Proper 27B. 7 November 2021. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17. I need to seek security for you.
Hebrews 9:24-28. Not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
Mark 12:38-44. She…has put in everything she had.
O God of Peace, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.
Being within the Octave or eight days of November 1, we are observing the celebration of All Saints’ Day today. Eight is a sacred number in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In our sacred texts, eight represents a fullness of time, more than complete, a time for new life and new beginning, entrance into the eternal. In Islam, there are eight gates to heaven. The Arabic numeral 8 on its side stands for infinity. For Christians, there are traditionally eight sides on a baptismal font recalling the Torah command to circumcise on the eighth day, the Torah command to observe the feast of Passover, and the Gospel account of the resurrection of Jesus on the eighth day. Today we are sacramentally full to the brim. Liturgically, our cup is overflowing with Jane Harte’s baptism and with our celebration of Holy Eucharist. Our Great Thanksgiving will memorialize and honor those on the heart of our parish who have died since All Saints’ Day in 2020, and the beautiful Ruehr requiem will commemorate Ruth Ann Richwine Ruehr and all who died in 2020.
Although our prayers, spoken and sung, are about the Feast of All Saints, our scripture readings are not the ones appointed for All Saints’ Day. Instead, they are the lessons appointed for this twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, in sequence with the readings of the last several weeks from the Book of Ruth, the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Gospel of Mark. They seemed too important to skip over, although I can understand the temptation to do so! And before I go much further, I should warn you that I am one of those well-educated religious leaders who likes to walk around in long robes, be greeted with respect in the Back Bay marketplaces, and have the best seat in the parish and a place of honor at banquets. I love the rector’s chair, and I love sitting at a good table at a reception. Although I’ve never personally devoured a widow’s house, and I don’t say long prayers for the sake of appearances, you should always take what I preach with some cautious skepticism.
Perhaps you learned this story of the scribes who love to parade around in long robes, have seats of honor, and who devour widows’ houses as a condemnation of Judaism or, if your education was more liberal, the Judaism of Jesus’ day. Perhaps you still hear scribes and Pharisees and think they were the bad guys. They weren’t, not as a group anyway. The comma after scribes shouldn’t be there. In the passage we heard from Mark last week, a scribe was talking with Jesus about how nothing was more important to the Holy One than loving one’s neighbor as oneself. That scribe and Jesus were both quoting the great Pharisee, Rabbi Hillel. I believe that Jesus was a Pharisee. [1] I say this a lot but someone is always hearing it for the first time. Jesus’ teachings were in alignment with the Hillel School. Scribes were the ones who were the scholars. I don’t think Jesus was a scholar in the literary sense, but he was undeniably a great teacher. And part of teaching and learning is debating, which religious people do a lot of (internally, intramurally, and intermurally), right?
Perhaps you learned this story of the widow’s mite as encouragement that every little bit helps at pledge-stewardship time. (Well, every little bit does help at pledge-stewardship time, but that’s not what I think this story is proving in the Gospel of Mark, and no one should be offering their last penny.) Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says it is “a mite strange and a mite disturbing” to interpret this story as a whole-scale condemnation of the Temple as a religious system of domination. [2] After all, as far as we can tell, Jesus worshiped and taught in the Temple on a number of occasions throughout his life. (Back to Jesus’ extended exchange with a good-and-wise scribe, who was told by Jesus he was very near the kingdom of God because of his understanding of the Torah’s teachings about love). So Jesus was not arguing with or critiquing the whole religious system of which he was a part. I think he was reminding folks of the Torah obligation to care for the most vulnerable in the community. Jesus’ followers made his teaching a Gospel obligation. The Church has much to atone for when it comes to caring for women who are unattached to fathers or husbands or fair wages.
Rather than this being a libelous caricature of all scribes or an overly-sentimental picture of the piety of all widows, I’d like us to imagine that Jesus was seeing and naming a gap between words and actions, between what any religious organization professes with its lips and what it demonstrates with its life. “Mind that gap between talk about the Holy One and the practice of love,” Jesus is saying, and we would all do well to heed his advice. It’s often so much easier to see the gap of hypocrisy in others than it is to see it in ourselves (at least that’s my own experience). So let’s imagine that the Temple treasury was functioning as a redistribution system, a place which promised that everyone could make a meaningful contribution, even a poor widow, and that everyone could have their basic needs met, especially a poor widow. And let’s imagine that the system wasn’t perfect. Let’s be confident that the system was not without blemish, based on what we know of our own well-intentioned redistribution systems – within our selves, our parish, our wider church, and our society. We could stand to critique and improve our own redistribution systems in the church, and we must beware of pretentious or self-congratulatory practices in ourselves and in our community.
One of the prayers for the Church in our tradition refers to the church as an it, third-person singular, which gives the ones praying too much distance, I think. The better pronoun for the Church is first-person plural, because we are the Church after all. So with edited pronouns, the prayer goes like this: “Where we are corrupt, purify us; where we are in error, direct us; where in anything we are amiss, reform us; where we are right, strengthen us; where we are in want, provide for us; where we are divided, reunite us, for the sake of Jesus Christ.” We already know, if we’ve been paying attention, that the way toward purity, right-direction, and reformation is love and more love, the kind of love that Ruth had for Naomi, which was worth more then seven sons. That’s a lot! For the sake of Jesus Christ means for the sake of kindness, of compassion, of redeeming what and who seem not worth the effort – the lost causes, the dried-up wells, the barren wombs – and leaning into glorious impossibilities of change and growth, expanded hearts and minds, which move us toward greater kindness, compassion, love, and a understanding that eternal life includes now, this very moment.
It seems to me that to behave in a loving way, to imagine and enact greater kindness, compassion, and love requires a great deal of humility. In his book called Humilitas, John Dickson, an Anglican in Sydney, Australia, writes about the development of humility as a high virtue in Israel in the last centuries before the Common Era, about which Jesus of Nazareth taught and around which some of his followers organized after his death on the cross. Though not at all original to Christianity, humility gained a lot of traction among early Jesus followers as they grappled with the crucifixion. Dickson points out that one doesn’t have to follow Jesus Christ to appreciate humility or to be humble (and God knows many followers of Jesus Christ aren’t so humble), “But it is unlikely any of us would aspire to this virtue were it not for the historical impact of Jesus’ crucifixion on art, literature, ethics, law and philosophy.” [3]
It occurs to me that what the widow’s mite might be doing in this story is asserting the value of humility because of how Jesus restores the widow’s dignity in the eyes of others. He gives them corrective lenses. You know, when humility is being asserted and valued, then the best seat in the house is not proof of God’s favor any more than shame is proof of disfavor or worthlessness in the eyes of God.
Humilitas is actually a book about leadership development in business and politics, written by a musician and minister. In the last chapter, Dickson offers some practical exercises for cultivating humility, for countering the narcissistic trends he sees in our contemporary culture. Dickson’s exercises strike me as compatible with the teachings of Jesus, and of course this is not accidental. First, he says, know that we are shaped by what we love. Second, study and learn from the lives of others who are humble. Watch them closely, Dickson says, and emulate their behavior. Imagine feeling empathy if you can’t quite manage to feel it. Act humbly, even if you’re not quite able to manage feeling it. Imagine in your mind responding to any given situation gently, truthfully, and generously before you speak or act. When I read this I immediately went to the line from Ephesians that I recite each week as an offertory sentence: “I beseech you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love.” [4] I say that at the offertory because what we are being invited into as we approach the Great Thanksgiving part of the service is about so much more than giving money. It’s about how we are to live with dignity and with the hope of resting in peace.
In the weeks leading up to this service, I was so struck by the similarity of concerns expressed to me by baptismal candidate Jane Harte and composer Elena Ruehr about language and meaning, about reframing religious words weighed down by centuries of dogma and naming the essential using words that are much more accessible: humble words like kindness and compassion. It’s a beautiful and grace-filled exercise to remove the stumbling blocks, to clear a path for oneself and others in order to make a message both inclusive and personal. Their hope, and mine as well, is that you all will feel invited more and more into right-relationship with one another, and into the mystery that is eternity, and into peace at the last.
[1] Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at the Jewishness of Jesus (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003).
[2] Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), p. 157.
[3] John Dickson, Humilitas: A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), p. 112.
[4] Ephesians 4:1-2.