Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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Doesn’t it seem like,
a lot of times when the Bible
wants to tell a story about faith,
it chooses a story about a widow.
And yet also,
when the Bible talks to us about people in the society
who have a tough life,
and who need help getting justice and getting fair play
and just getting by …
again, always heading the list are widows.
Makes you wonder,
how it is that they get such wide and varied coverage.
Well, the second half of it is fairly obvious, I imagine:
Widows sometimes needed special help and special consideration
because they had no legal standing in their community.
If you were a Jewish woman in that day and time,
you had little identity of your own;
you were known as somebody’s wife,
or somebody’s widow,
or, if you were younger, the daughter of so-and-so,
or if your son were illustrious, the mother of so-and-so.
Women had few legal rights:
we find record in Deuteronomy that
a few centuries before, it had been determined
that a woman could inherit the family property
if she had no surviving brothers, but only if …
but if someone tried to cheat her out of that land,
she had no recourse to the courts,
unless she could find a male to plead her case for her.
In addition, it was nearly impossible for a woman on her own
to make a living of any kind.
So, we find that the faith community took on the responsibility
of caring for widows:
seeing to it that they had something to eat,
watching out to see that they weren’t cheated,
protecting them to some extent
from a society that treated them almost as nobodies.
So, for example, in Ruth and Naomi’s time,
the faith community made it a rule that
when you were harvesting the crops from your fields,
you were not permitted to harvest all the way to the edges of the field,
nor were you, the landowner, permitted to do the gleaning,
that is, picking up what had fallen.
Those should be left for widows and others in poverty to gather,
so they could do at least some little bit of work to feed themselves.
Which is why Ruth was out there gathering in Boaz’s field,
gathering up food for herself (a widow, remember)
and her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi,
and being there she managed to snag Boaz,
and the rest, as we say, is history!
And, on the other side of the story,
we find the widow of this morning’s reading,
putting two little copper coins into the Temple treasury,
which, as Jesus points out to his disciples,
is likely all the “real money” that she had.
We find a widow in the story of Elijah,
who already had a small son to feed,
and no food left, in the middle of a three-year drought,
and yet she agreed to provide food and shelter for Elijah,
and trust God’s promises that, somehow, their needs were going to be met.
It seems to me that stories like those
are why the different biblical writers
so often choose widows as examples for the rest of us of faithful living.
Here are people who have little or nothing in the present moment,
and no real hope that things will get much better in the future,
and yet they give to others generously
and trust that God will continue to provide for them
because they have been faithful.
And underneath it all, the authors seem to imply:
well, they did it; how about the rest of us?
And they also stress an idea
that bears repeating over and over again in this acquisitive culture we live in:
It doesn’t matter how much you have …
What matters, is what you do with it.
And that, and only that, is the key,
when it comes to the question of stewardship.
Whether we are talking about our money, or our talents, or our time, or something else …
the question to ask is never
how much of it do we have,
but rather,
what are we doing with it?
How are we putting it to use?
Are we burying it in the ground fearfully,
or using it for God’s work in the world?
It is easy, I think, to become discouraged
when we hear about people who are able to do
so much more than we are.
It makes the newspaper when Multimillionaire X
writes a big ol’ check to some worthy cause,
and it’s a little hard to get excited about
sending our own check for $10.00, or $25.00, to the same outfit.
They probably won’t come do a story about us.
Our picture is not going to go in the paper.
Our name probably won’t go on the “honor roll” of donors.
And yet, if that $10.00 truly represents everything you are able to give
at that point in time,
then your gift is every bit as faithful –
maybe even more so –
as that pile of money from the multimillionaire who has it to burn.
We tend to have the same kind of feeling
about sharing our talents with each other, as well.
For me, that time of year is coming when,
on some Christmas special,
we will get to hear Luciano Pavarotti sing “O Holy Night,”
and I will be sorely tempted
never to open my mouth and sing again.
There is absolutely no way I can compete with that.
And I have to remind myself, often,
that I am not called by God to compete with that!
I am called to faithful about using
whatever voice God has given me.
I am never going to sound like Pavarotti;
I’m not even ever going to sound like Cecilia Bartoli,
just like I’m not ever going to be able to give a big ol’ pile of money
to any cause, no matter how worthy!
But that’s all right.
It’s not what God expects.
As long as I give in proportion to what I have received,
that is a faithful response.
As long as each of us gives in proportion to what we have received,
that is a faithful response.
And yet there’s something even more important than that …
and it’s something we also have to grow into.
Even more important than proportionate giving,
is the spirit in which the gift is given.
Jesus doesn’t condemn the others at the Temple for
“giving out of their abundance”;
he doesn’t say they shouldn’t have given …
after all, they are giving the required tithe.
But he reserves his praise for the widow,
who has given generously out of her poverty.
The spirit of generosity is an acquired gift,
and it comes and goes.
There are times when it is hard
to write that check to the church,
or the United Way, or to the Caring Fund,
or to whatever charitable good works it is that you support.
There are times when you really need a new pair of shoes,
or the grandchilddren have a birthday coming up
that must be celebrated,
or perhaps Social Security didn’t come through
with the cost-of-living increase you needed,
or the IRS has started taking more out of your paycheck,
or you had doctor bills,
or whatever other surprises life dishes out.
Even those of us who have tithed for a long time,
and you’d think we would be used to it by now,
sometimes have a hard time mustering up
the generosity of spirit that God wishes for us.
Every now and then it occurs to me that if I were to quit tithing,
I could make payments on a new car,
which I’m coming close to needing.
And I can get pretty grumbly about it;
we all can …
But what needs to happen then is that
we come here and see all the neat things
that go on here in this place,
morning, noon, and night, these days …
or, in my case, I get a letter from one of the two kids I sponsor, in Mexico,
and suddenly, giving becomes a privilege and a joy again,
not something to gripe about.
And I strongly believe
that that’s the way, ideally,
God means for it to be for us.
Several years ago when I was out in west Texas,
we had some trainers come out to meet with several churches
to train “visiting stewards” to do an every-member canvass …
One of them pointed out something that has always stayed with me:
He said that our gut response to giving tends to be,
“what a pain, that God thinks
I ought to give 10% or some proportion, back to God’s work.”
Wouldn’t it be great, he said,
if we could train ourselves to think instead,
“This is so cool, that God lets me keep 90%!”
That would completely re-orient our attitude.
I think this is what’s behind
that problematic Bible verse,
about how “the Lord loves a cheerful giver.”
Paul is talking there about how
we need to move beyond a sense of obligation or guilt,
“because the pastor said so,”
or “because the session said so,”
or even, “because the Bible said so”!
We need to grow into joyful plate-passers,
joyful check-writers, joyful bank-drafters,
or however we choose to deal with it.
We need to let God’s Spirit transform our attitude from one of compulsion
to one of joy, and hope, and faith, and love.
We love,
because God first loved us.
We give,
because God first gave to us.
We have an exciting opportunity
to respond in kind.
There is a poster I’ve seen but never owned, that says,
“The Lord respects me when I work,
but he loves me when I sing.”
That is,
God respects us for doing the things that need to be done,
but God rejoices when we
do things out of the sheer joy of it.
Perhaps this can be a motivation for our giving as well.
God respects us when we give …
God loves us when we enjoy it.
Let us grow together,
and grow this congregation,
into that love.
Amen.