H. Michael Brewer
Crescent Springs Presbyterian
16 October 2005
IMITATING THE WIDOW
Mark 12:41-44
In the Jewish Temple of Jesus’ day, there were thirteen offering receptacles in the so called Court of
Women, an area open to both sexes. These receptacles were shaped like trumpets. A worshiper could
drop an offering into the big end of the trumpet and it would be funneled through the small end into a
lock-box. Giving in this way was sometimes called “sounding the trumpet,” perhaps because of the
clamor of coins sliding into the offering box. These gifts were used both for the upkeep of the Temple
and also for doing God’s work among the poor, the hungry, and the sick.
The Jewish faith emphasized alms giving, and we can be sure that the trumpets were sounded often
in the Temple. Particularly at the time of the Passover, when many out-of-towners would be bringing
offerings, some of whom may have saved up their gifts since last year’s Passover. So one day near the
time of Passover when Jesus sat down to do some people watching in the Temple, he saw the arrival of
some large gifts from wealthy people. It was in the midst of this wealthy company that a poor widow
arrived and dropped in two puny pennies.
In fact, the coins she gave were half-pennies, a tiny copper coin called the lepton. Lepton literally
means “tiny thing.” The lepton was the smallest coin in use in Palestine in those days. Although we call it
a half-penny for simplicity’s sake, actually it would take probably eight lepta to equal the buying power
of one modern penny. The lepton, the widow’s mite, is an unimpressive coin, the sort of thing a person
might leave lying on the street, not worth stooping to pick it up. It was two of these lepta that the widow
dropped in the offering box, not enough to get even a tiny squeak out of the trumpet.
So much for the coins. Maybe a word about widows is in order as well. The New Testament world
was quite a different culture than ours. There were no jobs for respectable women. There was no social
security. Except for the extremely wealthy, there were no investments, no savings, no nest eggs.
Poverty, real, grinding, hand-to-mouth poverty was the rule rather than the exception. And widows
were the poorest of the poor. Unless there was an adult son or a brother-in-law or a second husband, a
widow was sentenced to absolute destitution.
Form the poor state of her finances, we may assume this widow was on her own and barely getting
by. According to Jesus, the two tiny copper coins she dropped into the trumpet constituted everything
she had at that moment. We could wax sentimental about this widow and her gift, but if we wander
down that road we may miss some important lessons.
The first lesson has to do with God’s peculiar economy. When the widow drops her coppers in,
Jesus nudges his disciples and says, “Look! That woman has given more than all these rich people with
their bulging bags of silver and gold.” That may explain why Jesus didn’t carry the money bag for the
disciples!
If Jesus were a member of this church, I can think of kinds of ways for him to serve. He’d be a great
deacon. He’d be a delight on the Fellowship Committee. As a carpenter, he’d be a great catch for
Buildings and Grounds. But we wouldn’t want him on the Finance Committee. Instead of focusing on
the top 20% of givers, Jesus would be all excited about some little girl who dropped half of her
allowance in the plate or a widow who was tithing on her social security check.
You see, God doesn’t simply look at what we give, but God also looks at what we keep. That’s the
yardstick Jesus applied to the gifts at the Temple. “The rich people,” says Jesus, “have given from their
abundance.” The Greek word translated “abundance” literally means “overflow.” The rich have so
much more than they need that they can give grandly from the overflow and never deprive themselves at
all. Their appear large, but they have kept back so much for their comfort and security that in God’s
eyes their offerings are very meager indeed.
But the widow gives from her “poverty,” that is in Greek her “deficit.” You’ve heard of deficit
spending? This woman practices deficit giving. The widow may not know where her next meal is
coming from, but she empties her purse into the collection plate. She has a grateful heart and she has
trust in God. The rich are too scared to give more than the interest on their investments, but the widow
is bold. Everything she has comes from God, and she’s not afraid to hand it back to God.
Somebody told me a story about the richest man in town who stood up in church during the
stewardship season and said, “When I was a young man, I sat in church one day and the time came for
the offering and I only had one dollar to my name. I put that dollar into the offering plate. God has
prospered me because I gave everything I had that day.” As he sat down, an elderly woman leaned
over to him and said, “I dare you to do it again!”
Somehow, the more we have the harder it is to turn it over to God. According to the statistic, the
poor give a greater percentage of their income to charity than do the wealthy. Odd that those who have
less would be willing to give more. This is a hard lesson for folks like us. God judges our giving not only
by what we hand over, but also by what we hold back.
There’s a second lesson here. The truly acceptable gift to God is the giving of one’s life. There’s an
old Jewish folktale about a woman who brought a handful of flour to the Temple, but the priest rebuked
her for approaching God with such a paltry gift. That night an angel appeared to the priest and said,
“You do not know how poor that woman is. You had no right to belittle her gift. When she brought that
handful of flour it was as if she offered her very life to God.”
Jesus seems almost to echo that story as he says to the disciples, “This widow has put in all she had
to live on.” It is as if the had offered her life to God, and that is the offering God desires from us. Our
lives. Our selves. If we have given ourselves to God, we will scarcely balk in the matter of money. On
the other hand, if we’re nervous about giving our money to God, there are clearly strings attached to
our discipleship, conditions on our commitment.
I’m not suggesting that God wants us all to be like Francis of Assisi who gave away even the clothes
on his back and lived the rest of his days depending upon the charity of others. But neither does God
want us to have heart palpitations at the mere mention of tithing, as if giving a tenth of our income is an
unthinkable impossibility. Frankly, giving a tenth would be a small sacrifice for most of us.
By now you may be thinking that the point of this sermon is that you and I should imitate the widow.
Actually, there’s be no point in preaching a sermon like that, since most people are already imitating the
widow in one way or another. Either we are imitating the size of the widow’s gift or the size of her
commitment. People tend to do one or the other.
I remember a story from Charlie Baker, who used to be the director at a wonderful Presbyterian
mission in Eastern Kentucky, the Buckhorn Children’s Center. A woman wrote to him and explained
that her heart had been touched by the needs of the children under Buckhorn’s care. In a spirit of
Christian charity she wanted to give something to help the work at Buckhorn. She didn’t have much
money, so she was enclosing some teabags for the children. “P.S.” she added, “the teabags have only
been used once.”
I’m uncomfortable criticizing someone else’s gift, but it seems to me that if the lady had been
imitating the size of the widow’s commitment, she would have sent the teabags without using them first.
As it turned out, she merely imitated the size of the widow’s gift.
For a look at the other side of the coin, consider the Christians living in Nepal, an officially Hindu
nation. Christians belonging to a small house church in northern Nepal were attacked by Buddhist and
Hindu villagers last summer. One church member was hospitalized after the assault, but the violence
didn’t end there. The angry mob also destroyed houses and cornfields belonging to Christian villagers.
Buddhist authorities in the village had repeatedly asked the Christians to give up their faith. The
Christians refused and paid dearly for their commitment to Jesus.
A married couple who run two children’s homes in Nepal have been imprisoned for their faith. The
man is Indian and his wife is Nepali. They care for 77 children in an orphanage in Nepal and nine more
in a children’s home in India. They also operate a Christian school. Authorities have jailed the couple
for teaching children about Jesus, an alleged violation of Nepal’s law against encouraging people to
change from one religious faith to another. They face as much as three years in prison for their crime.
Threats, intimidation, loss of home and livelihood, prison—that’s a lot to sacrifice for the name of
Jesus. Yet the church in Nepal is growing because Christians there are imitating the size of the widow’s
commitment in their willingness to offer everything to God. I confess my faith feels like a small and
casual thing when compared to the sacrifices some Christians are making.
How much of your life are you offering to God? If you want to give that some thought, why not take
a long, honest look at your giving? Being a Christian certainly requires much more than the stewardship
of our finances, but our giving is one very visible barometer of how much we love God. Is our giving
proportionate to what we have received? Is our giving commensurate with our commitment?
Think about it. Some people imitate the size of the widow’s commitment and some imitate the size of
her gift. We all imitate the widow—in one way or another.
Soli Deo Gloria!