THE TWENTY-THIRD SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
I Kings 17:8-16
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44
Year B/Proper 27
The story is told about a
farmer who woke up one morning wanting ham and eggs for breakfast. Finding his
best laying hen he then got a prime tender hog. The hen responded by delivering
two fine grade A large eggs. But when the hog started to run for cover the hen
said, “What’s your problem? The farmer
has given us all that we have.” The hog replied” “That’s easy for you so say. All he wants from you is a contribution.
From me he wants a real commitment!”
The stories from Elijah and
Mark today are about commitment and faith. From Elijah we hear of a time in
ancient
What one of us wouldn’t love
that kind of transformation; the kind of transformation that draws a line in the
sand of our days; a time of ‘before and after’ that we could always point to
and say “That was me then. But this is me
now”. It sounds illusive, but it’s as close as the air you breathe, as
close as God’s presence within it.
In today’s gospel we hear
about the important people who were listed in the ‘Who’s Who of Religious Society’;
the guardians of the faith, the religious aristocracy. They were the ones Jesus
had excoriated for, among other things, exploiting vulnerable widows. For what
we must remember in both these stories is that in the Hebrew law code a widow
had no rights of inheritance.
Today Jesus had stopped to
rest along the inner wall of the temple courtyard. Across from him stood the
temple treasury and the metal-trumpet-shaped boxes into which temple taxes and
offerings were dropped. All faithful Jews were obligated to pay these taxes.
Many people threw in large amounts of money and because the coins made a great
clang when dropped into the metal trumpets it drew considerable attention. They
were the ones to watch; only it wasn’t them Jesus was watching that day at the
temple. Identifiable by her dress, he was watching a solitary widow at the
temple coffers. Unaware that anyone was watching she turned her pocket inside
out and surrendered two small coins, worth one fortieth of a penny; virtually
worthless to the temple. To her however, it was everything.
What made her do it? What
made her entrust what little safety net she had, in spite of the corruption
that existed among the religious authorities, to the God of the temple? We
cannot say. We only know that Jesus called his disciples to take note. Was he
pointing out a system of monetary giving for them – or was it something else?
Being interviewed about the
preparation of clergy for ordained ministry, the dean of one seminary was
asked, “What quality do you want most in
future ministry?” He responded, “Passion”.
Shortly after a young man I had mentored for the priesthood had preached and we
were taking our vestments off in the Sacristy, I said to him, “You did very well, but I have one
suggestion. I want to see your passion. I know it’s there, but I want to see
it”.
Passion is a word that makes
us moderate, balanced, reasonable people nervous. Emotions and passions get bad
press when it comes to the history of human thought. We have been highly
influenced by philosophers that the goal of life is to foster reasonableness
that holds back. Socrates warned his students not to be carried away by
emotion. Aristotle stressed that the good life is the life of moderation. We
have a negative view of emotions. We say our emotions ‘got the best of us’ or ‘overwhelmed’
us. We say we were ‘paralyzed’ by
fear. We talk about ‘falling’ in
love. If we weep uncontrollably we say, ‘I
just lost it’. Thinking of emotions
so negatively, no wonder we push them into a closet, leaning on that door with
all our might until we can manage to get a padlock on it. It’s safer that way.
It means we won’t make any rash decisions. It also means we will experience a
kind of death long before we ever stop breathing.
Whatever you may think of
Steve Irwin, the Crocodile hunter recently killed by a stingray, he was
passionate. It’s easy to criticize his sometimes reckless behavior but you
cannot deny his passion. It was his passion that mesmerized people as much as
the dangerous circumstances he was often involved in with wild animals. When
his American wife was asked if she would now stop their daughter from doing the
same kinds of things her father did, she said in no way would she stop her
daughter from developing her own passions in the same way her father had. It
was what made him so special.
We have succeeded in making
religion and therefore God, into a kind of emotionless distant Being and
therefore uninvolved with us. Yet Christianity declares that God is the source,
the origin, of our emotions and our passions. The ways we perceive the world is
through joy, sadness, ecstasy, heartache, grief, and love. Jesus does not come
to us as a Stoic. He does not come and reveal to us a God who is distant and
far removed from our lives, our circumstances. He comes to show us a God who is
passionately involved with us. In fact, as Bishop Ed Salmon once said, “The cross is the begging of God”. Isn’t
that an interesting turn of phrase? “The
cross is the begging of God.” In Christ’s passion, God is showing us that a
life that is worth anything is a life you are passionate about; a life you are
willing to passionately entrust to God.
The very word passion means
suffering, but sometimes suffering can be the vehicle through which we allow
God into our lives all the more. In 1801 Ludwig van Beethoven realized that he
was going deaf; the bitterest of all fates to happen to a musician. He
desperately tried to conceal it, but ultimately had to surrender to it.
Deafness brought him to despair but it also fueled him to compose music with a
fever and passion he had never known before. “Removed from the society of people, he sought communion with the
spirit. Deaf to the sounds of music he sought to put down the turbulent and
majestic sounds he heard within him. One masterpiece after another came from
him: the Waldstein, Appassionata,
and Moonlight Sonatas, the Erotica Symphony; the Kreutzer Sonata as well…. He created
one other remarkable document, the letter to the “Immortal Beloved,”* one of the most remarkable love letters
ever written, found in a secret drawer after his death. It had never been sent,
leaving the experts only to speculate to whom it had been written. How very
sad. One can only imagine what other treasures the world might have known, what
he might have known, had he
surrendered his life to his passions before his deafness.
We’re all very good at
holding back. We’re cautious, fearful, timid in our commitments rather than
bold, decisive and brave because we fear losing what we have. Yet time and time
again Jesus tells us that placing all that we have and all that we are into
God’s hands is the only way to find life. The problem is we don’t believe it!
Like the princess in the fairy tale, we take the straw we are given and thatch
the roof with it to keep the weather out, but we do not do what we might do
with it; which is to spin it into gold.
When Jesus left the temple
with his disciples that day his public ministry was over. In four days he would
be dead, having offered up not a piece or a percentage of his life, but all of
it. The rich young ruler walked away from Jesus because he could not/would not
commit. And scripture tells us he was downcast and very sorrowful; his heart no
doubt safe, but empty. The widow walked away from the temple that day with an
empty pocket, but with the
We do not know what brought
the widow to that point of passionate surrender to God. We only know that Jesus
pointed it out to the disciples, because he knew the day would come when they
would be called upon to declare where they stood. And when that day came, in
spite of all their fears and weaknesses, they passionately entrusted their lives
to God - and we are blessed because of it.
When God is at the center of
our passion, our lives become explosive, like nitroglycerine, sowing seeds that
will be harvested in the Kingdom; a place where the eyes of Jesus will look
upon all our gifts with the eyes of complete and unconditional love. How we
respond in the meantime is ours alone to decide.
AMEN
*Cross, Milton, Encyclopedia of the Great Composers
and Their Music, Doubleday & Co., Inc.
The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett,
D.Min.
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church