Two Cents Worth

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Mark 12:38-13:2

I went online the other day and searched for the origins of the phrase “my two cents worth.”  No one really knew.  Several sites pointed here to Mark’s Gospel (and Luke’s) as the earliest reference to the phrase, but not likely the origin.  Mark uses the widow’s “two cents worth” quite differently than what the phrase means to us.  A person’s “two cents worth” for us is usually their opinion.  We also use this phrase as a way to tone down our comments with a little humility or politeness.  For example, it is better to say, “if you want my two cents worth, that dress doesn’t bring out your best features” than saying “If you’re going to wear that dress, you best not stand next to any couches because people will mistake your rump for an end table.”  Another more rare use we have for the phrase is for indicating too much information.  I say to you “a penny for your thoughts” and you in turn give me “two cents worth”.  There are some who think the phrase most likely dates back to the early days of the British postal system when postage was two cents.  If you wanted to send your thoughts to someone, you wrote a letter and put a two-cent stamp on it, thus valuing the worth of your thoughts at two cents. 

            My two cents worth on the matter is that we shouldn’t point to the actions of this widow as the source of the phrase.  If we did, we would find that her “two cents worth” isn’t just an opinion.  It’s rather a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy of institutionalized religion.  The widow’s faithfulness cost her everything.  Her two cents worth was literally all she had to live on and here she was giving it to the establishment because that’s what faithful people did when they came to the temple.  Her meager gift which cost her everything was much greater than that of all the rich people who came and made a public display of their huge donations which were supposed to make them appear to be exceptionally faithful.  Yet in comparison to widow, their extravagant gifts really cost them nothing.

And consider where the money went.  The treasury money bought the long robes the scribes were wearing while they stood there giving long, meaningless, bereft of faith prayers on behalf of their wealthy patrons to honour them rather than God.  The temple itself looked great due to these ostentatious donations.  Even Jesus’ disciples are impressed.  A well-kept temple and a well-dressed priesthood made Israel and Israel’s God look good before all the other gods of all those other nations, so they believed.  But, what a waste of this widow’s last two cents.

When Jesus gave his two cents worth he pointedly noted how this widow and her two cents exposes the hypocrisy of the whole affair.  The scribes in all their empty, obsequious impressiveness were nothing more than devourers of the household means of many a truly faithful widow.  That offering box or treasury was there in keeping with Moses' command that the other eleven tribes of Israel support the tribe of Levi who were designated to be the priests and scribes.  The Levites who were not given an allotment of land when the Israelites first conquered the Promised Land and were dispersed among the other tribes like parish priests.  They were unable to support themselves.  The other tribes were to support them.  But, the Israelites were also supposed to support the widows and orphans and strangers in their midst.  This widow really shouldn’t have been giving anything to the Scribes.  They should have been taking from the treasury to provide for her.  Yet, her two cents only went to make them look better while they apparently wouldn’t give her a dime.  What a waste of her two cents worth!

 Yet, here this widow was giving everything she had probably hoping that God would notice and in turn bless her.  TV preachers and scam ministries are good at using that scam to manipulate people in times of financial desperation.  Give to my ministry and God bless you a hundredfold.   Well, God did notice her.  Jesus noticed her.  Her two cents worth would stand as the condemnation of that whole twisted system and be the reason for its destruction.  It did happen as Jesus said that not a stone would be left on top of another.  That judgement came to pass in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the Temple. 

And...whatever became of this nameless widow?  We don’t know.  We only know that she is just one of those insignificant characters who show up only once in the Gospels to reveal what true fidelity to God is.  It is to give the totality of one’s life in faithfulness even if it appears by this world’s standards to be a waste of everything you have and are.  This widow gave her last two cents to God (unfortunately it went to support a sham) and that was her two cents worth.  In essence, she gave her whole life, her last little bit of security.  She put it all into what she believed to be the hands of God.  Just like Jesus did with his life when he took it to the cross. Faithfulness has to do with what we do with the “two cents worth” of the totality of our lives.  The rich, like everyone of us, gave from their abundance and it really didn’t cost them anything.  This impoverished widow gave everything she had.

I have to admit that I hear this widow’s “two cents worth” with fear and trembling.  Quite frankly, being a minister I’m one the Scribes.  I, like you, try to be faithful, but I pale in comparison to this widow.  Oh, (and to pat myself on the back) there was a time many years ago when I was a university student that I put my last fifty dollars in the plate to help pay for my church’s parking lot.  That was all I had until the next paycheck which was never enough to pay my bills.  There was also the time years ago in my last church when the year end credit card balance equaled what Dana and I had contributed to my employer, the church I was serving, that year because “ministers are supposed to set an example in giving for their congregations” and that we did.  That debt was in the thousands and it took a few years to get out from under it.  Interestingly, my employer’s bottom line began its downward spiral after that year because we, one of the largest giving units, had to stop contributing.  I feel rather strongly that ministers should not give financially to the congregations they serve.  It’s a “company town” way of doing things.  I give to PWS&D ministeries and some missionary friends currently serving in Jordan.

This Remembrance Day we should all be feeling like Scribes knowing that there are those who have given their lives or been maimed in body and spirit for us to have basic human freedoms.  Do we honour the sacrifices they and their families have made?  I look at our materialism and consumerism and the narcissism that plagues our culture and I don’t think "this" is what my grandfather suffered for in France and Germany as a machine gunner in World War II nor what so many of his friends died for.  We pay a lot of attention to remember those who served in WWI and WWII, but let us not forget the Korean Conflict, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the UN Peacekeeping missions.  Let us not forget the psychological injury our soldiers endure – the PTSD, the moral injury.  When the go to war they have to do and see horrible things which they find quite difficult to live with.  Let us not forget the families who have lost and who struggle to love someone who’s come home quite different because of war and horribleness.  

Let us not forgot and let us remember that remembering isn’t just a mental exercise.  Remembering means getting involved, making some changes that give continuing worth to the lives that have been lost due to war.  How can we live our lives differently in ways that are truly faithful and not just in appearance?  This widow was the prime example of what it looks like to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength and it truly showed in what she did with what little means of security she had.  Can we find ways to do the same and love our neighbours as we love ourselves?  I personally think we need to start thinking and moving this way or not a stone will be left on top of another.   We need to truly start looking to the needs of our very neighbours.  We need to start thinking “we” rather than “me”.  Let’s not be afraid to waste our “two cents worth” on Jesus and his Kingdom because what we have in Christ is an invaluable “two cents worth” this world needs to hear.  Amen.

Fidelity's Reward

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Ruth 1:10-18, 3:1-5, 4:13-17

Fidelity is a word that I think we don’t hear much anymore.  One place that I think it oddly shows up is the financial world pertaining to investments.  The idea is that we take our money and we enter into an agreement with an investment specialist who gets paid to have our best interests in mind and we entrust our wealth to him/her and they will make it grow.  We can trust them because they make their money based upon how much they make our money make for us.  In essence, we can trust this investment specialist because we have bonded his or her skills, knowledge, and indeed their greed to work for us rather than to take advantage of us.  We have to trust that they won’t just take our money and run as does sometimes happen.  In proving faithful to us by seeking what’s best for us and our financial needs, the specialist is rewarded.  

Fidelity is also a word that shows up in the context of marriage.  Spouses bound one another on oath that they will set their own needs aside to seek what is best for the other rather than seek their own self-fulfillment or fulfillment with another.  Fidelity doesn’t pertain simply to the bedroom.  It is the whole of the relationship.  In fact, if you want to know what the biblical definition of love is, it is fidelity.  Fidelity goes beyond feelings.  Feelings come and go.  But choosing to remain faithful, choosing fidelity to another, when feelings have waned and even at times in the face of adversity, that is love.  If you read the Psalms, the two words that show up most frequently to describe God are steadfast love and faithfulness.  The two words together are fidelity.  God’s love for us is God’s fidelity to us.

The story of Ruth, the Story of Ruth is about fidelity and its reward. In a way it is like Job’s story, a sort of "lose it all, choose fidelity, get it all back” thing.  Yet, her story comes at it from a different angle.  Ruth’s story is more about fidelity to people, whereas Job’s was about fidelity to God.  Let me tell you a bit about her.

Ruth was a Moabite woman.  In the Bible, the Moabites are not viewed favorably.  They come from the bad side of the family tree so to speak.  The Moabites are not direct descendants of Abraham, but rather of Abraham's nephew Lot, if you remember him.  Well, Lot had two daughters who never married and were afraid they wouldn’t have children thus leaving Lot without descendants.  So, taking matters into their own hands, they got Lot oblivious drunk on two consecutive nights and had sex with him respectively and they each got pregnant.  One had a son whom she named Ammon, the father of the Ammonites.  The other daughter named her son Moab.  Because the Israelites and the Moabites shared borders and were always fighting each other, the writers of the Old Testament kept that story alive to tarnish the Ammonites and Moabites as being the children of incest.  Thus, there was considerable prejudice against the Moabites.  

It is surprising that in the continuing story of God’s people that Ruth even though she was a Moabite in the end became the great-grandmother of King David, Israel’s greatest king and the royal ancestor of Jesus.  This turn for the better came about as the result of Ruth’s simple choice of fidelity, her choice to be faithful to her mother-in-law Naomi.  Ruth is a reminder that we must be careful about looking down our noses at people because we never know what God has in store for them.

The story of Ruth begins with an Israelite family taking a turn for the worse into infidelity to their God.  They were a family who turned away from their God to try and save themselves from dying during a famine.  Hard times, famine, came upon the land of Israel.  In order to survive this famine Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons left Bethlehem, left Judah, left the Promised Land of their God, Israel’s God, to go to the land of Moab because things were apparently better there.  

Leaving the land was an act of infidelity.  Back in those days people believed that gods were tied to particular plots of land.  In the Promised Land, the god was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  The God known as Elohim or Yahweh, the warrior God who brought the Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt and led them to conquer the land of Canaan, the land he had promised to give to Abraham, their ancestral father, and his descendants.  Elimelech, whose name interestingly means "my God is king", left his God and king to go to the land of another god.  That god's name was Chemosh, another warrior god like his God Yahweh.  In the land where Chemosh was god, there was no famine.  Apparently, the Hebrew God Yahweh was only good at making war and wasn't so powerful when it came to making rain come and crops grow.  So, Elimelech took his wife, Naomi, and their two sons and left for Moab where it seemed apparent that Chemosh could make crops grow.  To top it all off, in Moab his sons married Moabite women, an even greater act of infidelity.

The outcome of Elimelech's infidelity was that he and both his sons died leaving Naomi and his two daughters-in-law widowed and in grave circumstances.  Back then, the only honorable way for women to survive was either they had to be married or live with family.  Women were usually not allowed to own property for they themselves were considered to be property.  Without a man and his piece of land, a woman didn't have a chance.  Naomi, realizing that she was now widowed and in essence son-less decided to return to her homeland and to her God for her God, Yahweh, was now blessing the Promised Land.  The famine was over.  In the Promised Land she had family who could help her.  Elimelech’s infidelity to Yahweh, his moving to the Land of Moab, the land of the other god Chemosh, left Naomi being nothing more than a victim of someone else's poor decision.

Naomi decided to turn back to her God and head back to her homeland.  She tells her two daughters-in-law to go back to their own mothers’ houses because she could not promise them any security.  At least there in Moab, there in the land of their god Chemosh, they had a secure way to survive among their people and families.  If they were to leave and forsake their god as the family of Elimelech had done with Israel’s God, Chemosh might turn against them as Yahweh had turned against Elimelech.  One daughter-in-law, Orpah, turned back.  But Ruth for no other reason than love and loyalty to Naomi, something we call fidelity, Ruth decided that no matter what she would go with Naomi to Judah.  This act of fidelity by a young woman maybe not even yet seventeen or eighteen sets the stage for God's means of salvation for all humanity.  She becomes the great-grandmother of king David, the royal ancestor of Jesus.

Ruth's act of fidelity was very involved.  It was a turn for the better.  It required her to become a completely different person.  She had to forsake her family identity and become Naomi's family.  She abandoned her people to become one of the Hebrew people.  She turned away from her god to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  

Though it was a turn for the better, this act of fidelity came with great risk.  There was no guarantee that Naomi's family would accept this foreigner…this Moabite.  If they didn’t, she had no real alternative.  There was no guarantee that the Hebrew people would not treat her with prejudice.  Could she dare to hope that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would bless her as she was not one of “his people” but rather a child of Moab?  

Well, in the end Ruth's act of fidelity has a reward.  Naomi's skill at matchmaking leads to Ruth marrying Boaz, a wealthy kinsman of Elimelech.  She and Naomi live happily ever after.  The son of her son’s son became Israel’s greatest king.  Further down the line, a grandson of hers would be Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God.  Fidelity has its reward.

The story of Ruth is a powerful one for it makes us ask ourselves some difficult questions.  The first one is simply to what extent are we willing to exercise fidelity towards God, towards Jesus?  Are we willing to stick with him through those times of proverbial famine - when our relationships are sour, when our kids are going their own way, when money is tight, when other people persecute us?  Do we trust God to see us through the tough times or do we start looking out for ourselves?

Our second question pertains to our fidelity to others.  We live in a culture that teaches us to be faithful to ourselves over and above fidelity to others.   We like to misinterpret Shakespeare’s character Polonius who said: “To thine own self be true.”  We mistake “true” there as meaning fidelity rather than honesty and think it means to put ourselves before others, to be faithful to ourselves above being faithful to others.  Polonius was giving advice to his son who was leaving home and it was to be honest with himself and that will help him to be honest with others.  That’s a far cry from speeches that turn up at High School graduations in which this line is quoted and interpreted as follow one’s own dreams, seek one’s own happiness, above all else.  Put fidelity to self before fidelity to others.  This is why marriages and families are disintegrating, addictions are rampant, volunteerism and community involvement have fallen by the wayside, civic organizations and churches are a thing of the past, and mental health crises are off the scale.  We are miserable because we have misplaced our fidelity.

Ruth presents us with the challenge that it’s highly probable that the happiness everyone seems to be seeking these days can’t be found in focusing on being faithful to oneself as a matter of first course.  Ruth’s story demonstrates that fidelity to God and to others is blessed with contentment.  Fidelity has its reward.  Amen.