Scripture Mark 12:38-44
As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”
He sat 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. Then he called his disciples and said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
Sermon
This morning is all about giving. We are celebrating six years of serving our community through our food pantry. The food piled on our Communion table is a reminder that we are sharing what God has given us all—from our table we see others whose tables are bare, and we try to help. We are also marking the end of our Stewardship campaign, during which we’ve been attempting to remember what “living like kings” means when Jesus is our role model of a king. And we’ve all just heard what is, probably, the Bible’s most famous story about giving.
The passage we’ve just read is so famous that even many non-Christians have heard the story of the Widow’s Mite, as it is traditionally called. That’s m-i-t-e, meaning, something very small, vanishingly small, such as the two copper coins the poor widow dropped into the Temple treasury, evidently, the last resources she had in the world. Because I’m a lectionary preacher, I’ve preached this passage just about every three years. I have preached this passage as encouragement to this congregation to be bold in giving, though—public service announcement here—neither I nor anyone else in this church wants you to bankrupt yourself by giving to us. That’s not the point of a Stewardship campaign. We are meant to give from our abundance. I have preached this passage from the point of view that Jesus approved of this woman’s generosity. I have also preached it from the point of view that Jesus was horrified that this woman was giving all she had and was left with no resources whatsoever—in his mind, a scathing indictment of the whole Temple system, that, as he says, “devours widows’ houses.”
What I have never done was to investigate this passage from the point of view of the woman herself. We see her from a distance, as Jesus and his disciples see her. What was she thinking? What was she feeling in that moment, as the tiny coins fell from her fingers? Why did she do it? Let’s seek to answer these questions—not definitive answers, because we can never know those. Let’s try for the answers that seem most likely.
What was she thinking? Here is my imagining of her thoughts in this moment.
I’m imagining her remembering the long path that led her here. She is a widow with just two copper coins to her name, so I’m imagining that she has no one. Perhaps she lost a son in childbirth. Perhaps she has lost one along with his father at sea, a real risk for the trade of fishermen. Without a man to care for her, in this society, she would have had few options, none of them good. If there is no husband, or grown son, or brother, or father to care for her, her life is truly in peril. Perhaps she was able to scrape along weaving baskets for a while, until arthritis took over and she could no longer force the reeds to allow themselves to be woven. Or perhaps she lived for a time on the kindness of neighbors. All this, until there was no one and nothing left for her, until her meager resources finally dwindled down to those two copper coins. Why keep two coins that wouldn’t even buy her a loaf of bread? Better to give them away. Better to give them to God. Better to accept her fate.
I imagine she was feeling alone. Utterly alone in the world. Even friends who couldn’t afford to help her or house her looking away as they passed.
I imagine she was afraid. Fearing death—a death alone, maybe in a cold cave in the wilderness, or an alley somewhere near the Temple. No one to prepare her body for burial. No one to sit Shiva for her and grieve. No one to speak her name, ever again, so she would cease to exist as if she had never existed in the first place.
She may have felt ashamed, bathed in the shame of her circumstances. Didn’t people always blame the poor for their situations? Don’t we still? Imagining the voices of her neighbors. “It must have been her fault,” or, “Her husband didn’t plan to provide for her.”
It’s possible she was in despair. The dictionary definition of despair has to do with loss—complete loss, including a loss of hope. And there is truth to that. But like any emotion, despair is a message to us from our bodies. Irish poet and spiritual teacher David Whyte writes,
Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, when our world disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away.[i]
I’m struck by that first phrase: Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go. This is certainly true of this woman. But all the possible situations are striking as well. We can despair for myriad reasons—everything from the loss of love to the loss of confidence in God or the world around us. Some of us may know what that feels like. Was it despair that drove this woman to give away the last of all she had? And what happened to her after those coins fell from her fingers? Whyte continues,
Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of beauty and of self-compassion, it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt. Despair is a last protection.[ii]
Despair can be a comforting place to go. This may be a surprise to a lot of us—it feels counterintuitive. But if you think about it, it makes sense. It can offer a space where the pain is lessened because the truth of the situation is acknowledged. But that is not the only function of despair. Again, Whyte writes,
Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest… We give up hope when certain particular wishes are no longer able to come true and despair is the time in which we both endure and heal...[iii]
What if the widow is experiencing her despair as a necessary moment of repair, when she allows herself to stop striving, even to stop hoping, so that she can simply be? What if it is a time of rest, as maple and honey locust trees rest in winter? And what if despair necessarily comes with a springtime, in which a new version of our inner lives, and our hope, are reborn, as when nature’s first green is gold?
What if I’ve gotten the widow all wrong? What if dropping those two coins into the treasury was a relief, the end of trying to achieve an impossible goal, and she was, somehow, freer? Lighter? Joyful, in a way? We don’t know how her story ends. What if all her fears and expectations turned out not to be true? What if she didn’t have any of those fears or expectations, at all, and instead, was convinced that, if she gave, it would do some good—even, possibly for her?
We don’t know what happened to this nameless woman. What if she ended her days, not alone and frightened, but among friends, with her needs provided for? We see slices of life in Jesus’ experiences and in his stories, but often we don’t see the end of the story. What if this woman’s gift really did free her to see new possibilities for her life, those she hadn’t seen before?
One more word from David Whyte:
The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath… even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself… We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning. Despair… is a season… not a prison surrounding us. A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.[iv]
We leave the widow having left her mite in the Temple treasury. But if her despair truly is a season, a necessary time of preparation and repair, it may be that we see her taking on her might—m-i-g-h-t. Giving is a powerful thing. It can be a freeing thing, as when we Marie Kondo our messy houses, or we give someone some item which is in some ways hard to let go, but which we truly know they need more than we do. Giving can be a joyous thing, and who is to say the widow was not filled with joy as she gave those coins to God—free at last from something that wasn’t working, but also, faithful, hopeful.
Giving can be a joyous thing. Giving can also help us to understand what matters to us—what we value, what we wouldn’t give up for the world. If this community, UPC, is meaningful to you, I hope you will give in a way that reflects how much you value it. I hope those of you who support the mission and ministry of UPC give from your abundance. I hope your giving will come with joy and a song in your heart, as our choir has just so beautifully sung for us:
All that I am, all that I will be, All Thy hand hath created in me.
Lord of all, my God and King, What I have I will give Thee.[v]
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] David Whyte, “Despair,” Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. San Francisco, CA: Many Rivers Press, 2015). Excerpt found online.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Mark Patterson, “What I Have I Will Give Thee,” 1996, Shawnee Press, Inc..