November 9, 2006
Change
Pentecost 23/27B (Mk 12.38-44)
There’s a pleasant irony in Jesus’ story of the widow’s two copper coins. It keeps us mindful that the gospel’s Good News is not only about change, it is also about small change.
This fact about the gospel seems forever to escape the church, and it is easy to see why. God puts the church in the world as a change-agent, but also as a “safe house” where people can come not only to worship, but to risk being themselves and talking about what really matters in their lives. To talk about change and about how hard it is to change, about why they need to learn to love and need to learn to be loved, about why some people are so mean-spirited and others so helpless, about why life is so difficult and often so unfair, about why there seems to be so much evil and so little good.
Imagine their feeling when they discover how consumed some churches are with self-preservation and with keeping the status quo. Imagine what a shock it must be to find the church’s limited energy wasted in debating a part of its security system, such as whether to change its prayer book or hymnal or its scheduled hour of worship or whether to allow God to give a sacramental blessing to a deep and devoted companionship outside legal marriage. Imagine how puzzled one must be to discover all these issues held on the same level of importance and labored about seemingly without end, as if the gospel really is decided by majority opinion.
No wonder one more segment of people becomes convinced that the church is an inept and limited institution with little or no interest in risking its life for the good health of a broken world. When millions need food and medicine, when religion-based violence produces slaughter and hopelessness, when a handful profits and masses struggle even to survive, when armies itch to seize the day, yet the church so often remains beset by the small-minded and self-serving.
Reflecting on St Paul, Paul Tillich reminded us that the message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a new creation (2 Cor 5.17). To risk a new creation is to risk the greatest change of all. But paradoxically, to embrace this gospel about change is the one condition that allows for the unconditional, and the unconditional love of God is the essential environment in which one can dare to risk surrendering to the frightening experience of a new creation.
For what is both Good and New about the Good News is the wild claim that Jesus did not simply tell us that God loves us even in our wickedness and folly and wants us to love each other in the same way and to love God, as well, but that if we will just get ourselves out of the way, God can and will single-handedly bring about this unprecedented transformation of our hearts.
And what is Good and New about the Good News is the mad insistence that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory but as the outlandish, holy, and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments but in countless hidden ways to make even people like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off by ourselves.
And thus the gospel is not only Good and New but, if you take it in good humor, it’s a Holy Terror. Jesus never claimed that the process of being changed into a human being — and that, by the way, is what conversion is all about — was going to be a Sunday School picnic. On the contrary, one of life’s most painful experiences is hanging on for dear life to our refusal to change.
We think of the church as protection. We even speak of a part of its architecture as the sanctuary, but that hallowed ground was never intended to avoid change, only to nourish and enhance the onerous process of maturing spiritually. Such sanctuary is there to remind us of the widow and her gloriously pitiful offering as she majestically rubbed shoulders in the temple with the fat cats and their trickle-down economics yet gave away without question all that she had.
It is probably no accident that the liturgy gurus placed this story of the widow’s mite smack dab in the middle of these fall seasons when most parishes have their every member canvass. Perhaps the planners hope for at least a mild twinge of conscience in the pews and in the pulpits. But that is to miss the point. For the issue, you see, is not what we do with money, but what we do with ourselves and the ministry to which we are called and which money may or may not enable.
In our story this morning, Jesus warned us about the scribes, not because they were guilty of bad doctrine or wrong-footed politics, but because they were mean, and they were small. They trivialized their positions of respect in exchange for small favors. At a time when people needed large and noble spirits, they were petty. They remind us, as well, of one kind of human behavior that has hardly changed at all.
This small parish in its recent past and in its current transition seems already remarkably on its way to becoming an enclave where people can dare to wrestle productively with change. It can be a place where many of the larger church’s so resistant movements can be seen as mostly theater where vagueness and shouting and religiose performances make for marginal entertainment value at best. And it can proclaim to all who would hear that the world as it really is out there beyond this ecclesiastical myopia makes such shallowness seem positively dangerous.
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Note: My frequent “research” colleagues Tom Ehrich and Fred Buechner (plus a pinch of Jack Spong) again had something of a hand in this current homiletic mayhem.