November 8, 2009 | 4:00 p.m.

The Least I Can Do

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Mark 12:38–44

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I’m not going to preach on money from this text, but it does remind me of a joke I heard last week. A $20 bill and a $1 bill meet in a bar. The dollar asks the twenty what he’s been up to lately.

“All sorts of stuff,” says the twenty. “I’ve been to concerts, to nice restaurants, to casinos, to malls, to bars like this one. How about you? Where have you been lately?”

“Same place all the time,” says the dollar. “Church, church, church.”

So later this afternoon, when we get to the sharing of gifts, let’s give some twenties a religious experience and drop them into the plate.

• • •

Let me tell you what a typical week looks like for me.

Last Saturday, I had a planning retreat for the Youth Ministry Committee from 9:00 a.m. to about 1:30 p.m. I woke up at about 4:00 that morning to finish preparing for it, because I simply ran out of time during the week before.

After the retreat was done, I raced up to Belmont to get the last few pieces of my Halloween costume.

I raced back down here to officiate a wedding, which I still needed to get ready for. I somehow managed to finish writing the homily early, so I squeezed in a haircut—mostly for my Halloween costume—right before the wedding.

Right after the wedding, I ran up to the staff bathroom to trim my beard for my costume—I was Walter Sobchak from the Big Lebowski, by the way. I finished up the costume and drove up to Logan Square, where I cohosted a Big Lebowski-themed Halloween party with my youth ministry partner, Kurt Esslinger, who was the spitting image of the Dude.

After some mishaps misplacing my keys in a diaper bag that my wife had taken home already, I finally made it home to Hyde Park around 1:00 a.m.

At about 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., I woke up and headed to church to get ready for my Sunday duties, which that day included Parents Day for our confirmation class, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

After a great Parents’ Day, I locked myself in my office to write a sermon for Kurt’s ordination service that evening at 6:00 p.m. Don’t worry: I had started writing it earlier that morning between Parents Day activities.

I finished the sermon with just enough time to change clothes and drive over to UIC for the service, scarfing down a salad when I arrived.

After the service, I headed home and fell asleep on the couch watching a football game I had recorded the day before.

I got a little break because I needed to stay home from work for the next day and a half because our ten-month-old son was sick, and my wife couldn’t miss grad school on those days. But I’m not sure that being home with a sick baby is that much of a break. In any event, I came into the church on Tuesday afternoon to cram in as much office work as I could before heading home, stopping at the grocery store on the way.

My Wednesday was essentially a series of nonstop meetings, some at church and some not, with a few moments here and there to take care of other business.

On Thursday morning I flew to Cleveland for a conference. I flew back on Friday afternoon and stopped by the hospital to visit a member of the congregation that had just had a hip replacement surgery. Then I drove up to Lake Geneva with a group of teenagers for a Presbytery youth retreat.

I got back to Chicago this afternoon, and settled into my office around 2:00.

At various places in the midst of all this, I tried to be a husband and a father while also following an ailing grandmother down in Arkansas.

Oh yeah, I also found some time to write this sermon.

• • •

I share all of this partly for my own benefit. Writing this down and then speaking it out loud this afternoon puts into perspective for me the sometimes ridiculous schedule I keep.

But I don’t for a minute think that I’m unique or exceptional—or that I have the craziest schedule imaginable. I know plenty of people in this church and beyond that are much busier than I. They might hear the week I just described and think it sounds pretty nice and easy. Maybe some of you are in that category. Maybe you fill your life up by the minute, jumping from activity to activity, never slowing down, trying to do as much as possible.

At the youth ministry planning retreat last weekend, I showed a video by one of my favorite preachers, a pastor named Rob Bell at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids (“Shells” by Rob Bell, in the Nooma video series). In this video, he talks about this very thing I just described, this tendency to pack our schedules with so much stuff, even good stuff, that we lose sight of the few, simple things God calls us to, or even the one simple thing God calls us to. “Being busy is a drug that a lot of people are addicted to,” he says. I don’t know about you, but I might as well have an IV of busyness pumping into my veins.

The thing I’ve noticed about being super busy is that I don’t really have time to do any of the many things I do exceptionally well. And the more this becomes a reality for me, the more I’m getting frustrated by it.

There are two Presbytery committees that I serve on. I don’t really have time for either one them—and I just said yes to be on a third. But for various reasons—some of them actually good ones—I just can’t bring myself to quit them. Instead, I’ve figured out the least amount of time and the least amount of effort I can put into them to just get the job done.

The least I can do.

I feel that way about a lot of things in my life these days, even the things I’m most passionate about. Maybe I’m passionate about too many things. Maybe I’m a pathetic time manager. Maybe I just can’t figure out how to say no. Maybe I have a gross underestimation of my own limitations. Maybe I’m not the superman I thought I was.

The least I can do.

Our gospel story today is a familiar one. Traditionally, it’s known as the “widow’s mite”—a mite is a small denomination of money, practically worthless. This story takes place while Jesus is teaching about humility and the temptations of pride. He sees a poor widow come to the temple treasury and put two of these worthless coins into the collection plate, coins not even worth a penny. In that simple act, Jesus recognizes a beautiful witness to the kingdom of God. This poor old widow woman placing some worthless coins, her last, into the plate—this is what the kingdom of God is like.

Now to everyone else who saw what Jesus saw, it looked like this woman had done the least she could do. But Jesus knew that it was the most she could do. It was all she could do. She gave all she could. She gave her very best. She gave everything.

What would it be like to live life that way? I don’t mean what it would be like to be poor. Some of us know good and well what that is like. That’s not what I mean. You see, I don’t think this story is really about just money. It’s about our entire lives. So what would it be like to give everything to something? What would it be like to give your entire being?

I suppose that there are two ways you could approach this. On the one hand, you could say that filling your life up in pursuit of good things is giving your all. There are weeks or days or even hours when I feel that way. At times like that, when I’m running from thing to thing, and they’re all good things, things that I think might actually be having an impact on the world, at times like that I think, “Yeah, I’m giving my all.” That’s why I’m exhausted. That’s why I feel so spent.

But then—then I keep coming back to this notion of “the least I can do.” Because I’m spread so thin, I’m not giving my all to anything. I’m giving a little bit to a lot of things. But I never give my all to a few things—or to one thing.

And that’s what this is about. Whether you’re like me and do so many things you can’t do any of them really well. Or you don’t do enough of anything for whatever reason you may have. Whatever your story is, Jesus is challenging us to give it all, to lay it all out on the line, to live with reckless abandon.

Can you imagine what the world would be like if a bunch of us did that? Can you imagine how the world would be changed if we approached life with the kind of reckless abandon that the poor old widow woman did when she gave away her last little bit of security, when she gave away everything she had—to God?

Think about what your relationships would be like if you gave your entire being to them. What kind of spouse or partner could you be? What kind of son or daughter? What kind of sibling? What kind of parent? What kind of friend?

Think about taking care of yourself. If I could put everything into eating right and exercising and getting enough rest and taking care of my mental health, I’d feel so much better. My life would be so much better.

Or think about the big problems of the world. Along with many other people, rock star Bono of the band U2 has been saying for years that we currently have the resources, right now, to end world hunger. But who among us, or how many among us, have devoted our entire lives to that?

Or what about interreligious relations or race relations or the rights of people different from the majority? What about hunger right here in Chicago? Or homelessness? Or gun violence?

Man, there’s so much to do, and we could do so much good. If you’re like me, you want take it all on. But that would only get us back to where we started.

Or perhaps when you think about all of these things we could do, all of the things you could do, you feel overwhelmed. The weight of such a daunting task paralyzes you and you do nothing.

But what if we each had a few things—or even just one thing from that list? What if God was calling us—as individuals or as a community—to just a few things, or just one thing? Could we do that? Could we approach that call with the kind of reckless abandon that Jesus saw in that poor old widow woman giving her last little pittance to God?

This is kind of a new idea for me. And I must admit that I owe a lot of this to the inspiration of Rob Bell in that video. But I’m willing to reorient my thinking a little bit. I’m willing to consider, on faith, that God is leading me not to fifteen different things, but to just a few things, and that those few things are what God really wants me to focus on. Those few things are what God wants me to give everything to.

That means that I’ll have to learn to say no. It means that I’ll need to focus in a way that I’ve never been good at before. But I’m willing to try it. I don’t want my life to be defined by the least I can do. I want my life to be defined by the most I can do. The best I can do. And I think that somewhere in there, I’ll discover God in a new way.

But in order to do that, I have to listen for God’s call. I have to cancel out all the other voices in my life that are competing for my attention, all the other voices that drown out the still, small voice of God calling me to be who I’m supposed to be. Calling me to be the person God created me to be.

• • •

There’s a story in the Bible that haunts me. It exposes some of my deepest fears, fears about my weaknesses and my inability to follow God’s call when I hear it. Like the story of the widow’s mite, it appears on the surface to be about money, but I really don’t think that it is.

The story is about a rich young man that comes to Jesus. He says that he’s done everything he’s supposed to do. He’s followed the laws and the commandments of his faith. He’s a good person who does good things. But something is missing. Something is missing, so he asks Jesus what else he must do to experience the kingdom of God.

Jesus tells this rich young man that he must sell all of his belongings, give everything he has to the poor, and then come follow Jesus.

I don’t know how long that man thought about it. I don’t know how much he wrestled with it. But in the end, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give it all away and follow Jesus with reckless abandon, the kind of reckless abandon that Jesus saw in the poor old widow woman.

I don’t want to be that rich young man. I want to be the poor old widow woman.

Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church