24 Pentecost B November 8, 2015
Luther Memorial Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Guengerich Hutson
1 Kings 17: 8-16 + Psalm 146 + Hebrews 9: 24-28 + Mark 12: 38-44
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Last Sunday our sisters and brothers in the Episcopal Church installed their new presiding Bishop, Michael Curry. In his sermon, Curry said this: “If it is not about love, it is not about God.” If it is not about love it is not about God. In other words, if someone says that something is “of God”, but that something is filled with hate or prejudice or judgment or bigotry….then it is not about love and it most certainly not about God.
Bishop Curry’s words settled deeply into my heart this week; I read them on Facebook, which is one of the good uses for Facebook. Of course I also read a bunch of ridiculous stuff, and that often gets me into trouble. Very shortly after reading Bishop Curry’s sermon, someone who I genuinely love and care for, someone to whom I am sort of related, posted that he thought all welfare recipients in our country ought to be tested for drugs. Like I said, I sometimes get into trouble on Facebook, but I like to think it is most often when I stand up for what I know to be right in the face of what I believe to be wrong.
And so I responded to his post with the story of the mostly women and some men I encountered as I sat in the welfare office to prove that as a suddenly single mom and a senior in seminary I, in fact, did not have enough money to buy food for my children or keep a roof over our heads or provide health care for them. I wrote of the indignities of that experience and how, actually, I was rather certain that any of those people I met along that difficult journey would have gladly taken a drug test if it meant their children could eat.
What saddened me most of all is that this person is a very public Christian. But his post was so lacking in love that I couldn’t find God there anywhere. What he was saying publicly and how he was treating and speaking of the poor simply is not how God sees the poor.
Biblical scholars have a term for it, a phrase devoted to it. It is called “God’s preferential option for the poor” or “God’s preference for the poor.” Throughout Scripture, God is very close to the poor, calling for the community to care for them. Over and over again, in the life of Jesus, he hangs out with the poor. He calls the poor and the outcast to be his inner circle, his 12 disciples. He could have called the religious leaders or the leaders of government, but he didn’t and the Good Friday story tells us how that ended.
In both the reading from 1 Kings and the Gospel reading from Mark today, widows figure prominently in the story. In 1 Kings the widow we meet is a foreigner. She is not an old woman, for she has a son still living at home. Somehow she has been as resourceful as possible, managing to eek out a living for herself and her son. She is just about at the end of their provisions, though, when Elijah appears and she puts her own needs aside to care for his.
The Gospel story begins with Jesus warning the people about the scribes. Now, the scribes were a group of people who enjoyed status in Israel. They were obviously educated, they were religious leaders in that day, and they were known to hang around with the Pharisees, who were the leaders in the temple. In the hierarchy of the time, the scribes were pretty high up the ladder.
But we know what Jesus thinks of hierarchies and status and ladders.
So Jesus is warning the people to stay away from the scribes, precisely because they think so much of themselves. And then there is this in verse 40 of Mark 12…”they (the scribes) devour widow’s houses”. Jesus doesn’t offer details about how they do this exactly, but we can imagine that they might have ample opportunity. Perhaps they took advantage of the widows by asking them to give their homes over to the temple treasury. Perhaps they asked the widows to give more than was fiscally prudent. Perhaps they imposed unfair taxes on these very people who could not afford it.
Perhaps things have not changed much at all.
If we take this understanding of God, framed by Bishop Curry, and say “If it is not about love, it is not about God”, clearly the actions of the scribes, despite being the religious authorities of the day, were not about love and in fact, were not about God.
There is a song whose refrain says “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love. Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” That song is based on the words of Jesus in John’s Gospel “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples: that you love one another.”
Some days I find it rather miraculous that anyone knows that there are Christians in the world at all. Too much is said by those calling themselves Christians that is not about love and so, is not about God. Too much time is spent on ridiculous, unimportant matters, like whether or not the Starbucks holiday cups are agents of evil. Too much energy is given to judging those who are different from us…whether it is how they identify in their gender, who they choose to love, or how low on the social ladder we have constructed they appear to be. And then in the irony that is the Gospel, we remember that those voices that drip of judgment and hatred and bigotry….those people are just as beloved by God as anyone else, as everyone else. But I believe that their actions and words, filled with hate and fear and prejudice, must break God’s heart.
Following God is very seldom the easy path. I’d venture to say that it is almost never the easy path. God will ask hard things of us in the name of caring for the least of these when that is the absolute last thing that we want to do. God will ask us, when we are in the middle of trying to figure out how we are going to survive…when we are perhaps down to just a little oil and a little grain and our last meal….to care for a stranger.
The Psalmist sang of the great joy that comes from acting out of love. 5 Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God, 6 who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; 7 who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; 8 the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. 9 The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
I often tell people that the year I lived on welfare was the year that my children and I received the greatest blessings in our lives. It was because I learned this truth: That God cares for God’s people through God’s people. That God executes justice and feeds the hungry and sets the captive free and opens eyes and minds and hearts and watches over strangers and upholds the poor…..God does that through God’s people. That God cares for God’s people through God’s people.
Beloved community….how will they know that we are disciples of the living God? How will they know that we are followers of Jesus? What will they know of us and what will they know of God and what will they know of love when our decision making focuses on what we want – respect in the marketplaces and the best seats at the banquet and the best spots at the synagogue or church? What will they know if we say we are Christians but do not care for the poor or the orphan or the widow? What will they know when we choose to ignore the homeless around us….the families sleeping in their cars, the young men sleeping in our doorway, the old veteran asking for $2 for a burger. What will they know when we live in a city that has declared a state of emergency because of the number of people who do not have homes and we do not respond?
At the last day, when we stand before God and offer some account of how we used this one wondrous, holy, beautiful life God has given to us….will we be able to say that, although it was very hard much of the time, we acted out of love?
Thanks be to God. Amen.