Everything on the Line
“Everything on the Line”
Proper 27, 32nd Sunday Ordinary Time, 25th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
November 11, 2018
Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17 Mark 12:38-44
First Presbyterian Church of Sandpoint, Idaho
Pastor Andy Kennaly
The scriptures from Ruth and Mark show the haves and the have nots, and they call into question society’s assumptions and practices that create such a split. The people in desperation are trying to make the best of life from the margins of a culture that creates the conditions for margins in the first place. For Ruth and Naomi, things eventually work out, and the reading this morning skips over much of the high drama, the sexual intrigue, but we get a sense of God’s hand in the overall process because the happy ending story has Ruth becoming King David’s great grandmother, also part of the genealogy of Jesus. Not bad for a foreigner gleaning the fields for survival!
In Mark, we hear Jesus warning through his teaching about the scribes who go about life for show, the prestige, and seem to have no problem committing self-serving injustices toward vulnerable people. Not only do they enrich themselves monetarily, these scribes even make it look like God is blessing them and their faith is devout and sincere, and they can pray long prayers, but it’s only appearance.
We also read as Jesus was “sitting down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury…many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny.”
Many people point out the faithfulness of this woman, that she gives all of her resources to God. This story has long been an example of sacrificial giving, and lifted up in countless stewardship sermons to challenge people to give. If she can do it, certainly you can do better. Faithfulness is key.
Last week we started worship with the Noisy Offering. This is when we pass around two metal buckets and invite people to put in loose change. The coins clank when they hit the bucket. The more coins, or the bigger the coins, the more they clank. Tracy Gage who ushers on the first Sunday of the month, often adds that clanking is not enough but it also needs a good shaking to make lots of noise. Sometimes people get into this, and dump quite a load of coins, saving them up for just that offering. Mostly it’s in good fun for a good cause, and it is amazing how these coins add up over the course of the year. Several hundred dollars helped last summer as kids went to summer camp.
In Mark, when people contribute to the treasury, custom has it that bells are rung. Maybe even trumpets blast and cymbals clang. The bigger the donation, the larger the show, the more attention it gets, the more pomp and circumstance. Presumably the more faith is involved. Yet we also know that Jesus is likely not approving of society’s inequities. This passage becomes a story highlighting the hypocrisy of the religious establishment, of those with the power fooling themselves and destroying others in the process as they basically extort money from those who have the least as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Jesus helps us so we don’t just blindly participate in unjust systems.
So which is it? A story of faithfulness, or exposing hypocrisy? Is this a financial, treasury, stewardship issue, or a commentary on social justice? Is this an economic critique that challenges culture at it’s foundations, or a spiritual call to just trust God more, to have faith, knowing Jesus will see you and you will be blessed? Maybe it’s all of these, and we just resonate with one angle or another depending on our context or mood or season?
Let’s take a clue from the text itself, allowing the style of the story to inform our interpretation. He says to beware of the scribes who take center stage for all the wrong reasons. He observes wealthy people putting in a percentage as they share from abundance. But then the poor widow quietly puts in two small coins. That’s when Jesus calls his disciples to pay attention. He witnesses life on the margins, so let’s move to the margins of the larger Christian church and see what is discovered.
It may help to not focus on the money. Looking at the money as a metaphor rather than factual, and it’s really the percentages that gives us the biggest clue. Rich people give vast sums, but small percentages. The poor give very little, yet “this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury…everything she had, all she had to live on.” This is 100 percent, no holding back.
Meister Eckhart was a “mystic and prophet, feminist and philosopher, preacher and theologian, administrator and poet, a spiritual genius and a declared heretic” who lived from around 1260 until 1329. (Meditations with Meister Eckhart, by Matthew Fox, Bear & Co. Publishers, 1983, pg. 3). He is someone who explores faith through the Wisdom Tradition with a creation-centered focus that doesn’t start with humanity’s sinfulness, but rather with our potential to act divinely both by way of compassion and of beauty-making and sharing. Matthew Fox writes about Meister Eckhart, saying “all reputable scholars today agree he was unjustly condemned – his condemnation [by the church of his day] bears all the earmarks of an attempt to silence his prophetic preaching on behalf of the poor in his society – his way of spirituality remains too little known in the West. While Hindus and Buddhists claim Eckhart as one of their own, while psychologists like Jung and Marxists like Bloch and Fromm learn from him, many, many, many Christians hardly know the name, much less the spiritual tradition he represents so beautifully.”
Like watching to poor widow in the story go largely unnoticed until Jesus flags his followers to pay attention, let’s look at Meister Eckhart as he helps us perceive Christ’s teachings from slightly different angles as he says,
“In God,… action and being are one.”
(Fox, Eckhart p. 96) “In God,… action and being are one.”
For example, if you say God is love, then love is a state of being but also an action as you can’t separate one from another. The same if you say God is compassion. There are elements of compassion as characteristic, but also of action which express this quality.
As we read this week’s story, we need to remember last week as we looked at love – loving God, neighbor, self, with whole soul, all your strength, all your mind, all your heart. With this foundational teaching from deep within the Jewish roots of Jesus, saying, as metaphor, that she puts in all she has to live on is another way of saying “In God, being and action are one” and this woman is showing us a life claiming this unity. Her being expresses it, and her action shows that her whole soul, strength, mind, and heart are given completely to God. It has nothing to do with the temple treasury, and everything to do with her existential reality. The rich, in contrast, put in a portion of their wealth, not their whole mind, heart, soul, strength. They are people living a divided life, a split, and this leads only to condemnation as they bring judgment on themselves by perpetuating a broken and corrupt system that creates the very people they look down.
And look at the percentages of participation as the rich contribute their partial amount, in show, to get attention. The nameless woman is in the margins, she is not after show, no bells or cymbals. In absolute poverty (again as a metaphor) is where we find God, and where God finds us. All she had to live on….this means total trust.
Another aspect of the story involves Jesus waiting. He sits down opposite the treasury and watches the crowd putting money in. As the crowd filters through we eventually get to “A poor widow” which is code language, and its connected to Jesus in his act of waiting.
Again, Meister Eckhart:
“God waits on human history…and suffers as she waits.”
(Fox, M. Eckhart, 92) “God waits on human history…and suffers as she waits.” Jesus is waiting, watching, observing, as people work, and their action is connected to their being, so what they do expresses who they are, where their heart is there also is their treasure. As Meister Eckhart shares,
“All works are surely dead
if anything from the outside
compels you to work.
Even if it were God himself compelling you to work
from the outside,
your works would be dead.
If your works are to live,
then God must move you from the inside,
from the innermost region of the soul –
then they will really live.
There is your life
and there alone you live
and your works live.
(Fox, Eckhart, pg. 98)
And along the theme of the story contrasting the rich and the poor, Eckhart says,
“The outward work
will never be puny
if the inward work
is great.
And the outward work
can never be great or even good
if the inward one is puny or of little worth."
(pg. 99).
Jesus is calling us toward our original blessing, a deep trust that does its inner work, inherently welcoming unity with God because divinity is our core identity as beings created in the image and likeness of God. Just like electricity sparks or lightning flashes when a negative pole and a positive pole connect, we too, participate in the divine flow of energy, or love, or compassion, when we remember the LORD is One. Absolute poverty is needed for this connection because that’s another way of saying it’s through release of attachments to created things that we discover the depths of our True Self in Christ.
In this story of the poor widow as an example of deep faith, Jesus is sharing from the Wisdom Tradition the importance of release, of non-attachment to become fully human and participate with all we are in God’s divine dance; just as Jesus does as he shows us the Way.
So this week remember this story and the various ways of looking at it. But mostly, ask God to meet you deep inside, at your heart level. In that space, look for connection because when the lightning flashes, everything else comes into perspective. Pray for the desire to desire divine flow, for God’s being and action to share in your heart a unitive perception that transforms your life at all levels. In Christ, may we truly live from the edge of the inside, where we
“draw all [our] being from nowhere else except from and in
the heart of God.”
(Fox, Eckhart pg. 99).
And may God be glorified, now and forever. Amen.