A Once and Future Hope (Luke 21:25 - 36; Jeremiah 33:14 - 16)

 

In the Sunday Lectionary, that three-year cycle of scripture readings a lot of us mainline churches use, the longest bunch of readings is called Ordinary Time. It’s time that’s . . . Ordinary.  That is, it's not Advent or Christmas - or Eastertide, nor is it Pentecost.  It’s just ordinary, and it spans 34 Sunday's in two separate chunks.  And last week was the 34^th and final Sunday, and as usual, I breathed a sigh of relief, because I’ve gotten mighty tired of Ordinary Time. Every Sunday I look up the number, and it says twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Or thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Or four-hundred and seventy-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time.  (OK . . . so I made that last one up.) But you get the picture . . . it seems to drag on and on, numbing in its sameness, wearying and gray, like the gift that keeps on giving well past its welcome.  Maybe it's just me, just some preacher-crankiness rearing its ugly head.  Or maybe I'm just tired of preaching about Jesus' trip to Jerusalem, I don't know.  But whatever it is, I want Ordinary time to go away.

 

It's not always that way, though . . . right after Pentecost, I'm glad to be in Ordinary Time.  After reading and hearing and preaching about Jesus' death and burial and resurrection and ascension, I'm ready for a rest.  Ready to sit back and relax, and hear stories about living.  Jesus calming the seas.  David killing Goliath.  The feeding of the five thousand. Stories we grew up with.  The old, old stories.

 

But 'long about October, after a Summer of ordinary weather, our late-eighties-early- nineties, rain-as-scarce-as-hen's-teeth weather, I begin to get restless.  I begin to fidget and fuss, and look forward to the cool, to something new.  And September rolls around with its hint of fall and I know something's up.  I know things are about to change, and they've gotta be for the good, because it's been a long time, a long, dry ordinary time and hope chokes the air like wood smoke from the season's first fires.  And while color slashes the trees, and snowflake leaves layer the ground, I begin to believe that deliverance is coming, deliverance has come, and that deliverance will come again.  I begin to believe in the possibility of Christmas.

 

In both passages this morning, there's a yearning, a longing for deliverance, a hope for change.  In Luke, Jesus foretells his own second coming, and he describes it in vivid detail.  “The Son of Man will come in a cloud, with power and glory,” he says and “when these things take place your redemption draws near.” Jesus spoke of his return to earth, and whatever he meant by it, whatever he meant by a kingdom on earth, Luke's audience took it as comfort, as rescue from oppression.  The people were cowed, uncertain, beaten-down physically and spiritually by the Romans.  When Luke wrote, Jerusalem had been sacked and the temple destroyed and Christians were an outlaw sect, despised and marginalized.  Luke's readers would have been comforted by Jesus' words, and yet longing, aching for release.

 

Seven hundred years before Luke, Jeremiah witnessed a catastrophe.  The Babylonians had overrun Judah and carried its people off to captivity.  As in Luke's time, the great temple on Mt. Zion had been destroyed.  The center of their lives, the ground of their identity, their being, had been burnt out, reduced to a blackened shell.  All the furnishings and opulent fittings had been carried away to Babylon by the destroyers.  Jeremiah sat in Babylon—a captive himself—and wrote this oracle of hope, looking forward to a time when God would cause a righteous branch to spring up from the house of David.  A time when Judah would be delivered, and Jerusalem would live in safety.

 

Jeremiah yearned for the coming of a savior, the coming of deliverance.  He predicted a King, a branch of David, a shoot of Jesse.  And our Jewish brothers and sisters still await their Messiah, and a time when Jerusalem will live in peace, and Jews will be safe again.

But for us, Jesus is that savior.  He is the Messiah, the anointed one, in the direct line of David.  For us, the Son of Man’s first coming brought deliverance from sin, and began our access to the Kingdom of God.  We believe that Jeremiah spoke of that first coming, that first Christmas long ago, when wise men journeyed and shepherds watched their flocks by night.  But in Luke, Jesus speaks of a second coming, his own, when he will arrive in might and glory, and sweep the powers and principalities before him like so much chaff in the wind.

 

In our readings this morning, we put together passages that evoke the past and the future, that point to Christ's first coming and to his last.  Two points in time—the beginning of the coming kingdom, and the end, its fulfillment.

 

At Advent, we have this double vision, this looking backward and forward in time.  We sing “O come O come Emmanuel” and “Watchman Tell us of the Night,” and point in two directions at once, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.  We point to things past and things future, but what about the here and now? What about the present?  Do we merely remember at Advent? Do we only re-enact an historical event, and look forward to a future hope?

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In the spring of every year, along about Easter, observant Jews celebrate Passover.  It lasts 8 days, and is bookended by Seders, elaborate feasts where God's deliverance is celebrated and retold.  And in the retelling, it's remembered and re-called, and brought into the present.  It's made new, fresh, and immediate.  It’s like it happens all over again—like it did happen, like it’s happening now, like it will happen again.  At the Passover table, God constructs a new reality . . . in which the past, and the present, and the future are somehow there, all at once.

 

Theologians call this kind of re-membering “anamnesis,” a Greek word for a Hebrew practice.  As an event is actively remembered, actively re-enacted, it becomes real and present, all over again.  In a sense, it happens anew and is immediately available to the participants.  Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann views the Psalms as engines for anamnesis, poetry sung in daring acts of re-creation.  He claims that as Psalms were sung at worship, God used them to invoke an alternate reality.  What was sung about came about, right then and right there.

 

Closer to home, the Lord's Supper is just such an act of charged remembrance.  As Presbyterians, we believe that it’s more than remembering in an ordinary way.  As we break the bread, and pour the wine, we are drawn into the presence of Christ.  As we eat his body and drink his blood, we are nourished for the journey, fed along the way.  We are made part of the body of Christ all over again. 

 

At Advent we are poised on the brink of hope, but still mired in despair.  We hope, we ache for deliverance from pain and sin and all our creaturely cares.  We remember past hope—I will cause to spring up a branch of David”—and anticipate the second coming, when Christ will come again.  But at the same time, we are here, today, not yet delivered, yearning for his coming, hoping for his coming, looking for his birth.  And in the bleak midwinter, when all is dark, and all is calm, Jesus will be born in a manger. 

At Advent, we're at the crossroads of past and future.  Between the depressing, violent, excessive now and the ghostly past.  Between marching ancestors and coming generations, unknown and yet known.  Imagine:  crowding around us, waiting with us for deliverance, for salvation, all of God's people, right here in this room, tense and expectant, quivering with anticipation.  Can you hear them? Can you feel them?  Aunts, great-aunts, great-great-grandfathers, all God's people of times past, times present, and times future.  Breathing, sighing, waiting.  Can you feel their breath on the back of your neck?

There are slaves here—Miriam and Moses and Sojourner Truth.  Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Grandma Moses.  Aching, yearning, crying to be free.  Victims of apartheid, cancer, and imprisonment, sickness, poverty and addiction.  All wait to be delivered by the righteous hand of the Lord.

Others are with them—I hear them stirring in the gloom—inner city children, malnourished and undereducated, hopeless in the blasted tenements of Portland.  Alzheimer patients strapped in their beds, closed up in the silence of themselves.  Shooting victims, heart attack victims, rape victims, incest victims.  Folks without money, folks without clothes.  People without food or hope from anywhere on earth, all right here with us in this room, grasping at Advent, looking for his birth, longing for his truth.  All creation is here at this moment, groaning with anticipation for the coming of the Lord.

And now, at Advent we can see a light, far away, flickering in the darkness.  Our companions stir—they can see it, too—a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb.  When swords will be beaten into plowshares.  When justice and righteousness fall down like rain, and all are redeemed.  We see the Sea of Reeds, parting to let the Hebrews pass.  We see the temple, rebuilt and shining, and a rock rolled away from a hillside grave.  Apostles gathered around in fear and wonderment and joy, hands thrust into a wounded side.  We see God's final victory over death.

We see the future, taste the hope.  Nelson Mandela, singing in freedom and light; Miriam, whirling before the Lord.  The Apostle Paul, Desmond Tutu, Mother Theresa—in our vision, all have been saved, all have been delivered, all have been redeemed.  We see our loved ones, that have left us behind, or are bound by chains of earthly limit.  Beaming at us, restored, reclaimed.  There's my grandfather, freed from the cancer that killed him, and my father, stroke free and as I remember him as a little boy.  And all are redeemed, all are whole, and all are free.

Brothers and sisters, at Advent, all creation sighs in hope and yearning for the coming of the Lord.  For God's deliverance from the powers of evil.  And as we wait and as we groan, and as we tremble in longing, we know that when it comes, when it bursts among us in the dead of winter, all of God's redemptive acts, all of God's transformation, all of God's righteousness will be present, bound up in that blinding-white act of love.

But for now, all we can do is wait, and watch.

Come, Lord Jesus, Come.

Amen

Getting Her Penny's Worth (Mark 12:41 - 44)

So Jesus sits down opposite the treasury of the temple, and here he is opposite again, here he is apart . . . he’s not part of the temple apparatus, not part of the scheme, the great engine that keeps the whole thing running . . . For no matter what else controlled the Jerusalem Temple—whether it be the Lord in his holy of holies or the high priest just outside—you couldn't buy calves without copper, you couldn't burn doves without dollars, couldn't pay priests without pennies.  So while God may have sat on the cherubim throne, the seat of the temple’s secular might was right there in the treasury, in front of Jesus and his disciples.

And I like it that our translation says he sat opposite, ‘cause wasn’t he about as opposite to the wealth that kept the whole ball rolling as you could get?  Wasn’t it he who drove the money-changers out of that same Temple?  Didn't he tell the rich young man to sell everything he had to the poor?  Weren't the rich and famous the fall guys in a much of his teaching?

And so he sits there watching the crowd putting money into the treasury, and he’s not just seeing them, he’s observing them, he’s taking it all in, not missing a beat . . . “watching” is too passive a translation of the Greek, which implies more that he is absorbed in it, even fascinated by it . . . I couldn't swear to it, but I suspect that Jesus the man was like that, whatever he was looking at, whoever he was looking at, got his total attention . . . Can you imagine being observed that way, receiving the observer’s whole attention?  Nothing in the other’s mind but you, all her cares, all her thoughts, all her dreams put away, shunted aside, so she can contemplate only you?  The Greeks had a word for that: it's kenosis, emptying, and Jesus’ whole life was one of self-emptying, self-kenosis. As Paul put it, Jesus “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”  Jesus the human being lived his entire life that way, constantly emptying himself—or as he himself put it, dying to self—so that he might be filled up with us, contemplating only us in the perfection of his unity with the divine.

And that's how I imagine Jesus observes the scene before the Temple: not only missing nothing, but seeing into everything, seeing beyond the surface, and it is a seeing of infinite compassion, a complete seeing, full of understanding . . . And look! although Jesus talks in dualisms, about the behavior of the rich as opposed to the widow, he does not condemn them for it. Like the rich young ruler, who couldn't give up his stuff to follow him, Jesus looks at them and loves them, just the way they are.

He sees into the hearts of everyone putting coins into the treasury, it's as if there is a field around him, an empathy-field, a heart-field, and what does this deep seeing tell him about the widow?  What does he perceive about her act (in the Greek she’s throwing money into the pot)?  Well, he doesn't say . . . He just states the obvious, or what should be obvious to anyone with any brains, that she’s given more than all of those they’ve spied on up to this point, ‘cause she's given all she has.  He doesn't condemn her for it, asking the same questions I just did, but he doesn't praise her for it, either.  Nor does he condemn all the others contributing out of their abundance, either, not really—he just states the obvious, that she’s contributed more.  He leaves his disciples—including us modern-day ones—to figure out what he's getting at.

And so, this passage has been a blank slate, a great tabula rasa upon which preachers can write whatever we need at the time.  Most of which, of course, revolve around stewardship; a version of it comes up every year about this time, just by coincidence, I'm sure.  And most sermons take one of two variations—first, as a call for sacrificial giving, which she certainly does: giving up all she has is certainly a sacrifice.  The other variation is an intensification of the first—we’re called to give up our life.  And Jesus might have had something like this in mind, because though our translation has him saying she put in “all she had to live on,” a more literal reading of the Greek is that she put in her entire life.

And many of you can certainly feature that . . . Many of you put in long hours and gave large chunks of change to keep this church afloat over the years . . . And every hour you gave, whether in money or in sweat, is an hour of your life, which you could have been spending on something else, on dinner or cars or sleep.  Thus, in a certain, real, sense the church—this building, it's programs, it's people, even—have become your life, or at least a part of it, and here’s this widow, giving it all . . .

But, to what is she giving that all?  Jesus has made it pretty clear that the Temple, hub of the Israelite religion of the time, is a corrupt institution.  After all, he marched into that very Temple and overturned those money changers’ tables.  He criticized them for being in bed with their Roman oppressors, and in the episode right before this one, he warned his disciples about the Temple scribes, who devour the houses of widows just like this one.  And to top it all off, in the passage right after this one, right after she gives her life for it, he predicts the Temple’s destruction.

So it makes me wonder: just what is Jesus trying to say here?  The picture of the widow giving her all is surrounded by bad things about the temple: first, that it is full of corruption, that it devours the houses of the most vulnerable, then that it's headed for imminent destruction.  The widow is shown giving her life to a corrupt institution that is going to be destroyed anyway by—his disciples would assume—God.

Let's look at in a slightly different way: first, Jesus warns his disciples about scribes in the Temple, who devour widows’ houses.  Next, he points out one such widow, giving all she has to that corrupt institution.  Then, he predicts its destruction.  It seems to me that the widow giving her life to the Temple is simply another example of its extortionate nature, that induces a widow, in that culture a symbol of the least of the least of these, to give to it more than the rich—remember: that's what Jesus says, that what she gives is greater, as in more, not better.  And because she gave all she has to live on, she presumably starved.

Another thing to remember is that giving to the Temple was not optional for Jews.  For example, the Temple Tax, which Jesus indirectly protested by turning over those tables, was required of every person, and Jesus’ disciples—and the people for whom Mark wrote 35 years later—would have been aware of this, they would've known that what the widow did was not voluntary.

And so, far from being a picture of stewardship, where the widow’s small sacrifice is more faithful than all the rich’s giving from their abundance, what we have is another example of the corruption of the religious institution that would make one of the most vulnerable of society pay the last of her money.  And then it was destroyed.

This was likely a great comfort to the folks for whom Mark wrote this, Mark’s congregation, who were likely more like the poor widow than the rich folks, but this is stewardship Sunday, and where does it leave us looking for a model of faithful giving.  Well, I don't think it's the widow who gave her life for a worthless institution, but just as she's not a model for us, the Temple isn't exactly a model for our church, either.  Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian, has been a faithful outpost for Christ for over seventy five years.  It has served and ministered to this community, and to its own members, for three-quarters of a century.  And, as I always say, we’re all adults here: we know that the lights must be kept on, the heat fired up, and the staff paid.  We're all adults, and we don't need to be reminded that our pledges are the main things that keep this operation afloat.

And there’s another thing: we don't need another model of stewardship, we don't need another model of faithful service.  Because we worship and study and praise the ultimate model in Jesus Christ, who like the widow, gave his all for us.  So once again, as I do every year, I ask you to prayerfully pledge what you will give for the coming year.  Amen.

Rumors of Our Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated (Mark 13:1 - 8)

      Sometimes, I have a hard time believing that any disciple – after following Jesus around while he overturned temple tables and preached against the rich and famous – would say “Look, Teacher, what large stones! and such large buildings!”  like a child taken into the big city for the first time on a field-trip . . . teacher, teacher, look at that big building . . . or a tourist at Mount Rushmore – look at the size of that Schnozz on Washington . . . or “Master, what big buildings they have!,” but Jesus doesn’t say  “the better to serve the people with, my dears” or “the better to sacrifice pigeons with, my pretties” . . . he says “You like those great big buildings?  You like that huge treasury, that ‘holiest of holies’ in there, that vast Temple Mount?  Well, better like ‘em while you can, ‘cause not one stone is gonna be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”  And notice he doesn’t say that God’s gonna do it, either, he doesn’t tell us who or when, just that its gonna happen . . .

      And sure enough, forty years after our episode, the Romans took Jerusalem and crushed the Israelite rebellion, and they burnt the city and razed the temple to the ground.  Kaput.  End of story.  And to this day, nobody’s rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, and in fact, at the present time, the Moslem Dome of the Rock sits right smack dab on its spot, right there on Herod’s Mount.  This, of course, has given end-time predictors fits, because how could the temple be destroyed in the final days if it was already obliterated 2000 years ago?  And so what they do is, they predict the rebuilding of the Temple, so they can prophesy its final destruction . . . and as our Jewish friends might say . . . “Oy!”  So let’s get this straight right from the start: Jesus is talking specifically about the Roman destruction during the Hebrew revolt, which occurred in the year 70 A.D.  What else he’s talking about, we can only speculate.

      Mark, writing at about the same time as the revolt – at about 65 or 70 A.D. – may have had a pretty good idea of what was coming down, or already knew about it, and so it must’ve seemed pretty cool to him and his readers, his little band of early-day Christians, that Jesus did in fact predict the present situation, the current hard times . . . it must have helped confirm in their minds his identity, that he was truly Son of God.  But it must have done something else, as well, it must have been comforting in a way, that the one they worship, the one they call Lord knew all about their problems, their situation, that he was somehow there with them, that even though his words were in the chronological past, they spoke to them in the present crisis.  And that because he had predicted it, had known all about it, that somehow it was all part of a plan, that God was still somehow in charge.

      But for the disciples at the time he said it – remember our old tri-focal Gospel reading glasses – for the disciples at the time, it was a sharp object lesson, or the punctuation thereof . . . remember the widows mite?  Where Jesus points out that the rich – who give from their surplus – were not as faithful as the widow, who gives her all?  Remember?  Well, this follows directly on its heels, Jesus admonishes them about the idle rich, they walk out of the Temple, and the disciples prove they’re still in awe of all the power by acting like a bunch of country bumpkins.  And Jesus’ response was that these stones are to no avail, because they will not remain standing. All the things of the world, all the riches, all the apparatus of the rich and famous, all are to no purpose, they will all pass away.

      And so they left the temple and the city itself – probably through the Golden Gate, through the Eastern wall – and climbed up the Mount of Olives, past the garden, past Gethsemene, and sat there among the olive trees, peering out at the great Temple Mount, directly across the Kidron Valley.  They sat watching the people, moving about like ants on its platform . . . and there was a great symbolic divide between Jesus and all the religious apparatus, a great chasm . . . from here the Temple indeed looked puny, it looked human-scaled compared to God’s mountain glory.  And as they sat there, four of the disciples asked him in private “Tell us when all this is gonna come down, what will be the sign that all this is about to happen?”  And two of these disciples – the Zebedee brothers, James and John – were the same ones who asked – also in private – to be first in the Kingdom, so I can’t help but think there might be more behind it than a simple thirst for knowledge . . . maybe they wanted to know when to cash in their stocks and bonds, maybe they were looking for a little insider-advantage-action like ol’ Martha Stewart, or maybe they were gonna write a book, “The Late, Great City Jerusalem,” or something, make a bundle on subsidiary rights, but if they were, Jesus doesn’t make it easy for them . . . “Beware that no one leads you astray,” he says. “Many will come in my name and say ‘I am he!’ and they’ll lead many astray.”  They’ll write books claiming to know when the time is, they’ll have you squirrel away food, lead you up into the mountains, they’ll go on television and ask for monthly contributions . . . but don’t be afraid, don’t panic . . . even if you hear of wars and rumors of wars, the end is still to come . . .

      The end is still to come, Jesus says, these aren’t signs of the end times, they’re yet to come!  Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines . . . these things are just the beginnings of the birth pangs . . . and in every age, whenever things get a little dicey on the world stage, certain Christians get caught up in apocalypse fever . . . wars and rumors of wars!  Nation against nation!  Earthquakes and famines and revolutions, oh my!  And every time, the world doesn’t come to an end, Jesus doesn’t return, and the kingdom doesn’t get fully realized here on planet Earth.

      Jesus was talking about specific times, the revolt and all the turmoil that surrounded it, but it applies to almost any time you can think of . . . nations are always at one another’s throats, earthquakes are part of life, particularly in earthquake-prone areas, and there is always a famine somewhere, but these are all just the beginnings of the birth pangs, the start of the coming of the kingdom of God.

      Let’s look at this metaphor of “birth pangs” a little more . . . as any of you females out there who’ve experienced it know – and us males can only imagine – contractions come in waves.  They’re periods of intense pain and struggle – and between them relative calm – as the time of delivery draws closer. Each contraction may seem like the end, but there are often many hours – or even days! – of labor ahead, and the time varies with every birth. It’s unpredictable in its onset and unpredictable in length once onset begins.  Thus, labor is a particularly apt analogy for the upheavals that will transform the earth into fully the new creation . . . the birth of the New Earth –  AKA the Kingdom of God – will come upon us, Jesus is saying, like birth of a child, and who can predict that?

      And so we in the church should be especially suspicious of anyone claiming the ability to predict the end times . . . many will come in Christ’s name saying “I am he” – as in I am the one who knows these things – and we should be suspicious of their motives, not just their accuracy – many a person has made a tidy sum selling apocalyptically-toned hokum, from Hal Lindsay to John Hagee to Tim LaHaye. Jesus’ did predict that, and it was right on the money.

      But what’s the problem, you might ask?  What if a few Christians do make a few bucks?  What’s the harm if we enjoy sifting through end-times puzzles, whiling away an afternoon or two reading speculation about the meaning of Revelations?  Nothing, on the face of it . . . although I think most of it’s pretty bad theology . . . but think of all the millions of dollars spent, think of all the emotional and physical energy used up, all the flat-out time spent on it, when Jesus clearly says – in more than one place – that we aren’t to know?  Now think of all the people we could feed, all the Bibles we could distribute, all the blind and lame we could heal with this time and money.  Jesus clearly defined the mission of the church, and he didn’t include figuring out who the bear in Revelation is or who the Anti-Christ was or is or will be.

      Worrying about the future damages the mission and the body of Christ, it impedes it, slows it down . . . why do you think Jesus told us to consider the lilies of the field?  Why do you think he sent his disciples out, without a bit of money or scrap of bread?  Why did Paul counsel the same thing?  If our minds and our resources are fixated on the future, then they can’t be on discipleship, they can’t be on mission, it’s as simple as that.

      Now does that mean we’re not supposed to plan for the future, that we’re not supposed to look toward it at all?  Of course not . . . but it’s a matter of balance, and that’s not something we do well, sometimes.  We all know folks so worried about their retirement incomes, so worried about a possible terrorist attack, or something, that they spend all their time thinking about it, planning for it, and have no time or energy to enjoy, to cherish, to live for today, in the here and now.  And that’s how it is with living the Christian life . . . if we worry about signs of the end, if we worry about portents and omens and things in the sky, our attention isn’t where it’s supposed to be, right here on Earth, on today and our mission, which is to proclaim the Gospel in thought, word, and deed.

      And you know, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to apply this to our own situation, in little ol’ Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian.  Attendance has been a little . . . thin . . . in recent months, we’ve lost some members to death and other stuff, and so some of us are a little worried, a little concerned . . . and that’s natural, you know?  It’s normal to be a bit uneasy when our beloved church seems threatened, and we don’t know what to do.  But you know, Jesus says we’re not allowed to dwell on it, we’re not allowed to let it paralyze us, to compromise the mission of God in this place.

      Which is why I’m happy to report that we’re not doing that . . . Through our participation in Transformation 2.0 we are learning to look for where God is working in our neighborhood.  Through our Coffee For a Cause events, we are introducing our church, extending our hospitality to a new group of people, forty or fifty at a time.  And through the Christmas Bazaar, happening right now, we’re extending that hospitality to even more people, and making a little change to further the kingdom to boot.

      Notice what’s going on here . . . we’re doing evangelism, plain and simple.  By inviting our friends and associates and acquaintances to share with us, by extending our hospitality, we are doing the mission of the church!  We’re proclaiming the gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Instead of panicking, instead of spending our time fretting over what might be, we are responding just as we should – by practicing the mission of God.  And because of that, I think I can safely say rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated!  Amen.

Rita and Tony and Fred and Lorriane (Mark 12:38 - 44)

Fred Pearson is a banker, a good and generous man.  He sits on the boards of six major charities, helps build Habitat houses in his spare time, and teaches Sunday School at First BigSteeple Presbyterian Church, whose motto is “Where All God’s Children Have a Home.”  Emphasis on the “all.”  He is past-Treasurer and finance-committee chair at First BigSteeple because, well, he's a banker, after all, and who better than a banker to faithfully steward the precious resources of God?  But that’s not all . . . Fred is particularly well-suited to teach Sunday School because he has a seminary degree from Old Liberal Presbyterian Seminary, whose motto is “Training Progressive Presbyterians for Over One Hundred Years.” Emphasis on the “Progressive.”  But although Fred loved seminary, and knows scripture well enough to joust with Pastor Ferguson on the fine points of interpretation, after much prayer—and contemplation of his sizable post-seminary student debt—he decided he could serve the church in much more meaningful ways by remaining a banker and dedicating his art to the service of God.

Rita Garrett is another member of First BigSteeple Presbyterian Church who, up until three years ago, was married to her high-school sweetheart Tony.  Theirs had been a lovely romance: the handsome high-school quarterback and the pretty cheerleader, and everybody said it was picture-perfect, like in a story-book, or Hollywood’s idea of small-town bliss (Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson would be perfect for the roles).  Tony went to work straight out of high-school as vice-president at his father’s company, which made the best pfluger-widgets in the world—even better than the ones from Germany, where—as everybody knows—pfluger-widgets originated.  Rita stayed home to raise their children, because everyone agreed that children need their mother, and they could certainly afford it, because Tony made a very good salary at Allied pfluger-widgets, his father firm.

The story-book came to an end in the crash of 2008, when the market for pfluger-widgets dried up almost overnight.  Fred Pearson was an officer at the bank that held the note on Tony’s father’s plant—recently re-financed to buy more efficient pfluger-widget makers—and he tried his hardest, he really did, extending their credit as far as he could, but the law was the law: he had a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders of his bank, and his hands were tied. Tony’s father lost the company he'd given his life for; the day after it closed, he hung himself in his and wife Lorraine’s walk-in closet.

Well.  Stronger marriages than Rita and Tony’s had crumbled at this kind of catastrophe, so it was no particular surprise when theirs did too.  At first, Rita didn't notice Tony’s slide into depression and addiction, but she did notice his emotional withdrawal: increasingly, he'd just . . . disappear, right in front of her.  And that was the last thing Rita needed . . . she needed support, she needed comfort, she needed assurances that it was going to be ok., that she and the children wouldn't be out on the streets.  Tony was in no shape to provide that for her, and his arrest for trafficking was the last straw.  Mandatory sentencing got him 10 years, and when the divorce became final, Rita got the children, the car—which was paid off—and a mortgage, which wasn't.

She lasted fifteen months in the house.  Her formidable home-making skills were little in demand, and the best she could do was at the local McDonalds, where the wage wouldn't even pay for childcare, much less food and housing, and Lorraine couldn't help much: her husband had used their life insurance as surety for a loan.

So Rita went to Fred Pearson, elder at her church, whose bank held the note on her house, and asked him for a loan to start a business she could operate from home.  And although Fred had serious reservations about her business plan—he felt she’d severely over-estimated the market for pfluger-widget-themed gifts—he was a Christian man, and believed that Christians should help other Christians, and so he got her a small-business loan at a really good rate, secured by the equity in her home.

Well, you can guess what happened next, can't you?  Fred was right: there was very little market in pfluger-widget-themed gifts, and he helped all he could (he even paid the mortgage a couple of months as an anonymous donor) but in the end, there was nothing he could do: after all, the law was the law, and the bank had a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders.

Now, this sounds like a set-up, a made-to-order story to provide sermonic hay, and of course it is, but it's also is a fairly accurate representation of modern-day counterparts of the characters in Jesus’ teaching.  Scribes weren’t just experts in the Hebrew scriptures (like Fred is of the entire Bible), they were also the ones proficient in cyphering, in keeping the books.  They not only kept the Hebrew law, adjudicating its finer points from the best seats in the synagogues—literally the “first couches”—but they were the temple bankers as well.  And although Rita isn't a widow, she is in the same dire straits as those whose houses the scribes devoured.  And there are a lot of Rita's in this country: statistically, women fare much worse than men in a divorce or in case of a spouses’ death.

In fact, women worldwide are many times more likely to be in poverty than men, saddled as they usually are with multiple mouths to feed and under-valued skills; what the market will bear is almost universally women’s salaries that are a small fraction of those of men.  Even in this enlightened country, women only make 79% of their male counterparts.  So, just as in Jesus’ day, single women—widowed in those days, divorced and widowed these days---are emblematic of the poor these days.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the stereotype: though widows (and orphans) were code words for the poor in Jesus’ day, and there was no particular negativity placed on them, these days things aren't so cut and dried.  In classic blame-the-victim rhetoric, the phrase “single mothers” has become politicized so it has less-than-spotless credentials.  In fact, it has been so overused that a certain mother I know, though she's not single, sighed heavily when she read a sermon wherein I used the term, asking Isn't there some other group you could've as representative of the downtrodden?

What’s worse, the term has been slyly associated with a much more pejorative one: ”welfare mothers,” which refers to largely imaginary women who lay around all day, popping out babies like raisins so they can live luxurious lives on the public dole.  This image helped drive so-called “welfare reform” in the mid-nineties, which produced many more latch-key, at-risk children than before because while it limited single mothers to two years of assistance before they had to find a job, it didn't specify that the job had to pay a living wage . . .

Anyway.  Jesus sets his morality tale up with stark, cardboard-cutout characters: the scribe who is more interested in his image, in his standing in marketplaces, synagogues and banquet-halls, than he is in helping the poor, of whom the widow is a stock representative.  This of course, screams hypocrisy, and I'm sure that it's in part what Jesus has in mind.  After all, over in Matthew he castigates church officials for their hypocrisy in no uncertain words, calling them whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside are full of the bones of the dead.

Here in Mark, he doesn't go that far. . . not long before this story, he commends a scribe, telling him he's not far from the Kingdom of God.  Indeed, he knows as well as anybody else that there are good scribes and bad scribes, just like there are good widows and bad, good Pharisees and bad.  Why then does he seem to condemn scribes in general here?  Could it be that just as widows are symbolic of a certain group, so the scribes represent, are code for such a group as well?  Widows (and orphans) stood for the poor and disenfranchised in Jesus’ teaching; what did the scribes represent?

Look at Fred: he was a decent guy, a guy who—like the scribes—knew his scripture.  Also, like the scribes, he knew his finances, and was trustworthy enough that his church depended upon him to manage its treasury.  When Allied Pfluger-widgets went under, he didn't want to foreclose on the factory.  In the same way, he didn't want Rita to lose her house, but he was caught in a system of financial laws and obligations, and he couldn't see his way out of them. In our little morality tale, you might say he represented “the system,” a financial system that isn't particularly easy on the vulnerable in society.

Is that what the scribes represent in today’s scripture passage?  Do they represent a system that devours widows’ houses?  And if so, what system do they represent?  Well, they were employed by the religious apparatus of that day, and because there was no separation of church and state, they were apparently involved in relieving people in need of their possessions.  The scribes were symbolic of the religious and financial apparatus of the time; like Fred, they represented “the system.”

Last week, in our remembrance of the saints of the church, I read a quote from modern martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who said: we must work “not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”  Although “injustice” maybe too strong for Rita’s case, what happened to her, and what happen to women and men all over the country, is certainly unfair and unfortunate . . . Is it our calling as Christians to ameliorate that, to help “fix” a system—through our votes, if nothing else—that can be harmful to its most vulnerable members?

There is one thing Rita has going for her, though, that others might not have: she has the love and support of her church community.  Although it is caught up in the system itself, it provides a caring, comforting presence in her life, and in the life of her children.  As another saint said, Christians are the hands and feet of Christ.  It is through them that we fell God’s presence.  It is through them that we know that no what matter comes, we are not alone.  Amen..comes, we are not alone.  Amenstren.  As another saintdes a rtunate,