November 8, 2009 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

How Naive Do You Expect Me to Be?

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 30:1–5
Jeremiah 29:10–14
Mark 12:38–44

“For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

Jeremiah 29:11 (NRSV)

I want you to slip into a way of life you say you like, as you might slip into a church building. I want you to sit in it, or rather, walk around inside it for a little while. There, you just might discover a living God—not at the end of an argument, but in the midst of a life well lived.

Miroslav Volf

The first time I worshiped at Fourth Church, my now-colleague Calum MacLeod stood up to introduce the offering and said something I hadn’t heard since the last time I went to church in Scotland: “This is the time when we praise God with our money.” That seemed pretty direct to me—it always has—and so I was taken aback when I started my ministry here and learned that many of you wish the clergy in this place would be more frank when talking about money. Surveys and focus groups about congregational giving and two Bible studies I led this week about the passage I just read from Mark support that view. “Give it to us straight, Adam. You gotta tell the congregation what you need from them.”

Most pastors don’t like to talk about money. We didn’t go into the ministry because of our passion for fund-raising, and when we stand here in God’s house and make it the subject of the sermon, we assume that you find it icky. That’s a problem, because on the other side of our aversion to asking you for money lies an important fact: money is important to you and to me. Everyday we make decisions about money. Those decisions reflect our priorities in life, those decisions say something about who we are and who we want to become, and those decisions have an impact on our spiritual lives. And so, as your pastor, if I read a passage of scripture like the one I read today and do not speak to you directly about the relationship between faith and money, I am doing you a great disservice. So let’s talk about the passage of scripture I read and let’s consider what it might have to do with us and the choices we make about our time and our talents and our money.

It is near the time for the Passover. Jesus and his disciples have come to the temple, the primary gathering place in Jerusalem, the Michigan Avenue of that ancient city. Jesus and the disciples watch what plays out. The scribes come along first. They are the religious authorities, and they are also some of the few who can read and can cipher, so they are the power players of their day. And they know it. And very publicly they bring their offering and add it to the pile and off they go to worship the Lord. Just like I do, they wear flowing robes and sit in the high seat at the temple. They sit at an intersection of faith and life that is as stark as Fourth Church sitting across the street from Chase Bank. Then the widow comes along. Without any of that pomp and circumstance, she walks up and brings her gift, her two small coins—all that she had. Perhaps no one sees it except for Jesus.

The chair of our Resource Development Committee might be cringing right now. Major gifts are important, here and everyplace else; we meet goals and accomplish major initiatives that way. And giving that is done publicly often inspires others to give. But Jesus’ criticism of the scribes seems not to be that they give, but that they give in a way that doesn’t seem to change their lives much.

The first thing I want to say to you about this passage is that, on first glance, the temptation is to valorize the widow: Jesus praises her generosity and her spirit of sacrifice, and so should we. I do not deny that there is truth to that. But I do think that is a simplistic interpretation regardless of the size of the gift; furthermore, it is an interpretation that is not very helpful to us. Here is why:

First of all, if you are an extremely poor widow, or if something about her story resonates with you, I do not want for you to give all you have to Fourth Presbyterian Church. We are a community of faith; we expect all of you to care for one another and we care for you; and we are here to fight poverty, not to increase it one faithful giver at a time.

More importantly, though, it’s my hunch that if we lift up the widow’s sacrifice as an example of faith, we tell a story that does not resonate with most of us. To have almost nothing and give every bit of it away is not an experience many of us have shared, so when we read the passage, we tend to look at it and find it nice but impossible. It just doesn’t have much to do with us.

Think about it this way: Consider Mother Teresa. In life and even in death, Mother Teresa’s name is synonymous with generosity. I’m confident that were I to ask what real twentieth-century person you think about when I read you the Bible story about the widow, most of you would say Mother Teresa. Now, to be sure, Mother Teresa was an inspiring person. People who witnessed her life and work gave generously to support it, and many were moved to volunteer their own time in service to the poor. But her name remains iconic in our minds precisely because she was unique. No one else really lived like her; the sacrifices she made seem impossible for us. Given the real demands of our jobs, our families, and our own life goals, Mother Teresa represents a level of sacrifice, a level of change, that is impossible for us.

In the same way, I don’t think we relate to this widow. Things that seem impossible rarely inspire us. Much more often things that seem impossible paralyze us; they keep us from acting. And something that is frightening to me is the extent to which many of us apply this same sense of impossibility to all kinds of situations that surround us—both things we do and the way we think about the world around us. It is frightening to me that when we look at the world and see impossible things, we stop giving of our time and our talent and our money, because we become convinced that our efforts won’t make a difference.

I was thinking about this as I walked through my days this week—this idea of how impossible and unchangeable the world can look. There really are so many signs of it. Talking with people, watching the news, paying attention to the rhythms of our lives, I see the impossibility of our world. The news is filled with it. We are surrounded by news of the seemingly unsolvable political situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are surrounded by news of our inability to agree on a way to fix our schools and our health care system. We are surrounded by reminders that human behavior is unchangeable. Turn on any late-night comedy show and you’ll hear a litany of disillusionment and impossibility. The jokes remind us that our government is corrupt and our business leaders are greedy; drug and alcohol abuse is not a problem to be solved but a human folly to laugh about; and God’s covenant of marriage is an unhappy institution, a Herculean labor for those who endure it, and, all too often, is simply headed for infidelity and divorce. We so often live our lives not dreaming about how good life might be but teaching ourselves how to cope with the way things are. That’s frightening to me, because these problems are not fantasy; they are real. There is great vulnerability in life; from job loss to life-threatening illness there is much to fear. Just this week a stark reminder of the fragility of our lives confronted us. Even on a military base in the most powerful nation in the world, one of God’s own troubled children can snuff out thirteen lives with the pull of a trigger. When we see life this way, when we live out of a sense of impossibility, out of a sense of how little we can do, there is a terrible danger—a danger that we will lapse into a complacency, a fear, a despair that is devastating to the human spirit.

That is why I will not tell you the story of the widow as a woman who does an impossible thing. Instead, consider this for a moment: the same world I just described—the same troubled, impoverished, uncertain world in which we live—is the world in which this poor widow lived and out of which this poor widow walked to the temple. She placed in the temple treasury all that she had, her two small coins. And I want you to consider this: in the midst of all the impossibility of changing the world, that woman believed that even her gift could make a difference. God could take that gift and change something about the world. That woman knew something that was absolutely priceless. She was able to say to herself, “My contribution matters, what I do matters. I matter to the world, and I matter to God.”

That assurance is something we all long for; we all need it. It is such an elemental part of our human experience to need to feel like we matter. Every one of us struggles with that longing. Some of you may remember that a few years ago, after her death, Mother Teresa’s diaries revealed that she experienced a crisis of faith. While she stood out among us as the great icon of Christian generosity, inside even Mother Teresa had tremendous doubts. She once wrote in her dairy, “My smile is a great cloak that hides a multitude of pains.”

Some people were disillusioned by this discovery about Mother Teresa’s life. I think it’s the best story that could have been told about her. When we learn that she was frustrated and depressed and had doubts, her story is still different from ours, but suddenly she’s not so impossible anymore. Suddenly she no longer represents someone who does more than we could ever do or are capable of doing. She becomes another member of our human family, one who made a decision to do something with her life that was a little more than she thought she could do. It’s my hunch that seeing Mother Teresa as being like us might get us into the place where we most need to be: a place of having enough hope to get started.

Let me tell you a story about someone who might be a little more relatable than Mother Teresa or the widow in our scripture lesson. A member of this congregation called me to ask if I would officiate at a wedding. The member’s name was Sue, and she was calling for a young woman named Latoya. Sue and Latoya met in our Tutoring program eighteen years ago. Sue started tutoring Latoya when Latoya was ten years old. She saw her through high school graduation and helped her navigate her way into college, where Latoya completed her degree. Along the way Sue and Latoya became almost like mother and daughter. Sue took Latoya to her first Bears’ game; she invited her into her home and taught her how to eat balanced meals and how to cook them for herself. Sue convinced Latoya that a woman can be successful in a business environment and provide for herself. And today Latoya is happily married; she has a good job; and she’s raising a son. And at Latoya’s wedding it was clear to me that everyone who was there knew Sue.

I cannot imagine that on that day when they met eighteen years ago, Sue or Latoya had any idea how much their relationship would change their lives. And that’s the point. The amazing story of this congregation and its members is seldom told in terms of the tutor who is around for eighteen years and fundamentally alters the life of a child. But every week, every single week, more than 400 tutors walk into this building and spend an hour with a child, and why do they do that? My hunch is that there’s a little tug God makes at the hearts of those tutors—there is a tension, a hope somewhere inside of them that says, “Maybe the gift I give will change this child’s life for the better.” And behind that statement is one that is very close to it: “Maybe the gift I give will change my life for the better.”

In this church we feed and clothe people who live on the street. They sleep in the underpasses that go under Lake Shore Drive to the beach; they gather for warmth over the grates and in alleyways. We give these struggling children of God phone and Internet access so that they can take steps to improve their lives. We help them get medical attention. We help them find homes and jobs. This church offers education to adults and children; we offer gathering spaces for people who want to meet friends and companions in a safe and welcoming place; every day we welcome older adults into this building and offer programming to keep their minds sharp and their bodies fit. We offer counseling on a graduated pay scale to people who are depressed or anxious or struggling with their marriage. And on Sundays we offer faithful worship and beautiful music. And we offer outstanding preaching! And none of it is free. None of it is free. And if you can give—you should.

But the giving isn’t just about the church. It’s about you. It is about those first steps, those tension-filled moments where we begin to move down a road where we haven’t yet been. Giving is about those places where we open ourselves up to the possibility that our lives might change for the better—we might find God’s grace in serving someone else.

This is my challenge for you today: I want you to consider how you might like your life to be different, and then I want you to slip into that place and try it out for a while. I want you to walk around and feel and touch and taste what it is like to move toward the life you’ve always hoped for. Might that be what the widow does in the story? She doesn’t make some ostentatious sacrifice. She makes a small and quiet offering; she gives a little more of herself than she thinks she can—and it changes her life.

The good news about our Lord Jesus Christ is that God’s earth is not an impossible place. The world can and will be a better and brighter and more hope-filled place if only we can keep the idea before our eyes that what we do matters—it matters to God. That is the promise of our faith: that just like that widow, what you have to contribute matters tremendously, because your life matters tremendously.

Every time one of us cares for a student at risk, life matters again.

Every time one of us feeds a hungry mouth or clothes a cold body, life matters again.

Every time we bind up a brokenhearted soul and reassure a grieving heart, life matters again.

Every time we take that first step and consider that we might be a little more, do a little more, give a little more of ourselves than we have before, life matters again.

The Lord says, “I will fulfill my promise to you. . . . For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope.”

Amen.