The best part of the Christmas story is, I think, the way that people surpassed themselves. It could have gone much differently. Mary found herself with child by the Holy Spirit, and she could have found herself with-out the support of her family, fiancée, and community. Instead, they believed her. They trusted her. They supported her. They loved her.
People don’t always do that, do they?
Later, caught in an unusual and unwelcome government operation, Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem to find no space available. One of the innkeepers among the many without a place for them created some basic shelter, some semblance of comfort. Meanwhile, on a hillside shepherds chose to follow the wild directions of heavenly beings. Exhausted in the stable, I can’t imagine that Gabriel’s promises of a Messiah sounded likely to Jesus’ first-time parents. When the shepherds brought the angels’ word, they also brought an assurance they desperately needed.
Later, Herod acted like an ordinary king – fearful, jealous, and violent – while foreigners took the extraordinary step (steps, actually) to celebrate the birth of one who would rule in a different way. Their stunning generosity enabled the threatened family to survive, and the infant Messiah to thrive.
Over and over again, people surpassed themselves. They did more than others expected, perhaps even more than they expected of themselves. This Christmas, surprise yourself with your goodness, your mercy, your support, your acceptance, your generosity. Surpass yourself with your family, your neighbors, and your church.
As we celebrate the surpassing worth of Christ, let us give as he would have us give.
Merry Christmas!
Eric Anderson
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Our Every Member Canvass is coming up, beginning once we’ve approved a budget at the All Membership meeting next Sunday. In one sense, that makes this story of the widow’s two coins just a little early. In another, of course, God’s call to generosity is evergreen, always in season.
So. Give everything you have to the Church of the Holy Cross. Down to the last two pennies.
I’m kidding. Unlike some of Jesus’ contemporaries, the scribes he criticized so harshly, the ones who devoured widows’ houses, I’m kidding. Unlike some of my own contemporary religious leaders, who call for major donations while buying mansions and private jets, I’m kidding.
Keep the last two pennies.
All right, I’m kidding again.
But you see the problem, right? It’s a good thing for people to be generous to their faith community, to their neighbors, and to strangers. Love makes the world go around, as the saying goes, and giving goes with love. Do you love someone? You give them what they need. You give them what will delight them. Do you love God? You give God things. You give what will delight the Holy One.
Like two small coins. Or as we might translate it, she gave “her whole life.” That’s how it reads in Greek.
Having warned of religious leaders who devoured the houses of widows, Jesus watched it happen right in front of him, recognized it, named it, and, I would guess, wept.
D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “In a profound way, she [the widow] is acting with nobility and self-sacrifice and she is contributing toward an unjust system. She is giving all that she has and she is abetting a system that will take away all that she has. It is truly a tragic situation facing the widow, because her means of practicing true piety is at the same time a system that is devoid of justice and will, in turn, exploit her.”
As it did.
It wasn’t supposed to. The Law and the Prophets of ancient Israel made abundantly clear who was to be protected and cared for in that community: the widows and the orphans. Oh, and the foreigner, too. As Sung Soo Hong writes at Working Preacher, “If the leaders had kept the Law (for example, Deuteronomy 24:19–20; 26:12–13) and feared God, who is portrayed as the ultimate defender of widows in many passages of the Hebrew Bible, the widow in our passage would have not become that poor. The widow’s extreme poverty is the evidence that the leaders have failed.”
And they still invited her to put money in the treasury.
Debie Thomas asks at JourneyWithJesus.net, “Should we cheer or weep in the face of this story? Or — here’s a third alternative — should we call out (as Jesus did) any form of religiosity that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction? Any form of piety that privileges long-winded prayers over works of compassion and liberation? Any version of Christianity that valorizes soul-killing suffering as redemptive? Any practice of faith that coddles us into apathy in the face of economic, racial, sexual, and political injustice?”
My answer to Ms. Thomas’ question is: Yes. We should call it out.
Don’t give us your last two pennies.
I say that despite having a certain amount of anxiety about the financial situation of this church. The pandemic has been hard for us. We have spent more than we brought in for four years for several reasons. Our expenses, as you might expect, haven’t gone down, and some have gone up. Insurance has been a major headache. Our income has suffered. During the pandemic we lost revenue from rentals of space on our campus, and that hasn’t yet returned to 2019 levels. Our members maintained faithful levels of giving, for which I’m grateful, but there have been fewer of them. Mercifully, we lost very few people to COVID in this church, but some people moved away, and other people’s health deteriorated, and some precious people died. I’m afraid that during COVID none of us in leadership here, starting with me, figured out how to welcome new people into this congregation through the virtual space. We’re delighted that new people have joined in the last year, but that’s still nearly four years of losses to make up.
The budget you’ll see in the mailing from our Moderator, Stefan Tanouye, projects a substantial deficit. I simply don’t know how to cover it. Except.
To ask you.
Sometimes when strangers ask me what I do for a living (which isn’t often; most people in Hilo recognize me for some reason), I’m tempted to say that I’m a professional beggar. I literally ask people for money, money that I live on, every week. You might say, “No, pastor, it’s the lay reader that says such things,” and you’d be right, except for one thing:
Where do you think the invitation to the offering they read comes from?
That’s right. The professional. The professional beggar.
That’s OK. I signed on for this thirty-six years ago. Frankly, I just wish I was better at it.
If I was really good at it, do you suppose we could afford a mansion for me and a private jet?
I really do wish I was better at begging because it really isn’t about me. It’s about the church. It’s about maintaining a space in which we can worship. It’s about providing compensation for the hard work of the people who make the music, print the bulletins, and clean the floors. It’s about making spaces available for people to support one another through hard things, for celebrating the blessings of life, for learning about God and God’s world. It’s about having the means to assist those who are hungry, homeless, or hurting. It’s about providing nourishment for the soul, perhaps starting with actual bread (or breadfruit; this is Hawai’i, after all). It’s about sustaining ourselves in a community living out its mission as part of the Body of Christ.
That’s worth begging for.
What do you think? Is it worth giving for?
That’s a good ending, don’t you think? “This church is worth begging for. What do you think? Is it worth giving for?”
I’d like to end it there, but I can’t.
You see, it’s not just religious leaders like me who devour widows’ houses. It’s other leaders, too. People who underpay their workers, and perhaps have either not read or simply ignored these words from Deuteronomy 24: “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers, whether other Israelites or aliens who reside in your land in one of your towns.” People who reduce the taxes on the very wealthiest and pass on the debt to future generations. People who separate fleeting refugee children from their parents and essentially create orphans when they neglect to track either the children or the adults. People who lie as casually as I drink coffee.
The United States has re-elected as President a devourer of widows’ houses. Plain and simple. Already his followers have sent messages to African American children telling them to report for sale as slaves. Already his followers have sent messages to women: “Your body. My choice.”
I have no words of comfort about this, and I have no patience with those who deny the extraordinary risk now faced by a number of people. What rights will be maintained by LGBTQ people? The Constitution, I’ll remind you, makes no guarantee about the rights of women except the right to vote. Religion is protected by the Constitution – but who defines religion? May not a Congress or a court conclude that “religion” must meet certain criteria? As for race, well. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law did not protect American citizens of Japanese origin – including children – from being incarcerated during World War II. Oh, and having that upheld by the US Supreme Court.
I am not optimistic.
I will also not give up the faith. I will not surrender in advance. I will not permit the widows and orphans or our day, the most vulnerable of our neighbors, to have their houses devoured by a government unrestrained by moral sense, sound judgement, and effective oversight, without my voice raised in protest.
I do not expect to succeed. Jeremiah didn’t. Hosea didn’t. Amos didn’t. Elijah didn’t. The nations they sought to guide went their own way. Others preserved their words and stories because, it turned out, they’d been right all along to plead for the welfare of the widows and the orphans, the most vulnerable of their societies.
Jesus didn’t succeed, either. Perhaps if the Temple scribes of his day had given up devouring widows’ houses, the calamitous war with Rome wouldn’t have happened, and the Temple would be standing on Mount Moriah today. But Jesus didn’t persuade them. He went to the cross instead.
He transformed that failure into the possibility of new life.
Don’t give us your last two coins, people. We need the money, but more than that we need to be faithful to our obligation to care for one another. Don’t help us devour your house. Do help us maintain this house as best you can, but no more.
As you do, watch and see where the other devourers approach. Watch, see, name, protest, and act.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the prepared text you have just read will not exactly match the video you (may) have just watched.
The image shows the widow depositing the coins with Jesus watching. One of the 5th or 6th century mosaics in the Church of Saint Appolinaire in Ravenna, Italy. Photo by Sailko – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28214920.
Jesus warned about greed among religious leaders – and then observed the consequences.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the twelfth chapter of Mark’s Gospel (Mark 12:38-44). At the end of the chapter, as Jesus and his disciples were sitting in the Temple, and none of the officials were any longer willing to ask him any questions or engage him in conversation, Jesus looked around at them all and told his disciples to beware of the scribes. That is, to beware of those who had high position in the official religion of the day.
He criticized them for their appearance, criticized them for their affection for power and respect. He warned that they devour widows’ homes.
And in the next story, Mark describes Jesus as he observed a woman putting two small coins into the giving box for the Temple treasury. “She has given more than any of the rest,” he told his followers, “because she has given everything she had, everything she had to live on.”
It is, on the one hand, an example of extraordinary generosity, of faithful giving, of giving with faith that something will come from God tomorrow — because there is nothing left from today. On the other hand, it is also an example of what Jesus had warned about in the preceding paragraph, in what he taught about religious leaders. “They devour widows’ houses.” And that is exactly what happened when that woman put in the last two coins, all that she had to live on.
I am a religious leader and I am familiar with all the anxieties of maintaining a budget for a church. It is no easier in the twenty-first century than it was in the first century and I am sure that the priests and the scribes and all the rest of them wondered how it was that they were going to maintain that magnificent Temple there in Jerusalem. I wonder how we are going to maintain our structure, how we are going to maintain our programs, how we’re going to maintain our ministries, how we’re going to maintain our faith without significant gifts from our worshippers and our friends.
But do not let me do not let us devour the houses of the most vulnerable, of the most needy in the world.
Do not give us your last two coins.
Give us that — not so much which you can do without — give us that which will enable you to feel good about your giving, to know that you have extended yourself, and are still able to maintain yourself in a life that is rich and full (not wealthy, necessarily, but rich and full).
I would not devour any widows’ home, any poor person’s home, any person that is struggling: I would not devour their home. Give what is right, but also give with an eye to tomorrow, that you may have something to live on.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
My first job for which I was paid – other than coins from the Tooth Fairy – was as a performing magician. I did three shows at the Blandford Fair in Blandford, Massachusetts, when I was around thirteen. And I got paid for it.
I wasn’t terribly good, but I was better then than I would be now. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I knew.
Most of what I knew came from the writings of Henry Hay, particularly his 1947 book Learn Magic. I do remember something from that book. More than once, Hay urged his readers to slow down and give the audience a chance to grasp what was going on. He’d say something like, “Hold up a coin, and count slowly to three. By that time, the slow one in the back knows you’re holding a coin.”
And if you have to, repeat yourself. Repeat yourself again, until everybody knows what you said. Later in life I learned a similar formula: Tell them what you’ll tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.
By this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus had been struggling to convince his disciples that his journey to Jerusalem would end in arrest, crucifixion, and death – and that this would be OK. It hadn’t gone well. In chapter eight, when Jesus first said it, Simon Peter’s protest had been so forceful that Jesus lashed out with, “Get behind me, Satan!” In chapter nine, Jesus said it again, and none of his disciples dared to ask him what he was talking about. They did, however, start arguing about who was greatest.
Jesus told them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” You might recall that I preached on that story, asking, “Who wants to be first?” and suddenly nobody did.
Here in chapter ten, Jesus told the twelve for the third time that he would be killed and resurrected. The lectionary, somewhat strangely, skips that section, and jumps to what we read this morning, when James and John asked for a special place at Jesus’ side. Let’s be careful, however, to be sure of what they meant.
Sarah Hinlicky Wilson writes at Working Preacher, “James and John misunderstand the glory they are pursuing actively, for Jesus’ ‘baptism is not a matter of action but of passion. Their boastful assurance ‘We are able!’ earns a response from Jesus whose irony can only be grasped by those who read to the end of the story: you bet you’re going to undergo this baptism, but it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
They thought it meant the liberation of the people of Israel from foreign domination, which included the Hasmonean monarchs who were so clearly lackeys of the Romans. Goodbye Caesar; goodbye Herod: Welcome, King Jesus! A new-crowned monarch would need a royal court, you see, a collection of aides and officials to pass along Jesus’ directions and, of course, receive near-royal honors themselves. The most powerful of them would stand to the right and to the left in a formal setting.
They thought they were asking for what other civilizations might call a Prime Minister, a Chancellor, a Grand Vizier. It’s an impressive ambition for a couple of fishermen from a backwater part of the world.
Debie Thomas, writing at JourneyWithJesus.net, notes that James and John did a few things right. “First, the two brothers place their full faith in the right person… Second, they are ambitious for the reign of God. They expect and want Jesus to be glorified; they expect and want the world’s wrongs to be righted… Thirdly, James and John ask. They approach Jesus boldly, and make their request with hearts full of confidence. Is the request tacky? Yes. Is it borne of ignorance and immaturity? Yes. Are some of the motives behind the request selfish? Yes. And yet. They ask.”
As D. Mark Davis writes at LeftBehindAndLovingIt, “Since this is the third time that Jesus has disclosed his impending death, and the third reaction, a question would be whether James and John have a sense of what Jesus’ ‘glory’ really is. The twelve’s reactions to the first two disclosures would indicate that none of them gets or accepts that death is in the package.”
Do any of us, really?
One more time, Jesus brought the twelve together to tell them, “You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.”
One more time.
Mark quoted Jesus on this theme twice. Matthew quoted Jesus on this theme of greatness via service four times. Luke made it five times.
I mean, one more time, right?
John didn’t really quote Jesus on this, but he made sure to demonstrate Jesus’ emphasis on greatness through service, when he described Jesus washing the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper.
They didn’t get it, so Jesus said it one more time. I would guess that some in the early church didn’t get it, either, so Matthew and Luke said it one more time and time again. I would guess that when John got to writing, there was enough of a gap between words and actions that instead of saying it one more time, he wrote about Jesus doing it one more time.
One more time.
What if we did understand greatness as service? What if we reserved honor for those who help other people? What if we provided resources and power to those who share it with those around them? What if we made sure that we reward those who lift up (and who are lifted up), rather than those who take and grab and keep and hoard?
What if we honored Jesus with magnanimity, not might?
What would the world look like?
Just to start, a world devoted to serving neighbor and stranger would not go to war. If you prize the welfare of others, you don’t kill them. Or rape them. Or plunder them. Crime rates would plummet, partially because if you care about someone else, you don’t steal from them, but also because the motives for stealing drain away. If you’re hungry, someone will care enough to feed you. If you’re out of work, people will help you find a way until there’s work again.
For that matter, people who care about one another work as best they can, because it’s one way to contribute and to share.
Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and all the other prejudices and oppressions also lose their foundations. When I make your welfare an important thing in my life, how can I accept anything that diminishes you? How can I permit someone else to denigrate you for being who you are, or prevent you from achieving the good you are capable of? How can I withhold my support for you being you?
I won’t pretend that this will be a paradise. Even if every human being fully commits to every other human being, the natural world will not. Floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes, storms, and volcanic eruptions will shatter and disrupt lives. Imperfect human understandings of our impact on the world could lead to things as serious as climate change.
At the interpersonal level, my commitment to your well-being does not mean that I understand your needs. I may get it wrong. I may mistakenly hurt or even injure you. So no. It’s not a paradise in the way we often envision one.
But isn’t it a lot better than what we have? Isn’t it worth dreaming? Isn’t it worth working for? Isn’t it worth changing ourselves for?
Getting there – well, that’s the hard part, for certain. Our structures of power, prejudice, and privilege are well established. Christianity has made relatively little headway against them in two thousand years, and has often adopted them as its own during that time.
So. Small steps. Make positive choices for the welfare of other people. Do the work to find out what people actually need before you do something they don’t need.
Check yourself for your own preconceptions and privilege. Will an action benefit you? Examine it carefully. It may also serve others more than yourself. If it’s better for you than anyone else, though, and especially if it harms someone else, maybe try something different.
Jesus said it to his disciples one more time. He tried it with them one more time, and he’s trying it with us one more time.
One more time, and one more time, and one more time.
The destination is worth the effort.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric sometimes improvises while preaching. Sometimes he even intends to!
The image is “The Songs of Zebedee,” an etching by Jan Luyken from the Phillip Medhurst Collection of Bible illustrations housed at Belgrave Hall, Leicester, England (The Kevin Victor Freestone Bequest). Photo by Phillip Medhurst – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20225346.
The United Church of Christ has issued an appeal for its members and friends to support those affected by Hurricane Helene in the American Southeast. The Rev. Kent Siladi, Interim Director of Philanthropy in the national office, wrote yesterday:
“The impact of Hurricane Helene is widespread and devastating, as more than 100 people have been confirmed dead, over 2 million people are without power, and damages are estimated to be over $140 billion. We know of two UCC congregations on Florida’s Gulf Coast whose church buildings suffered significant flood damage, and another building that experienced structural damage from high winds. We continue to be in touch with our Southern, Southeast, and Florida Conferences as they work to contact local congregations and become aware of their needs.”
Church of the Holy Cross will collect relief gifts this coming Sunday (and afterward, if people continue to make donations). If you are using a check, please note “Hurricane Helene” on the memo line, or put it in an envelope marked “Hurricane Helene.”
If you would like to give online, our donation system does not have the ability to handle special gifts. Please use the UCC’s giving portal at:
