“Out of Sight ≠ Out of God’s Mind”

“Out of Sight ≠ Out of God’s Mind”
Mark 12: 38-44; Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17; 1 Kings 17:8-16
November 8, 2009 – 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
First United Church – Sermon by Caela Simmons Wood

When Jack and I picked a date for me to preach in November, I said, “Just not pledge Sunday, okay? Because I did pledge Sunday last year and the year before that I did the Sunday after pledge Sunday it was still about stewardship.”

I thought I could safely slide by, preaching the week before pledge Sunday, and not have to deal with the well-loved topics of stewardship and money.

After all, you’re tired of hearing about money, tired of being challenged to think about how you use your hard-earned dollars. And so, I have some good news and some uncomfortable news for you this morning.

The good news: this is not a sermon about the stewardship campaign. I will not be talking about how to ponder what you give to First United Church.

The uncomfortable news: it’s still a sermon about money. More specifically, it’s going to be a sermon about the wider concept of stewardship. Instead of pondering the stewardship campaign, we’re going to ponder stewardship in a broader sense – taking care of God’s creation.

Creation includes everything, really: the Earth, animals, children, our partners and spouses, our shared projects and endeavors, our friends, our neighbors – even the people we don’t think about very much.

“And why,” you might ask, “are you going to confuse things even further by asking me to think about all of this other stewardship stuff today? I already have enough ‘stewardship’ on my brain just trying to think about my giving to the church. Why are you confusing the issue?”

For that, my friends, I have a simple answer. The Bible made me do it.

Seriously, the Bible made me do it!

Jack and I are both lectionary preachers. We do our very best to examine the texts given to us by the Lectionary committee and address them in some way. In doing so, we not only ensure that this congregation encounters a lot of the Bible, but we force ourselves, as preachers, to deal with texts we’d rather just ignore.

And when this particular preacher took a look at the lectionary texts for this Sunday, the Sunday where I was not – NOT! – going to preach on stewardship, it just got awkward. I couldn’t figure out another direction to take it. And here’s why:

There are three fascinating stories in today’s lectionary – one of them you heard earlier in the service (Ruth and Naomi working together to figure out how to become financially stable in a world where Ruth needed a man to make that happen).

One of them you heard just a moment ago – Jesus’s thoughts about a widow who put her last two cents into the offering plate at the temple.
And the other story, the one that we didn’t hear today aloud, can be found in 1 Kings 17 – the story of Elijah and a nameless widow who is so poor that she’s planning on making one last loaf of bread and then dying.

The element that ties these stories together is the character of “the widow.”

You don’t have to read too much of the Bible to quickly discover that “widow” is not usually used the way we often think of widows today. When I think of widows, I think of someone who has outlived their spouse – someone who is grieving deeply and profoundly because their partner-in-life is now gone.

Widows in the Bible usually stand in for something else, though. In a patriarchal society where women were cared for by the men in their lives, a widow is someone who is financially vulnerable. A woman who is living on the margins of society, totally dependent on the goodwill of others to get by. It is a woman who, like the widow Elijah encounters, is so hard-up that she is scrambling for twigs in the gutters of the city, just so she can light a small fire to eat one last tiny loaf of bread and die.

A widow in the Bible is a woman like Naomi, counseling her daughter-in-law to offer herself to their next-of-kin so that she can get married and have someone to take care of them both.

A widow in the Bible is the nameless woman Jesus observes in the Temple – putting the very last money she has into the offering plate.

Widows in the Bible are symbols for the marginalized. The last, the lost, the least. Those people who lurk on the fringes of society. The people that “the rest of us” don’t notice when we’re walking down the street. And here we have three of them in our lectionary texts – refusing to be ignored, standing right in our faces, saying, “Look at me. Learn from me.”

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The Mark passage, usually known as “the widow’s mite” is actually a favorite for stewardship season.

Unfortunately, it usually gets used in all the wrong ways, I think. Stewardship sermons about the widow’s mite usually go something like this: “Jesus was in the Temple, griping about all the fat cats who ran the place when he saw a widow - a woman who didn't have anything - put her last two cents into the offering plate and praised her. Therefore, we should all be all like the widow and give until the very end. Open up your checkbooks, pass the offering plates, turn in your pledge cards, thank you very much!”

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get to that interpretation when you actually read the passage in Mark. For starters, Jesus never praises the widow. No, seriously, go look it up in Mark 12, if you don’t believe me. I was shocked, myself, to discover that this week. All Jesus does is observe the woman giving her last two coins to the treasury and note that she has done so. He notices that what she has given is substantial – even though it’s small in numerical value, it’s huge in terms of sacrifice because it’s all she has.

But his comment isn’t meant to make us all want to be like the widow. Instead, Mark tells this story to make us critical of the economic and religious systems the widow inhabits. A little earlier in the passage, Jesus teaches that the religious leaders “devour widows’ houses” – meaning they force the people who are already impoverished to sell what little property they have in order to pay their dues. They force people to give more than they really can, just so they can walk around in fancy robes and eat at big parties.

And so when I look at this text and try to figure out where to place myself, I am stuck with a reality that I don’t much like. If I have a place in this text, it’s not as the widow. I am not economically marginalized. I am not the victim of a system that takes advantage of me. If I have a place in this story, it’s among those that make Jesus cranky.

And this becomes the point where I really wish I wasn't preaching this sermon! This text - and the multiplicity of the marginalized in today's texts - calls me to account. It forces me to think about stewardship in ways that are even more uncomfortable for me than writing a pledge card.

It makes me think – it’s not enough for me to think about how my family uses our resources on pledge Sunday or on Sundays in general. It reminds me that stewardship is much larger than church campaigns with catchy themes. It’s about all choices I make as I use my resources on a daily basis.

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It’s not my place to tell you what to think about this text or how to engage it. I wouldn’t presume to do that because I’m already stressed out enough wrestling with it myself. All I can do it show you a little of where it's leading me and hope that you might take the time to do the same work for yourself.

There are three things that I had to wrestle with when confronted with these texts this week.

First - God cares about how I use my resources. Period. There's just no way around it.

As I child, I may have learned that you’re not supposed to talk about money in public, but apparently the authors of the Bible didn’t learn this rule of social etiquette. Or maybe they just don’t consider Scripture to be public, I don’t know.

Again and again, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures smack us with stories about our financial resources. They confront me when I get squeamish thinking about money. They remind me that God really and truly cares about what I do with my debit card.

The second thing I’m left with is even more unpleasant: Whether or not I realize it, I am a part of systems that oppress people who already have little.

Last weekend, I had a realization of this when David and I were doing our weekly grocery shopping at Kroger. I overheard a couple in the produce section say to a friend they encountered, “Yeah, we don’t usually shop here. We’re Wal-Mart people and it’s just so shocking to see how expensive everything is here at Kroger!”

And immediately, there is was. Just trying to mind my own business, looking at bananas, and I’m confronted with the part my dollars play in the larger economic system. My brain and heart immediately went 1000 directions at once: “Do those people realize that when they get those low, low prices at Wal-Mart it’s probably because people aren’t being paid a fair wage?” And then, almost immediately, “Wait a minute, Caela, don’t be so quick to judge – I’m pretty sure you’re nor really being so virtuous by shopping at another major chain store either. Plus, those bananas you’re about ready to buy probably came all the way from Chile and used up a million gallons of gas to get here.”

The choices I have to make about how to spend money are overwhelming – where to buy, what to buy, when to buy, how to buy. It’s a daily struggle. And whenever I start to feel good about a decision I’ve made, I’m almost always gripped by the realization that I could be doing more.

And this leads me to the final thing I pondered this week: how does what I see affect my choices?

I can choose to see or not see the marginalized. I can choose to see or not see the effect my living has on people our society has labeled invisible and on our Earth. But God sees. And God wants to help me see.

There is a plethora of information out there mean to help educate me on how to spend dollars in a just way. I could probably research every purchase I make – from the big ones, like a car, to the tiny ones, like a cup of coffee – to try and figure out the effect my choices have on the rest of the world.

I truly believe God sends prophets to help us figure out how to negotiate our way in the vast economic systems we inhabit.

But trying to figure out which voices are prophetic and which ones are out to serve themselves is difficult. For example, I just read an article online this week about how major national retailers are advertising their products as “local” because “buying local” is now the big rage. People feel good about their consumer choices when they support a local business, and the big chain companies are catching on. The result is that companies like Frito-Lay are making ads that feature potato farmers and pitch their food as locally grown. And Winn-Dixie, a supermarket chain with over 500 stores, now advertizes itself as “local flavor since 1956.”

Trying to sort out the truth from the hype is almost enough to make me want to throw up my hands, swipe my debit card, and give up.

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But just when I’m about to give up, the words of Scripture call me back outside myself. They remind me that I am not alone in the struggle. I may choose to live my life as if the marginalized in our world are “out of sight, out of mind.” But God refuses to do that.

These stories remind me that even those I choose to ignore are never out of God’s sight. God sees the people who struggle to find a way in a world that turns a blind eye. God sees the systems that oppress. God sees my role in the oppression, too.

And God calls me to stop whining about too much information; pause; and prayerfully make the best choice I can.

The good news I found this week is that God believes I can do it.

God believes you can do it.

God believes we all can do it.

God entrusts us with the awesome responsibility of caring for creation. God is there to comfort us when we fail, encourage us when we ask the hard questions, point the way to prophets of truth, provide communities that help us discern the right path, and rejoice with us when we get it right.

And God wants to open up for us the awesome joy of being a part of being stewards of creation - because there's nothing that feels better than when we get it right.