As some of you know, I went to seminary in Berkeley, California. Berkeley is in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the East Bay. It has two seasons: the season of sun and the season of rain. During the winter, it rains and rains for weeks on end. It’s that cold kind of rain that seeps into your bones until you feel like you will never be warm and dry again.
In the Berkeley area, there’s a sizeable homeless population. One day, I was going to the store during the season of rain. I parked my car, put up my umbrella, and walked through the rain toward the store when I saw a homeless man. He was huddled on the sidewalk with a plastic garbage bag over his head. I went into the store and when I came out, he was still there, huddled under his garbage bag in a puddle on the pavement. I walked up to him and asked him, “Would you like my umbrella?” He looked at me as if I were offering him a thousand dollars and said, “I can’t take your umbrella, you’ll get wet!” I said, “Oh no, it’s not a problem, I have another one in the car.” He looked at me very seriously and said, “Thank you.” He took the umbrella as if it were now his most precious possession, and he said, “And now, sister, I will give you a blessing.” Right there in the rain, he put his hands on my forehead, a priest in ragged clothes, and blessed me with a prayer that brought tears to my eyes.
Here I thought I was blessing him. But instead of the one giving a blessing, I was being blessed. Yet this was no sacrifice – I had another umbrella in the car – I gave out of my own abundance. It is the way I have experienced all giving to others – the blessing I receive from giving is far more than the sacrifice I made to give.
This might be one lesson learned by the widow of Zarephath in our Old Testament lesson today. A 3-year famine has spread throughout Israel and surrounding countries, God sends the prophet Elijah to a foreign widow and promises she will feed him. She has enough to make one meager meal for herself and her son – and then she knows she will die. Yet instead of hoarding that last meal for herself, she responds with generosity to this Israelite stranger, giving all she has left to feed him. She finds that her generosity in giving her whole life away is rewarded by life and more life – not only does her meager store of food last until the famine is broken, but also later Elijah miraculously brings her son back from the dead. By doing so, Elijah demonstrates that God of Israel is God of life, whose generosity is the basis of all life, whose gifts to us far outweigh any gifts we could give back, whose overflowing blessing to us is worth more than anything we could hold on to.
Perhaps this is what the widow in our gospel knows too. Jesus is sitting opposite to the temple, watching all that happens there. Note that this is Jesus’ last week of life – one of the last things he does is to watch a widow giving her own life to God – before Jesus does the same, on the cross. It is Passover time, so Jews are making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem –bringing their annual offering to temple and putting bags of money into the coffers. He watches rich people, scribes – these are educated people who provide their services to the rich and the elite – these are the lawyers and professionals. It appears that this is a time of economic misfortune among the common people – Jesus speaks about “devouring widows’ houses” – there are bankruptcies and foreclosures (the more things change, the more they stay the same). At Passover time, the scribes bring large sums to the treasury, but Jesus sees that those gifts are no sacrifice; giving to God large amounts but small percentages of their income will not affect how they live the rest of their lives. So Jesus gives a withering critique of religious show they are making – they are not living their faith.
He watches a widow walking quietly up to the treasury and giving two pennies – the last two pennies in her purse – everything she has to live on – and he praises the generosity that caused her to give her entire life to God. He tells his disciples that generosity is measured not by the amount of the gift, but by the abundance that it came from. The problem with the scribes is not that they give large sums, but that they give from their abundance an amount they won’t miss – they give the leftovers. God apparently doesn’t want leftovers we won’t ever miss – God wants what the widow gave. God wants it all.
The Great Commandment is: love God with ALL your heart, ALL your mind, ALL your soul, ALL your strength – God wants it all – your love, your time, your prayers, your energy, your service in every part of your life. God wants not just a pittance of our lives, 10% or any other percentage – God wants our entire lives. One hundred percent.
We can unpack what that means. I don’t think that means God wants most of us to give away everything we own and starve. I think that God intends us to use our gifts for God’s purposes, which include caring for our families, providing a decent home, sending our children to college, having a decent job, etc. But God also intends for us to use our gifts generously for purposes outside our own homes, including caring for the poor and supporting God’s mission. I like to think that the widow was cared for like widow of Zarephath, that Jesus’ disciples took her in and cared for her as one of their own – because this is what Christians do – from beginning, we have cared for the poor.
Bishop Greg Rickel of Seattle tells a story: before he became a bishop, he would often do workshops on the spirituality of money. He would start by asking people to share their first memories of money. Often, he says, someone will share a variation of this story: my grandfather (or grandmother, aunt or uncle) gave me a silver dollar – sometimes once, sometimes every year, for birthday or Christmas. Invariably, sometime in the story the person will say, “I still have that silver dollar” (or dollars). Bishop Rickel continues, ‘Sometimes the same people will later share stories of hard times in their lives when they were barely surviving. And I just want to ask, and sometimes have, "Did you ever think about spending that silver dollar?" The answer is almost always a resounding "NO WAY."’ What that silver dollar has become is the sign of a relationship, which is more precious to the holder than anything they might purchase. The relationship is the treasure, not the dollar.
Stewardship means remembering that the treasure God has given us is the gift of a relationship. Stewardship means understanding that our possessions are personal and relational – they are entrusted to us by one who loves us, with God’s hope that we will care for them and leave this world better than we found it.
Jesus says, you can’t serve two masters, you can’t serve both God and money. When we begin to understand that our money and our possessions, our time and our talents, our families and homes, everything we have and everything we are, are a gift and a trust, then we begin to understand stewardship and our own place in God’s kingdom. And that’s when we begin to develop in our relationship with Jesus Christ, becoming disciples who serve him in every part of our lives – in our families, in our businesses, in our church lives, and in our financial lives too.
This Sunday is the kickoff of our stewardship campaign. Stewardship is so often a euphemism for the annual fundraising campaign – and it is absolutely true that this church asks all members to give what they can from their abundance for God’s work. If I didn’t think that this was a worthy cause, if I didn’t see God’s work being done every day here, lives being transformed, I wouldn’t be working here. I do believe God’s work is done here, and I do believe that contributing to God’s mission is part of the personal mission of every disciple who is part of this church mission.
But at its heart, stewardship is not about contributing to the church to keep it going – stewardship is about each person’s relationship with Jesus. Stewardship is about recognizing everything we have as a gift from God, and treasuring and using every part of our lives as God calls us to do.
Some people think that money and possessions aren’t things that should be talked about in church because they aren’t spiritual matters. Well, I will promise you not to talk about them any more than Jesus did. Jesus talks about money and possessions more than anything else in the Bible except the kingdom of God itself. And I think he did it because he watched people like the rich scribes and the poor widow in the gospel story, and he realized that for all of those people, money was the biggest spiritual issue in their lives, and how they acted with their money reflected their relationship with God and with their neighbor. He recognized that for the widow, what she gave was a measure of her faith.
He also recognized that for the scribes, what they gave was an indication that they were in spiritual danger of letting their possessions separate them from God. Let’s be clear: Jesus believes that having an abundance of possessions can put a person in grave spiritual danger – he says things like, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
The reason our possessions put us in grave danger is because it is too easy for us to make money our god, to put our trust in our money rather than in our God. Money promises security and comfort – yet ultimately, only God can save us. You can't take it with you!
I think it is quite possible that in America today, our relationship with money and possessions is the most important spiritual question in our lives. Money and possessions can easily become the addiction that drives our whole lives, the thing that takes up all our energy, the passion that takes our energy away from the true calling of our lives, the god that separates us from God. Jesus says, you can’t serve both God and money. Well, our society tells us to serve money, not God – our world has made up its mind which is more important; but it’s up to us to make up our own minds.
I would be astonished if anyone here has ever experienced what widow of Zarephath experienced – enough to eat one meal, knowing death will follow soon after. But we are also in difficult economic times, so I want to say this. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from or whether you will be able to keep your home – then give to God in other ways – your time, your worship, your prayers, your love. God knows what you have and what you need, and God doesn’t want you to starve. And this church wants to be there for you in your hour of need.
But if you are not in this kind of situation, if you have what you need and more, if you are living with abundance, then the stewardship question is different, and that question is this. How are you serving God with what God has entrusted to you? It may be the most important and most spiritual question you will ever ask.
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