our scripture readings this morning speak about the experience of widows, but particularly widows who live in the culture of the ancient near East. They appear to be women who’ve been left destitute – without a shekel of support – at the death of their husbands. The story from 1 Kings is actually more about Elijah than it is about this widow and her son, but in Mark’s story a widow is at the very center. This second story is practically a climax to the statements that Jesus has just made about lawyers who excel in their knowledge of the books of Moses, but who prey on widows.

The first story has a happy ending: by some “miracle” that particular widow and her son will live – at least for another year. But her generosity isn’t the real point of that story. It’s that Elijah now, too, can live and do the prophetic “work of God” against Ahab and his domineering wife Jezebel.

Mark’s version of this other event (at which Jesus pointedly remarks about the injustice of a certain widow who puts two pennies – “all she had to live on” – in the Temple offering plate) is also a story about selfless generosity. But Mark places that story in that particular place in his narrative for a reason. It follows Jesus’ condemnation of money given by the poor to complete the construction of this opulent Temple begun by Herod the Great. The targets of Jesus’ attack are the scribes, the priests and their allies – men learned in the Law. This widow, who is so extraordinarily generous in the story, is only to be cast as their victim. She’s the one whose savings have been devoured by those guys who “for the sake of appearance say long prayers” and take “the best seats in the synagogue.”

Yes this widow’s gift is unbelievably huge, but we shouldn’t hold up her giving as some kind of model for our current stewardship campaign! Sincerity and “blind faith” are never enough. There’s a movement gripping our denomination by the throat that’s saying to us, “You’ve just got to believe!” It’s come at the cost of rational judgment about just what the mission and goals of The United Methodist Church really ought to be. Now, as never before, you and I have got to question, not only what the General Church is calling us to believe, but then how we’re expected to act on that belief. The good thing about our questioning is that we ought to trust that the truth, finally, will be revealed. And in spite of what it says in the last book of our Bible, God’s revelation in and to the world did not come to an end sometime around the close of the first century!³ Revelation has less to do with believing the “right doctrine” than it does with our understanding what God’s truth means for us in our own day and time. If the church is given any authority it will be maintained not by appealing to the cooperative generosity of people who remain submissive to its dictates, it will be maintained by remaining in dialogue with those who know that being faithful includes being critical of what we’re being called upon to believe, and of what that belief then calls us to do in the name of God.

So when your gift to the church is a thoughtful and reasonable response to the love of God which you experience here, I really believe that it also can be a moment of liberation that frees both you, the giver, and The 1^st United Methodist Church of Napa, who receives your gift. The stewardship of our gifts becomes one more way in which “the hand of God” touches the world.

When our first granddaughter, Samantha, was born she was, of course, showered with beautiful gifts of toys and clothes, but somebody also made a gift in her name to Heifer Project International. For those of you who don’t know this group, they help some of the poorest people of the world become self-sufficient members of society. They’re given livestock and then the training to eventually “pass on the gift” by giving the first offspring of their gift animal to a neighbor who needs it as much as they once did.⁴

What makes stewardship effective – through your gift or anyone else’s – is that that generosity, once it’s released, never comes to an end because it becomes part of the world in which “we live and move and have our being.”⁵ An intelligent gift educates, liberates, informs and produces a better world in which to live. And it’s remembered because the gift goes on.

In the last decade or so those of us who serve in the church have heard a lot about the “successes” of the independent “mega-churches” and the business acumen of their charismatic pastors. What can we make of that in light of these stories about the faithfulness of a couple of poor widows? Aren’t we a whole lot more at ease in this culture speaking about profit-and-loss statements and balanced budgets, about full churches and thriving programs, than we are about “faithfulness?” Isn’t bigger better than better?

Faithful Christian discipleship is all too often overlooked these days in favor of therapeutic cultivation of constituents and how much influence one holds at the mayor’s office, in the governor’s mansion, or in the corridors of power within the White House. In the face of all of this we’re confronted by the question in today’s readings that asks: “What does it mean to be a faithful Christian in the twenty-first century?” In the face of competing loyalties and lifestyles, what difference does it make that we hear some story about an impoverished widow who gave “everything she had?”

We need to be reminded that in her day this nameless woman (nameless at least to us) has been disregarded for at least three reasons: she was a woman; she was a widow; and she was poor. Those guys that were putting in huge chunks of change into the treasury, weren’t they the ones who financed things, who got things done, who should be emulated and revered since they were the “heavy hitters,” the biggest givers? This poor widow and her two cents worth, though, must’ve been made an example for us for some reason.

As we look forward to tomorrow (and not just the kind of tomorrow that promises to be shaped by an entirely new Congress!), we need to ask ourselves: What kind of shape will our ministry take here at The First United Methodist Church of Napa? Will we be able to sustain the weary with the word of God, or will we “aim higher” because, after all, bigger is better? Will we, as the church, be able to “speak truth to power,” or will we shape our medium and our message to blend in with the market place? In the future, as the body of Christ in this place, will we even be able to recognize the faithfulness of “the least of these,”⁶ or will our vision be impaired by measuring our success with terms like the “first” and the “greatest”?

Mark’s story of one poor widow goes way beyond the issues of misspent money. It shines a bright light into one of the dark corners of injustice.⁷ If pastors and people alike refuse to embody the teachings of Jesus in the face of a world stumbling in the dark, then our “salvation” is good for nothing.

Almost a decade ago a woman from Carleton College, Anne Patrick (with the curiously redundant title of “moral theologian”), said this:

The lines that human beings draw to identify who they are and what is theirs have kept those who are different from sharing in what is within the protected sphere controlled by groups in power.⁸

Now Dr. Patrick wasn’t alluding specifically to the widow’s story here in Mark’s Gospel, but she could have. Making her point in the context of “barriers and frontiers,” she said that if the consciences of Christians north of the barrier that divides San Diego from Tijuana...

…were really attuned to the life situation of those to our south, the southern border of this nation would not be the ‘steel curtain’ that it has become.”⁹

As Christians we’ve got to make the “turn toward the oppressed,” she insisted. But it will mean that those of us who do have the power and the influence – by the very virtue of our wealth and political dominance – have got to rethink, very carefully, what it is that we truly value.

When asked to reflect on the issues of money and giving around stewardship time, I’m no different than all of you who sit in the pews on Sunday morning. When I’m asked to think about what I spend on myself and my family, I become… well, uneasy. Sometimes, though, this kind of “uneasiness” can lead to compassionate and careful listening. We hear things as if for the first time. We see people that have been relegated to the shadows of our world for far too long.

Until we can hear and see that many of those who’ve been shoved aside by our society may, in fact, have given more than we ourselves have, we’ll be above really hearing and seeing anything of worth at all – much like the scribes portrayed in our gospel lesson. What’s worse, for some people their prejudices against the disenfranchised are among their most prized possessions. They’ve got to let go of them, no matter how much it costs.

I’ve been thinking of these scripture readings all week in the context of a commercial that’s been on T.V. (in one form or another) for some time. It’s an ad for yet another credit card¹⁰ where one poor sucker after another is attacked by hordes of Visigoths for having the wrong card. It always closes with one of these barbarians sticking his face in the camera and asking the viewer, pointedly, “What’s in your wallet?” The clear insinuation is that your salvation comes from having the right credit card company. So it’s not just we self-indulgent clergy, but also prosperous laity, who can lose perspective on the whole purpose of Sunday morning collections and fall stewardship campaigns, as if we pool our money only to spend it on ourselves.

I remember laughing out loud at how contemporary a statement sounded from that renowned biblical scholar of the ancient church, St. Jerome, in the year 410, when he said, “Avoid as you would the plague a clergyman who is also a man of business.”¹¹

In our own day it’s been said that every church budget is an implicit statement of that church’s theology. So it’s good that we be asked from time to time, “What’s in your wallet?” And what of it do we offer to the church? In Luke’s emended version of the parable of the faithful and unfaithful slaves, he adds:

From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.¹²

What we do with the Sunday morning offerings and the regular gifts that we receive in response to stewardship campaigns does reflect, however consciously or unconsciously, both our understanding of the mission of the church and our understanding, simply, of our roles as individual Christians.

Next Sunday is “Celebration Sunday” – when we gather to give thanks for our shared gifts (represented by those cards hanging from the umbrellas in our Fellowship Hall) and then to respond by placing an estimate of our giving for 2007 at the foot of the communion table. Our freedom to be more generous in the four-fold covenant of United Methodist membership – through our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service – will only grow as we too become more aware of the unbelievably lavish gifts that God has already given to us. The staff and program committees of our church are planning ministries that will be reflected by an ambitious increase in our budget for next year. Will we have enough to go around?

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