November 10, 2024
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
1 Kings 17:8-16; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44
What We Learn from Our Poverty
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.”
When Jesus delivers his seminal Sermon on the Mount, this is his opening line. This statement sets the stage for everything that follows in his proclamation.
Poverty. It seems a strange place to start. We’re taught to lead with our strengths, and poverty would not be one of them. But here is exactly where Jesus begins.
Today we hear the stories of two poor widows. In our first reading, the prophet Elijah travels to the foreign land of Sidon. A far-reaching famine has stretched across the Middle East region. No rain has fallen for months. The little brook where Elijah had hunkered down had completely dried up, and this forced his move to Sidon.
When Elijah arrives at the town, he approaches a widowed woman. “Please, could you give me something to drink?” The widow shares some precious water with him. Then he asks her to share some bread.
Her answer tells us just how desperate her situation is. She is literally setting about to prepare her very last bit of food. She has food for one fianl meal, a meal she’ll prepare for herself and her son.
But Elijah persists. He instructs her first to go and make a little loaf for him, and that God will make sure her supplies will not go empty.
What a story! It sounds like a con artist line! I don’t think I would have believed him if he’d asked me. But this poor widow, she shares what little she has with a foreign stranger.
In our gospel story we meet another widow. Jesus is sitting in the temple mount area in Jerusalem. He’s set himself near the treasury, where people come to make their offerings. You can see from the picture the kind of trumpet-shaped treasury boxes they used. You’d drop your coins into the metal funnel, and they’d drop into the secured box below.
The system was set up in such a way that the giving of your gift was very public. It’s not the way we prefer to make our offerings. We prefer to do that privately. Like Jesus said later in his sermon on the mount:
“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others…But don’t let the right hand know what the left hand is doing so that your alms may be done in secret.”
We prefer to keep our giving between ourselves and God. But in Jesus’ day, that giving was very public. And you can imagine the clatter of those brass trumpets as large gifts were poured down them.
Jesus sees all sorts of people make their gifts. But then she steps forward. She’d probably be invisible to many, but Jesus sees her, and he watches what she does. The poor widow contributes two small copper coins into the treasury. Two cents.
Her gift was about as insignificant as she was, by society’s standards. But Jesus pointed out how her gift far exceeded the large gifts of the wealthy. “They give out of their abundance,” he says, “but she gave everything she had, everything she had to live on.”
What is it that motivated these two poor women? Did they understand a blessing in poverty? Did they feel blessed?
Jesus lifts up the generous giving of this poor woman to teach us about what we can learn through our own poverty. There are some things you can only learn through poverty, through emptiness. That poverty can make itself known through financial want; or we can feel emotionally empty; or we can feel poor in spirit, bereft of hope for tomorrow.
What can we learn from our poverty? This question is not meant to sentimentalize or glamorize poverty. Poverty sucks. But two potential blessings come to mind.
The first one is compassion. Compassion is borne of pain. When we have experienced want, we recognize the same plight in another. When we’ve struggled with our own poverty, we readily identify with the suffering of others. Perhaps this compassion factor prompted the widow of Zaraphath to share her last meal with someone who was even poorer than herself.
The movie actress Katharine Hepburn shared a childhood experience she had. She wrote:
“Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus. Finally, there was only one other family between us and the ticket counter. This family made a big impression on me.
“There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. The way they were dressed, you could tell they didn’t have a lot of money, but their clothes were neat and clean. The children were well-behaved, all of them standing in line, two-by-two behind their parents, holding hands. They were excitedly jabbering about the clowns, animals, and all the acts they would be seeing that night. By their excitement you could sense they had never been to the circus before. It would be a highlight of their lives.
“The father and mother were at the head of the pack standing proud as could be. The mother was holding her husband’s hand, looking up at him as if to say, “You’re my knight in shining armor.” He was smiling and enjoying seeing his family happy.
"The ticket lady asked the man how many tickets he wanted? He proudly responded, “I’d like to buy eight children’s tickets and two adult tickets, so I can take my family to the circus.” The ticket lady stated the price. The man’s wife let go of his hand, her head dropped, the man’s lip began to quiver. Then he leaned a little closer and asked, “How much did you say?” The ticket lady again stated the price.
“The man didn’t have enough money. How was he supposed to turn and tell his eight kids that he didn’t have enough money to take them to the circus?
“Seeing what was going on, my dad reached into his pocket, pulled out a $20 bill, and then dropped it on the ground. (We were not wealthy in any sense of the word!) My father bent down, picked up the $20 bill, tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, this fell out of your pocket.”
“The man understood what was going on. He wasn’t begging for a handout but certainly appreciated the help in a desperate, heartbreaking and embarrassing situation. He looked straight into my dad’s eyes, took my dad’s hand in both of his, squeezed tightly onto the $20 bill, and with his lip quivering and a tear streaming down his cheek, he replied, “Thank you, thank you, sir. This really means a lot to me and my family.”
“My father and I went back to our car and drove home. The $20 that my dad gave away is what we were going to buy our own tickets with.
“Although we didn’t get to see the circus that night, we both felt a joy inside us that was far greater than seeing the circus could ever provide.”
One of poverty’s lessons is borne through our own suffering. And through it, we grow in compassion.
The second lesson we learn is relying upon God to provide. When I was part of a church delegation to our companion synod of Malawi, one day we had a conversation with a church elder. Malawi is very poor, the fourth poorest nation in the world. One of our delegation members commented, “I don’t think we in the United States rely on God as much as you do. We tend to rely more on what’s in our cupboards and bank accounts.” The elder responded, “That is all we have, our trust in God.”
It’s when things fall apart, I mean really fall apart, that we learn just how faithful God is. It’s not something you can sense when you have a safety net under you. But when all our securities are stripped away, the structures we relied on, the promises we hoped in, that’s when we discover that God is faithful. This is what the widow at the temple treasury knew, this was why she could put all she had into that offering box. God had cared for her thus far, and God would continue to be faithful.
When Martin Luther died, a scrap of paper was found in his pocket. He had scrawled on it one final message: “We are all beggars. This is true.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God. Poverty has a lesson to teach us, if we will heed. At our core, we are all beggars.
It is in poverty that Jesus came to dwell with us. He came into this world, stripped of eternity, naked and frail. In his poverty, he knew compassion in its fullest sense. He felt compassion for us, and this compassion led him to his cross. And there, like the widow at the temple, he would offer up all he had. He offered up everything he had, his very self, for our sakes. And in making this extravagant gift, as with the widow of Zarephath, the abundance of his grace will never be exhausted. The supply of forgiveness will never be emptied, the vial of life outpoured will never fail.
What can we learn from the poverty of Jesus? What can we learn from our own poverty? May our compassion and generosity for one another grow, and may we rely upon the faithfulness of God in all things and through all things.
