single persons, people
of all races and families
of every kind.
Sunday
Service:
Holy Eucharist
at 9:30 am
Child care is available
Church of Our
Saviour
191 Flanagan Way (Rt 153) Secaucus, NJ 07094
Tel: 201-863-1449
Fax: 201-863-1474
Mark A. Lewis,
Vicar
MLewis@secaucus.org
Dorothy Fowlkes
Pastoral Associate
This page revised 12
Nov 00
http://www.secaucus.org/
oursaviour
The Church of
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The Widows'
Might
Reflections on the
lessons for the 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
By The Rev. Mark A. Lewis, Vicar
1 Kings 17:8-16 / Psalm 146:4-9
Hebrews 9:24-28 / Mark
12:38-44
I once heard of a bishop who claimed that when he did a parish visitation he always snooped around to find the most recently published book in the priest's library, to find out what year the rector had died. I am glad to say that I'm still breathing and still buying new books. Many things have been found out about everything since my own days in school. And I'm almost never sorry to learn something new.
One thing I read recently -- and you may have noticed from my sermons that I'm interested in the development of the Roman Empire these days -- is about the earliest Christian churches. Archaeologists in Rome have learned about the Christian community centers that existed there in the first two centuries of the church's life, before the congregations moved into basilicas. The Romantic idea that the church met in underground catacombs is largely fiction.
Christians began to meet and continued to do so for several hundred years, in the homes of wealthy widows. They may have been the widows of Christian martyrs, or of men fallen out of favor with the tyrannical government of Empire. The developing world today is full of such widows, though most of them are poor. Some are rich: Corazon Aquino, in the Philippines, was one of those widows of imperial murder, and the people made her President. Nicaraguans did the same for Violeta Chamorro, after the dictator Somoza murdered her newspaper editor husband Pedro Joaquin. No one would wish for the job, but it is often true that when a woman is left alone in the world she takes on a whole new kind of power and authority. She has to, or else.
As Christian missionaries like Peter or even Paul arrived in Rome on visits, they would stay in the homes of these widows. These houses became meeting places for Christian worship, and eventually were expanded and became impressive places, though from the outside no one would know that they were illegal "safe houses" for the Christian revolution. In the apostles' time the houses were called tituli -- "dedicated houses" -- and were usually named for women saints, such as Mary and Cecilia. Women owned them; women named them. Eventually they became the "cardinal" (that is, the "hinge") churches of the City of Rome, and the deacons appointed to serve in them were called the cardinal deacons. And so on -- there's a lot more to the story, some of it an embarrassment to the gospel, which you already know.
Widows were very important in the young church. The Acts of the Apostles tells us they were the reason that the order of deacons was invented in the first place -- someone was needed to look after the poor widows. They weren't all rich with big houses. Christianity, like all revolutionary movements had widows to think about. Widows are one of the classes of people created by class struggle, by the oppression of social change. In Central America, widows and other women are one of the vanguard groups fighting against corrupt governments. The murder of their husbands, sons, and brothers politicized them. It's an old story.
In the time of Elijah there were widows. Jesus chose to preach about one such in his very first sermon at Nazareth, when he offended his neighbors by saying that "There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there came a great famine in the land and Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow." This would be as if a rabbi in Jerusalem today stood up in Ariel Sharon's hearing and said that God had visited a Palestinian widow in Hebron, whose husband had been murdered by the Israeli Defense Forces, rather than visit any of the needy widows of Israeli troops. You may remember that the synagogue tried to throw Jesus off a cliff on that occasion.
Our first reading was the text that Jesus was referring to -- and it was in the context of a struggle -- a religious war -- that the visit was made to Zarephath. It's a town on the coast, the Philistine coast -- that's the origin of the word Palestine. The people on the coast were worshippers of the god Baal. It was a prosperity religion, similar to the kind of religion I hear coming from some rich suburban parishes, from well-paid preachers in ghettoes, and from an ex-Mormon woman I had dinner with recently. If God likes you, you get rich. If you're not rich . . . well, draw your own conclusions.
They promised prosperity to their followers, and rain for their crops whenever they needed it. But Elijah says Oh No That Won't Do. He asked the true God of heaven to demonstrate that heaven could not be manipulated by worshippers of good luck. So God shut up the heavens for three and a half years, and here was no rain at all, and no prosperity and no food. And Elijah himself got hungry, and God said Go. Go over to the widow of the Philistine, that Palestinian widow, the Muslim. She'll feed you. He goes, and not to rip her off of her last meal, as it seems to her at first, but to help her survive by helping him survive. The Revolution is to be built by the contribution of yet another widow. The gifts of little people, peasants, workers, unemployed, outcast - she not even a believer - are used by God to preserve the prophetic voice in Israel. So her last little tortilla is shared, but miraculously her little flask of oil keeps filling itself up and never runs out, and there is enough food. "And she, and he, and her household ate for many days." God uses "outsiders" to preserve the Word of God when it is lost even in the midst of God's own people.
Jesus looked at a widow in the Temple one day, and pointed her out to his students. They were sitting in that part of the Temple called "The Court of the Women" -- probably because Jesus HAD women disciples with him, and the presence of women meant they couldn't go further on into the Court of Israel. So they were sitting out where they could see the thirteen trumpet shaped boxes that received the gifts of the laity. And he saw that there were wealthy people, who gave generously, dropped in large sums. Jesus doesn't denounce their gifts or their giving. He notices -- indeed they all notice -- that "many rich people put in large sums."
But then, along comes a woman with two copper coins, and Mark tells us they were leptons, about a quarter inch in diameter, in circulation in Palestine, but not in Rome. So Mark tells his Roman readers they were worth a quadran, so they'd understand the value. Two little pennies worth a dime maybe. Not much. But she had two of them; she could have kept one, and fulfilled more than her obligation, which was fifty per cent, according to Luke's gospel.
The idea of tithing is not in the New Testament at all. You're getting off cheap with that. Half of our goods is what Luke asks as starters, and not for the parish, but for the poor. But here, in Mark, time and again, it's one hundred per cent. Remember the rich young man a couple of weeks ago who wanted to enter into discipleship?
The poor widow puts in everything. And Jesus puts her gift in perspective, along with the gifts of the rich. "My view is that the widow has put in more than all those who are giving to the cause, for they all give out of abundance, but she, out of poverty has put in everything she has, her whole livelihood."
The value of any gift cannot be set by its inherent cash value, but by what it represents for the giver. What has it cost the giver, in terms of the giver's net worth? Is it a small percentage of abundance, a "drop in the bucket" as we say, or is it the bucket? What commitment has gone into it?
Thus the widow gives to Elijah. Her death was imminent, and that of her son. This was her last meal, and she decided to share it with the man she associated with God, a poor wayfarer. And so in a real way she was giving her life in the measure of meal and the cruse of oil. So was the poor widow in the Temple, who cast in all that she had. And Jesus commended her, and did not ridicule her, didn't tell her to be a lot more cautious with her assets.
Elijah demanded sharing even of the poor. And God expects sharing, even of the poor. No one of us is allowed to get off the hook by saying, "There are people who have more than I do who should be carrying the load." The fact is plenty of rich people won't. Some do, of course -- that's where the tituli churches of early Rome came from.
Wealthy and committed patrons were responsible for getting Christianity on the move in its early days. It wouldn't be here without them. And the similar stories can be told about the heroic acts of well-to-do AND generous Christians in every generation of the church's life right down to today. But God asks for help from the poor, most of all, whose investment in the future of God's people is a total commitment.
It's interesting that Jesus does not praise the widow who helped Elijah; in fact, he says that it was she who got the blessing, by having Elijah sent to her. "There were many poor widows in Israel in the days of the prophet Elijah, but he did not go to any of them, but to the widow of Zarephath." She got to make an investment in the future, to share in the meals of many days; she got to pour from the miraculous cruse of oil until the famine ceased.
The epistle lesson today talks about sacrifice, and how Christ has not become the kind of priest who has to make "a multiplication of masses" to God on our behalf, but that he himself has become for us the One Sacrifice. And that the next time he comes in some extraordinary way it will not be to deal with the matter of our failings, our sins, our imperfections. Christ will show up again one of these days in a new way and it will be to drop the distinctions we make between the high and the low, the rich and the poor. It will be to finish the revolution we're living in now -- to make it finally possible for people to live together without setting up artificial oppositions that cheat both sides in the deal. An end to the equal-opportunity dehumanization we suffer under now.
"Always do the generous thing, and never stifle a generous impulse" I once read in a kind of silly -- kind of great -- book called Life's Little Instruction Book. "You will never regret it." I don't know how well I've done with that advice, but I do know that I never feel sorry for over tipping the waitress. And I can't tell you what I would have done with the money I gave to my parish in 1985 if I had kept it for myself. Bishop Spong said from this lectern once "Love wastefully". It was his summary of the Bible's message to God's people. He was right. Isn't true love always running in the red?
There is an old myth about the British author Oscar Wilde's last words, delivered as he died in a Paris hotel. The famous aesthete (anecdotally) opened his eyes, peered around the room, and said with his last breath: "Either this wallpaper goes or I do." Maybe. But he certainly did give us all a wonderful -- profoundly Christian -- exit line earlier in his last days he said to his son who had come to be with him: "I am dying as I have lived . . . beyond my means."
with acknowledgements to Grant Gallup
-- Mark Lewis
Your comments or questions are welcome MLewis@secaucus.org.
Links to additional "Reflections on Lessons" may be found at the bottom of the Sunday web page.
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