November 12, 2006

Twenty-Third Sunday of Pentecost

Miss Zena and Luther’s Three Conversions

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17; Mark 12:38-44

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

 

 

I met her years ago, in one of my first churches in South Carolina.  During our worship last Sunday, as we remembered the saints who have touched our lives, she came to my mind again, and she has haunted me all week long.  Her story, as I knew it, was simple, really.

 

Her name was Zena, but most of us, including me, called her “Miss Zena” in deference to her age.  Small, quiet, and simple, Miss Zena lived alone in what had been her family’s farmhouse.  She didn’t own it, but the man who had bought the farm allowed her to stay there, surrounded by his crops.  The house was grey, and weathered, as she was.  She was no more willing to paint her home’s sun-dried clapboard walls than to color her own white hair.  Her wrinkled face looked as ancient, in its own way, as the walls of that old place where she lived in a couple of rooms, and where the chickens pecked bugs from the dirt beneath the flooring.  But when she smiled, her wrinkles though deepening, seemed to disappear, her eyes dancing like those of a schoolgirl.

 

Zena was as small as she was quiet, which meant that she fit quite nicely in the little Ford Pinto she kept beside the house, a car she used for occasional visits to town to see the doctor, or for her regular Saturday trips to pick up her baking supplies.  During the week she gathered the eggs laid by the hens in her yard, and on Saturdays she exchanged most of them for sugar and flour and flavorings.  These she added to her remaining eggs to make the pound cakes.

 

Her cakes were the source of her generosity, you might say.  She gave many of them to friends, starting with her preacher.  She was delighted to learn, in my first year there, that I loved pound cake.  Often she would arrive at the back door of the parsonage with a cake that was still warm from the oven.  She sold them, too, to help pay for her few necessities.  I don’t think Miss Zena ever indulged in any extravagance.

 

Except this:  her cake money provided her tithe to the church.  She was always in her accustomed pew on Sunday, except on the rare time when she was sick.  She sat in that same pew, and she put her tithe into the offering plate.  It took her cake money to get her there, but she always tithed.  Always.

 

I was glad to be her pastor, and glad that she liked me, for I liked her.  I enjoyed listening to her talk about her family, or about happier times in the old farmhouse.  Listening to her was my way of repaying something of my own joy at receiving one of those wonderful cakes.  But Miss Zena baked for others pastors, before me and after me.  She liked me, I think.  But her gifts of pound cake had nothing to do with liking me.  It was what she did for her preachers.

 

And her giving to the church was the same way.  She gave from her egg and cake money, faithfully.  Not because she had so much, not because she couldn’t have used the money in other ways.  Miss Zena gave because she loved her church, she loved her God, she loved Jesus.  She loved God with all her heart, and with all her soul, with all her mind, with all her strength. 

 

It had taken her a lifetime to build her life as a giver, and, at her age, giving seemed as natural as the weathered wrinkles in her face.  Her wrinkles and her generosity were part of her, and both were lovely. To Miss Zena, I think, tithing to the Lord was her way of smiling at the world, of giving some support to the causes of Christ in the world.  There were things she could not do, certainly, but she could be in church on a Sunday, so long as the old Pinto kept running.  And she could give from her income of her Saturday baking. Miss Zena was committed to the Lord, heart and soul.  Her cake and egg money told the story.

 

I tell you about Miss Zena because, as I said, she’s been in my mind for the past week.  She’s one of the saints that I deeply believe God will remember fondly and well when all else in our world lies cold and forgotten. 

 

And I tell you about Miss Zena because, as I read the story from Mark in today’s lesson about the widow who put the two little coins into the temple offering, I couldn’t help but think of her again.  Jesus said that others “contributed out of their abundance,” but he said of the widow, “she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” 

 

I wonder if the widow had ever given Jesus a freshly baked pita, or even a little cake.  It’s not likely, of course.  Jesus didn’t come to Jerusalem much at all.  He was from Galilee, not far in our time, but quite a way in his day.  Mark’s gospel suggests that Jesus comes to Jerusalem only once, this once, and he comes there to die.  He, too, is giving God everything he has, all that he has.  Jesus gives God his life.  He gives it freely.

 

Maybe that’s why Jesus notices this woman.  She, and he, are both in the temple, both giving all they have, both trusting God for their daily bread and for their next breath.  Like my friend Miss Zena, both the widow in the temple and Jesus with his disciples had come to trust in God and God alone.  This trusting in God is what some would call faith.  That’s certainly what I would call it.  Trust.  Total trust.  We are called to trust as well, you and I, not in the future that we have planned for ourselves, but in the days that God will open for me and for us, together.

 

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Jesus uses the occasion in the temple to teach the disciples something about the kind of giving that trusts God and God alone.  Knowing that very soon he would no longer be with them, he pointed to the widow, implicitly telling his followers, including all of us:  “See her?   See the trust in her life?  Be like that.  Give like that.  Live in that way, totally trusting God alone.”  Jesus himself had already taught that very same lesson in the prayer he left for his followers.  “Give us this day,” he said we should pray to God, “our daily bread.” 

 

We say we believe in God.  We even put the slogan on our money, “In God we trust.”  Some think it’s time to remove the slogan, and maybe they’re correct, for we don’t really live that way.  If the slogan were to tell the truth of our lives, it would say, “In money we trust.” In our spiritual affection for wealth, we are not all that different from the scribes Mark uses in the first half of today’s lesson as a counterpoint to the widow whom Jesus commended in the second half of the lesson.  Read between the lines.  They are religious leaders.  They profess to love and trust God, with all of their hearts, and with all of their minds, and with all of their soul, and with all of their strength.  But they hang out in the marketplaces, and they jockey for position when they gather for worship.  They say they love others as themselves, but they see in widows only support for themselves.

 

In his day, Jesus saw through the hypocrisy, as did Martin Luther, fifteen centuries later.  Luther, the protestant reformer, was not just a great leader; he was a fine pastor.  He knew that what we do with our resources says something about our deepest commitments.  The use of money is a spiritual issue.  Luther said this:  “People go through three conversions in the Christian faith: their head, their heart and their pocketbook.”  Luther is absolutely correct.  He wrote and taught to help the church come to a better way of thinking the faith.  It’s important to think wisely and well.  But Luther knew in his time what is still true in our time:  unless we love well and give well, it won’t matter much that we think well. 

 

In other words, all three conversions are essential to the faith:  the conversion of the head, to right thinking; the conversion of the heart, to sincere compassion and Christly love for neighbors; and to sacrificial, generous stewardship of the many gifts God puts into our hands.  Unless and until we are generous people, we are at best only barely Christ-like people.  To love God with our heads means to know that God is real, that God is with us.  Knowing is important.  But how much better to love God with our hearts:  that’s about having come to understand that we are loved generously, so we love God and others.  Still that is not enough, says Luther.  The final step is realizing that the God we love with our heads and our hearts asks also for our hands.  God expects us to engage in loving our neighbors as ourselves, investing all we have in making our world more livable, more equitable, more loving for all.

 

Like the widow, Christ was in the temple putting his whole life at God’s disposal.  Christ calls us to be just that courageous.  Nothing else is worthy to be called “Christian,” which means, of course, “Christ-like.”

 

There’s a simple way to put our trust in God, financially:  tithe.  If that’s too much of a challenge, look at what you’re giving for the work of God’s people and God’s kingdom in this world.  Less than about 4 percent is less than the average in a strong, healthy church in our country.  Less than 2 percent is less than the average for all Christians, as a whole, throughout the country.  Less than about a percent, or nothing at all, or just a bit if I happen to be in church when the offering plate is passed.

 

We could all look at ourselves and ask ourselves, do I believe in Christ?  With my head?  With my heart? And with my pocketbook? Failing that, I suppose we might try to live a simple, generous life like the one modeled for me years ago by Miss Zena.  It won’t be easy, of course.  But I would wager, if she were here, Miss Zena would say to us, “It really wasn’t a bad way to live.  In fact,” she might say, “it was the best way.  The very best way of all.  It was the way of trust in God, and finally, that’s all that matters.”

 

That’s what she’s been saying to me this week anyway.  It’s a haunting thought, isn’t it?

Amen.