Sermon: "Widows and Their Might" November 9, 1997

Text: Mark 12:38-44 Rev. James R. Gorman

The woman gave all that she had. It didn't amount to much on the scale of things that matter in our world or her world. But it was all she had and Jesus found that gift important enough to use as an illustration of how stewardship ought to be.

I remember visiting among the elderly of my first church and I would be given the envelopes for the offering plate each month. One elderly woman would give me her packet of envelopes, each one carefully filled out and each envelope filled with her pittance. Or at least I thought it was a pittance.

In the course of one of our visits she had been telling me about the amount of money she had as income. Social security wasn't much because for most of her life she had worked as maid and then later as a dishwasher in a restaurant, so she either paid nothing into social security or paid in very little. She wasn't trying to impress me with her poverty, the conversation just moved innocently in that direction. The point of her telling me all this was that while she received very little, it was enough.

Then she handed me her envelopes. There written on each of her five envelopes was the amount of $10, totaling $50 for the month. From what she had told me about her income, I guessed that she made less than $400 per month. She lived in subsidized housing for the elderly which took 25% of that. The $50 I held in my hand represented very little money, I thought, until I realized that at that time, I wasn't even giving $10 per week. And secondly, I realized that what I held in my hand was a tithe.

A tithe is a rare thing in our denomination. It is a rare thing in any mainstream religious group. I held those five envelopes in my hand as if they were rare jewels. I realized that she had given all that she had and I, like the rich men, had given what I had to spare of my riches. And then I realized that there was an ocean's worth of difference between me and her.

My giving has never been the same since. It is her standard of giving that I now try to emulate. It is her standard of giving by which I am challenged.

There is something about the widow's mite that moves us to better stewardship than all the arguments about the lack of generosity in our society. I have always been challenged by the generosity of others and I have never been moved by appeals to my conscience. Guilt either makes me angry, or it depresses me. It rarely motivates me. It is stories about grace and graceful people that move me to re-examine my own life and the way I live it.

I also remember at that same Church, a homeless woman who lived in Lincoln Park when the weather was good and in the Salvation Army mission when it wasn't. She would regularly come to the door of our church to beg for money. Because we knew her, we always gave her just enough for lunch, but she always would divide what we gave her by 10 and then give us back a tenth. She believed in tithing she said. Often she would have to ask us for change if we gave her a five dollar bill. Most of the time we remembered and gave her four singles and change so she could return 50 cents to the church.

The widow's mite makes right.



When the homeless woman would return the 50 cents, I would always be struck by the riskiness of such an act. Given the thin ice upon which she lived, this woman was taking quite a risk by returning her tithe. Couldn't she have used that 50 cents for a cup of coffee or tea at a moment when she most needed to keep warm? Wouldn't that 50 cents have bought her a fairly nice pair of used gloves at a thrift shop somewhere?

Couldn't the shut-in elderly woman I visited have found some use for the $50 she gave to me that day? Isn't it a risky business to be handing out money when money is at such a premium? Indeed, many of us would say that it might be more prudent if an elderly person on a limited income just kept all that he or she had. We would certainly understand if they gave nothing to the church. Certainly the church could do without the shut-in's $50 per month and the homeless woman's 50 cents.

But then we miss the central teaching of this moving story. That life lived in covenant with God allows us to take graceful risks with our means of livelihood. It allows us to run our lives counter to the economic logic of our day. It allows us to be risky, not just with our money, but with our time and our talents as well. A life lived in the light of God's rich blessings is a life that will always be seen as strange for it will always run counter to common sense. The woman who gave the two coins (and they were the smallest coins in circulation at that time), was a woman who believed that God would provide, and because God would provide, she could do crazy things like give all that she had.

This story is often referred to as the "Widow's Mite" because in the King James' Version of the Bible it reads that the widow gave two mites which is worth about a farthing. The Greek coin in question is the smallest coin in circulation and in order to emphasize that, the King James translators used the word for a Flemish coin called a "mite." From that we have grown to use the word to mean anything small including insects.

Morris West uses the word in an interesting way. In his novel, Clowns of God, a vision of the final coming of Christ is described by the returned Christ with a Down's syndrome child on his knee, serving her the Eucharist. Christ then says, "What better [sign] could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it; but I will not. . . . I gave this mite a gift I denied all of you -- eternal innocence. . . . She will never offend me, as all of you have done. She will never pervert or destroy the works of my Father's hands. She is necessary to you. She will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. . . . She will remind you every day that I AM WHO I AM." [cited in Diane M. Komp, "Hearts Untroubled," Theology Today, Vol. XLV No. 3, October, 1988. p. 276.]

This little mite. This innocent Downs syndrome Child reminds us of the powerful agenda of our Christ. The children, the poor, the widows, the orphans, the lepers, the prostitutes, the tax collectors, the despised, the forgotten, the ignored, the little, the microscopic are lifted up to our unseeing eyes and we are told to look and touch, and hold and love.

It was the little things, West reminds us, that most attracted Jesus' attention and escapes our own. We were watching the rich people place the big bucks in the Temple treasury and would have missed the widow's mites had not Jesus called our attention to her. For certainly she called no attention to herself.

I think what most impressed Jesus about the mites of our society is that they have no pretensions, partly because society will not allow them to have any. And because they have no pretensions, they are forced to trust in God in a way that the more secure will not. Those who own the bakeries don't have to pray for daily bread, my Old Testament professor used to say. We who have wealth trust all the more in it. We who have possessions are all the more possessed.

The widow had a certain knowledge that the wealthy lack. She had daily evidence of God's grace, for God provided for her well-being from day to day, from hour to hour. The wealthy might be able to give more than two mites, but they could never give up all that they had. That would make no economic sense. Indeed it doesn't. Even if Jesus were exaggerating and the widow was only giving half of what she had rather than all, it still makes no economic sense. But then very little of what Jesus calls us to makes sense.

The wisdom we all learn has to do with "a penny saved is a penny earned." It has to do with hard work and "earning a living." It has to do with making money the old fashion way, as the recently deceased actor John Houseman used to say, "We eaarrnn it."

The wisdom of the widows and the Downs Syndrome child is fundamentally different from that. You don't really earn a living at all, in the final analysis. Life is the unearned gift of God, nothing more. Nothing more. If life brings you good fortune, then don't hoard it, share it. Give a hunk of it away, and trust that the God who gave in the first place, will bless you again. Trust that the God of history is the God of your history and will provide in marvelous and mysterious ways.

And that simple faith will bless you a thousand times and will empower you to do incredible and strange things. It will first of all allow you to part with possessions which possess you and in a strange way allow you to enjoy them all the more.

That's finally the object of the grace-filled life. The ability to enjoy. God loves a cheerful giver. You can only enjoy the riches you have if you are willing to part with them. You can only be cheerful about what you have when you are willing to give it away. For the mystery of our blessings is this, you can only have that which you are willing to lose. You can only keep that which you are willing to let go.