Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
A few years ago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London, England, hosted a display called Bags: Inside Out featuring
handbags going back into the 16th century. The display moved from massive, traveling
trunks, evolving to carriers for wartime gas masks, to the first-ever Hermès
Birkin. Looking at the displays online, you see the story of how carrying
devices evolved from practical, utilitarian containers. Coming out of the Middle
Ages, bags began to morph into a form of self-expression, portable canvases
that featured the bagmaker’s craftsmanship and artistry. It became more common
for people to carry ornately embroidered drawstring pouches; grooms gave their
brides bags that depicted love stories as wedding gifts. “What makes them so
powerful as symbols is that they are so visible on the body,” said Lucia Savi,
who curated the exhibit. “We carry them at the crook of our elbow or in our
hands or at the waist. They immediately tell us who we are, and who we aspire
to be.” She added, “We don’t need a bag when we’re inside our homes; we need
them when we’re moving from one place to another, so the history of bags
reveals what men and women could and could not do.”[1]
As a boy, I watched my mom and my sisters and their
purses, and then my wife with her purses from slim and demure to massive
purses-as-diaper bags, culminating with my daughters with their purses. I have
observed other purses as well. As such, I am eminently qualified to make this
assessment: I have never seen a woman’s empty purse stay empty for long. Once
taken into possession, almost immediately, a purse is filled. Little girls want
to copy their moms, so they fill their play-purse with some change, a packet of
Kleenex, a tube of chap-stick, and their play phone. Meanwhile, moms grab their
wallet, sunglasses, keys, cell phone and battery backup, lipstick, blush, Smith
& Wesson…the list goes on. Like mother, like daughter; like daughter, like
mother. Except when it’s new, or when being cleared out to give it away, I
don’t think I have ever seen an empty purse if it belongs to a woman.
Maybe that’s why this woman in Mark’s Gospel is so
surprising. Literally, we know nothing about her except she is a widow and she
is poor. I think most suspect she is elderly, but it is quite possible she was
younger. Wives, generally, were much younger than their husbands – think Joseph
and Mary who, tradition says, had a great age difference between them. This
woman’s husband could have died as a soldier in combat, from the flu, from a
farming accident, from marauding bandits or even a snake bite. In the days
before life insurance, welfare programs, and social security, a widowed woman
was in serious financial trouble. Unable to own property or a business, with no
regular means of income or, perhaps, a son or male kinsman-redeemer, all she
had was the charity of others.
It has been said that clothes make the man. If that’s
true, I submit that accessories set apart the woman. In this case, however, it
only accentuated her poverty. What did her purse look like? Certainly not an
Hermez, Vuitton, or Coach; it was probably as plain and ordinary as she,
without oohs or aahs, going completely unnoticed. What do you think her purse
looked like? In my mind, it was a very small cloth drawstring bag, made from
scraps of some unidentified garment. I imagine it to be not much bigger than
her fist, small enough that it could be clutched tightly so some scoundrel
couldn’t easily snag it from her grasp while she counted out a precious penny
for a bite of food for a meager meal.
How is it that something so small seems so deep when
reaching in for the last penny? If you’ve ever had to reach into a wallet or
purse and pull out the very last bill until payday, it yawns wide to show its
pending emptiness. In her case, the depths of that shallow bag revealed two
copper coins. Those of us that grew up with the King James Bible learned this
as two “mites.” You are familiar with the name from the LWML Mite Boxes. What
you probably did not know is this was not an official coin of the Roman Empire.
It was strictly a Jewish coin, called a lepton in Hebrew, made
especially for the poor. It was very small, both in size and in value, less
than even the smallest coin that Rome made. The smallest Roman coin was a
denarius, a day’s wage. The lepton, the mite, was valued at 1/64 of a
denarius. (Doing the math of the modern American wage, this equaled about $20
in today’s economy.) The widow had two of these coins, 1/32 of a day’s wage.
(By contrast, Judas was paid almost three months of wages to betray Jesus.) She
reaches into her home-made bag, pulls out the 2 coins, and slides them into the
temple treasury without any attention given to her.
It is doubtful that anyone even noticed. The text says that many people had been coming into the temple, tossing large amounts into the treasury. The way offerings were collected then was with something that looked like a funnel or trumpet bell sticking out of the wall. You would toss your coins into the funnel and they would pass, sliding and rattling, into a treasury. You can imagine the clatter of coins being tossed into these metal tubes. The bigger the coin, the more coins, the more noise was made as drachmas and shekels and denarii clattered and rattled their way into the treasury. Apparently, some made quite the show of tossing their offerings into the brass bells, as if the volume of noise was a measure of their standing before God. Look! Listen! See how God blessed me!
Contrast that with the widow. She reaches into her
meager purse and pulls out the two coins and puts them into the treasury horn.
They were so small, so insignificant that the faint sliding sound they make
isn’t even noticed among the noisy crowd. Then, she disappears. We want to know
what happened to her. Did someone help her? Were her physical, material needs
cared for by strangers or a family member? Did the temple treasury help her
with alms for the poor, ironically giving her those very coins back, along with
a few more? We don’t know. I suspect she faded into the crowd, one of the
nameless, countless poor of the city of Jerusalem, unknown, unrecognized,
unnoticed by anyone.
Except by Jesus – He noticed. He pointed her out to the
disciples: This poor widow has put more than all those who are contributing to
the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out
of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” I cannot
prove this with the text, but in my mind, her purse is about the size of a
fist. I’ve read that your heart is about the size of your fist. I admit this is
speculation, a homiletical connection if you will, but I’ll offer it here: her
purse may have been empty, but her heart is full of faith in the promises of
God in Christ Jesus. In fact, that’s what Jesus notices – not the size of her
gift or the emptiness of her purse but that her faith is placed solely in Him.
I do not want you to hear this text as a prescription,
“You must put your last two cents into the offering plate to be like this
woman.” It’s not a stewardship text, nor is it to be used with the stick of the
law where you are pushed into giving more because you’re not giving it all.
Rather, this text tells us something about Jesus and that He was willing to
surrender everything for you.
This morning’s reading began with Jesus commenting on
the scribes. He says they are enamored with how people look and the positions
of power and prestige they hold. Then he comments on how they “devour widows
houses and for a pretense, make long prayers.” It’s a rather sad commentary of
how they see their vocation of service to the church. Their calling to be the
spiritual leaders of the house of Israel has lost its sacred nature as they
take the houses of the widows. Their holiness has disappeared, and they have
become depraved that they seek to take from the poorest, all while parading
about with fine clothes and wordy, blabbering prayers. The church leadership is
corrupt and, by extension, even the church has become corrupt in failing to
demonstrate the mercy of God to the people of God.
In contrast, the poorest offers what little she has,
willing to sacrifice everything for the wellbeing of the church of God. She
sacrifices what she has, even her own livelihood, for the corrupt church and for
its corrupt leadership. You want to stand up and scream, “Don’t do it! Save
those precious pennies for a small meal! They are pretentious and pietistic.
They have plenty and are stealing from you! Even the widow of Nain saved a
little for herself and her son! Don’t do it!” But she won’t; she wouldn’t be
denied her joy in giving her small gifts back to the Lord who provided those
two small coins first to her. She sacrifices her gifts, she sacrifices herself
for the sake of the church, corrupt though it might be.
This widow stands as a picture of what Christ does for
His bride, an image of what Jesus will do for the Church. Or, rather, Christ fulfills
her sacrifice; He takes her sacrifice for the sake of a corrupt church, and
magnifies the gift. She was willing to surrender two coins; Jesus is willing to
surrender His life to redeem a corrupt church and her corrupt people. In Mark’s
Gospel, Jesus is drawing nearer to the cross. This is, in fact, his last Temple
visit prior to His arrest. He will soon enter Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Those
corrupt leaders – the scribes and pharisees, the Sanhedrin and teachers of the
law, will have Jesus arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death on the
cross. In effect, the church – led by
the very scribes like those whom Jesus addresses – devours Him. Look at what
Jesus does! He takes this corrupt thing and He dies for it! He dies for those
who build beautiful buildings and for those who will never set foot in one. He
dies for the prideful and the humble, the powerful and the weak. He dies to
offer His very last breath to the Father, and He rises to bring to His Father
all who believe. He sheds His blood for it to redeem its corruption and make it
the holiest of all holies in His death and resurrection.
If you have ever felt out of place in the church, like
you are on the outside looking in, that the church doesn’t need you and that
leaves you feeling that maybe you don’t belong, yet at the same time knowing
you need the gifts God offers to the church? I remember a young couple, new
members of the church at the time. She and her husband volunteered to help
count offerings. After a few weeks, they dropped out of the role, and soon
after that, they stopped coming to church. When I saw her one day at her place
of work, I told her I missed seeing she and her husband. She looked sad. She
said, “We helped count offerings for a month. We saw what people give, and we
know what we can’t give. Pastor, I can tell you – you don’t need us.” She saw
herself and her husband through the eyes of everyone else in the church. She
failed to see herself and her husband through the eyes of Jesus.
Perhaps we would be better off, instead of thinking how
rich we all are, by remembering what Luther taught us. He often referred to Christians as beggars
who stood before the Lord with our sacks that have been emptied by life’s
struggles, temptations, hardships, and frustrations, by spouses who don’t
understand, by children who demand, by bosses who command, by rising costs and
declining health. We sin against others and we are sinned against by others. Bit
by bit, piece by piece, our sacks are emptied. So, we return to the Lord’s
House each week, refilled and refreshed with the Word, with Bread and Wine,
Body and Blood, hearing our sins forgiven, renewed and refreshed, encouraged by
each other in the name of Jesus. Even if our purses are light, our sacks have
been refilled with the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We live in a world branded with names like Chanel,
Vuitton, Prada and St. Laurent, and in some circles, if you’re not carrying
those names, you’re nothing. Thanks be to God, you are marked with the name of
Jesus in Baptism, so regardless your purse says Dior from Paris, or Time and
Tru from Walmart, you are marked with the sign of the cross, on your forehead
and heart, and through water and word, are made God’s child, through faith in
Christ. That is a treasure beyond measure.
When you reach into your purse or your pockets later,
and fetch out your keys, your sunglasses, or Advil, remember this unknown,
unnamed saint who gave her final two pennies to the Lord. Remember her, not out
of guilt or shame that you still have change rattling around, but that she gave
lovingly and faithfully to the Lord. Thank God for her faithful sacrifice. It’s
not about quantity but quality, remember. Or, to be more precise, it’s about the
faithfulness and love of Christ who surrendered all for you. We are beggars; it
is true. Yet, we are filled with the rich grace, mercy, and hope that is in
Christ Jesus.
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