11/8/09 Listen:  Who Gives
Bulletin

Dear Friends, 

This Sunday we meet a poor widow in Mark’s gospel (Mark 12:38-44) who walks into the Temple seemingly unnoticed.  She’s been there a hundred times, standing in line at the treasury, waiting to make her humble offering to God.  Among so many big-spenders and headline-makers, she is a nobody surrounded by so-called somebodies; she is flat broke, worn-out, used up, and overshadowed by the wealthy and the spiritually proud who gather around her.  And yet, in giving away everything she has, she catches the eye of Jesus that day, and she has been remembered ever since.

 Some people give mere left-overs to God and seem still to take the spotlight, while some people, like the widow, give everything to God and go completely unnoticed by the world.  Because the left-overs of some are often of greater value than the whole of others, it’s hard to tell the difference between a genuine sacrifice and a mere contribution. 

 But according to Mark, Jesus knows.  It takes one to know one, as they say, and heading toward the cross that awaited him, Jesus was about to do the same as that widow had done in the Temple — offering the whole of his life to God for the sake of others, holding nothing back, doing the seemingly foolish thing of giving something away without any expectation that it might be returned.

 Maybe Jesus understood that you cannot nickel and dime the Kingdom of God.  Like that widow in the story, he would choose the better way: to let go of what he could not keep in order to obtain what he could not afford to lose. 

See you Sunday,

Rev. Mark