32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
November 8, 2009
Mark 12:38-44

　Watching Jesus

In the first congregation I served as a full-time pastor, there was a widow named Georgia Lee. Slight of stature and white-haired, she could easily have been mistaken for a sweet old lady of the old school, the kind who crochets toilet roll covers for fundraisers, irons the linen cloth for the Communion Table, and keeps the nursery on Christmas Eve. Just a kind old soul who would never harm a fly.

Well, Georgia Lee did all of those things, but she was a force to be reckoned with. She didn’t exactly run the church, but she scared the daylights out of those who did, especially the young pastor fresh out of seminary who assumed that the church would be governed according to the Book of Order.

Georgia Lee could stretch a dollar farther than anybody I’ve ever known. When she served ham sandwiches for a church meeting, the slices of ham were so thin, you could read the King James Bible through them. After every covered dish supper you could find Georgia Lee sifting through the garbage, looking for plastic knives and forks that profligate Presbyterians had thrown away after using only one time. Georgia Lee grew up during the Great Depression. Widowed early, she raised four children on a kindergarten teacher’s salary. "Disposable" was not a word in her vocabulary.

I know for a fact that Georgia Lee was a tither – not because she told me so, but because the church treasurer did. Each year when the pledges came in, he’d record the meager figure that she’d put down on her pledge card and placed in the offering plate. Because he was also the president of the local bank, he knew better than anyone else that, unlike certain other members of the church, Georgia Lee was a truly sacrificial giver.

I once asked the treasurer if he thought I should know who gave what the to church. "Don’t look," he advised me. "It’s bad enough that I have to know. Just know that when Georgia Lee recycles plastic cutlery, it’s not because she’s stingy. It’s because she’s generous."

At one time I thought that today’s passage from the Gospel of Mark was a kind of homage to the Georgia Lees of the world, the hardworking, penny-pinching widows who know the value of money but can be generous to a fault. Nowadays I’m not so sure.

The scene comes toward the end of Jesus’ public ministry, just before his Passion. This is his last appearance in the magnificent temple in Jerusalem, where he has been critiquing the entire system upon which the religion of his day rests.

In today’s text he takes aim at some scribes. Watch out for those fellows in long robes, he warns (current company included). They like to live in the limelight, to get the best seats in the synagogues and to sit at the top table at banquets. When called upon to give the invocation, they offer long, wordy prayers, but "they devour windows’ houses," Jesus says.

What do you suppose that means? "They devour widows’ houses."

Well, observe that happens next. Jesus sits down opposite the treasury in the temple and watches the people as they make their contributions. Apparently the procedure went like this: You brought your offering and gave it to the priest. The priest then counted it and announced the total to everyone within earshot. (I hope the Stewardship Council is listening. This is bound to beat passing the plate.)

But Jesus is watching closely. He observes that those who give large gifts "contribute out of their abundance," but this widow has given everything she has. Out of her poverty she has given "all she had to live on."

Is Jesus commending the widow for her faith, or is he condemning a religious system that bleeds people like this widow dry? I’m pretty sure his comment is a further critique of the scribes he has just criticized. "You devour widows’ houses, and here is a case in point."

Read this way, this story raises uncomfortable questions for the life of the church today. It puts Jesus in the front pew this morning, taking note of what we do with do with the money in our treasury. Are we building up the kingdom, or are we erecting a temple to our own religious egos?

I think I know the answer. It appears to me that this congregation does a rather good job of spending money in the right places for the right reasons. But as I was dawning my "long robe," after having written my "long prayer," for the day, it occurred to me that I am not the best judge.

When Glenn Laird and his crew were excavating in the courtyard last week, they unearthed a section of terra cotta pipe that formed part of the storm water drainage system that has given us so much trouble for the last fifty years. The pipes were only four inches in diameter – too small by modern standards -- and we could never seem to keep them cleaned out.

Wedged in that section of pipe was a Coke bottle, fully intact, bearing the date 1959. It had to have been put there on purpose. It couldn’t have gotten into the pipe after it was installed. It appears that fifty years ago somebody put that bottle in that pipe, knowing full well that the system would soon clog up and never be able to repaired without digging up the whole thing.

For fifty years we’ve been trying to make that system work to keep water away from the Education Building, and for 50 years – from 1959 to 2009 – that Coke bottle has been keeping us humble. For 24 of those 50 years I have been waking up on rainy nights, wondering if the rain would be heavy enough to flood the basement, thinking "Should I get up and check?" "Will the Preschool be flooded in the morning?"

I won’t say, "All because of that Coke bottle," but it does seem to have had a lot to do with it.

The point I’m trying to make is this: We don’t always see the whole picture. We can deceive ourselves and we can be deceived. We need to have Jesus sitting in the front pew, reminding us that the scribes thought they were on the right track, too.

The motto of the Reformed tradition, as you probably know, is "Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda." It means, more or less, "The Church reformed, always to be reformed." To be the children of a living God is to be constantly open to God’s living word. In this text, that living Word is sitting across from the temple treasury, watching a widow give away her last two coins, and prompting his followers to look at this scene from God’s perspective: "Is this really what the Lord requires?" "Is a temple built on widows’ mites really built to the glory of God?"

I was sitting outside Hopkins Eatery a couple of weeks ago, waiting to meet Andra for a luxurious sandwich supper, and found myself trapped into overhearing a conversation between two men at the table near mine.

"There aren’t 47 million uninsured people in this country," one of the men said. "It’s more like 30 million, and if any of them walks into the emergency room, they’ll get seen. We don’t need this socialist healthcare reform in the first place."

Inside my head I’m saying, "But that’s not healthcare, you blunder head. That’s emergency care. It’s not the same thing." But I just sat there, gritting my teeth.

After a few minutes of conversation in a similar vein, the man began to talk about the wonderful experience he had had at the Mayo Clinic. "I didn’t even know I was in danger of losing my sight," he said. "A regular checkup found the problem. They did eye surgery on me, and the care I got was first class. And what’s more, it didn’t cost me a dime. My insurance and Medicare paid for the whole thing."

And if that man had been a widow in her fifties, too young for Medicare and not quite poor enough for Medicaid, that story could have been very different. It could have been a story about a widow who only has a few coins left in her purse. She can spend them on food or she can go to the doctor. Either way, her house will be devoured.

To follow Jesus sometimes means to sit with him and observe the systems we live by and prosper from. The church is one of those. The healthcare system is another. Before we pat ourselves on the back for being such faithful followers, we should ask if there’s a Coke bottle lurking somewhere.

In other words, just when we think we’re reformed, it’s time for reformation.

 

 

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