Ripping Off Widows (Fourth Sunday in Lent; Mark 12:28-44; March 6, 2016)

Ripping Off Widows

Fourth Sunday in Lent
Mark 12:28-44
March 6, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Jesus talked about a lot of things. He talked about anger and conflict. He talked about love, but not the romantic kind. He talked a great deal about politics, not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of power, and who has it and how they use it. He talked about sex hardly at all, which you would never know to listen to some people tell it. He talked about family life and mostly he was against it.

He talked about a lot of things, but one of his favorite subjects was money. This comes as an unpleasant surprise to some folks. Most of us think that a once-a-year sermon on money at stewardship campaign time is more than enough. Folks who complain about how often we talk about money don't know the half of it. Of the many failings of modern preaching one of the most prominent is that we preachers talk far less about money than Jesus did.

And when we do talk about money we almost always do it in the context of what we call "stewardship." We say stewardship when mostly we mean fund-raising, a necessary but different thing. But when Jesus talked about money, he never meant fund-raising, ever. In Jesus' day our movement didn't have buildings and paid staff and the only time in the New Testament that fund-raising is mentioned it was for famine relief in Jerusalem so that Paul could prove that Gentile Christians were just as good as Jewish Christians.

When we've needed to preach a fund-raising sermon, we press stories about other things into service instead. Take this chestnut of a text, a story called "The Widow's Mite." "The widows might what?" No, the widow's mite. The smallest coin in circulation in ancient Palestine was the copper lepton. Two lepta were worth a Roman quadrans which was the least valuable Roman coin. And since a "myte" was the smallest coin in England when King James commissioned a new translation of the Bible, that word was pressed into service as a translation for lepton. The point is that the "mite" was worth very little.

Jesus and his disciples were hanging out in the Temple courtyard in Jerusalem. Jesus was watching people put their offerings into the Temple treasury collection box when a "poor widow" put in two of those little copper coins, two leptra. Jesus pointed her out to his disciples. The rich had put in some of their "walking around" money, but the poor widow had turned over her whole living. She had counter-signed her Social Security check and put it in the offering box. They gave what they could easily spare out of their abundance and she gave everything she had. So by Jesus' mathematics— which is not taught in accounting schools— she had given more than they had.

So we preachers have seized on this story and we bring it out every fall as a way of saying that every little counts to those who can't afford much. We don't say so, you know, but we know very well that reading the story this way shames those who could give more so maybe they will give more.

But it's not stewardship campaign time. I'm not under any instruction to raise funds with this particular sermon, though as a rule we do accept donations.

So I'm free to tell you that, although this is a story about fund-raising, it is not a fund-raising story. I'm also free to go where the story sends me. And I'm free to notice the context, the parts that come before and after the story of the widow. I'm free to stand where the story invites me to stand and see what the story invites me to see.

What I see first of all is that before we get to the story, Jesus has been in a long dispute with the Temple worthies. They try to trap him with questions, but he slips through their nets. He finishes the series by going on the offensive. Jesus attacks the scribes for their large egos. They like to be treated with respect in public; they say long prayers to look good; and they expect places of honor when the synagogue meets or they are invited to a dinner party.

They also exploit widows. Widows, as you remember, along with orphans and foreign workers, are the groups that ancient Israel considered to be especially vulnerable. Widows, orphans, and guest workers were isolated in a world where being alone was the next step from death, not just socially, but often quite literally. It was for this reason that God takes their treatment seriously and personally.

I know I hate it when I hear of some new scam that exploits the vulnerable. It's still too often the older folks among us, too often literally widows who are taken advantage of in this way. A Bernie Madoff builds a Ponzi scheme on retirement investments, or roofing companies take down payments and then skip town, or people posing as IRS agents offer to settle a tax debt for pennies on the dollar. All they need is your checking account number. They all get my blood boiling. If it were up to me I would smear them with honey and stake them out on a hill of fire ants. So it's probably a good thing it isn't up to me.

And here, according to Jesus' accusation, we have people who make their living telling people what the Covenant of Yahweh means— the covenant that demands the protection of widows, orphans, and guest workers— who are themselves the exploiters of the vulnerable, widows included. They figure out ways to separate widows from their precarious livings and then parade their own piety on the street corners.

This widow is a case in point!

While it is true that, if generosity is measured by what we give in comparison to what we can afford to give, the widow has a virtue few if any of us can match. But Jesus pointed her out, not as an illustration of generosity, but as an illustration of the hypocrisy of the scribes and an example of their flagrant disregard for justice and the covenant's demands. I don't think Jesus pointed her out because he admired her, although he may well have. I think Jesus pointed her out because he was disgusted by the way the Temple was abusing her piety and taking advantage of her.

Anyway, he seems to have had enough for the day. He and the disciples left the Temple. As they were going out, the disciples like a bunch of tourists were gaping at the architecture. That was the frosting on the cake. Wouldn't the Temple be more beautiful if it were a place where widows were protected and orphans were cared for and guest workers were treated fairly? Wouldn't that more than compensate for the slight loss of income and the slightly reduced operating budget for the Temple?

"You see these great buildings?" Jesus asked his disciples. "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down." The Temple will be destroyed for the crimes that were committed there and the pride and hypocrisy of its leaders. Maybe honey and fire ants are in order, after all.

Fund-seeking preachers have turned this into a story about the wonderful piety of the poor widow when they should have noticed that Jesus underscored her actions as an indictment of the fund-raising efforts of the Temple and of the system of which it was the symbolic center. If anything, they should have been giving her money, not the other way around.

The whole of this text makes clear what generations of Consecration Sunday sermons have not: A society that requires that the poor become poorer so the rich can become richer lives on borrowed time and under the shadow of an impending doom. Any society founded on injustice builds fine monuments to its own glory upon a fault line so deep, so severe, so unstable, that not one stone will be left upon another.

Justice is a finer ornament than any amount of gold leaf. Mercy makes for better architecture than towers of glass and steel. Protecting the vulnerable from the rapacious rich provides better security than any amount of electronic surveillance. It is not too late to turn ourselves and to begin to turn the world toward these things.

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