The Widow's Mite - Mark 12:41-44

There’s a story told of a minister in a city church which was always struggling for money. They were having real problems with their roof and unless something happened quickly, the church was going to have to close down.

But then one day the minister was visited by one of the local gangsters, whose brother had just been killed in a fight. And he said “Minister, I’ll give you the money for your new roof, but only if you agree to tell everyone at the funeral service that my brother was an angel”

Now of course, that put the minister in a real dilemma because he knew that both these brothers were bad news, and he was being asked to stand up and tell the congregation a pack of lies.

But he thought about it overnight and he rang the hoodlum the next morning to say that it was a deal provided he put the cheque in the post that day. Which he duly did.

And so, the day of the funeral came round, and the minister climbed up to the pulpit to begin the service.

“Dear Friends, he said, we’re here today to bury Knuckles McGraw. And as all of you well know, McGraw was a crook and a thug and a womaniser, not to mention a drunk and a layabout. But you see compared to his brother, he was an angel!”

Today I want us to think about a subject I don’t often preach on, and it’s the business of how we support the church financially.

Last year’s General Assembly instructed all congregations to run a stewardship campaign, and in Belhelvie we’ve decided to make stewardship something we reflect on every year. One year we’ll think about money, the next year time and then talents. And then we’ll begin the cycle all over again. That way, every year we’re reminded of the promises that we make in membership, and how we should be stewarding the things we’ve been blessed with in life.

And this year – at the Assembly’s behest – we start with finance, and I’ve chosen two readings for today, both of which get to the heart of the one question every thinking Christian asks him or herself when it comes to this issue. How much is enough?

The Story of the Widow’s Offering is one that you’ll probably know quite well, and it’s often referred to in discussions about giving. There’s something about the imagery that grabs us; the picture of the wee old lady, bent over, dropping her two coins into the collection almost unseen, while the rich process in with pomp and ceremony, making sure that everyone knows exactly how much they’re giving.

And the commentators fill in a lot of the background for us. They tell us that there were 13 collecting vessels in the Temple, shaped like upended trumpets, and each of them had a sign telling you what that particular vessel was financing – wood for the sacrifices, maintenance on the building and so on.

And workers in the temple would actually stand beside the vessels and announce to all and sundry who you were and how much you were offering. And that was part of the pay-off for the wealthy.

How do you fancy that system at Belhelvie Church!

But here’s the question. As Jesus watches the widow put in her two coins, and draws his disciples’ attention to what she’s done, what’s going through his mind?

You see it’s often argued that he’s commending her for giving away everything she had to live on. But I’m not sure that he is.

Read the passage again in your own time if you don’t believe me, but it’s quite possible that Jesus is watching this not with approval, but with anger. Anger at a system that would make an old woman think that she had to give away all she had to live on. As though that were what God required or expected.

“Beware the teachers of the Law” he says, in the verses just before this: “they take advantage of widows and rob them of their homes.”

Jesus is often found defending the cause of the powerless and the poor and you don’t get much more powerless and poor than an elderly widow with just a couple of coppers to live on.

Perhaps she wanted to make the sacrifice – that was her choice. And Jesus is unambiguous that her offering, small though it was in real terms, was actually far far more than the offerings of the wealthy. She gave 100% compared to their 1 or 2%.

But none of that means that God required it of her, or indeed of us.

As Christians we need to hold our wealth lightly, realising that everything we have, we have on trust from God. But we understand too that God is not unreasonable or unjust. If all of us gave away all that we have to live on, we wouldn’t be able to live for very long!

Nowhere in Scripture do we find giving away ‘all that we have’ being held up as a model for regular Christian giving.

So to summarise, we need to get this story straight. In this incident, Jesus is showing us that what really matters is not how much we give - £1 or £10 or £1000.  What matters is the proportion of our income that we choose to give. She gave more than all the rest, he says. Why? because proportionately she gave far far more. Maybe too much.

So there’s one end of the spectrum. A woman who offered all she had to live on. And it’s my sense of the text that Jesus, though touched, wasn’t commending that kind of heroism to everyone.

In our old Testament reading, we go to the opposite end of the spectrum.  

King David wants to build an altar to God at the threshing place of a man called Araunah. And being a good and loyal subject, Araunah says – ‘My King, please take what you need! Take the place, and the animals to sacrifice, the wheat as an offering and the threshing boards to burn”.

And David says ‘”No. I will pay you the full price. I will not offer to the Lord a sacrifice that costs me nothing”.

An offering that costs us nothing, or next to nothing so that we hardly even miss it, isn’t really an offering at all. It’s unworthy of God.

Let’s say you’re hosting a dinner party, and as one of the guests arrives he smiles and reaches you a half-empty bottle of flat Irn Bru as he’s taking off his coat. Do you feel valued by this gesture? Do you get a sense that this individual has gone to some trouble to bring this along to the evening’s festivities?! No. You think he couldn’t care less, and you’re probably quite right. Especially if you happen to know that he’s got a nice stash of wine tucked away under the stairs for his own personal consumption.

I will not offer to the Lord a sacrifice that costs me nothing.

If we don’t notice what we put on the plate or in the envelope, quite simply it’s not costing us enough.

So there are the two extremes – an offering that doesn’t cost us enough, and an offering that costs us too much.

And in terms of our giving to the church, we need to be somewhere inbetween those two poles.

But where?

Well, luckily, or perhaps you’ll think ‘unluckily’ the Scriptures do give us some guidance about this.

Ten percent. That’s what God thinks is a reasonable amount of your income to channel back into his work in the world. Ten percent. Not nothing. Not 100%. Ten percent.

That principle goes right back into the Old Testament when Israel were an agrarian society. This from Leviticus 27 is typical ³⁰“ ‘A tithe of everything from the land, whether grain from the soil or fruit from the trees, belongs to the Lord; it is holy to the Lord ³²The entire tithe of the herd and flock—every tenth animal that passes under the shepherd’s rod—will be holy to the Lord..

A tenth was what was expected by way of offering from God’s people. And though the term tithe isn’t used in the New Testament, it’s clear that giving in the early church was both generous and sacrificial.

I wonder how 10% sounds to you this morning. I have a fair idea, especially in the middle of a recession.

But here’s the thing. If I asked, this morning, if you could live on 90% of your present income, I’d guess that most of us could just about manage. We’d have to cut corners; a few things would have to go or be done differently, but most of us could get by. It wouldn’t be easy, but we could probably do it. It’s not as impossible as it sounds.

So if 10% sounds preposterous maybe that’s a sign that we’re sailing too close to the wind in terms of our finances. Maybe we’re overcommitting ourselves.

Or maybe it only sounds ridiculous because we get everything else in place first – mortgage, car, holidays, luxuries, and then we see what we can give God out of what’s left, and by that stage there’s precious little left. The only way to sort out that problem is to factor in our giving at the beginning and then cut our cloth according to what’s left over.

If you want some guidance on giving, 10% is what the Scriptures say. How you respond to that challenge is between you and God, but that’s the teaching. And the simple truth is – we get the church that we’re prepared to pay for. I’m reminded of that every time I pass that new church building down in Balmedie. Buildings like that don’t build themselves.

My colleague Matt Canlis is in the States just now at a conference for Presbyterian pastors and just out of interest I got him to do some research for me. I asked him to find out how much a congregation the same size as ours would be pulling in, financially. He mailed back to say that a congregation of 400 would expect to be bringing in around £300,000 per year, employing three full time pastors for preaching, pastoral work and youth, and also two part-time ministries in music and administration. And it's not because the congregations are necessarily wealthier than ours. It's because they have a culture of tithing - the norm is for people to support the church sacrificially.

Perhaps I’m preaching to the converted here today. By dint of being here, I’m assuming you’re among the folk who take their financial commitment to this church seriously.  But I do know that these words from the Scriptures have something to day to all of us, regardless of our circumstances.

There is a giving that’s too much, and God does not ask that of us. There’s a giving that’s too little, and God’s unimpressed with it. And there’s a giving that’s right – a giving that costs us without crippling us. And it’s for that we need to be aiming.

CS Lewis was once asked what proportion of our income we should be giving to God's work, and rather than put a figure on it, his reply was that we can only be sure that we're giving enough when it starts to hurt a little. 

"I will not offer to God a sacrifice that costs me nothing."

The question for all of us to take away and think about this morning is “What does it cost me to put that money on the plate each Sunday? Does it hurt a little? Because if it doesn’t that’s a sure sign that we could be giving more”.

I’ll leave the last word to the Apostle Paul as he writes to the church in Corinth about this very issue.

"Remember this”  he says. “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. Each person should give what they have decided in their heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver”

As we begin to think about financial stewardship this year, may God help us all to offer what we can to his work in the world; and to give with generosity and with joy. Amen

An Easter Sunday Sermon -

What do we make of this story that we hear every year on Easter Sunday? The story of the resurrection.

Some folk take this story as yet more evidence that Christians are cranks, required to believe six impossible things before breakfast-time. They dismiss it out of hand. Someone back from the dead? Appearing and disappearing at will? Pull the other one.

Others give the story a little more credence, but try to sift out the supernatural elements and find rational explanations for what happened on that first Sunday morning. Jesus had only swooned, the disciples took his body, it was all some kind of mass hallucination – that kind of thing.

And though they differ, the starting point of both those perspectives is more or less the same. They both start from the assumption that it can’t have happened.

But why? Why can’t it have happened? The answer you’d get back is  Because none of us have ever seen anything like this! Because the world doesn’t work that way!

Well, find a tribe of natives deep in the Amazon rainforest, point to the moon one night and tell them that men have walked on it, and see if they believe you!

Or travel back in time, even a couple of hundred years, and tell people about iPads and chartered aeroplane flights and television and electricity and they’ll think you’ve lost the plot.

Just because something is beyond our present understanding, it doesn’t mean it can’t possibly be true.

I’m not embarrassed by the resurrection stories, even as a scientist. Because if it’s true, and I believe it is, what’s happening in the resurrection is something so new and so alien and so unique that we can’t measure it by what we presently know.

Those of you who’ve seen the movie 2001 will remember the scene when the astronauts discover this massive, perfectly rectangular black monolith on the moon. It’s an utterly alien presence – totally beyond what they know. It’s an unambiguous sign of another intelligence, another power, at work in the universe.

For me - that’s what we’re seeing in the resurrection. The breaking into our world of another world. Small wonder we can’t get our heads around it.

But where’s the evidence for it?

Well we’ve been down this avenue many times before – too often to go over the same ground again. But the telling thing for me has always been the change in the disciples. What took them from being cowards, hiding away in a locked room, to preaching fearlessly that Jesus had been raised and risking prison and death for saying so?

Eleven of the twelve were martyred for preaching the resurrection of Christ. If it were all a hoax they’d cooked up, you’ve got to admire their commitment to it!

But aside from that, the resurrection stories themselves give us some strong literary hints that they’re authentic and not fabricated.

If you were making this stuff up, you wouldn’t have women coming to the tomb first and being the first witnesses. You’d make sure it was men, because in the ancient world a man’s testimony was thought to be more reliable than a woman’s.

But all four gospel writers tell us that women came to the tomb first.

Last at the cross and first at the tomb. Full marks to the girls!

And there’s more evidence that the story’s authentic in today’s reading, and it’s the fact that for reasons that aren’t clear, Jesus seems hard to recognise.

Now if you were making this story up, why would you introduce that element of confusion?
Surely what you’d want is for everybody in the story to recognise him straight away?!

“Jesus – it’s you! You are unambiguously raised from the dead!”

But here, John records that Mary was confused over who Jesus was, at least at first. And the very fact that John’s included that ambiguity in his account is strong proof that it’s authentic. Why put it in otherwise?

And it’s that little detail I want us to think about for a moment. The fact that in the story of Mary at the garden tomb, she didn’t recognise Jesus at first.

That sounds daft to us. How could she not recognise him? Well you don’t have to resort to theories of Jesus shape-shifting to explain it. Maybe she was struggling to see anything properly because she was beside herself with grief. Or maybe Jesus was trying to be incognito to avoid re-capture. Thousands of hoodies up and down the country know how easy it is to hide your identity by the simple act of covering your head.

That Mary might not recognise Jesus isn’t as daft as it sounds, and I have anecdotal evidence to back that up!

I take weddings every now and again. It’s a professional hazard. And this phenomenon nearly always happens at the weddings I take. I’ll be standing in front of the congregation for a full half-hour or forty minutes. And I know I’m not the centre of attention, but they’ll be looking in my general direction for all of that time. And there’s always be a spell when the bride and groom sit down, and the congregation will see and hear only me for a good ten minutes.

But I guarantee you that later on in the day when I’m chatting to the other guests, and I’m in my civvies, on at least two occasions someone will say to me “so – how do you know the bride and groom?” and they’ll be mortified when they realise I was the guy who just married them and they haven’t recognised me.

That either says I have an eminently forgettable face. No comment. Or it says that when we see people out of context, and dressed differently, it’s not always easy to recognise them.

Perhaps it’s not so strange that here, and in other places, people are initially slow to recognise the resurrected Christ. They certainly weren’t expecting to see him.

So what we can take away from that for ourselves today?

Well, here are a few thoughts to leave you with.

Firstly – Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that Jesus was hard to recognise. Here is God born into the world, and only a few ever recognised him for who he was. Last week we read the set texts for Palm Sunday and remembered Jesus looking out over Jerusalem and lamenting. Why? Because they did not recognise the time of God’s coming to them. He was right in front of them, and they didn’t recognise him.

In Mark’s gospel there’s this strange motif of what’s called the Messianic Secret – Jesus seems keen to keep a lid on his identity. He heals, but then he tells the people who’ve been cured not to say anything about it to anyone.
And when he teaches, so often he chooses to tell parables. Stories that draw you in, but leave you with as many questions as answers.

And all of this adds up, to me.

I wonder if Jesus was playing hard-to-get. If he was deliberately being a little obscure so that only those who really wanted to know him would make the effort. Who would go the distance with him? Who would stick in? They were the kind of people he wanted to gather around himself.

And gather them he did.

And it’s no accident, secondly, that they are the people he appeared to once he’d risen from the dead.

He didn’t turn up in Herod’s palace, or Pilate’s courtyard, or in the middle of the Sanhedrin and say ‘told you so’. In some senses that would have been the natural and logical thing to do. To prove it. But that was never his way. He didn’t have to prove anything, except to those who loved him – and it was to them that he appeared.

The folk who followed, who lingered with him in his life, were the same ones to whom the risen Christ made himself known.

And maybe that’s a word for us today.

And one final observation – it was when he said or did something that was personal for them that they realised who he really was.

It was only when he said ‘Mary’ in the way he always had, that she recognised him in the garden.

It was only when the Emmaus disciples saw him break and bless the bread that they realised who he was.

It was when the disciples in the upper room saw the nailprints in his hands, and the spear wound in his side that they believed.

The truth of all of this hits home when we receive it in a personal way. When we know that the risen Jesus is speaking directly to us.

Because he still does. Not in words or presence, perhaps, but in a call that comes straight to our spirit and demands a response.

To the disciples, and to Thomas in particular, the resurrected Christ says ““Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

That’s a word for me and you this morning. That was my experience as a young man. I’d been in the church since childhood, but it was only when I started to seek Christ for myself that it all became real. As I lingered over some verses in John’s gospel, I knew in the depths of my being that he was asking for my life and my commitment. This was personal. He was calling my name in the garden.

We live in an age of instant everything. Instant relationships, instant coffee, instant information, instant communication. But there’s something about the way God deals with us that won’t be rushed, that can’t be understood by those who aren’t prepared to look for him and linger.

So what are you waiting for this morning? A thunderbolt from heaven? Writing on the wall? Some final logical proof that this story is real?

My fear is that you can wait from now ‘til kingdom come and it’ll never come. It doesn’t work that way.

Here’s how it works – you have to take the initiative. “Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened unto you”

Take a risk. If you’ve never done so, ask Christ to come into your life. Ask him to accept you as you are, but to change you into what you can be, in him.

If you’re willing and able to pray that kind of prayer, you’ll find – as countless others down the centuries have found – that he’s not nearly as ‘hard to get’ as people might like to believe.

The Two Tables - A Maundy Thursday Reflection

As we gather this evening around the Lord’s Table to remember the events of Maundy Thursday, our reflections are going to centre on two ancient paintings of two different tables.

This is the first picture – an icon of the Trinity painted by Andrei Rublev in the 15^th century and currently held at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

In Genesis chapter 18, Abraham is visited by God in the guise of three persons who sit and eat with him, and this is Rublev’s interpretation of that story and it’s full of symbolism.

Look first at their faces, they are all identical, but you’ll notice that the figures in the middle and on the right have their heads inclined towards the figure on the left as though deferring to him. That makes him the Father.

Then look at their clothes. All three wear blue – the colour of the heavens and of divinity. But the father wears a robe of shimmering, ethereal gold. The figure in the middle wears an earthy brown, with a stripe of Kingly Gold on his right sleeve. This is the Son. And the Spirit, on the right hand side, wears green – the colour of growth and new life.

Now look at their hands.

The father holds his sceptre with both hands. All authority is given to him.  The son rests his hand on the table, joining earth and heaven, and the two fingers show his two natures as fully God and fully human. The Spirit too touches the table because he is the go-between God, bringing God’s life and presence to the faithful.

Behind each figure there are other clues to who they are. Behind the Father is a mansion, and in the Fathers house there are many rooms. Behind the Son there’s a tree, which could be the tree of Mamre, or perhaps a symbol of the tree on which he died. And behind the spirit we have a mountain, and we all know the significance of mountains in the Biblical story. Mountains are special places for encountering God – it was on a mountain that Moses received the law, that Elijah heard the still small voice, that Jesus was transfigured and later on, returned to his Father in heaven.

So it’s a picture full of symbolism. But we’re still not quite at the heart of it yet – because as any student of art will quickly tell you, the perspective is all wrong. But that’s a deliberate choice Rublev has made. He’s played with the perspective to give the viewer the feeling of being drawn into the table because that’s exactly what he wants us to experience.

He wants you to know that there is space for you at the table – Father, Son and Spirit are inviting you into fellowship with them. Inviting you to share in their life and companionship.

This picture isn’t meant to be a reflection on an historic event at the trees of Mamre. It’s a meditation on the eternal now of God’s invitation, extended to every man and woman.

It’s beautiful, it’s personal. And each of us must make our response to God’s invitation.

Here’s our second picture – instantly recognisable but actually quite hard to make out in real life, so let me take the liberty of showing you a more colourful replica.

I want you to keep your eye on the picture as we hear Luke’s account of the Last Supper as we find it in Luke chapter 22.....

I have to confess, I was shocked when I read that passage again just a few weeks ago. There was so much in what Luke records that I’d edited out in my mind, or forgotten. And what came home to me with great force was that even at this stage, the disciples still didn’t get it!

Look at them! Look at the movement in the picture. The gestures! This isn’t fabrication on Leonardo’s part, as far as I can see.

“One of you is going to betray me”, says Jesus, which sets them murmuring; and before long we’re into a full blown argument about who’s the greatest disciple. They’ve obviously come a long way in three years, eh? Simon’s singled out for special treatment and informed that Satan has his eye on him, but Peter reassures Jesus that he needn’t worry because, of course, he’s rock solid in his commitment. There’s no chance of him denying Jesus.

And to cap it all, there’s this deeply unsettling ending where Jesus seems to be suggesting they go out and arm themselves for battle – sell your cloak and buy a sword he says! It sounds like a call to arms, though we know from events a few hours later in Gethsemane, that that was never his way. Perhaps he was just trying to wake them up to the dangers of the situation they’d soon find themselves in– we don’t know.

But the point I want you to take is that this was no gathering of mature, reflective, together disciples – gently having their eyes opened to the reality of what was about to happen to their leader. It was as riddled with tensions and misunderstandings and love and good intentions as communal human life ever is.

And as we prepare to eat the Lord’s Supper together, these two tables we’ve thought about this evening help us remember something of great importance.

The invitation of God, Father Son and Spirit, comes to us all in the quiet, inner places of our hearts. It’s there that we make our first response. That’s what Rublev is showing us.

But the outworking of that faith commitment takes place around another table – a table which is far from serene. That’s what Da Vinci is showing us.

The Lord’s table is not, and never has been, a celebration for those who have arrived, who are all of one mind. It’s the place where different and sometimes difficult people gather and discover unity as we begin to realise and live out of the truth that we are all beloved of God.

Look at the picture again. Christ in the centre, drawing us together in our disparity. It’s like the old illustration of the wheel and the spokes. As the spokes get closer to the hub, so they get closer to one another.

This is what the Lord’s Table is about. We may not know each other well. We may not even like one another very much. But if our Lord welcomes us to his table, then there must be depths in each one that that we have not yet seen, worth in each one that we have not yet recognised. We must trust his judgment above our own.

If we, in all our complexity and faith and unfaith, have been welcomed, then who are we to keep others at arm’s length?

I’ve always marvelled that at this table, knowing full well what was about to happen, Jesus makes room even for Judas. Judas too, shares in the fellowship meal. Perhaps Christ was hoping that even at that stage, he might have a change of heart.

We don’t know. But we know this. The Trinitarian call to that peaceful inner table is worked out around this table. It’s here that we learn to forgive as Christ forgave, to hope as Christ hoped, to follow as Christ followed. It’s here, in the reality of bread and wine shared, that we remember the high calling Jesus gives those he calls his disciples and his friends. To love one another, as he has loved us.