Remember Who You Are (A Sermon for Reign of Christ Sunday)

Scriptures:     Daniel 7:7-14    Psalm 93

Revelation 1:1-8        John 18:33-38

How many of us have read the Diary of Anne Frank?  Written by the teenage girl Anne Frank while in hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam, and later in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, the diary not only chronicles her experiences, but also her relentless search for joy and hope in the midst of an increasingly grim and hopeless situation.   Perhaps the most famous and heart-wrenching quote from her diary, written while she was experiencing the worst misery that human hatred could devise, is, “Despite everything, I still believe people are good at heart.”

Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, otherwise known as Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday in the liturgical year when we proclaim the rule, the reign, of the Risen Christ not only over our individual lives, but over all things, over the universe, a cosmic reality that is hidden by our own brokenness and by the rebellion of those who claim authority without submitting to Christ who is the only true authority.  In our three-year cycle of readings, the Gospel reading for Reign of Christ Sunday portrays Jesus, basically, as a king who doesn’t look at all like our idea of a king.  Today’s Gospel reading is from the account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate in John’s Gospel.  Next year we’ll be reading Luke’s account of the crucified Jesus’ telling the crucified but penitent thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”  And two years from now, we’ll be reading from Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus describes himself, in essence, as a king who goes around in the disguise of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the sick, and the imprisoned, so that whatsoever is done to the least in our society is done to the king.  Three accounts of a king who doesn’t look like a king, reminding us that God’s ways of exercising power in the world are very different from ours – that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways not our ways.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus stands before Pilate, on trial for his life.  It would appear that since Pilate has the power to free Jesus or imprison Jesus or condemn Jesus to death, that it would therefore follow that it is Pilate who has the power in this story.  Nonetheless, both the portion of the story in our reading and the portions that follow before and after reveal that, indeed, it is Jesus who is in charge all the time.  The religious authorities arrest Jesus, but later admit that they have no power to put him to death.  Peter tries with his sword to rescue Jesus, but Jesus rebukes Peter, and affirms that he must drink the cup that the Father has given him.  It becomes evident that Pilate would like to release Jesus – and he certainly has the legal authority to do so – but triangulated as he is between the religious authorities who intimidate him and Jesus who doesn’t seem especially frantic about being released, Pilate eventually caves in to the religious authorities and gives them what they want.   Ultimately it comes down to the words of Jesus that I referenced earlier:  “Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?”

As I was reading this passage, it struck me that Jesus steadfastly refused to allow Pilate to define Jesus on Pilate’s terms.  Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you the King of the Jews?”.  Clearly this is a setup for Jesus to declare himself as some sort of usurper or rebel leader – a political rebel seeking power.  Politics was Pilate’s world, and an admission on Jesus’ part of political rebellion would have given Pilate an easy excuse to have Jesus executed.  But Jesus isn’t going to allow Pilate to define Jesus on Pilate’s terms….Jesus asks, ”Where’s all this coming from?  Did you come up with this on your own, or are you listening to other peoples’ gossip?”  And Pilate says “Am I a Jew?  Your own priests and people brought you here.  What have you done?”  And Jesus responds, “My kingdom is not from this world.  If I had a worldly kingdom, my followers would be fighting tooth and nail to save me.  But I have no worldly kingdom.”  Pilate keeps wanting to draw Jesus back onto his turf, and asks, “So you’re a king?”  And Jesus insists on defining himself on his own terms:  "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."  And Pilate pretty much gives away his political game by saying, “What is truth?”  Whatever truth is, at that moment, for Pilate, truth wasn’t a priority.

Despite Pilate’s repeated attempts to draw Jesus into Pilate’s frame of reference, Jesus resolutely insisted on defining  himself on his own terms, and more importantly, insisted on remembering why he had been sent, remembering that he had to drink the cup of suffering his father had given him.   In these chaotic days, I believe Jesus’ actions in our gospel reading are an important reminder to us, as Christians, to remember who we are, to remember whose we are, and to remember who we are to love and serve.

The events of the past weeks have been deeply upsetting.  Wall to wall coverage of bombings in Paris, for many of us, bring back memories of the days following 9-11 in our own country.  Similar attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, in Mali, and in Nigeria have been much less widely reported, but still give us a sense of widening chaos.  And as I wrote my sermon, Belgium was on high alert, vigilant against the possibilities of attacks there.  And there have been threats of an attack here in the US.  And at the same time all this is happening, Syrian refugees – fleeing the same kinds of attacks in their own land – are seeking asylum anywhere they can get it, including here. 

The message of the news media, of the talking head commentators, of many government officials, and of most of the candidates for president can be summarized roughly as follows:  Fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear fear, fear and more fear, wall to wall fear, all fear all the time, fear 24/7/365.    But the writer of John’s gospel also wrote, in a later letter to the churches, “Perfect love casts out fear.”  At a time like this, on this Reign of Christ Sunday, it is absolutely crucial to remember that, in the words of our first hymn, Jesus Shall Reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run.  It is absolutely crucial to remember that despite human hatred and fear, God is still in charge.   And it is absolutely crucial to remember who we are as baptized Christians:  children of God, disciples of Christ, members of Christ’s church.  When I baptize someone, after I say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost”, I anoint the candidate with oil, and these are words I pronounce:  “Receive the Holy Spirit, (candidate’s name) child of God, disciple of Christ, member of Christ’s church” – and as baptized Christians, indeed, that’s who we are, our core identity, trumping all other claims of nationality or race or ethnicity, or gender or sexual orientation.  Our core identity: “child of God, disciple of Christ, member of Christ’s church.”

Children of God:  at the beginning of this sermon, I mentioned Anne Frank and her diary.  What is less well known is that Anne Frank’s father, was among hundreds of Jews who sought sanctuary in America.  Had refuge been granted – who knows, Anne Frank could well have lived to a ripe old age here in the United States.  But the Frank family was refused, on the basis of the same arguments being used right now against admitting Syrian refugees – that the country, having struggled through a depression for more than ten years at that point, should take care of its own citizens first, that among the refugees there might be spies for Hitler.  And so asylum was refused, and the United States sent those Jewish refugees back to Hitler, and for many of them, to their deaths – Anne Frank among them.  And indeed, many of the refugees are themselves children. …children like Rana, the four year old Palestinian girl whose education I partly sponsor and to whom our own children have sent drawings.  Are we going to let the fearmongering on TV terrorize us to the point where we’re afraid of four-year-old children?  Or afraid of children like the two or so year old Jesus whose family fled as refugees to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod?  Is that what we in the land of the free and the home of the brave have become?  Really?  As children of God, disciples of Christ, members of Christ’s church, I hope we can do better.

Disciples of Christ:  As Christians, we believe we are saved by grace through faith.  That is the bedrock of our faith, the reason we’re here.  But we are not saved so that God will baptize, bless, and sanctify our fears and prejudices, but rather that through the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit we may not be conformed to this world, but transformed through the renewing of our mind.  As followers of Jesus, we are called to be different from the world; in a word, we’re called to be Christlike, to be….Jesusy.  The world looks on us, to see if we will indeed follow in the way of Jesus, if we will be Jesusy.  And when they see that we are not Jesusy, they think we’re phonies, and rightly so.  The call to care for the stranger and the alien is embedded throughout Scripture, Old and New Testaments; from Leviticus 19:34:  “The alien who resides among you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God – to the beginning of Hebrews chapter 13: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels unawares.”  Truly being disciples of Jesus is not easy – Jesus said that the gate is narrow and the road is hard -  but it is the call we as Christians have received and committed to follow.  And again, the key is to resist the messages of fear that are out there, to heed the words that appear throughout Scripture time and again:  “Fear not.  Do not be afraid.”  Paul wrote to Timothy that “God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”  Fearful people can be led around by the nose and manipulated and stampeded to their own self-destruction.  After 9-11 in this country, people were terrified,  the media and the government did all they could to perpetuate and amplify their terror – remember the terror alerts, the government telling us on one day to be afraid and the next day to be really afraid, and the day after to be not so afraid, but still afraid - and people trusted what the government and the media told them, and we were stampeded into policies that have destabilized not only Afghanistan and Iraq but more recently Lebanon and Syria as well, turning them essentially into failed states, and the resulting power vacuum, in fact, contributed to both to the refugee crisis and to the formation of ISIS….the formation of ISIS was caused, in part, by Us-es, or at least by our political leaders.  Been there, done that! We’ve seen this movie before!  There’s no need for a sequel, and as children of God, disciples of Christ, members of Christ’s church, I hope we can point to a better way forward.

Members of Christ’s Church – There is an unusual level of consensus among Christian leaders against the fearmongering and bigotry perpetuated by the media and by political hacks across the spectrum.  Of course, the mainline Protestant churches are generally strong on peace and justice issues, and United Church of Christ in particular is known as a peace and justice church, and so everyone expects the UCC to advocate for peace and justice and against fearmongering and anti-Muslim bigotry, as we eat our granola bars and hold hands and sing kumbaya, because, in the words of the Geico commercial, it’s what we do – I’m joking a bit about stereotypes of UCC folk, of course.  But so is the Roman Catholic Church, itself with a strong and proud tradition of social teaching that Pope Francis is emphasizing in ways that haven’t been heard in decades, and so is the National Association of Evangelicals, generally on the conservative end of the Christian spectrum, normally the last people you’d ever expect to climb on board the peace train.  Left, right, and center, our Christian sisters and brothers are urging us to choose love instead of fear and hospitality instead of rejection.  As children of God, disciples of Christ, and members of Christ’s church, perhaps we should listen.

It’s not easy to be a Christian in these days.  It’s not easy to stand against the tide of fearmongering and hatred and say “no”.  But just as Jesus came to testify to the truth, so must we, even when our voice shakes.  And in the worst of times, we can draw comfort from the words of the first question of the old Heidelberg Catechism that our longtime members grew up with.  The first question goes, “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?”  And while the answer is a bit lengthy, it begins with the words, “That I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”   May we remember who we are and whose we are, and may this comfort carry us safely through the days ahead. Amen.

Silent Strength

Scriptures:     I Samuel 1:1-28, 2:1-10    Psalm 16

Hebrews 10:11-25     Mark 13:1-8

Last Sunday, we met women – Ruth and Naomi, and the nameless woman who  gave her last coins to the Temple – who had been down so long that it looked like up to them, who indeed from where they were situated had nowhere to go but up.  Today we meet another woman, Hannah, who outwardly appears to be in a much better position, and yet is carrying a heavy burden, by which she is, in her own words, “deeply troubled”.

Hannah is married to a man named Elkanah, and we’re given his geneology.  It’s an interesting geneology – the name of the first ancestor, Zuph, means “honeycomb”. We seem to go downhill with Zuph’s son, Tohu, whose  name means “waste” - it’s the Hebrew word used in Genesis when it says that before the earth was created everything was formless and void. But the next two generations, Elihu (He is my God) and Jehoram (God is exalted).  The name Elkanah itself means “God creates”. So Elkanah came out of a family whose beginnings were a mixed bag, but that was devout.  The name of Hannah herself means “gracious”  And then we’re told there’s a second wife, and her name is Penninah, which appears to mean “pearl or coral”.  To support two wives, we can suppose that Elkanah was at least comfortably well off.  We’re told that Hannah has no children, while Penninah had many children – the main reason Elkanah married Penninah in the first place is that Hannah hadn’t come through with any children.  And Hannah was deeply unhappy about this; in that culture, bearing children was the most important purpose for a woman, the one thing a woman could do that a man could not.  In that culture, for a woman, to be childless was to have failed at one’s purpose in life. And even though Elkanah loved Hannah, the second wife Penninah constantly picked on Hannah for having no children.

We’re told that Elkanah went up to Shiloh every year to sacrifice to the Lord – this took place long before Jerusalem was the center of worship; at that time Shiloh was the main center of worship.  On the occasion described in our reading, the family went up to Shiloh, with Penninah picking on Hannah the whole time.  Elkanah gave portions of the sacrifice to Penninah and her children, and an extra big portion to Hannah, because he loved her – but Hannah was so upset she couldn’t eat.  Elkanah tried to comfort her, with words that might make the women among us want to smack him: “Why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad?  Am I not more to you than ten sons?”  Yeah, Hannah, how can you cry when you’re lucky enough to have me!  Elkanah surely saw himself as enough of a prize that Hannah should be satisfied with him, but Hannah for some reason seems unconvinced.

So Hannah breaks off from the group and presents herself before the Lord.  Only men would have been allowed into the worship space proper, so she would have been near the entrance of the space.  Hannah was absolutely at the end of her rope, and so Hannah poured out her heart to the Lord, begging him for a son, pleading with him for a son, promising God that if she was granted a son, she would dedicate his life to serving the Lord.

Eli, the old priest who presided there, sat at the entrance, and so saw Hannah.  He saw her lips moving but no sounds coming out – in those days, silent prayer was very unusual – and so Eli supposed she’d gotten drunk and staggered in by accident. Eli hisses at her, “How long will  you make a drunken spectacle of yourself?  Put away your wine.”  Poor Hannah….unable to bear a child, tormented by Penninah, having to deal with Elkanah’s clumsy attempts at comfort, and then, when she comes to pour her heart out before God, the priest chews her out.  But she responds, “No, sir, I’m at the end of my rope, but I’m not drunk; please don’t regard me as a worthless drunk, for I’ve been pouring my heart out to God.”  And Eli gives her a grudging blessing: “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made to him.”  She responded to Eli, “Let your servant find favor in your sight.”  But even with Eli’s misunderstanding and interrupting her, and only grudgingly blessing her, it was enough: we’re told that “The woman went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her face was sad no more.”  She and her husband conceived, and in due time she gave birth to Samuel, and when he was old enough, presented him to Eli to be trained for religious service, fulfilling her vow.  And God blessed Hannah for her faithfulness: Hannah went on to give birth to three more sons, and two daughters.  But Samuel…..Samuel was more than a cute baby….he grew up to be a game changer, first supplanting Eli and his corrupt sons, and eventually himself anointing Saul, the first king of Israel, marking the end of the period of the judges – sort of the wild wild west period of Israel’s history – and the beginning of a central government for Israel.

But Hannah was not looking for any of that.  Hannah poured out her heart to the Lord, shared her cry of the heart with the Lord, and the Lord responded, spectacularly.   

What are the things that weigh you down?  What are the things that block out the light in your life, that keep you in the shadows?  What is your cry of the heart?   Today’s passage reminds that even when family opposes us, that even when those who are supposed to be on our side are insensitive to our needs, that even when the official representatives of God dismiss us as “less than”, God hears the cry of our hearts.  God hears the cry of our hearts.  And God will respond….perhaps not on our schedule, perhaps not as we expect, but God will not ignore the cry of the heart from those who love him.  So let us bring our deepest yearnings to the throne of grace.

Today, on this day, and I have to say on most days, the cry of my heart is for justice for the poor and oppressed, and for peace.  In many ways, this has been a really difficult year....from the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France in January to the church shooting in S. Carolina this summer, to the ramping up of hostilities in Palestine in recent months, to the crisis of refugees from Syria and elsewhere, to this week’s attacks, not only the attacks in Paris that we’ve heard about, but the attacks in Lebanon that happened the day before, but weren’t included in our news cycle, though other countries are well aware of them. And aside from these national stories, the shredding of the social safety net which once provided the poor with some measure of dignity, but is now leaving more and more people on the streets… As a pastor, all of this weighs heavily on me….what am I supposed to do about all this?  What even am I supposed to say about all this, to tell the congregation about this? And so my cry of the heart is justice and for peace.

And our Gospel reading tells us that the path ahead may not be peaceful.  In our gospel readings, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem, and the disciples are admiring the scenery…”Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings.”  And Jesus responds by telling them, in effect, “all of this will soon be crashing down, all of it.  Not one stone will be left on another.”  He goes on to say that there will be wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, famines, and persecution.  But after likely scaring them half to death, Jesus then says, “the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

The one who endures to the end will be saved.  God will answer the cry of our heart.  God will not abandon us.  The one who endures to the end will be saved.  Even as the world we thought we knew seems to come apart, may we be comforted by the reality that God hears the cry of our hearts.  May we be comforted by Jesus’ promise that there is salvation to those who abide.  Amen.

Nowhere But Up

Scriptures:     Ruth 2:1-23, 3:1-5, 4:13-17,  Psalm 146    Hebrews 9:24-28       Mark 12:38-44

 Some slightly “cleaned-up for church” lyrics from an old Jim Morrison song, released in April 1971, just a few months before his untimely death:

Well I’ve been down so long that it looks like up to me.

I’ve been down so very long that it looks like up to me.

Why don’t one you people c’mon and set me free

I begin with these lyrics, not only to stir up memories for the hippies among us, but to ask a question….What does it feel like to hit rock bottom? …. And not only to hit rock bottom, but to be stuck at rock bottom, to be held to rock bottom with Velcro or even crazy glue, to have “been down so long that it looks like up” to me, to you?   What does it feel like to grasp here and there for straws of hope, only to have them break off in our hand, and then have someone else’s boot come down to smash our fingers because we dared to hope for something better? 

Of course, in twelve-step programs, it’s common wisdom that recovery cannot begin until a person has hit bottom….and “bottom” can comes in all shapes and forms.  I’m told that at one time in some AA circles, the joke went that in wealthy Chestnut Hill, one was considered to have hit bottom when the maid quit.  But in all seriousness, addiction takes people terrible places, cutting addicts off from family and friends, driving them to theft and prostitution and worse, with “jail, institutions, and death” at the journey’s end.

But people hit bottom in other ways, and often from circumstances beyond their control….the death of a loved one, a devastating illness or injury, extended unemployment, especially if our skill set no longer has a place in today’s job market.  Our country’s treatment of our injured and disabled veterans is appalling, an abomination, and I think of Brian, a vet that Mark and I know, slumped in his wheelchair by the side of Knights Road just off Woodbourne Road in the Northeast, or Matt, a vet I see at my SEPTA stop near work, missing an arm and a leg – though he has an artificial leg – from his military service.  Matt told me once that despite multiple surgeries, he’s in constant pain every minute of every day, and yet he does what he can for himself, taking the train from Norristown to Philadelphia and back most days to collect and sell scrap metal to a friend in Philly with a scrap metal business.  What does “up” look like for him, or for Brian?  What would it look like for them to have restored to them at least a measure of what their military service took away?

Our reading from Ruth and our reading from Mark’s gospel tell of women who have been down, who due to circumstances beyond their control have hit rock bottom.  In our reading from Ruth, both Ruth and Naomi have been widowed, Ruth quite recently.  While Naomi and Ruth had been living with their husbands in Ruth’s homeland of Moab, they’ve just made the journey to Bethlehem, the home of Naomi’s late husband.  They’re grieving hard, they’ve been dislocated from the place they’d been living, and they’re destitute.  And, just to make things worse, as a Moabite, even though Ruth is with Naomi, she’s somewhat suspect, because relations between Moab and Israel had sometimes been hostile.  In today’s terms, imagine an aging Israeli widow who had been living for years in Palestinian territory with her late husband and family, and who has just arrived home in Israel with her widowed Palestinian daughter-in-law – and  you might get some sense of the side-eyed glances and whispered conversations that Ruth’s presence would have generated.

So Naomi and Ruth arrived in Bethlehem, Ruth as a somewhat suspect stranger in a strange land, and Naomi deeply embittered by all that had happened to her family.  But they had to eat.  Part of the social safety net of the day was provision for what was called gleaning, according to texts such as Leviticus 19:9-10:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of y our field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.

So, risking hostility from the landowner or his servants, Ruth, who was both poor and an alien, looked for a field in which she could glean, that is, gather any heads of grain that had fallen to the ground or that the harvesters had missed.  We’re told that, quote, “as it happened” – and there’s a lot of room for divine intervention in those words – “as it happened”, Ruth gleaned in the field of Boaz, who turned out to be both wealthy and a member of Naomi’s extended family.   Ruth’s care for Naomi inspired Boaz to act with compassion; he not only instructed Ruth to stay with his workers, but then instructed his workers to be a little extra sloppy in the harvesting, leaving more than usual for Ruth.  It’s at this point that Naomi snaps out of her bitterness and begins to stage manage matters for Ruth so that Boaz will think of Ruth not only with pity, but also as a potential love interest…and the story ends happily ever after, with the descendants of the union of Ruth the Moabite and Boaz the Israelite including not only King David, but Jesus.

“Well, I’ve been down so very long that it looks like up to me.”   Naomi and Ruth had hit bottom, were down, down, and down some more.  The Lord did not forget Naomi and Ruth, but provided for them through their own resourcefulness – Ruth’s in taking the initiative to glean, and Naomi’s in recognizing and working her family connections - but also through the kindness of the community.  But in so doing, the boundaries of the community itself became wider.  Suppose Ruth had followed Naomi’s initial advice to go home to her own people in Moab, as Orpah had done. Opportunities for blessing would have been missed, and none of the “happily ever after” stuff at the end would have happened.  Suppose Boaz or his workers had objected to Ruth’s being a foreigner and driven her away from the field?  None of the blessings at the end would have come.  Or, even allowing that Boaz let Ruth remain in his field, suppose he had been a stingy person and instructed his workers not to leave anything for the gleaners.  None of the blessings at the end would have come.  Naomi and Ruth were down, had hit rock bottom, and at that place were met by God and blessed by God in unexpected ways, and became a blessing for others.

When we hit bottom, God can also meet us where we are and bless us, sometimes through the generosity of some of the most unlikely people.  The other alternate Old Testament reading for today, in which the prophet Elijah lands on the doorstep of a widow and her son who were preparing to eat their last bit of food and then starve, requested and eventually got hospitality from the widow, and in response God provided that the grain and oil would be sufficient for all three, tells a similar story – a prophet of Israel blessed by a widow from outside the community.  Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan tells a similar story, of a Jewish traveler being ignored by the religious leaders of his community but cared for by a Samaritan passerby, someone outside his community to whom the Jewish traveler likely would not have given the time of day.

God can bless us in unexpected ways, and God can use us in unexpected ways to be a blessing to others….if we’ll allow it, if we approach our lives with generous spirits and open hearts and hands.  Our stewardship, our tithes and offerings given to this church, is not meant only to keep the church itself going…important as that is, and as small as we are, it been through the hard work and dedication and generous giving of a faithful few that the doors have stayed open at all.  But the blessing in that is not for ourselves alone, but for the wider community.  And as we’ve opened our doors to more and more people, we’ve blessed others, and we’ve been blessed.

We have a story of this here at Emanuel just this week.  You may have noticed the announcement in the bulletin about Maritime Academy’s intention to donate a slew of canned goods to our church.  Our mini food cupboard has been going for almost a year, and has helped out four of our families along with occasional as-needed assistance to others – but it’s a very small operation.  Prior to this week I’d never even heard of the Maritime Academy, but they’re located in the Arsenal Business Center on Bridge Street near 95, and they describe themselves on their website as a charter school that provides students in grades 3 through 12 with a rigorous academic program with a special theme of maritime studies, including nautical studies and maritime business.  I got a call from Kathy White this week saying that the students at the academy, over 300 of them, are collecting nonperishable food - at least one can per student and maybe two or three cans or more - and want to donate it to our church.  And my first thought was “why us?  We’re so tiny?”  But one of the leaders at the academy was with us for the baptism of Kathy’s grandson Benjamin, and she remembered us.  And now we have a different challenge…what to do with potentially hundreds of cans of food – but that’s a nice challenge to have.  And beyond the can drive, the students  want to continue to bless us by preparing hot meals for our members.  We’ve welcomed Jim and Kathy and their family and friends, and in blessing them, we’re being blessed ourselves.

Which brings me to the other woman in our readings who has hit rock bottom, the widow who gave her two small copper coins to the Temple treasury.   This woman has been held up as a model of faithful stewardship, giving what little she had and trusting God to provide.  And we are called to step out in faith, to tithe and to trust that God will provide.  All of that is true.  And yet, the woman’s giving comes in the larger context of Jesus’ criticizing the religious leaders of his day for their false piety, in making long prayers in public while devouring widows houses in private.  Just as he’s speaking, along comes this widow to prove his point that while the wealthy gave out of their abundance – out of their leftovers – this widow gave all she had to live on, even though it was such a small amount that the Temple folks probably wouldn’t notice it one way or the other.  We have to trust that God blessed the widow for her giving, but Jesus did not bless the Temple for its receiving….indeed, in our reading next week, Jesus proclaims that the Temple is doomed to destruction.  Those who benefit others are blessed, but those who in their greed grab everything for themselves are condemned.  

“Well, I’ve been down so long that it looks like up to me.”  When we’ve hit bottom, may we trust in God to provide, perhaps in unexpected ways from the least likely people, and may we open ourselves to being used by God to provide for other sisters and brothers who have fallen on hard times.  May we be a blessing to our neighbors, and in so doing, may we be blessed. Amen.