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November 9, 2003; Proper 27, Year B
    The Rev. Harold "Skip" Comer, Rector

There was a mega church in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, that when it came to the collection on Sunday morning was notorious for passing the plate more than once.  After the first collection the head minister would look at the money in the plates and if it wasn’t enough, he would tell the people that they needed to give more, and the plates would be passed around again.  How’s that for a teaching on stewardship.

We are in the midst of our annual stewardship, or pledge, campaign, and it is timely that we have the story of the Widow’s Mite as our Gospel reading for this morning.   But instead of just using the Widow’s Mite to talk about stewardship, I am going to use several incidents that Mark records in his eleventh and twelfth chapters, mainly because I believe that they lead up to the widow’s story that we have just heard.

The setting is Jerusalem shortly after Jesus’ triumphal entry, what we now identify with Palm Sunday.  Jesus went to the temple where he witnessed merchants cheating the people as they bought animals for sacrifice in the temple and that the money changers were using weighted scales to exchange money.  As we know from the Gospel accounts, Jesus was not very happy with what he saw because he overturned their tables and chased them away as he stated, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.”[1]   Unfortunately even today there are people who use God, Jesus, and the Church to fill their own pockets.

I now jump to the beginning of the twelfth chapter of Marks’s Gospel and the parable of the vineyard.  Remember the story?  It is about a man who plants a vineyard and leases it to tenant farmers while he travels.  At harvest time he sends his slave to collect his portion of the profits and the tenant farmers beat him up.   The owner sends several others who are either beaten up or killed.  Finally the owner sends his son, and the tenant farmers decide that if they kill the son, the vineyard and all the money they earn from it will be theirs.  There are people today who do not appreciate the planet that we call earth.  They believe that it is theirs to do with as they please with no consideration of others, or of the one who provided it in the first place.  I believe that all of us here would acknowledge that this planet and all of its resources did not just happen by accident.  Our Bible claims that it is God who created it and gave it into our care.  Are we – should we – be grateful?  And how do we express that gratefulness?

Next some Jewish leaders come up to Jesus and want to know, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”[2]  Ah, one of those favorite topics that we all like to complain about.   Jesus answers the question by asking for a coin and then saying, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?”  They responded, “Caesar’s.”  

Beneath the issue of whether or not we should pay taxes to the government is, I believe, the deeper question, “Whose likeness and inscription do we bear?”   How we respond to this question not only identifies who we are, but who’s we are.  It is a question of ownership and stewardship.  Am I my own boss, answerable to no one and ruler of my destiny, or do I belong to someone else, answerable to a higher authority who will determine where I end up.

Do we really believe what Genesis has to say about us?  “God created man (and woman) in his own image, in the image of God he created (them); male and female…[3]  And what about the inscription we bear?  As most of you are aware by now, this is one of my passions.  At baptism we were sealed with the oil of Holy Chrism, and bear the inscription, “Christ own forever.” 

I was kind of resentful growing up.  We didn’t have very much, at least compared to other kids and families I knew, and my mother was always telling me to remember who I was.  It wasn’t until I was much older that I appreciated my mother and all that she did for us.  The only way that I could ever repay her, was to become a responsible and loving person.  Did I have to do it? No.  I wanted to do it out of the love and gratitude I had for her.

When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, he responded, “…love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your should, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.  The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[4]   We all know that you cannot command or make someone love you.  Love, true love, comes from within a person, and radiates toward someone else.  It is hard to explain, and even harder to explain the desire to love God.  In one sense I want to say that the seed of love for God was planted inside each and every one of us by God himself, and is just waiting to be expressed.  But how do we express that love?   We express it by first acknowledging the existence of God and then by responding to his love and grace by the way that we live and in how we treat others.

In all of these we are stewards:  stewards of Christ’s Church, stewards of Gods creation, stewards of ourselves, and stewards of love.  How well we manage our lives is an indication of our faith, a faith that longs to be expressed in gratefulness.

Finally we come to our reading for this morning of the widow’s mite.  Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, notes, “Nowhere in this passage does Jesus praise the widow for what she is doing.  He simply calls his disciples over to notice her, and to compare what she does with what everyone else is doing.  He invites them to sit down beside him and contemplate the disparity between abundance and poverty, between large sums (of money) and two copper coins, between apparent sacrifice and the real thing…   He does not dismiss the gifts of the rich.  He simply points out that … the poor widow – turns out to be the major donor of the all.”[5]

The Widows’ Mite is a simple story of a lady who did not hoard what she had, but gave it willingly as an offering to God.  Could it have been a thank offering?   I find that hard to imagine, when the widow didn’t know where her next meal was coming from and the only clothes that she had were the clothes that she was wearing.   How could she be thankful for so little?  But maybe she was, thankful that is, for what she did have.  Maybe she treasured the God that she believed in, the faith that sustained her in her meager existence, and the love that filled her heart.  I believe that is why she gave those two coins.

We give not because we have to, but because we want to.  We want to express our own gratitude to the God we believe in, the faith we have received to sustain us in this life, and the love of God in Jesus Christ that fills our hearts.       

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