November 10, 2024, Devouring Widow’s Houses, Mark 12:38-44 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ November 10, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon click the link above. The text is below:

When Carroll and I bought our first house, lo those many years ago, we found an old brick farmhouse inside the St. Louis city limits. It had been built in the 1800’s and then kind of swallowed up by the neighborhood that had grown up around it since it was first built. The ladies, two sisters, who lived there before us had grown up in that house and lived there for going on a century, until they passed away and left the house to their nephew, who was a retired fireman and really didn’t want an old falling-down house to take care of, so he sold it to us. Very cheap.

We never knew those ladies, of course, but we could tell, by the mail and the phone calls that we kept receiving on their behalf, that they must have been kind, generous Christian ladies who had donated to a lot of missionaries and evangelists and other charities. And it was also clear that they barely had two cents to rub together themselves, because there obviously hadn’t been any work done on that house for decades. The wiring was ancient, the plaster that hadn’t fallen off the walls yet was old horsehair plaster, there was no insulation in the walls or attic, and the first time we turned on the water in the upstairs bathroom it came pouring out of the kitchen ceiling downstairs.

And yet, for the first year or more of our life in the house on Mitchell Avenue, we received a seemingly endless barrage of cards and letters thanking those sweet old sisters for their generosity, and asking for more. Always asking for more. We got so many letters like this: God bless you for your donation. If you could just send another dollar or twenty dollars or hundred dollars to Rev. Whoever’s ministry, we promise that God will give you a special jewel in your crown when you get to heaven.

The church has always been very good at teaching the story of the Widow’s mite. You better believe our ladies had been taught from their Sunday School days how blessed that old widow was when she made her way to the Temple and dropped her last two pennies in the offering box, in the midst all the great men giving their much more impressive offerings. I am sure they had been taught how Jesus noticed that old lady, quietly offering all she had out of her great love for God and her deep reverence for his Temple. Her offering was greater than all those other offerings, Jesus said to his disciples, because she gave out of her poverty, everything she had to live on. It is a beautiful and memorable story, and we all have it deeply imprinted in our minds and hearts.

But have you ever heard a sermon about what Jesus said before he pointed out the generosity of that poor little widow? “Beware of the scribes,” he said, “who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

God loves and blesses the generosity of those who give from the heart, who give out of their poverty and not their full bank account. That is true. But first and foremost, God cares about the needs of the poor and the helpless. All through the Bible, God tells us that he hears the cry of the orphan and the widow and the stranger. The orphan and the widow were mentioned in particular, because of all the members of Jewish society orphans and widows were the most vulnerable. They had the least support, the least protection. A woman who was a widow had lost the income and shelter her husband provided. She had lost the position she held in society by virtue of the respect people had for her husband. And an orphan, just the same. A fatherless child was set adrift with no family to provide a home for them, no one to feed them, no one to clothe them. The stranger, the immigrant, was isolated in a foreign culture, forever an outsider. God declares, over and over, that his ear is open for the cry of the helpless. That’s why Jesus’s heart went out to the widow of Nain when he saw her in the funeral procession, burying her only son, the only hope she had for support and care in her old age. That’s why he brought him back to life and gave him back to his mother.

In the book of Exodus, God warns his people: “You shall not do wrong to an immigrant or oppress him, for you yourselves were immigrants in the land of Egypt.You shall not abuse or take advantage of any widow or orphaned child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.” It is a harsh word, and kind of scary, but we should take to heart what it tells us about God, what he cares about, and what he expects from his people.

The Old Testament reading today is a parallel to the story of the Widow’s Mite. God sends Elijah to a foreign land, where he has commanded a widow woman to take care of him, to give him room and board. The difficulty with this woman’s assignment is that she is desperately poor because the whole land is in a time of famine. When Elijah asks her to bring him something to eat she tells him that she’s on her way to prepare one last meal for herself and her son. After that, she tells the prophet, we have nothing. We will eat together, my son and I, and then we will die together. But Elijah, knowing that God has appointed this woman to provide for him in the days to come, tells her. “Not to worry. You go and make me a little cake from that last flour you have. Bring it to me, and prepare something for yourself and your son as well. And I swear to you, by the word of God, that your oil and your flour won’t run out until rain has returned to this land.” And that’s exactly what happened. In faith, like the widow Jesus saw in the Temple, the widow of Zarephath brought that first cake to Elijah before she or her son had anything to eat. But God was as good as his word, so that the woman and her son had food to eat until the famine was over. Other things happened as well, but that doesn’t come into this part of the story.

The point is that God called that widow woman from Zarephath to give out of her poverty. And she did. But there is another point, and that is that God sent his prophet to provide for her so that she didn’t have to prepare one last meal and die alongside her son, but had enough to keep them all fed as long as the famine lasted. And I believe the people of God, and the church of Christ, are called in the same way, to have God’s heart for the needy and the helpless, for the widow and the fatherless, for the immigrant and the outcast, the last and the least.

The prophet Ezekiel revealed, shockingly, that the reason God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, the classic bad guys of the Old Testament, was not because their inhabitants were homosexual, as is so often taught, but because they were greedy and heartless to the poor. “Look,” Ezekiel said, “this was the sin of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, abundance of food, and all the creature comforts, but they did nothing to help the poor and needy.” The thing that God was unwilling to tolerate was the neglect of the poor.

That’s the heart of Jesus’s parable in Matthew 25, when he tells us clearly, speaking of the hungry and the naked, the prisoner and the sick: “As often as you have done these things for these, my brothers and sisters, you have done them for me.”

And remember that the very first deacons who were ordained, at the very beginning of the church, were ordained, according to the book of Acts, to make sure the widows of Jerusalem were not neglected.

God hears the cry of the widow, the stranger, and the fatherless. And woe be to the Church if we build our buildings, or carry out our ministries, by devouring the houses of widows, by which I mean looking to our own needs and neglecting the needs of the poor and helpless. If we do that, we will receive the greater condemnation. I believe this is a word to the whole church, but especially to the church in America which is extremely wealthy by the standards of the world. It’s a word to us here at St. Philip’s, in this time when things are at a point of change and uncertainty for us, to remember always that God has put us here for to care for one another, but also to protect and care for the vulnerable, those whose lives are maybe more than ever hanging in the balance.

We love and admire the generosity of the widow who gave her last pennies out of her deep faith and love for God. And we should follow her example, because we have work to do, to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked and to visit the lonely: to come alongside the despised and the neglected, the last and the least, and all those who are dear to the heart of our God. +