Proper 27B, November 11, 2012; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of vision, 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.

Many of you know that we have been steeping in Jewish commentary on the New Testament now for more than six years at Emmanuel Church. Having a Rabbi in Residence should and does change the way we sing our songs, say our prayers, and read our scripture. So when a Gospel portion like this one today comes along, we are challenged to put on our “corrective lenses” to see Jesus in his Jewish context, which is not the way most of our eyes were trained to see Jesus in Sunday School or in adult education or in our Christo-centric popular culture.

So here are three things to look at through corrective lenses today. 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, and the story of the widow’s mite as encouragement that every little bit helps at stewardship time. (Well, every little bit does help, but that’s not what I think this story is proving in the Gospel of Mark.) Jewish New Testament scholar, Amy-Jill Levine, calls the interpretation of this story as a whole-scale condemnation of the Temple as a religious system of domination “a mite strange and a mite disturbing.”[1] After all, as far as we can tell, Jesus worshiped and taught in the Temple on a number of occasions throughout his life. It’s also the case that earlier in this chapter of Mark, Jesus had an 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 the Torah’s teachings about love. So Jesus was not arguing or critiquing the whole religious system of which he was a part.

Rather than this being an outmoded caricature of all scribes or 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. “Beware of that,” 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). We need to look at ourselves with corrective lenses.

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 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 own selves, within our parish, within our wider church, and within our society. We could stand to critique and improve our own redistribution systems in the church and we must beware of pretention or self-congratulatory practices in ourselves and in others. (When, in the year 70 of the common era, the walls came tumbling down, let’s imagine that there was plenty of speculation about fault or causation that got written into the Gospel of Mark.)

There’s a prayer in our tradition for the church. The prayer refers to the church as an “it,” third person singular, which gives the ones praying a little too much distance I think. The better pronoun is first person plural – because we are the church after all: So with the pronouns edited, 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.”

The second thing to see with our corrective lenses: I want to call your attention to the women in our lessons today – really, in the past two months, who have gotten scant preaching attention from me! Over the last two months, we’ve heard about the courage and intelligence of Esther, the beauty of Job’s daughters, the devotedness of Naomi and Ruth, we’ll hear the story of the hopefulness of Hannah next week – all brave and faithful women in Hebrew Scripture, and leaders among their people. They are our foremothers and they don’t get named in our worship nearly enough, as far as I’m concerned. They and all of the women in Mark associated with Jesus are role models of willingness to lean into God, to lean on the everlasting arms.

Think of the women in Mark. (I’ll name them for you.) Simon Peter’s mother in law models hospitality. The woman with the flow of blood models audacious courage. The Syrophonecian woman models persistence and anger at injustice. The anointing woman models tender and extravagant care. The widow in our Gospel lesson today models generosity and dignity. The women at the cross – Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, and Salome model fidelity – they stay when the others flee in terror. They are the last ones at the cross and the first ones at the tomb. They are the first witnesses of the resurrection. Mary Magdalene becomes the apostle to the apostles. Although the men in Mark often misunderstand what is going on, it’s the women around Jesus who unfailingly model qualities of discipleship in this Gospel narrative.

And the third thing to see with our corrective lenses is this: humility. I’ve just been reading a book called Humilitas given to me by one of my dearest friends. (I’m trying not to read too much into that!) It’s by John Dickson, an Anglican in Sydney, Australia, perhaps you know it. Dickson 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 in the early church 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.”[2]

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.

The book 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 being very 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.” (Ephesians 4:1-2) 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.

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