What We Learn From Our Poverty

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.