Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Mark 12:38-44

It’s been a week, church. Good job showing up here today. That took effort and intention and courage. The strong pull of isolation and the couch did not win today. Praise God. Because we need each other. We need bodies pressed into rows and children squirming and babies cooing. We need hands outstretched offering the peace of God. We need human contact. We need to sing and remember and breathe together.

You need this if you are brokenhearted or if you are not. And our hope is that the whole body of Christ is able to hear a word of grace this morning. A word of hope. Hope does not depend upon our feelings. Hope is a practice, a duty, a joy and an act of resistance. It is our birthright as Christians.

I refuse to let fear win or control me. So my resistance to it right now looks like dried beans in the crockpot, lighting a candle as the sunsets, music, calling friends, inviting over neighbors. The times ahead need rested and grounded people. I’m so glad you are here. This is a way to get grounded.

And sometimes, we need a word from outside what we are experiencing to remember the world is big and complicated and beautiful.

In the small hours of October 25, six Gloria Dei people got on a flight bound for Guatemala. I was one of them. For ten days, we learned and absorbed and noticed together. Our group loved to ask questions. In fact, our genuine curiosity and engagement meant that many of our learning sessions went well over the allotted time. At one point, I quietly whispered that “no one was allowed to ask any more questions” during the session. It was the last hour in a very long day of learning and I was at the end of my capacity to take in information. And if someone asked a question, it meant that our session would go ten minutes longer per question. So, like an absolute meanie, I said, “No questions, you guys.” Everyone ignored me and asked all the questions.

After four days together, our group was beginning to get a little raggedly around the edges. There is no hiding from one another on a trip like this. We eat and sleep and learn and pray and laugh and travel as a group. This is a cure for loneliness. And we were getting tired. I could feel minor irritations creeping up within me. So as we closed that evening together with reflection and prayer, we talked about it. I shared that it’s natural, at this point, to begin to feel tired of the humans being extra human. And one practice I have when I feel this way about someone is to quietly look for the gold. Everyone has it. Everyone has something absolutely golden about them. Everyone, a Child a God. So I pray, help me see the gold. This became a practice for us the rest of the trip. Not just within our group but with those we encountered. I imagine you might have some folks for whom you have to pray that God might help you see the gold within them. Go on and join me.

We have a million stories to share with you. A 1000 pictures. Today, I’m sharing one. While we were in San Lucas Toliman, we worked with the Catholic mission that Gloria Dei has been connected to for more than 20 years. I was skeptical at first. Of a mission started by a white Catholic priest from Minnesota. But I trust Gloria Dei so I prayed that God might help me set down preconceived judgements. My prayer was, “What if I was just open to whatever we experienced?” And truth be told, San Lucas is a heartening mission that treats people with dignity, that works to preserve Mayan and Guatemalan culture. They have started a hospital with a dental clinic that Gloria Dei folks helped to start. There is a whole coffee growing and roasting enterprise where the farmers are paid a sustaining wage. You can buy this coffee here in our church office. They build homes for the most vulnerable.  They built a school and after realizing traditional education wasn’t working, they switched to the Montessori Method.

People in Guatemala have many of the same hard things that we do: people get sick, need cancer treatments, have disabilities that prevent them from working, are widowed without support, experience mental illness. But there are no safety nets—no government programs to help. So it’s the mission that tends to the most vulnerable in these circumstances by offering charity bags filled with staple foods: dried black beans, rice, ground corn. It is a lifeline and an act of mercy.

One of our days in San Lucas we loaded up in a van—our group of six plus four volunteers from Willmar who are retired dairy farmers, who we referred to as “the farmers” all week and three 20 year olds who are long term volunteers. These young adults were lovely to be around—they are bright eyed and affable. Two of them quit college after a year and left everything to work as guides and translators with the mission. Because their faith compelled them to. So this whole crew, Gloria Dei, the farmers, the young adults with amazing Spanish speaking skills piled into a van and made home visits to deliver charity bags. This was hard in many ways. It meant being received as guests into teeny tiny ramshackle huts. It meant witnessing abject poverty firsthand. It meant relying on the graciousness of others to be invited in. It meant living with their stories of hardship and beauty for the rest of our days.

After one visit, it was quiet in the van. The situation felt too hard to comprehend. A man in a wheelchair, his wife, blind. Their dog barking. Cars whizzing by. They were lonely and talked a blue streak, both at the same time, in a language we did not understand. The translators worked hard to keep up.

The final home visit was to a woman named Clara Lydia. She was roasting corn when we arrived and quickly insisted that we move to the next room and each sit down. Our giant group tried to refuse this hospitality. “On no, it’s okay. We can stand.” But she wouldn’t hear of it. She rustled up enough plastic chairs and stools so that we could all sit, mashed up together in her cinderblock home. Her home that floods every time it rains, now more so with climate change.

Clara Lydia’s life is hard—likely harder than any of ours. She was the youngest of twelve kids and decided early on that she would be the one to care for her aging parents until their deaths. Which she did. It meant a life  of humble service to them. After her dad died, it was her and her mom. But then about a year ago, her mother died. She has a little altar set up in her home with her mom’s picture, fresh flowers, a candle. She’s carrying a lot of grief for her—she said she has home but no one to talk to. She’s lonely. By then end of the hour we spent with her, we had shared stories, she declared one of the farmers her new father, now that her father is dead. She said we are all family now. And maybe that sounds trite but we felt it, church. We felt the connection and the love given and received. It’s real. She couldn’t believe that we would come from America to visit her in her home. We couldn’t believe she would invite us in and love us up so well. It was as if, like the woman in the Gospel story, she had two coins to give and she gave them both to us.

About today’s Gospel:

Everywhere I went this week, I asked people what they needed to hear on Sunday morning. Not one person said, “Please talk about money.” But what has landed in our laps is in fact, a word about money.

And what I know is that we have such deep cultural shame around money that it’s a tricky position for a preacher. We worry about people knowing how much or little we contribute here. That if we give online, we tell ourselves stories that we are being judged when the offering plate comes around it looks like we don’t give.

Or that if we don’t give, we are being judged. Or that if we give generously, people are going to judge us for having too much money.

Maybe you are already looking at shoes or wishing you would have stayed home. What you wanted was comfort and here is the preacher is talking about money. Maybe your heart is racing. Notice right now what is happening in your own body. (Shame, embarrassment, anxiety, impatience).

We humans are created with a need to give.

It is a excellent time to consider what it is we are practicing here as a church. When we pass around those offering plates, we are practicing another way. It’s not that the church needs your money—the church has existed since Jesus with and without money. But you need to give for your own sake.

It’s an act of resistance to a life of simply accumulating. We are so naturally good at accumulating that we have to defiantly practice the opposite together.

And it actually takes all of us to do it. We aren’t strong enough to do it on our own. We need a communal act. We need every single person to touch those offering plates to remember that we belong to one another. Just like we belong to Clara Lydia and we belong to every single person for whom we have to pray: “God, help me find the gold.”

Back in my youth ministry days, I worked with Pastor Mark Becker-who is now retired and a member here. Mark taught us to give until it feels good. Give until it feels good. I know in my own life that when I’m feeling the worst about the world or feeling clutchie and a sense of scarcity with my accumulated resources—the antidote is generosity with my time, money, resources, energy.

What we have in the Gospel story today is Jesus as a professional noticer. He invites us to notice the wealthy scribes in long robes. Acting pious and super religious but ignoring the plight of the widow. They want the best seats and places of honor and they say long prayers.

It is not lost one that I stand here as a religious leader in a long robe in a house of worship. And I confess that I DO like to have the best seats in the house. On every flight I lean my head into the aisle back there in economy and imagine what it would be like to be up there in business class. At every concert or event, I wonder what it would be like to have the best seats. And really, do we have to wonder? We know it’s way better.

All of this is to say, this is highly related content this morning.

So here they all are in the temple. And just a reminder that scripture demands that they take care of the orphans and widows. Just a reminder that the temple was the largest bank in the ancient world. It was a ginormous corrupt system that made loads of money.

In this story, Jesus is a professional noticer who invites us to see this widow.  She’s a widow, which means in the ancient world, she is the most vulnerable in the room.

She’s got two coins left and she puts them both in. In defiance. Despite the corrupt system that ought to have been providing for her.

It’s not that this widow is a model in generous giving. It’s that she believes that the death sentence placed on her will not be cosigned by God. Her trust in God is immense. The system forgot her but God has not. God will not. So, she gives everything.

It’s not a mere risk for her. She believes in provision in the face of desolation and that comes from somewhere.

I suspect it comes from deep trust in God.

Perhaps you have had a week where all sorts of systems have failed you. Things you have put your trust into. Maybe it’s a religious system. Maybe it’s the government. Or election results. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s the illusion of safety.

Jesus peels back the illusions, exposes the lies, uncovers all the things we place our whole hearts and lives in.

If you hate the uncomfortable moment of the illusion being uncovered, you are in good company.

Take heart, church. The final word is always love. In the exposing. In the tearing down.

In the seeing.

See.
See the widow with 2 coins.
See the leaders in long robes.
See the systems that aren’t working.
See Clara Lydia ready with love.
See your neighbor.
See the gold in each.
See the gold within you.

If your eyes are not yet adjusted to this sort of seeing, keep coming around here until they are.