Month: November 2024

Ruth 3: 1-5, 4: 13-17; 1 Kings 17: 8-16 and Mark 12: 38-44;

Nov 10, 2024; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; New Blue Church, Mazatlan

My grandma was widowed when my dad was just 8 years old. It was during WWII. My grandparents’ general store, the Ellenson IGA, and gone bankrupt in the 30s and they had been rebuilding their lives. Times were hard even before my grandfather died. Before she married, my grandma had been a teacher. She found a job as a teacher again and they moved to a small town and lived in 2 rented rooms. My dad never spoke of the hardship, except when his arthritic feet hurt, hammertoes a result of shoes too-tight throughout his growing years. No, he spoke of the care and love that surrounded him, the mentors and father-figures who stepped into the gap, and of his mother’s strength of character.

Maybe you have a widow’s story in your family. Widows figure prominently in the scriptures, 81 times to be exact. Widows, orphans and strangers stand as a sort of archetype of need. God commands their care, warns consequences for those who fail to care or cause them harm. A portion of every third year’s tithe when to support widows.

The story of Ruth has a relatively happy ending. Boaz was a relative of Elimelech, Naomi’s dead husband, and he fulfilled his duty, married Ruth and provided for them. She produced a son who became the ancestor of David and Jesus. Naomi and Ruth did what they had to do to survive.

The text from 1^st Kings shows us another important widow in Israel’s history. The prophet Elijah had spoken a word of judgement to King Ahab and Jezebel, predicting a drought and famine. Then, at God’s leading, he flees to Zaraphath, what is now Sarafand in Southern Lebanon, a city recently bombed by the Israelis, creating new widows and orphans. In the miraculous story we heard today, Elijah, the widow and her son are saved from starvation.

Jesus referred to this story in Luke’s gospel, chapter 4, right after his first message in the synagogue in Nazareth. He quoted the prophecy, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. And said, today this scripture is fulfilled. There’s a linkage there, between his reference to the widow of Zarephath and his mission, our mission. Widows, orphans and strangers, symbols or need.

In today’s gospel Jesus points out another widow. Sometimes “The Widow’s Mite” is used as part of Stewardship Sundays, the day when congregations ask people for pledges of giving and set the budget for the coming year. Who hasn’t squirmed when a well-meaning pastor asks: “If a poor widow can give her sacrificial bit for the Lord’s work, how can we — so comfortably wealthy by comparison — not give much, much more?” I’ll admit it; I’ve preached that sermon. And I’ve squirmed, because it feels exploitive to use the text that way. I doubt Jesus had that in mind when he commented on her giving. I wish I knew her name. I hope that she died with dignity.

Died?  Yes.  Died. I suspect that she died, probably mere days after she dropped those two coins into the Temple treasury. Remember what Jesus said about her as she left the Temple that day: “She, out of her poverty, has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”

I think that was an accurate statement. If Jesus said the woman gave everything she had, well, she gave everything she had. We can be sure that she was an impoverished widow in first century Palestine, a woman living on the margins of her society, without a safety net. No husband to advocate for her, no pension to draw from, no social status to hide behind. She was vulnerable in every single way that mattered, just two pennies short of the end. 

As Mark presents the timeline, Jesus died about four days after the events in this story. I wonder if the widow died then, too. Mark prefaces the story of the widow with an account of Jesus blasting the religious leaders of his day for their greed, pompousness, and crass exploitation of the poor.  “Beware of the scribes,” Jesus tells his followers.  “They devour widow’s houses and for the sake of appearance and say long prayers.” The Scribes’ practice of their faith, in other words, is phony, and the religious institution they govern is corrupt — not in any way reflective of the God the Psalmist calls a “Father of orphans and protector of widows.”

In the days leading up to the widow’s last gift, Jesus offers one scathing critique after another of the economic and political exploitation he witnesses all around him.  He makes a mockery of Roman pomp and circumstance when he rides into Jerusalem on a donkey’s back.  He cleanses the Temple’s money-mongering with a whip. He refuses to answer the chief priests, scribes, and elders when they demand to know the source of his authority.  He confounds religious leaders on taxes, indicts them with a scathing parable about a vineyard and a murdered son, defeats them on the question of resurrection, and bewilders them with riddles about his Davidic ancestry.

Jesus isn’t pointing to the widow as a model of giving here… Why on earth would he praise a woman for endangering her already endangered life to support an institution he keeps criticizing? Jesus never commends the widow, applauds her self-sacrifice, or invites us to follow in her footsteps. He simply notices her, and tells his disciples to notice her, too.

Wouldn’t you love to hear Jesus’ tone of voice. Was he heartbroken as he tells his disciples to peel their eyes away from the rich folks and glance in her direction instead? Was he outraged? Or was he resigned?  What does it mean to him, mere seconds after he’s described the Temple leaders as devourers of widows’ houses, to witness just such a widow being devoured? 

Then to top it all off: immediately after the widow leaves the Temple, Jesus leaves, too, and as he does, an awed disciple invites Jesus to admire the Temple’s mammoth stones and impressive buildings.  Jesus’ response is quick and cutting: “Not one of these stones will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

Ouch!  I wonder if the widow is still on Jesus’ mind as he predicts the destruction of the Temple.  He has just watched a trusting woman give her all to an institution that refuses to protect the poor.  No structure funded by such injustice will stand.Jesus calls out, and we can call out any form of religiosity that manipulates the vulnerable into self-harm and self-destruction? 

Let’s find the good news. The gospel is this: Jesus notices the widow. He sees what everyone else is too busy, too grand, too spiritual, and too self-absorbed to see.  He noticed the widow’s courage.  Imagine what courage it took for her to make her gift alongside the rich with their fistfuls of coins, to allow the last scraps of her security to fall out of her palms, to swallow panic, swallow desperation, swallow the entirely human desire to cling to life no matter what — and face her end with hope.

Jesus noticed her dignity.  She must have had to steel herself when widowhood in her culture rendered her worthless, “expendable”, even in the Temple she loved.  She had to trust — in the face of all the evidence piled up around her — that her tiny gift had value in God’s eyes.

And finally, Jesus noticed her vocation.  Whether she knew it or not, her action in the Temple was prophetic.  She was a prophet because her personally-costly offering amounted to a holy condemnation of injustice and corruption. Without speaking a word, she spoke God’s Word in the ancient tradition of Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, and other Old Testament prophets.

She was also prophetic in the Messianic sense, because her self-sacrifice prefigured Jesus’ own giving.  Perhaps what Jesus noticed was that kinship.  Her story mirrored his.  The widow gave everything she had to serve a world so broken that it killed her.  Days later, Jesus gave everything he had in his unceasing intent to redeem, restore, and renew that same world.

We all know that the biblical world was patriarchal and misogynist, as has been most of human history. Women have not had self-determination, education or freedom. They were chattel, passed from control of fathers to husbands at marriage and passed back to fathers of on to their husbands’ male relatives at widowhood. But, in much of the world it’s still that way. There are 258 million widows worldwide, tens of thousands in Ukraine, 3000 in Gaza.   

How can we not make the connection between Ruth and Naomi, destitute, fleeing from Moab to Bethlehem and today’s widows without resources. How can we not see in them the faces of modern-day war widows, refugees, and victims of famine, making their own difficult way, nearly empty handed, carrying only the hope of safety and new life. 

God cares about this woman and her sacrifice. Our God sees her plight and recognizes her affliction. Our God will not stand for abuse, especially under the guise of religious piety. God sees her…and God cares about her. I doubt anyone else, including the religious elite parading around the Temple that day and dropping in their token offerings, noticed this woman. I doubt the disciples following Jesus noticed her either, until their Lord lifted her up for their attention.  God also sees struggles, recognizes challenges, cares about those who are hard pressed to make ends meet.

There’s a message to us, given our relative privilege in this world, too. God invites us to see each other, not just those like us, but those we don’t know too. To really see – the pain of those who are discriminated against because of their ethnicity, the desolation of those who beg on the street, those who have been exploited by sex traffickers, the millions of refugees seeking safety. God invites us to see them, to care for them, and to advocate for a system that does not leave anyone behind.

Oh, these are squirmy texts for sure…but the bottom line is this: God cares, and God invites us to care, too. God believes that we have something to contribute, that our words and actions can help bring more fully to fruition the kingdom God’s own Son, proclaimed and embodied. God cares about the widow and her sacrifice. God will not countenance abuse –especially under the guise of religious piety. 

God not only sees all our struggles and cares. God also believes in each one of us enough to use us to make a difference.  Where is God already at work?  Can we join God’s efforts to see those in distress, help them find comfort and relief, and work for a more just world?

Deuteronomy 6: 1-9; Mark 12: 28-34

Context is important when it comes to understanding most things. That’s true with these texts.

There are several layers of context to consider when we look at any scriptural text. The book of Deuteronomy begins with the people standing on the border of the promised land, which they are about to enter and occupy. That’s the storyline context- Moses and the people who have wandered the wilderness, preparing to conquer the land. The book of Deuteronomy is presented as a speech from Moses to the people before they enter the land in which he summarizes all the laws.

There’s another layer though. You see, the text wasn’t written down in 1300 BCE. It was first written down many centuries later, somewhere between 700 and 400 BCE. Deuteronomy was written in the context of foreign domination, just before, during or after the time we think of as the Exile. It’s important to remember that for most of Israel’s history they didn’t have their own kingdom with a temple and priests and so forth. Israel has nearly always been occupied land, dominated by various Empires—the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British.  

The 10 commandments are found in the chapter right before today’s reading. The law is to be observed, “so that it may go well for you, so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey.”  The original writers, in the 7^th to 5^th Century BCE, and the listeners or readers through the centuries that followed—even up until today— would have had the benefit of history to understand that text.

We know something about colonization, invasion and occupation. When we step back a bit and read the text with a historical mindset rather than the simple storyline view of it, we see the dangerous link between religion and politics. If we keep reading we find these words…

When the Lord your God has brought you into the land—a land with fine houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves you did not plant, when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

When God is used as justification for the subjugation of one people by another, things don’t go well for anyone. Whether that means the Israelites conquering Canaan during the period called the conquest, or the early white immigrants in what is now Canada and the US claiming the first nations’ peoples’ land through manifest destiny and the doctrine of discovery, or the Spanish conquistador’s domination of the Mexica or Aztec people, or the fighting over the Holy Land in our own times–when God is used as an excuse for domination and war, life becomes anything but a land of milk and honey. Contextual reading calls us to remember God as the liberator of slaves from Egypt and letting that understanding prevent the enslaving of others.

There are even more layers of context to consider though.  A few hundred years later, after the text in Deuteronomy was actually written down, the words were interpreted again in a new way.  During the Hasmonean dynasty, from about 140 BC, after the Maccabean revolt—from which the holiday of Hannukah arises—until 37 BCE, the Jews experienced a rare period when they enjoyed freedom and self-rule. It was during that time that Herod the Great had the second temple built. It was during that time period that the practice of reciting the Shema developed.

The Jewish people have a prayer called the Shema, after the Hebrew word for hear, with which the prayer begins. As familiar as the Lord’s Prayer is to Christians, Jews, everywhere, twice a day, cover their eyes with their right hand and recite,

Shema Israel, Adonai elhenu, Adonai achad. Hear, O Israel, The L-rd is our G‑d, The L-rd is One. 

They continue in a softer tone,

Blessed be the name of the glory of G-d’s kingdom forever and ever,

followed by the words from our Old Testament lesson for today.

You shall love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be upon your heart. You shall teach them thoroughly to your children, and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk on the road, when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be for a reminder between your eyes. And you shall write them upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates.

They often pray standing to show respect and deference and cover their eyes to prevent distraction. Their words express the belief that nothing exists outside of God, that all this exists is a veiled manifestation of God, that all is connected and interdependent, that life is continuously being re-created.

It was during that Hasmonean time that the use of phylacteries emerged. Still, today, some Jews take those words literally and they physically bind onto their foreheads and around their arms little leather boxes with long straps called phylacteries or tefillin. Those boxes have the words of the Shema printed within. They also place a little thingamajig on their doorposts, a mezuzah, which also holds the text of our lesson today. Jews touch the mezuzah as they enter and leave their homes.

Twice a day, Jesus would have recited the words,

Shema Israel, Adonia Elhenu, Adonai Achad! 

As I said, Shema! translates roughly to Hear! Or Listen! But it carries much more weight than that in Hebrew because there is no separate word for obey.  Hear means Listen and Do!  It’s sort of like that familiar parental command. Listen to me when I’m talking to you! It means: Listen and DO what I say. It’s why Jesus sometimes said Let those who have ears Hear, or They have ears but do not listen!  When he is asked what the greatest commandment is, his response is simply an elaboration of the word, Shema.  Love the L-rd your G-d with all your heart, soul and might and love your neighbor as yourself!  Shema! 

So that brings us to the next layer of context. The setting for our gospel reading for today is Jesus’ encounter with the scribe, during what we think of as holy week. Jesus had already entered Jerusalem on a colt to shouts of Hosanna! During the next few days, he was met with one challenge to his identity and authority after another. The Chief priests, scribes, elders, the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Herodians have all argued with him and tried to entrap him. They each reacted to him with questions, disagreements, or doubt. In our text a scribe engages Jesus in the only civil conversation of the week. That’s the story-line layer of context of our gospel—Jesus’ encounters during the days before his crucifixion.

In his and the scribe’s words we can hear all the previous layers of context, the 1300 BCE storyline, the exilic period when Deuteronomy was written down, the Jewish identity shaped by centuries of domination and movement, the Maccabean revolt, the new temple built by Herod the great that would have been standing in Jesus’ own time, the practice of recitation of the Shema, all underlaid by the liberating history of God’s deliverance and blessing, the various factions within Judaism and the Roman power structure during Jesus’ lifetime, the roles they each played in his trail and death.

Then, bear with me, there’s yet another layer. Mark wrote his gospel some 30 years later, during another period of unrest. There were four main factions of the Jewish world around 65 to 70 AD, the Zealots, Pharisees, Essenes, and the Sadducees. They were basically engaged in civil war with each other, not to mention coping with the new sect of Judaism—Christianity that was emerging.

Nero was the Roman Emperor. In 68, he sent his best general, Vespasian, to crush the rebellion of the Jews in the northern region of Galilee. Vespasian then became the new Emperor in 69 and sent his son, General Titus, to finally put down the revolution by besieging Jerusalem.  Unrest and rebellion against the Roman authority had been the order of the day. The internal division weakened the cohesion of the Jewish territory and meant that the Roman army could put down the rebellion and eventually destroy Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD.

That was the contemporary context of Mark’s writing.  When Mark includes the various challengers to Jesus’ authority, Mark’s community would make a connection between the opposing factions of their own time.

In Mark’s gospel, Jesus responds to the scribe’s question by reciting the text from Deuteronomy 6, and adding to it another command, from Leviticus, And love your neighbor as yourself.  His words call to mind the eternal dilemma of exclusive faith and universal love, the challenge faced by every time and people, that of loving One’s own God while maintaining a love toward those who love another God.  

Certainly, there is yet one more context to consider—today. How do we hear these texts on November 3, 2024? It is two days before an historic election in the United States, a nation challenged by division and the threats of Christian Nationalism and civil unrest. The nation of Israel is at war, a complicated situation nearly impossible to unravel even as the cities are being destroyed there, once again. The good news of Jesus Christ speaks to us, through the layers of history, with words of profound conviction and challenge.

Before I close today with a prayer in poetic form by Walter Bruggeman, included in his 2008 book Prayers for Privileged People. It is titled:
Post-Election Day

You creator God
     who has ordered us
       in families and communities,
       in clans and tribes,
       in states and nations.

You creator God
     who enacts your governance
       in ways overt and
       in ways hidden.
     You exercise your will for
       peace and for justice and for freedom.

We give you thanks for the peaceable order of
   our nation and for the chance of choosing—
     all the manipulative money notwithstanding.

We pray now for new governance
   that your will and purpose may prevail,
   that our leaders may have a sense
     of justice and goodness,
   that we as citizens may care about the
     public face of your purpose.

We pray in the name of Jesus who was executed
   by the authorities.  Amen.

The greatest commandment speaks through all the layers of history and can guide us onward. Love your neighbor as unconditionally as you love God, as God loves you. No historical situation, ethnicity, politics or religion is greater than this.