Our Money Story: Reimagine

Mark 12:38-44       Common English Bible

As [Jesus] was teaching, he said, “Watch out for the legal experts. They like to walk around in long robes. They want to be greeted with honor in the markets. They long for places of honor in the synagogues and at banquets. They are the ones who cheat widows out of their homes, and to show off they say long prayers. They will be judged most harshly.” 

Jesus sat across from the collection box for the temple treasury and observed how the crowd gave their money. Many rich people were throwing in lots of money. One poor widow came forward and put in two small copper coins worth a penny. Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I assure you that this poor widow has put in more than everyone who’s been putting money in the treasury. All of them are giving out of their spare change. But she from her hopeless poverty has given everything she had, even what she needed to live on.”

 

Let me begin with a prayer from Henri Nouwen:

Dear God, 

I so much want to be in control.

I want to be the master of my own destiny.

Still I know that you are saying:

“Let me take you by the hand and lead you.

Accept my love

and trust that where I will bring you,

the deepest desires of your heart will be fulfilled.”

Lord, open my hands to receive your gift of love.

Amen.

Sometimes it is easy for us to forget how radical the biblical story is.

In the Torah, in the book of Leviticus – that rule book that most of us like to ignore --- God gives some powerful commands.

Moses is given instructions from Yahweh on how this newly freed people are to live.

Remember --- God had just delivered them from the Egyptians and slavery.

In these laws, God reimagines a whole new way of life for the children of Israel.

The laws of this new kin-dom are created to ensure that all of God’s children live with justice and equality.

          These laws are radical

God seems to be trying to reorient the Israelite’s money story.

While slaves --- money was used as a tool for self-security while impoverishing others

God is seeking to help them see a new vision ---- one where care is given for all --- where all of God’s children have enough

It is a vision which transforms how we relate to our neighbors and our resources.

The instructions, God shared give practical and specific ways to love our neighbor.

In Leviticus 19 we read that God commands that that farmers are to leave gleanings for the poor.

When you harvest your land’s produce, you must not harvest all the way to the edge of your field; and don’t gather up every remaining bit of your harvest. Also do not pick your vineyard clean or gather up all the grapes that have fallen there. Leave these items for the poor and the immigrant; I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:9-10 CEB) 

And then just a few chapters later we find the most radical commandment of all --- the idea of the year of Jubilee.

The practice of Jubilee is when, in a fifty-year cycle, imbalances within the economic structure are rebalanced.

Where “those who gathered much had nothing over, and those who gathered little had no shortage; they gathered as much as each of them needed.”

Debts were to be forgiven --- and property returned to the original owner.

My Jewish Learning describes it this way:

The seventh year, during which the fields were to be left fallow (Leviticus 25:1-7) and debts released (Deuteronomy 15:1-11) [is called in] Hebrew Shemitah (“Release”). The seven years are counted in the cycle of fifty culminating in the Jubilee

In The Jewish Religion: A Companion explains it this way:

[Jubilee is] the institution described in the book of Leviticus (25:8-24) where it is stated that a series of forty-nine years [was] to be counted . . . and every fiftieth year declared a special year during which there was to be no agricultural work; all landed property was to revert to its original owner; and slaves were to be set free. (Leviticus 25:9) 

Just a little aside --- inscribed in our Liberty Bell that is found in Philadelphia are the words from Leviticus 25:10 which describes the Jubilee.

The Liberty Bell has these words: “proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof,” which come from the King James Version of the Bible.

In the context of the Liberty Bell, the word “liberty” is usually understood to refer to our values of freedom and independence.

However, in its original context, the Hebrew word dror (best translated as “release”) refers specifically to economic amnesty to be enacted during a year referred to as the Jubilee—from the Hebrew, yovel, which refers to a ram’s horn trumpet blown to announce the occasion.  (William Gilders: Bible Odyssey)

Jesus picks up on this same radical theme in Mark’s Gospel.

And what is challenging is that most of us hear this story of the “widows mite” very differently than the first hearers would have.

I hope that you noticed that I include the story of the “widow’s mite” in its larger literary context --- this context is pretty much the same in both Luke and Mark’s gospel.

The story of the “widow’s mite” is sandwiched between two challenges that Jesus gives to the Scribes and Pharisees.  The harshness of these sayings can still make us squirm, as I am sure that the earliest hears did.

The story of the destruction of the temple --- which opens the 13 chapter of Mark, is especially damning.

Luke Timothy Johnson at the 4^th Annual Lake Lecture in commenting about Luke’s version of this story said:

Those “noble stones and offerings” that Jesus includes in his summary prediction of the temple’s destruction are, after all, precisely the ancient Jewish equivalent of endowed buildings with memorial plaques praising the benefactions of pious donors, the visible evidence of noble philanthropy. And the ancient scribes with their religious garb and public posturing were not so different from contemporary examples of preachers “swallowing the houses of widows” for their self-aggrandizing projects.

The middle part of our sandwich is especially challenging to understand.

Luke Timothy Johnson continued:

It has a double contrast: between the wealthy and the destitute widow on one hand; between the gifts of the rich given out of their excess and the gift of the widow out of her neediness on the other. The widow is said to have given “more than all the rest,” not because of the size of her gift but because of its more radical character: by donating two of the smallest coins in circulation, she was giving away “all her life (bios),” that is, all that supported her marginal existence. The wealthy could give greater amounts but with less impact on themselves. The measure of giving, it appears, is here less the product than the cost. 

Before the destruction of the temple, [the treasury] was the method used to fulfill the demands of Torah for the collection of alms for those perennially dispossessed in a land-based economy in a patriarchal society, namely widows, orphans, and sojourners.

By giving to the treasury, the rich were fulfilling their responsibilities --- so that the widow did not have to.

The reality is: widows were not required to give to the temple.

Widows and the perennially dispossessed were to be cared for through the safety nets that were created by these gifts --- to keep the dispossessed from falling.

Even in Jesus time --- the systems weren’t working and needed reimagining. 

This widow gives all that she has --- and the system fails her.

How would it change the story --- if we hear it like I believe the earliest followers of Jesus did --- with Jesus telling this story, sandwiched between the others --- to use her act of giving as a way to highlight the corruption of the economic system in power?

What if Jesus tells this story to show us, in contrast, a new — and yet ancient way (harking back to the concept of Jubilee) --- a new/old way of sharing, distributing resources, and caring for each other?

Luke Timothy Johnson continues --- it is a long explanation --- but I think it is important:

In its negative form, the mandate of faith is clear and consistent. Faith forbids all acquisitiveness and greed and envy as intrinsically the expression of idolatry. Therefore, all of Scripture consistently and emphatically forbids stealing and fraud and oppression and perverting of justice and moving of landmarks and withholding of wages and neglecting of widows and orphans and sojourners. 

In contrast, the mandate for the positive sharing of possessions is far more various. It was this side of the issue that most intrigued me. Why so definite on one side yet so vague on the other? One reason could be the notorious difficulty with all positive commandments. Negative commands are easier to spell out and to observe, for they exclude a specific form of behavior but allow all others. Positive commands, because they are open-ended, tend to be difficult both to define and execute. Think of, “Do not kill,” which leaves open all the positive ways of giving life, and then, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” which gives rise to anxious perfectionism.

But I think that something more is at work in this case. The vagueness and open-endedness of the mandate “share possessions” is connected directly to the open-ended character of faith in the Living God. God moves ahead of us all in the circumstances of our lives and calls us to respond in those specific and ever-changing circumstances . . .

What this means for the faithful disposition of possessions is, I think, clear. The mandate of faith is, in the most proper sense, to symbolize faith. Faith needs to be embodied in ever-changing ways in response to the call of God. That embodied response in physical action, and specifically the disposition of possessions, is not “symbolic” in some weakened sense of the term, but in its fullest, sacramental, sense: it effects what it signifies. Acquisitiveness, greed, oppression: these all obviously symbolize the response of idolatry. But every open-handed sharing of possessions equally enacts the very essence of faith. It is in this respect that the obediential faith of Jesus, which expressed itself in a complete receptivity to the call of God in every circumstance and in the self-emptying service to his neighbor at every moment, can be seen as the Christological exemplar for the sharing of possessions. As Paul tells the Corinthians when trying to persuade them to join in his great collection of money for the poor in Jerusalem: “You know the gift of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9).

Jesus seems to be challenging us to reimagine our gifts of stewardship

He asks:

Can we reimagine systems of charity that have inevitably fail to honor and uplift --- that fail to provide true transformation and liberation?

Can we reimagine how we earn and how we distribute resources as members of our faith community?

Can we, in the words of Luke Timothy Johnson move our giving, spending and acquiring closer to a statement of our faith in Jesus --- while balancing that with the reality of the economic system we live in?

Can we reimagine our giving?

And are we willing to give it a try?

The first step seems to me to be the mandate that we reimagine our neighbor.

We must see our neighbor as a child of God --- regardless of their race, sex or even geographical location.

May God help us to begin to reimagine all that God has blessed and given us.

Let me end with the words of Jose Marti:

“Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.”

Let us see all the people --- and seek to treat them as the sisters and brothers that they are.