Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 8, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The widow in Mark’s story that we just heard is about to die. Unlike the story we heard about Elijah and the widow of Zarephath which says that that widow is expecting to die, Mark doesn’t say that the widow in his story is going to die, not in so many words. He does say that she has put into the temple treasury “all she had to live on.” Christians often over look that line, or take it mean only that what she put in was a lot for her; but we need to take Mark’s words seriously and, although its odd for me to say it, literally if we are really going to understand this story. Today is Stewardship Sunday in the UCC, and I could give you a traditional stewardship sermon on this text that says “see how generous the poor widow is toward the church. Go and do likewise.” I’m sure many pastors are doing just that today. The problem is that I am convinced that generosity is not what this text is about. This text isn’t about generosity; it’s about oppression. Some of you have heard or read this from me before, but let me explain.

The passage from Mark that we heard has a three part structure. Part One: Jesus says beware of the scribes, they “devour widows’ houses,” scribes being officials of the Jerusalem temple. Part 2: A poor widow puts into the temple treasure the last pittance that she has to live on. Part 3: Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple, the place where the scribes worked. Mark has here constructed a three-part condemnation of the temple and its religious system, its religious ideology. The temple officials oppress and dispossess widows. They “devour” their “houses.” “Houses” here means not only their physical houses but their entire means of sustaining themselves. A widow does what those scribes, those temple officials, tell her she has to do. She pays the temple tax, or at least a part of it. That is indeed what she’s doing here. She’s not making a free will offering. She’s paying the tax even though it means she will starve, just as the widow of Zarephath was starving. The temple, its officials, and its ideology will therefore be destroyed. So you see, this widow isn’t being generous. Not at all. She is being oppressed and exploited. The scribes are devouring not only her house but her very life. They’ve been doing that all her life, with their demands that she pay the temple tax. That’s at least part of the reason she has only two small copper coins left. So the scribes’ house, the temple, Jesus says, will be destroyed, which in fact it was a few decades later.

So OK. This story isn’t about the generosity of the poor, although studies consistently show that poor people are more generous than rich people when giving is measured as a percentage of income. But so what? We don’t have a temple with scribes and a temple tax. So is there anything for us to learn from this story? Well, of course there is. To discover at least one lesson in this story, let’s pan back and take a wider angle view of what’s going on here.

The fact I want to start with is that the scribes have an ideology. What’s an ideology? An ideology is a set of ideas or a way of seeing the world to which people adhere regardless of how those ideas or that world view plays out in reality, in particular regardless of how it affects actual people. One obvious example of an ideology is late, unlamented Soviet Communism. It’s Marxist Leninist ideology said that the dictatorship of the proletariat, in effect the rule of the Communist Party, would usher in an era of peace, justice, and equality. In reality this ideology produced a dictatorship of the communist Party that killed tens of millions of people and made life pretty wretched for most of the people it didn’t kill. Yet the acolytes of the ideology clung to it to the bitter end despite its abject and obvious failure. Some of them still do. That’s how it is with ideology. There are less obvious examples of ideologies too. Some are active in our own country. You can probably figure out what some of them are.

The scribes of Jesus’ time had an ideology—a religious ideology but an ideology nonetheless. It was the ideology of the temple and of the Mosaic law as the temple authorities interpreted that law. It said we temple authorities know what God’s will is. We know that God wants all the people to support the temple and its functionaries. It said that supporting the temple and obeying the laws as the temple authorities interpreted them was how you got right with God. And that ideology killed people. Ideology always kills people. This one killed people by demanding that they pay the temple tax even when it meant they couldn’t buy food. It killed people by excluding them from society when it declared them to be sinners when they didn’t pay the tax or violated the law in some other way, like by working for food on the Sabbath. This ideology was killing the poor widow in Mark’s story.

Probably the most radical thing about Jesus was that he put people ahead of ideology. Time after time in the Gospels he puts people ahead of ideology. Consider these few examples: He blessed a woman with a flow of blood who touched him in grievous violation of the scribes’ ideology. He approved of his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath, in grievous violation of the scribes’ ideology. He healed on the Sabbath, in grievous violation of the scribes’ ideology. He condemned a priest and a Levite who refused to help a beaten man because they were complying with their ideology, and he blessed a hated Samaritan who helped that man in grievous violation of the their ideology. Jesus would have none of ideology, any ideology.

Ideology is the work of the head. It is latching onto an idea—a head thing—and clinging to it against all of the pleading of the heart. The heart sees the suffering that ideology inflicts on real people and says the people come first. Ideology sees the death of widows and says: It’s their own fault. Or it’s for a greater good. Ideology puts ideas ahead of real people, and in doing that it kills real people.

Politics and religion are the realms of ideology. Political ideologies say we know what is right, and we will kill to defend what we know is right or even to impose what we know to be right on other people. Political ideologies see the death and suffering of real people as an acceptable cost of being right. Religious ideologies say we know what God wants, and we’ll kill to impose God’s will on people who don’t get it. They say we know God’s will, and they condemn, exclude, and dehumanize people who don’t fit what they know to be right. They use whatever is required, the ballot or even the bullet, to impose what they know to be right on other people. Here in Washington we just narrowly defeated an attempt by a religious ideology to do just that. Tragically, the forces of religious ideology, who put their ideas about marriage before the lives of real people, prevailed in a similar vote in Maine.

So what are we left with? We are left, I think, with a call from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to ask what our own ideologies are. And to ask what ideas and systems to we accept or tolerate, acquiesce or participate in, that put ideas ahead of the wellbeing of real people. Do we buy into political ideas that harm real people in our country or around the world? If we don’t consciously buy into them, do we nonetheless passively accept and benefit from them? I know that most of us, myself included, do. What about religious ideologies? I think most of us in this church have come a long way in giving up our religious ideologies and embracing beliefs that put people ahead of ideas. That’s one of the great things about this church. We’re faithful without being ideological. That’s why this church is worth supporting and sustaining. So see, I got a stewardship sermon of the story of the widow’s mite after all. How about that! Amen.