The Kiss of Fulfilled Hope

Jeremiah 33:14-16; 1 Thessalonians 3:6-13

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If I had to take a guess at what the most famous kiss ever might be, I would have to say the V-J Day kiss captured by photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt and published all over the world on the cover of Life magazine.  I think nearly everybody in at least North America and Europe has seen this picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after hearing that World War II had come to and end.  It was a very joyous day for those sailors and nurses for their ship was to leave that afternoon for the Pacific.  When the news of the war’s end came out, a spontaneous flood of about 10,000 sailors descended upon Times Square and the kissing commenced.  The goal was to kiss as many people as you could. 

The photograph of the V-J Day kiss is very important in Modern history.  It seemed to capture the joy of many peoples world over who were tired of war, of destruction, fear, and death.  It apparently also signified that there would be a future for it was that generation of people who gave birth to the Baby Boomers.  The war was over and there was to commence a new age of rebuilding.  I would not be exaggerating to say that the people who lived in the joy of that kiss built the world as we know it.  For them, community took precedence over individuality.  The horrors of war had taught “we” is more important than “me”.  That kiss symbolized the joy of their hope fulfilled of the war coming to an end.  The victory had been won in a far away land.  The soldiers would soon be returning from that far away land and life would begin anew.  It is this joy of a hope fulfilled that this photograph of a kiss proclaimed all over the world. 

The first generation of Christians felt a similar joy, I believe.  God had finally made a word of hope that he had spoken hundreds of years prior come to pass.  No longer would they be waiting for the time of “in those days” for those days were now upon them.  This Sprout of David had risen up and brought justice and righteousness to the land.  The Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, had come and made manifest the Kingdom of God.  He was put to death but God raised him from the dead.  As Jesus of Nazareth God had defeated sin and death but it was as if it were a victory in a land far away.  They would have to wait for Jesus to return for the full impact of the victory to be felt.  Until that day, the word of this victory was to go throughout the world accompanied by God’s abiding kiss, the Holy Spirit, who would rest in and upon God’s people, awakening faith, hope, and love among people wherever this Good News was proclaimed.  

The immediate effect of this kiss, the gift of the Holy Spirit, was that those who received it suddenly found their regrets and shame no longer mattered for God himself had kissed them with his very presence.  They suddenly felt free to live yet with gratitude and deeply desiring to live a life pleasing to God.  The war of life was over.  Jesus had won the victory and he would soon be returning from a far-off land to set his kingdom in place.  Until that day this abiding kiss from God, the Holy Spirit, inspired them to come together and share their lives and love one another as if the day of Jesus’ return was upon them.  Love for another and for all people was beginning to increase and abound among them. 

Life would not be easy for those who knew the victory had been won.  For the victory had been won, as I said, in a land far away and the enemy, sin and death, was still in their midst refusing to surrender.  Many of those first Christians died horrible deaths for believing the Good News and living according to it.  Because they knew God and knew the fellowship that arose from the presence of the Holy Spirit in their midst, they would not participate in the idolatrous, drunken orgy that characterized Roman society.  Rather, they withdrew to share their own worship-feasts.  People took note of this and were offended by it.  So, they spread the rumor Christians were a secret society of cannibals fostering treason.  This led to persecution often breaking out against the Church.  Yet, they knew Christ Jesus would be returning because he had come in the first place just as God had said he would through his prophets and he had sent his Spirit.  God keeps his word.  What God says comes about.  Jesus is coming back.

Now that’s talking about things down the road.  What about now?  How do we now live?  We like the early church live now in “those days”.  Like the sailors and nurses in Times Square on V-J Day heard the good news that the victory has been won in a far away land and the soldiers will be coming back, we have heard the Good News, that Jesus has won the victory over sin, evil, and death and will soon be coming back.  We have been kissed by God with the gift of the Holy Spirit and know that he is with us and that he keeps his word and does work all things to the good for those who love him.  Therefore, we have a hope that the war of life will have an awesome ending – resurrection and New Creation.  A real hope not just a wish for God has said this is the way it will be.  

But, as in the early church, the enemy is still in our land and will be until the LORD returns.  Therefore, we must persevere and live as those who have hope, a hope that does not disappoint because God has poured his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, a hope that is built on our each having personal knowledge that God is faithful and keeps his word.  We learn faith and hope by experiencing God’s faithfulness to us.  We’ve all had experiences when we knew God in love was being faithful to us.  If not, we wouldn’t be here right now.  We would be one of those who today have no faith or are done with the faith.  Knowing God’s faithfulness has changed the way we look at life.  God has taught us hope.  We know that we can always trust God’s faithfulness and steadfast love.  God will keep his word.

As a people of hope we must live our lives according to the values of the coming Kingdom of God rather than the values of this world.  We must love one another and all peoples the way that we have been loved.  This we must do as a testimony to the truth.  In our midst is a Christian community that gives testimony to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.  Among us is the New Jerusalem and our name is certainly, “The Lord is our righteousness.”  Go forth and be the kiss of fulfilled hope.  Amen.

Birth Pangs

Mark 13:5-8,32-33

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I am quite blessed to have been present with Dana when she gave birth to William and Alice.  As a man, I felt quite helpless to watch Dana go through all that pain and not really be able to do anything all that helpful.  For me it is unimaginable what the pain of giving birth is like.  If somebody were to cause as much pain to a person under different circumstances, post-traumatic stress would certainly ensue.  But rarely if ever do we hear of women having post-partum traumatic stress symptoms where they relive the painful event of giving birth.  Rather, it is quite often the case women are more than willing to go through it again for another child.  Apparently, they say, the pain is quickly forgotten for from it comes a new life.  The excruciating pain of childbirth is all a part of the miracle of bringing forth a new life, a new person.  The instincts of love and hope and wonder and joy overshadow the injustice of the violent pain of the actual birthing. 

When I first saw William and Alice, though they were red and wrinkly and looked like little alien babies, I immediately saw their links to people in their past.  William had features of my Grandma Benson and Alice had features of my mother.  They were part of me.  I felt completely humbled and helpless and yet I was protector dad.  These were my children and I immediately felt love and the wonder of it all and the reality of it.  Things were now all new.  The awaited day had arrived.  Here were two little lives for whom I was responsible.  Who would they become?  Only God knows and only time will tell.  Birth, life is such a wonder.

Well, it is interesting to me that Jesus compares all the disastrously bad stuff that happens in the world to birth pangs, to the pain of childbirth.  Famines, wars, earthquakes, and if you read further, religious persecution and deception and all the suffering those events leave in their wakes are birth pangs.  This certainly reframes the question of suffering, I think.  Why is there suffering in this world, evil, and natural disasters?  It’s because God’s good creation is giving birth to something new and really wonderful and these pains are what we must endure for this new life, this new world to come into existence.

This is Christ the King Sunday or as some call it Reign of Christ Sunday.  This is the Sunday we make our case that Jesus is Lord of all creation, that he really is in charge amidst all the Hell that breaks loose in God’s good creation.  This isn’t an easy case to make since reality is stacked against us.  The number one reason people say they don’t, won’t, or will no longer believe in God, especially a God who loves us and gets personally involved in our lives, is that there is so much suffering, evil, injustice, disease, poverty, and so forth in the world.  So, if God is so loving, how can he let these terrible things happen?  Why doesn’t he wave his hand and heal this broken world? 

Well, let’s take a look at the state of the world.  Major earthquakes happen frequently on planet Earth with devastating effect, but sometimes we just have to say this was a bit excessive.  I remember hearing the news of the tsunami caused by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean that hit southeast Asia on Sunday, December 26, 2004 killing over a quarter million people in an instant.  Mother Earth seems to have hit Western Canada this year with climate change vengeance – wildfires, drought, and now floods.  The consensus of the scientific community is that these weather events are all part of climate change.  Earthquakes happen when they happen, but these weather events will become more frequent and violent and they are our fault.  We’ve brought them about due to our love of fossil fuels and global leadership not wanting to make the unpopular decisions to curb the situation.  

On the war front, the people of Afghanistan will go hungry this winter because of power hungry religious zealots who want to rule but don’t know how to feed people.  But before we get too hard on that regime, we need to note that there is a global food shortage besetting humanity at present and all the while the human population will pass 8 billion any day now.  It’s doubled in my lifetime.  There are way too many people on this planet and over fifty percent of them, mostly children live in conditions of poverty.  Meanwhile, we are all waiting patiently for Elon Musk to fork over those 6 billion dollars of his personal wealth that he said he would give if somebody could show him how it could solve global hunger…and somebody did but he hasn’t shown the money.  Celebrity fixes aside, the problem of global hunger could be solved if global leadership would put feeding people and ending poverty at the top of their agendas instead of simply protecting the economic interests of those who have wealth hoping it will trickle down.  

We are in the thralls of a pandemic that in the last 20 months has killed 5.1 million people.  That’s just the tip of the iceberg as so many nations have not given accurate death counts because it makes their leadership look bad.  Some very effective vaccines have been developed but the drug companies who developed them won’t release the patents so that generic versions can be produced and distributed faster and more widely to poorer nations.  World governments won’t force them.  

The state of the world is a mess and I haven’t even mentioned all the personal and family tragedies that befall us all that hurt us deeply.  But from just taking a cursory look at the state of the world, I don’t think I’m wrong to surmise that global leadership, the kings and queens of the earth so to speak, for whatever reason are not making the necessary decisions that solve the problems that afflict humanity and the planet we live on.  We need King Jesus to come and put things right.  The situation is more precarious than it was 2,000 years ago.  But where is he?  It seems he rode into Jerusalem stirred some stuff up and is now sitting and watching from a neighbouring hillside and we are left asking the question he seems to avoid answering: When?

But to give credit where credit is due, I’m a person of faith.  I follow Jesus not because I have made intellectual assent to doctrines because somebody threatened me with eternal consequences if I didn’t.  My answer to the question of where is King Jesus is that he is with us.  I have had too many personal experiences of his presence and his acting on my behalf to discount him and faith in him as rationally impossible.  The work of the Holy Spirit in me has brought me to know that I am a beloved child of God.  That has changed everything for me.  I’ve encountered the presence and work of the Holy Spirit amidst Christian gatherings to the extent that I know God is working in his good creation in and through individual churches and individual believers as healing and reconciling signposts pointing humanity to the better future God has in store for us.

But, be warned, let’s not necessarily equate God’s work in the world with the religious institution of the Church.  We know the religious institution of the Church has done horrible things throughout history in Jesus’ name.  That’s not Jesus.  Rather, He works dynamically in the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus through individual believers, through gatherings of believers, works that have set in motion larger movements that change the world for the better in order to point us forward to a better day coming.  But, as soon as we make a stayed in the wool institution out God’s mighty acts and get religious about it and make religious practices the practice of our faith rather than actual faithfulness in the moment we go astray and, sadly, astray in Jesus’ name just as he said it would happen.

So, I know where Jesus is but I still have some difficulty answering the question as to why God continues to allow his good creation, his beloved humanity, his beloved children suffer and to suffer evil at that.  There is a grave futility set loose in God’s creation that truly makes us question his justice and love and for some reason God lets it persist and only gives us small tastes of good things to come by making his presence known and felt.

The answer Jesus hints at for this delay is this metaphor of birth pangs.  God’s good creation is in the process of giving birth to a new creation.  All things will be made new.  There will be resurrection.  There will be justice rendered in the form of forgiveness and healing.  God’s good creation will be cleansed of that futility.  As in childbirth the labour pains can be excruciating and they start to come closer and closer together so that relief seems impossible, but the baby comes.  No one can say exactly when a child will finally come forth and the labour pains end, but when it arrives, everything changes.  Everything’s new, different, full of hope and wonder.

So let us stay awake and not lose sight of the hope and wonder of the new life that is coming.  I don’t wish to dismiss the reality of the pain and suffering that we all go through and the terrible affliction that globally people are suffering, but as they say with childbirth, the pains and trauma of labour are soon forgotten.  Paul writes, “I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rm. 8:18).  We must set our sights and gear our lives towards that new reality that’s coming.  Love as we have been loved by God.  Show kindness and hospitality.  Be generous.  Be beacons of hope in our communities as individuals and as faith communities.  We are the ones who know that creation is pregnant and in the painful process of giving birth.  So, we need to make sure we are doing everything we can to keep this birth from being anymore painful that it already is, but rather be good coaches, good midwives of the new creation.  Amen.

 

 

 

About Those Buildings

 Mark 13:1-8

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My grandfather had some health issues that led to my grandparents having to sell the house that they had always lived in.  For over fifty years it was their home, the place they raised their family, the place we grandkids knew as a second home.  Quite frankly, it was the Benson family temple.  It was the place anyone of us could go home to, door always open, refrigerator always full, Grandaddy ever-ready to listen, Grandma ever-ready to talk, a bed ever-ready for a sleepover.  The home was as full of unconditional love, hospitality, and generosity as it was permeated with the smells of the natural gas range and Grandma’s cooking.

After the final box was carried out Grandaddy took a few minutes to stand alone in the house and say his thanks, say his goodbyes, to a very close friend of his.  The memories of so many Christmases, of children running and playing, of coming in from work and putting his policeman’s belt and holster on top of the dining room hutch where no kid could ever reach it, summer evenings on the front porch, the bannister up the stairs that had helped so much the last few years as he no longer had the air to make the climb without stopping a few times.  So many memories with such a good friend, his home.  So much of who he was lived embodied in that house and he knew he didn’t have much longer himself.  So, those last few minutes in a way was Grandaddy saying goodbye to himself.  His next little bit of time on this earth in a new house would never be as good as the years he spent in that house and would never amount to anything more than waiting for what awaits on the other side.  He had lived a good, full life.

When I picture Jesus sitting on the Mount of Olives looking across the Kidron Valley at the Temple, I cannot help but think of my grandfather and his last moments in his home.  It was a magnificent Temple.  It wasn’t the Temple Solomon built.  That one had been robbed and razed by the Babylonians when God passed judgement on his people for their idolatry and abusing their poor and sent them into exile in Babylon in 586 BC.  Then, roughly 100 years later a remnant of several thousand returned and in time they managed to piece together a less than magnificent Temple but still a place for their God who had brought them out of slavery in Egypt and returned them from Exile to come and repose among them.  This meager Temple in Jerusalem was the heart and home of the Jewish people and their faith.   It was the place of the sacrifices, where the relationship with God was maintained, kept pure.  It was where the prayers of the people entered Heaven.  Jews made frequent pilgrimages to Jerusalem because that was going “Home”.

Well, in 20BC King Herod the Great began a major renovation of the Temple.  The modest post-exile Temple became a massive display of national opulence.  The historian Josephus tells us that Herod put gold plating on the front of it so that at sunrise you couldn’t look at it for it was as bright as the sun.  He said that the outer surface of the rest of those massive stones were polished so white that when you saw the temple from a distance it looked like a mountain covered in snow.  It took a year and a half for Herod to renovate the Temple itself, but he also set in motion a project of building the Temple complex that took sixty years to finally finish.  It also took a lot of tax dollars.  This building project and the Scribal administration that oversaw it turned the Temple into the devourer of widow’s houses that I spoke about last week.  Temple taxes and Roman taxes were robbing the nation.  People were losing businesses and homes.  And so, Jesus pronounced the sentence that the Temple would be destroyed.  In 70AD that happened.  The Romans burned it to the ground and carried its wealth away to Rome like a prisoner of war.

So, there sat Jesus facing the Temple.  Quite a lonely, heartbreaking moment I would think.  This Temple was his “home” too.  I can imagine him feeling like I do when I go back home and take that nostalgic drive out in the country and pass by the house where my great-grandmother lived.  So many cherished memories of that little house, the wrap-around porch, the outhouse, the garden, the chicken house…always well-kept.  But now, the people who own it have closed in the porch.  Instead of the garden there’s this massive, gaudy satellite dish.  There’s old vehicles and junk everywhere.  It breaks my heart.  

Likewise, Jesus as a child, his family was among those who made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem almost every year.  Luke tells the story of when Jesus was twelve how he scared his parents by sneaking back to Jerusalem to go to his Father’s house to teach the Rabbis a thing or two and they were impressed.  So many cherished memories he would have had of Jerusalem and the Temple, only to come to the realization of what it had become and therefore what must happen to it for it was no longer the place where God and the people came together, where heaven and earth came together.  It was just a gaudy display of everything that God was not and his people were not supposed to be.  This Temple may have looked impressive, heavenly even, but for all its wealth it was spiritually bankrupt.  It would be like somebody tearing down my great-grandmother’s homey little home and replacing it with one of those massive stone estate homes that are so popular today.  Jesus’ home, his Father’s House, was nothing more than a vulgar display of religious hypocrisy and national debt.

I’m going to change gears for a moment and the grinding may cause some discomfort.  The Temple coming to an end immediately makes me think of church closings.  We used to rarely hear of a church closing.  Every Presbytery used to have that little country church that after 40 years of no one being able to understand how it kept going finally closing its doors.  Our Presbytery is rural and small town which means we have more than our fair share of little churches that just keep going.  The Whitehorse church near Wingham closed about seven years ago and was the first to do so in a long while.  But then in the last five years four of our churches have closed.  One amalgamated.  The next five years will prove to be even more brutal.  It is the same with our sister denominations of the United and Anglican Churches.  Rural/small town Ontario is seeing church closures on an unprecedented scale.  

Unlike the Temple in our reading, the reason for our church closures isn’t a judgement upon our iniquitous opulence.  Show me a rural church that’s not frugal to a T and generous to a fault.  The rural small church is all about relationship and community cohesion.  It has been a vital part of rural community life.  Well, about 40 years ago there started a significant migration to urban centers that stunted generational continuation in rural congregations.  On top of that there is also the general demise of institutional Christianity as our culture has become more secularized.  A recent survey of religious affiliation in Canada found that just over 50% of the population claim to be agnostic, atheist, or no affiliation and only 11% of the population attends a religious service on a somewhat weekly basis (that’s inclusive of all faiths, not just Christians).  Those claiming Christian affiliation are in the 20%.  The most recent National Census may show we’ve dropped into the teens.  The terms “None”, “spiritual but not religious”, “Done” (with the church), and “faithful remnant” adequately describe the religious landscape of Canada. 

When I first started in ministry 25 years ago, Congregational Redevelopment was the area to be in.  Today, it is church planting.  Those who plant churches today will readily tell you that they have no intention of ever building a building to meet in.  In fact, they find that most people today do not understand what goes on in a church building and have no desire to ever step inside of one.  They do not understand why if a church is supposed to be a charitable organization getting tax breaks and all that, then why so much money is wasted on buildings that could be otherwise used for actually helping people.  New church plants are content to meet in homes, vacant storefronts, or wherever they can find a space for cheap.  Afterall, the early church didn’t have buildings and met mostly in homes, in forest groves, and sometimes even in tombs.  Moreover, nearly all significant church renewal movements started in places other than church buildings.  It seems the next major form of the church will be building-less.

Well, I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that for most of us in the faithful remnant, we have a difficult time separating our faith from our buildings.  It is very difficult for us to in envision a Christian faith that does include a church building.  But, the harsh reality of today is that if we cling to our buildings, we will lose our congregations and in the case of rural Christianity, rural communities will lose Christian communities meeting and worshipping in their midst.  Rural Christianity will disappear.  In so many communities, that one congregation still holding on in its building is all that’s left of the Christian faith in that area and beyond.  Churches close and the members say they will go elsewhere, but they don’t because elsewhere is too far away.  It would have just made sense to sell the building but keep the congregation and just met together somewhere other than the building that had simply become too much for them to maintain.

In the world in which we live our old friend, our church “home” is no longer an asset to Christian witness and mission.  It is no longer a building block to ministry it is a stumbling block…and this is very, very sad.  We love our buildings.  They are “home” to us.  We have sat in these pews for years with family and friends and felt the peaceful, still presence of God and heard his voice in times of difficulty.  We have enjoyed countless meals in our church fellowship halls.  Our children have run and played up the aisles of the sanctuary and out in the church yard.  It is “home”.

In today’s world, if we take our advice from the church-planters, it would be prudent we make the proactive decision to sell our church buildings but continue on as a congregation in our communities so that there will continue to be Christian presence in our rural communities.  The assets freed up from the sale of buildings can do a great amount of good in our local communities if there is a worshipping, witnessing Christian presence in that community willing to be generous with them.  Church planters tell us that people are more willing to come to a potluck thing at their neighbour’s house that may have a Christian atmosphere, than they are willing to go to a potluck at a church.

Wrapping up, what is happening with respect to the church and its buildings in the Canadian countryside is very, very sad.  It just plain hurts.  Yet to look to the future as we must, the church just two to three decades from now will likely not be a Sunday morning meet in a church building thing.  The Christianity that’s left and that is therefore moving forward will have found a way beyond that sacred moment in a sacred place way of being the church and rather discovered a great freedom and an abundance in being adaptable as they wander in the wilderness of the 21^st Century as the people of God when they wandered in the Wilderness after God freed them from slavery in Egypt.  Amen.

 

Something's Wrong Here

Mark 12:38-44

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Around our house we occasionally take to binge watching The Murdoch Mysteries.  It’s interesting to see what happens when the clues completely stump even the brilliant mind of Murdoch.  Somethings wrong.  Something doesn’t add up.  The clues lead here but it’s a dead end.  That’s usually when the brutishly practical minded Inspector Brackenreid will chime in with something to the effect of, “Well, me ole mucker, follow the money.”  Then Murdoch looks at the clues from the perspective of who stands to gain financially from the crime and before you know it the crime is solved.  Lesson learned.  When something’s wrong around here and things don’t add up, follow the money and you’ll find the truth.

Well, the Gospel of Mark works a bit like that.  The point that we are now at in the storyline of the Gospel about Jesus, Son of God, is that there is a horrendous crime about to be committed.  Israel is about to crucify its Messiah, the one whom God had promised to send to deliver them from all their oppressors and establish the Kingdom of God on earth.  In fact, the crime is even more serious than that.  They are about to kill their God who has somehow become human as this man Jesus.  If you are following Mark’s story from the perspective of the Twelve Disciples, it is obvious that Jesus has been doing things that only God could do, particularly that calming the Sea thing.  For the people of Israel the fulfillment of the prophesied hopes of the prophets was taking place before their very eyes, but they just couldn’t see it.  Even the Scribes and the Pharisees, the most learned among them, just couldn’t see it.  As outsiders hearing these accounts of Jesus acts and teachings, we should be at the point of thinking something’s wrong here.  The clues are there but for some reason the “detectives” aren’t adding them up.  If I were Mark, this is the moment I would stage a cameo appearance from Inspector Brackenreid to say, “Well, me ole mucker, follow the money.” 

And that’s the point we are at in Mark’s Gospel.  We are about to find out what’s wrong with the system, with the way things are, with religion, with politics by following the money.  We are at the point when God the Judge decides the merits of our investigation.  Jesus, the Son of God, Lord and Saviour, the Messiah, the Holy One of Israel, the Son of David (all those titles we’ve heard him called by in the Gospel), the One who fed those crowds, who calmed the Seas, who cast out demons, who teaches with authority, the one who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey like a king, the one who ran all the big business thieves out of temple and called it his Father’s house; this Jesus, he sat down facing the treasury.  The language and the image here is of a judge taking his seat to scrutinize a case and render a judgement.  

The chief villain in the case is apparently the Scribes and Jesus is obviously biased against them for he announces that the greatest guilty verdict and sentence will be against them.  They are the polar opposite of Jesus.  He was a wandering preacher living off donations.  They like putting on their lavish robes and saying long prayers that make them sound so godly-ish.  They like you to kneel before them when you great them and they expect the best seats at all religious and social gatherings.  They think they are soooo special.  Why? Well, they know the Law of God Almighty and have the authority to interpret and enforce it…and they also know the loopholes.  They are literally the most powerful people in the theocracy of Israel.  A theocracy is a state founded on religious law.  (Check any Modern day theocracy and you will find that those who judge and rule over the people according to a religious law carry on the same way.)

Jesus told his disciples to beware the Scribes and names one of their specific crimes.  They devour the houses of widows.  If a husband died and there were no sons to look after the estate or only young children a Scribe would become the executor of the estate because in their patriarchal culture the widow, being a woman, was not considered capable or competent to look after such a matter.  This system was set in place to protect widows in a patriarchal system, but…the Scribes had ways to take financial advantage of the situation that in the end often left a widow without resource.  The Scribes were profiteering off the vulnerability of the widows they were supposed to protect resulting in many widows losing their homes.

That’s pretty serious business – Bad Business.  In the giving of the Law, God was very explicit in several places that widows and orphans were to be protected and provided for in Israel.  In last week’s passage when Jesus told that Scribe that the second greatest commandment was to love your neighbour as yourself he was quoting a passage from Leviticus in which that verse is the summary statement of a long list of social justice laws which included providing for widows and orphans.  But the rich and powerful in Israel seemed to have a problem with doing that.  Several of the prophets, Amos in particular, condemned the wealthy in Israel for such abuses.  In fact, taking advantage of the poor in the land by the religious and political authorities who grew wealthier by doing so is the reason God cast the Israelites off the land into exile in Babylon and let the Babylonian armies destroy the temple.  God got mad about their idolatry, but when they started to abuse their own poor for profit, that’s when God let them have it.  More about that next week when Jesus pronounces to his disciples that the temple will be destroyed again.

After announcing his judicial prejudice against the Scribes Jesus followed the money and takes his judgement seat across from the treasury.  This could be one of two places in the Temple complex.  In the Women’s Court, where women gathered as they weren’t allowed into other “more important” parts of the Temple, there were thirteen chests for people to throw coins into.  Some assume that the widow we are about to meet was here because she was a woman and had only coins.  But Mark said it was the Treasury that Jesus sat down in front of to scrutinize.  The way giving worked in the Treasury was that you came and made a public pronouncement of how much you were giving and declared what it was to be used for.  

As Jesus watched this public display of donating he noticed “something’s wrong here”.  Honorably, people were giving generously to the Temple for its upkeep and the provision of the Scribes and Priests and as we’ll find out next week it was a beautiful Temple.  Let’s not fault the wealthy here, they were giving generously as they should have been.  (Oh to have a few wealthy donors around here doing as honorably to our churches.)  But…Jesus noted that it’s not really costing them anything.  Their giving isn’t sacrificial, might I say.  

Then, almost as a matter of civil disobedience, or prophetic condemnation, up comes a widow to the treasury.  I can imagine her as being a bit feisty and going to the table of the ledger keeper  with a bit of a scowl and announcing “Here’s my last two cents.  Feed a Scribe.”  That’s the way I want to imagine it, but not likely how it happened.  The gift probably went unnoticed by everybody except Jesus who noted that she had just given everything she had; indeed, her whole life.  She could no longer buy food.  This woman who had lost her worth and dignity due to her husband’s death and being the likely victim of Scribal profiteering had just sacrificially given her whole life…at the treasury…of the Temple.  Talk about your money trails and where they lead.  This widow was doing what Jesus himself had come to do.  Jesus had come to give his life to give humanity back its worth and dignity.  What an astonishingly great act of generosity by a very poor, anonymous widow who had no worth or dignity to give… because it had been stolen from her by Death and by spiritual abuse.

But wait a minute.  Something’s wrong here.  Why are people giving all this money to a Temple building and the institution surrounding it when there are poor widows in their midst?  And worse why is this poor widow giving everything she has left to this blatant display of abuse and hypocrisy?  Is this what faith and faithfulness is…simply giving money to an institution that bears God’s name?  It reminds me of all those TV ministries particularly back in the 80’s and 90’s that would tell you to give to them and God would give back to you a hundredfold.  A couple of years ago one of the coin boxes at Joel Osteen’s Houston complex was stolen. $600,000 was its estimated worth, a coin box with one weekend’s givings.  $600,000 for whatever Osteen uses money for?  Good look following the money there.  Please don’t give to those folks especially when your local churches and food banks are running deficits and particularly large ones due to COVID.

Returning to Mark, a day or so earlier in the Gospel, some Pharisees and some Cronies of the King, the Herodians, tried to entrap Jesus over the question of whether to pay taxes to Caesar.  To pay the Caesar tax you had to have Roman coin.  Roman coins had images of Caesar on them and the words “Lord and Saviour”.  All Jews considered it idolatrous to carry Roman money.  If you remember the Children’s Church object lesson Jesus gave them, he showed them a Roman coin, asked whose image was on it, and told them to repay Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s.  We have to note that Jesus was not himself carrying any Roman coin and that he had to borrow it from them.  Thus, here’s some devout Pharisees carrying little idols of Caesar in their money pouches because they believed they needed it to live in a Roman world.  Another thing to notice, the word repay is debt language and Jesus forced them to ask themselves to whom they were more indebted: Caesar or God?  They owed the false god Caesar for safe roads, an oppressing army, and the continuation of their privileged status.  But they owed God for their life.  They owe God the greater debt and should repay God with the service of their whole lives…not this Caesar with whom they were colluding in taking advantage of the poor.

Well, this poor widow apparently understands that her life belongs to God and wants to entrust what little there was left of it to the God who gave it to her in the first place.  When somebody in such desperate situation gives their last little bit like this poor widow did obviously something is wrong here.  Was it an act of protest, or a desperate bargain with God, or had she just plain given up?  We don’t know.  What we do know is that out of her poverty she gave all she had – her whole life – while those who had a lot, though they gave large gifts, their gifts really cost them nothing.  

At the heart of that “something wrong” was that the hypocritical religious institution of the Temple had become a devouring idol due to decades to centuries of Scribal corruption.  The Temple was supposed to be the place where God dwelt and people should have been able to come and be in God’s presence.  The Temple was supposed to be the place where the poor could come and receive justice and the help they needed.  Instead, like Caesar’s coins, the temple had become an idol and the Scribes bore the bulk of the responsibility for that happening.  The people, both the wealthy and this poor widow, were simply giving money to an idol who devours the vulnerable and makes hypocrites out of those who give generously.

Usually, this passage of Scripture comes up on Stewardship themed Sunday’s when we take time to remember that we and all that we have and are belong to God.  We consider our generosity in our giving of time and talents and money and so forth.   Do we try to grow in generosity to where our giving actually costs us something, which is the pattern set forth by Jesus, or are we just giving what costs us nothing?  

But we need to think about what we are giving to as well.  As a minister, I have to entertain the thought of how much am I like a Scribe in an institution that’s exists by the generosity of people living on pensions. Does my salary come from somebody’s last two pennies?  I hope not.  I remember in university giving the last $50 I had for the month to a church parking lot fund which meant I had to go about a week and a half with no gas or food money.  That was stupid.  But, I felt I had to do my part and was being told God would bless those gifts.  That sounds like a wicked thing, but on the other side of the matter, I’m reasonably sure that if the leadership of that church had found out that I did that, they would have found a way to have given it back with a little extra.  So, we should be careful how we judge churches and money.  It truly is a rare church that is into profiteering off the spiritual needs of people and most of them are on TV.  

God asks us to give to support our local church ministries and the ministers we employ.  In these COVID times our churches are running deficits and we can’t fundraise like we used to.  This obviously means our personal financial support of our church needs to increase.  Moreover, there are needs in our communities and in the world that we need to be generous with as well.  There’s a huge need for food in Afghanistan and in our local food banks right now.  There is something wrong around here in that global food prices are increasing due to people profiteering on food in these COVID times especially and it ain’t the local farmer.  The local farmer isn’t being shown the money. But, here I am asking the local farmer to give money to programs that will feed people the food they grew.  Somethings wrong here.  

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough.  I’ll close by saying that God provides for us so that we can help provide for others.  God gives to us so that we may give to others.  That’s the supply chain in God’s Kingdom.  When we put a hold on that and start keeping to ourselves, then that’s when that proverbial something starts going wrong around here.  Amen.