Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17; Mark 12:38-44
Summary: As humans, we’re often tempted to focus on policing the in-group rather than reaching out to people we disagree with. Now more than ever, we need to live as Karl Barth suggested: with a bible in one hand, and a newspaper in the other, speaking truth to power and offering our two coins faithfully in the world.
Good morning friends — so glad to be with you, and also happy to have ditched my scooter for walking in the boot, though I actually move slower now than I did with the scooter! Everything is healing well, and I should be crutch free in just a couple more days.
I want to start with a story — last week I preached at Park View Mennonite, the church where I grew up in Harrisonburg. Their associate pastor, Paula Stoltzfus, had reached out to me back in August to see if I could help out with a sermon this fall while they search for a new lead pastor; she gave me a list of a few Sundays to choose from — I looked over my calendar and replied ‘oh, November 10 looks great;’ she wrote back right away with a big thank-you for being so willing to preach the Sunday after the election — that was news to me.
We live in a strange and changing time, politically, and as a pastor I struggle to know what my role is in addressing politics. Separation of church and state is extremely important to both my faith and my politics, and I never want my politics to stand in the way of spreading the good news of Jesus; but, my faith in Jesus clearly impacts my political understandings, and now more than ever I think it’s important we in the church speak honestly and openly about the political realm; however, I also want to do so constructively, for the purposes of building up, not tearing down. If I fall short of that goal today, please forgive me!
So, I come humbly today, wrestling with two simple topics: politics and money, because the lectionary text said I had too! Money, we’ll come to later; first, a little politics.
It’s one of the eternal questions of our faith — how do we balance our earthly citizenship with our kingdom citizenship; how do we live faithfully in God’s kingdom, our primary place of allegiance, while not overlooking or neglecting the rulers and powers of the world, which we know can do both tremendous good and tremendous evil? In the last two weeks, while pondering these things, I turned to Karl Barth.
Many regard Barth as the most important theologian of the 20th century. Born in Switzerland in 1886, he was a prolific author, and I, like many seminarians, at one point decided to read through his magnum opus, Church Dogmatics — an unfinished work of 13 volumes at the time of his death. Again like many, I gave up reading somewhere in the middle of volume one!
Barth has his blind spots and failures, as we all do, but he has some insights we cannot forget as we sail stormy political waters — seeking to give to God what is God’s, and to Caesar what is Caesers, in a time when the political foundations of our country, which many of us once perceived as immovable are shifting, if not crumbling. To have a politician who has promised violence, mass deportation, and political retribution lead our country once again — and to have him put in power with the blessing of many, many Christians — leaves me afraid: for the country, the church, and the world.
Now, I want to be clear — there are many values often labeled conservative that I deeply resonate with: some include personal and fiscal responsibility, respect for tradition and family, and limited government; and I don’t fault other Christians for seeking these things with their votes; but, Jesus calls us to be wise as serpents, and innocent of doves — we must be aware that leaders of all types use some issues as fronts for much more destructive ends, and our American parties have rapidly changed in the last ten years. That said, I want to be crystal clear that I believe it is an asset, not a liability, that our congregation has a variety of political opinions, and it is honest sharing and listening that leads to understanding, and away from hatred and fear.
In any case, it’s because of my fears that I went back to Barth these past two weeks. Though he spent most of his career as an academic theologian, he knew his faith compelled him to speak and act in the political reality of his day. He, alongside Deitrich Bonhoeffer and others, helped found the German Confessing Church, resisting the rise of Nazism generally and Hitler’s state domination of the church in particular. Barth, though he spent his career in Germany, was a Swiss citizen; when he spoke out against Nazism he lost his prestigious professoriate and was deported; Bonhoeffer, of course, later paid with his life. Though Barth did as much as anyone in the Christian community to combat Nazism, after the war he spent years lamenting and confessing that he had not done enough to stand against the evils of his day.
I bring up Barth today not just for his life story, but for a theological image he provides that keeps me centered in good times and bad: in an interview with Time Magazine just a few years before his death, Barth stated that faithful Christians need to go through life with a bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. When we isolate ourselves as Christians, dwelling only in the bible, we fail to act in the world as God would have us act; but similarly, when we read only the newspaper, and forget the story of God’s miraculous grace and redemptive work in the world, we are left anchorless, hopeless, and afraid; tempted to give up on the goodness of our neighbor, the goodness of God’s creation, and perhaps even the goodness of God. Barth encourages us to start with the bible — we must engage the world, yes, but after being strengthened, and challenged, by our faith.
But there’s a question we must ask today — didn’t the Christians of Nazi Germany have the bible in one hand, and a newspaper in the other? Don’t the Christians I disagree with today have a bible in one hand, and a news-source in the other?
So, we must refine Barth’s question: what part of the bible is in our hand? and what news-sources are in the other?
The bible is a long and curious book, and to borrow from Hesston College Bible professor Michelle Hershberger, it often it presents what happened, not what God wanted to happen; and so, if one looks for rigid law, punishment, the exclusion of the foreigner, and fear in the Bible, one will find it in the scriptures. But we as Anabaptists know where to go first, and most often, in the bible: to Jesus life and ministry, and particularly the Sermon on the Mount — a scripture that tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, rejecting the weapons of war and the forces and hatred, and embracing the way of peace. We strive for this kingdom — let that be in our right hand.
Similarly, today there are a near infinite array of news-sources, tailor-made to suit our already established world view — to feed and exploit our biases and fears for profit. Social media, and the siloing of news and the competitive world we live in, have made hatred and lies spread faster than the truth. We as Christians, however, aspire to the truth — as Luke puts it, “Everything done in darkness will be brought to light.” To put it another way — every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth; the more we dwell in a world cut off from reality, the more we stray from the truth God wants us to seek. If we choose only to engage with news we like — with good news for our community even at the cost to other communities; or, if we read the bad news but don’t speak out or act against it for fear we’ll lose our places at the synagogues and banquets, or in the churches and the board rooms, then we have failed to do as Jesus commanded, and we will receive, as Mark puts it, the greater condemnation.
It is tempting, in these days, just as it was tempting for Barth and Bonhoeffer, to see our neighbor only as a threat and a danger, beyond the hope of repentance, or the truth; this we resist: we must remain committed to seeing the image of God in every neighbor, and offering those neighbors paths back to truth and rightness with God in the way of Jesus.
But of course reaching out in this way is not always easy — we live in such polarized times that some of our attempts at building bridges will fail, and some of our friends may even see our desire to build bridges as a betrayal of our principles. One way I’ve heard it put that often rang true in my work for Virginia Conference is as follows: If you want to be a bridge, prepare to get walked on.
When we try to reach across divides, we’ll often take heat from both directions; it is often easier to focus on the purity of the in-group rather than on reaching the out-group — to put it perhaps a bit too harshly, its harder to seek converts than it is to hunt heretics. But seeking converts is exactly what we’re called to do as Christians. Reaching out to others, listening well, responding to hate with love — these are the marks of the Christian life that we must embody now more than ever.
Friends — we must be out to reach, and transform, people, including those we fear, misunderstand, and perhaps even hate: these are the enemies we are called to love. We must stay committed to the way of Jesus, and to the way of truth — we must offer the Sermon on the Mount with one hand, and the truth of the needs of the world with the other, whenever we can, and however we can.
This brings us to our gospel text for today — the widow’s offering. Let’s set the scene: As Mark 12 opens, Jesus and the disciples are in the temple courts, at the heart of the religious system. Jesus shares the parable of the wicked tenants — reminding that evil actions do often come from those who once accepted, and may still claim, God’s calling — and then the religious leaders try to trap Jesus: first, with a question about taxes — the hot political question of the day — and after that, with a question about the resurrection — the hot theological topic of the day, the dividing line between the Pharisees, who affirmed the resurrection, and the Scribes, or sadducees, who rejected it. Then, Jesus reminds everyone listening that he, the messiah, is from, and greater than, the line of Israel’s greatest hero, David — a line that conspicuously includes the penniless, faithful foreigner, the Moabitess Ruth.
So — with taxes, state politics, theological division, the resurrection, and immigration as the topics at hand, Jesus does the logical thing: he warns his disciples not to look for the approval of well-to-do people, but for the approval of God. Then, he has the whole group sit down to people-watch. The rich — the very people Jesus has just finished warning his disciples about — give generously to the treasury, putting in “large sums.” But Jesus doesn’t commend them for their generosity — rather, he commends the widow for giving the little she can.
In many ways this is a comforting story — but I confess to also wrestling with it, because it can seem impractical, but also because of the allegory that plays out in our lives. Does Jesus actually bless the seemingly insignificant amount we can give and accomplish as Anabaptists — a tiny fraction of the world’s population — in the face of much larger forces, like governments and wars?
It’s worth, for a minute, putting some real numbers on paper here. Mennonite Central Committee, the consortium of 14 Anabaptist groups working together for ‘relief, development, and peace in the name of Christ, has a yearly budget of a remarkable one-hundred eighty million US dollars a year, and this money, I know from first-hand experience from my time in Vietnam, is used frugally and effectively to promote peace and understanding around the world; but this offering is dwarfed by any number of other statistics: for example, the US has sent 18 billion dollars worth of military assistance to Israel in the last year alone. For every 2 dollars MCC spends for peace globally, we’ve sent 200 dollars to one country for war. Or, within the US government, we can compare the US Institute of peace’s $55 million a year budget to the department of defense’s $841 billion; for every two dollars spent by the US institute of peace, the DOD spends $30,500 (thirty thousand five hundred).
In the face of these odds, how do our tiny words and actions for peace, in the face of the gears of nationalism, hatred, and the military-industrial complex, do anything but salve our consciences?
We can and should recognize our inadequacy, even our poverty, in the face of global events and these large forces. As both individuals and as a people, we do not have the levers of power — but it is exactly from this poverty that we are still called to give, as the widow did. She, here, is giving to the very fund that should have, under Temple law, been providing for her — in today’s terms, she’s writing a 50-dollar check to the social security system because she’s heard it’s running low on cash. She could have chosen bitterness in the face of such injustice; instead, she chose to give.
I believe God judges by the heart of the giver, not by the size of the gift. It is not ours to question why we’ve been tasked to steward what we have — so much more than many, and so much less than many others — because what we have, we have been given by God, and Jesus insists we steward it well: and not well by secular standards — to buy influence and power and comfort — but by giving it to those who need it more than we do.
We must give despite our poverty — our poverty of understanding, our poverty of hope, our poverty of vision. While giving financially is of course a part of our stewardship, it is the stewardship of our lives that matters most — do we live lives oriented towards Jesus, the center of our faith; community, the center of our lives; and reconciliation, the center of our work; or not?
We must put our hope in God, and not in the government, or as the psalmist says, we must not put our trust in princes. I confess, however, that I have often done just that, placing hope in one politician or another. Why? Partly because I know the generations of pain that come from any war, and war is so often the natural result of bad government. In Vietnam, I sat with children far younger than myself with severe birth defects caused by a war fought with American money when my father was a child. I want every prince or political leader to work against these things, and we must push them towards justice and good government when we can; but we will never reach that just world without God, and Christ’s body, the church. This is where I place my hope.
Whatever we can do today, for the next four years, and for the rest of our lives, to — as the prophets did — comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, we must do; we must give our two cents with grace, pragmatism, and determination — as individuals, as families, as congregations and as communities. Jesus tells us to give our two coins now, despite our doubts and fears — because God will use our small gifts to accomplish greater deeds than we can imagine, and because it is how we give that Jesus values — even from poverty, fear, and doubt.
Friends —we face a world in need; a genocide in the Middle East, a land war in Europe, a divided country, and a failing climate. In the face of these things, not even the richest of us here has anything to give other than a meager two coins: but we must still give, and live, in a spirit of hopeful generosity, with the bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Let us be quick to give, and may we also be quick to forgive — for God has loved us first; thanks be to God.
To close, there’s a shared confession that will be up on the screen that I’d like us to pray together; but before we go there, I want to share something I know I’ve shared here before, one of the most important wisdom teachings I’ve ever encountered; it comes from the Jewish commentary on the Old Testament, the Talmud. Our spiritual cousins, of course, have wrestled with autocratic and hostile governments for much longer than we have — but in the face of the seeming impossibility of living faithfully despite the odds, the Talmud states: “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work of redeeming the world, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
Join me in praying the litany on the screen; after a few lines we’ll have a time for silent prayer, and then I’ll close us with a reassurance.
One: God, we confess that we have failed to love our neighbor.
All: We confess that we have failed to see the face of God in one another.
One: We confess our fear in the face of uncertainty, war, change, and hatred.
All: We confess we have withdrawn, selfishly, from these places of uncertainty and fear.
One: We confess our questions, and our need for you.
All: We confess our doubts that our words and work will make a difference.
[Silence]
One: Friends, we receive the assurance that God will use our meager offerings to his purposes, for it is not the size of the gift, but the heart of the giver, that God looks upon with favor. We are empowered to speak God’s truth — to friend, to stranger, and to power — by the work of the Holy Spirit. Go forgiven, to live, give, and serve as Jesus’s hands and feet, holding on to one another and to God. Amen.
