Jesus was simply not interested in people’s relations to God
in abstraction from their material practices and conditions. He touched souls
bodily, and bodies soulfully, as sites of spiritual healing and material
well-being. ~Catherine Keller
Scripture: Mark 12:38-44
As he taught, he said, “Beware of the
scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect
in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of
honor at the banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of
appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.” He
sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the
treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two
small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and
said to them, “Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those
who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of
their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all
she had to live on.”
Each of the narrative lectionary readings this week introduces us to the figure of the widow. The simplicity of that naming is
deceptive. We could spend an entire sermon series exploring the person of the
widow and what she represented for ancient Jewish morality and early Christian
culture. We have glimpses of that depth here in the gospel reading. If we take a moment to see past
the basic truth of her poverty, we see that Jesus names the widow as a moral exemplar and
teacher of the gospel. She is honored for her courage and her faith. Jesus
upholds her actions as a direct critique of the others gathered.
But if we read just a bit back in the story, we can see that the widow’s presence in the gathering guides us to much more
than a trite stewardship sermon about giving until it hurts. Jesus says,
“Beware of the scribes who…have the best seats in the synagogues and places of
honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses…” Which is to say, those gathered
are not worthy of blame only for failing to give sacrificially to the treasury.
More importantly, Jesus points out that what they are hoarding is stolen
wealth, acquired through active oppression of the most vulnerable in society.
For a widow, a small dwelling may have been her only remaining resource for herself and her children in
the wake of a life tragedy. The widow’s “mite,” as we have come to call it, could
well have been compelled by a culture demanding tribute. But it can equally
be seen an act of defiance, a claim to the blessing of God despite her
dehumanization at the hands of speculators. It is a blessing that Jesus readily
conveys and invites into his ministry.
The gospel text presents some familiar dangers. It is far
too easy to read the story of the widow’s mite as one more instance of
Christianity’s moral triumph over the iniquity of ancient Judaism—as the need
for Christianity to redeem and redirect wayward Jews. The gospel also bears the
danger of romanticizing poverty, suggesting to us that the widow’s destitution
buys her easy moral standing. The theologian Amy-Jill Levine argues that it was
precisely this question that likely shaped this passage historically. The
disciples, as we know, defined themselves by their willingness to abandon
incomes, property, and families to follow Jesus with nothing more than a staff
and a robe. It is common for us as Christians to understand this refusal of the
corrupting influence of the world, this willingness to live on the daily
provision of God, as uniquely about Jesus—and therefore uniquely about us. But by
the time of the writing of the gospels, there had been a significant tradition of
Jewish voluntary poverty, and the Jesus movement owes no small part of its
image of sacrificial discipleship to that tradition.
This choice of poverty surely stood in opposition to the
excess of the Roman Empire. And the gospel often depicts Jewish communities as
pawns of the empire, fully corrupted by the love of money and power. But a more
historically accurate picture of the controversy, Levine argues, is that there
was argument both for and against the abandonment of family and property as a
means of devotion. I believe we have these same controversies now. There were
and continue to be serious questions about whether poverty itself is sacred.
And both Jewish and Christian traditions have built ethical frameworks to support
families and communities through the thoughtful use of resources as an equally
legitimate form of devotion. They suggest that there are ways of living in and
of the world that are also the ways of God.
We also encounter the widow as a “type” in the reading from
1 Kings. Her circumstances are possibly more dire. The scripture tells us that
she was gathering sticks to make a last meal for herself and her son with the
little bit of meal and oil left for them, knowing that she had nothing more to
provide. She hoped, we can presume, for a peaceful death. God offers her
reality to Elijah as provision and as teacher. In nourishing Elijah through
her, God also provides for the widow and her son, interceding in crisis and
converting what little remains into enough for the family to contemplate a
future. It is worth noting that no charity is active in the way we usually
understand it. God saves those in need through those in need. God combines the
resources of the marginalized to create abundance. And God would rather work
there than anywhere else.
I can’t leave this passage without saying a word about what
happens next. In the text immediately following where the lectionary leaves
off, the widow’s son does die—or at least goes into respiratory arrest—presumably
from the continuing effects of malnutrition and exposure. The widow blames
Elijah, for offering hope only for her to suffer her son’s death shortly after.
Elijah takes the boy away to his room and begs God to revive him, and God does.
It is my sense that this passage was needed by the history writer to correct
for any impression that Elijah’s magical powers were responsible for feeding the
widow and her son, to make it clear that it is God’s movement working miracles
beyond Elijah’s power.
The scripture gives us the widow, then, as a model of faith
at the absolute end of probability, the place where only God can turn despair
to hope. But the scripture also continually offers the widow as the model of
our shared social responsibility, the demand that we build a society that does
not fail those who fall between the cracks. The widow was the mark of failure
of a patriarchal system, a system that kept property and access from women
except through their associations with men. The story of Ruth’s marriage to
Boaz, also presented in this week’s lectionary, demonstrates that women had to
use incredible resources of will and strategy to secure their futures when
their husbands died. This is, of course, one of the places where the historical
scriptures routinely fail us by refusing to indict the system itself, by
refusing to acknowledge that women with control of their own financial
resources could much more easily bear the loss of a marital partner. And it
cannot offer us an analysis of the wealth and privilege that inherently depend
upon the disposability of some. Capitalism as it has evolved cannot proceed if
everyone is provided for. It must extract from and discard many in order to
enrich few.
Earlier this year, the New
York Post published a profile of a young man from Wisconsin who had
recently moved to New York City to pursue his dream of working as a chef in a
high end Central Park restaurant. Grayson Altenberg had come from a small,
rural community, with plenty of living space and close connections to family,
friends, and neighbors. His encounter with the realities of the New York City
housing market were harrowing. A studio apartment—averaging about $3000/mo in
the outer reaches of the city—was an impossibility with his starting salary. He
was determined to maintain some quality of life while contending with the
challenges of the move, and he spent his early time in the city walking Central
Park, talking to people he met in and around it, eating, reading. Eventually,
he came across an ad on Craigslist for an apartment a five-minute walk from his
restaurant for only $1,100 per month. The ad was humorous, describing the
apartment as: “so small you can’t have three friends over at the same time; one
of you will have to wait outside in the hall” and “so small you can’t gain
weight once you move in.” The apartment,
which Grayson took in the end, was a total of less than 100 sq ft in size, a
little smaller than many of the SRO units available here in the Bay for those
transitioning from homelessness. It’s just large enough for a bed, a hot plate,
and a small desk, with a standup shower in an adjacent room. Grayson eats his
meals on his lap.
The question of small living in our culture has many
dimensions. For some landlords, there is the opportunity to subdivide living
space and garner more income. For some homeowners, there is the opportunity to
reduce their own living space to get support with mortgage payments. For many
renters, the decreasing size and amenities of living are part and parcel of a
surreal housing market, and acceptance and adaptation are simply the only means
of survival.
But there is also an intentional move to small living
celebrated in architectural and interior design circles—mostly
young singles and couples who have chosen to construct tiny, fashionable dwellings to
reduce their carbon footprint and embrace their time outside of the home. Some
are slightly larger than Grayson’s New York apartment, but it is not unusual
for tiny homes for two to run about 250 sq ft, the rough equivalent of
Grayson’s single dwelling. They include innovative storage and mechanical
designs, lofted beds, multipurpose furniture and flexible floor plans depending
on the habits and interests of the occupants. Some are fixed, some are movable.
Some are urban, some are rustic. They represent a cultural urge to “live
light,” to not take more than is our due, to immerse in nature and community
out of the home, and a fascination with the gadgetry and efficiency that can
make this possible. Tiny livers are generally zealous and evangelical. And they
build their tiny houses often on vast stretches of unoccupied land.
But tiny living does not get universal rave reviews. Many
find it unimaginable. In response to a recent Dwell Magazine feature on the
architecture of tiny houses, one blogger expressed her incredulity: "Look, I'm not criticizing you. I commend you for making this giant leap. Since we humans seem comfortable with pillaging Mother Earth of all of her resources, I believe more people should think like you. But 250 square feet? What the hell happens when your tiny house partner farts Mexican food farts, huh? Where do you escape to? Nowhere. You have nowhere to run. All you can do is walk three feet to the other end of the house and pray. Or maybe you can run out into the tiny forest surrounding your tiny house."
We most certainly have a culture used to owning more, taking
up more space. But we also have a millennia long tradition of people making
life work with less and less space and fewer and fewer resources, squeezed by
the pressures of consumptive economies. And we have evidence of survival
despite the odds. As friends and internet commentators poked fun at his tiny
dwelling in New York, Grayson Altenberg replied, “This is all I need for the
time being. My routine works here. I can get up in the morning. I can still
take my shower. I can still make my coffee. I can get myself to work in five
minutes.”
Surely we can and should expect more from life. Mere
survival threatens isolation and despair, and more importantly continues to support systems
that we know are wildly unjust. But I don’t believe our spiritual or ethical
journeys really begin until we ask ourselves—or are forced to—how little we can
actually live with.
It is undeniable that we have the space, the resources, the
technology and the examples to provide all of the homeless, all of those who
have been cut off, all of the abandoned of our society with decent transitional
living spaces at the very least. A place to rest, a place from which to connect
to the world with dignity and hope for the future, a place to call home. What
we lack is the will to do so. We lack the urgency of God’s intervention in
the life of the widow in 1 Kings—the story that tells us that we must make
basic provision a reality in our lifetimes, now.
The great lie of the Bay Area housing crisis is an
argument that proceeds from scarcity. It is true that we have underbuilt
housing. It is true that we have wrongly built housing. But more importantly,
we have failed to make housing a human right rather than a privilege of concentrated wealth.
A few weeks ago in our faith journey discussion, we approached some important
questions about Christian discipleship given the crises of homelessness and
rising income inequality. We questioned the ability of a wage economy—built on
efficiency and always to benefit large property owners—to provide for the needs
of the most vulnerable. We questioned the concept of equality as a way to meet
the ends of justice. We also shared some of our own sources of resistance to
the gospel’s suggestion that financial provision should not necessarily be tied
to the volume of work we perform. For many of us, that is a difficult pill to
swallow.
One of the things that remained with me from that
conversation and informed my reading of this week’s scripture was the idea that
we are often doing two different things when we consider our own welfare and
when we critique the system. It is not exactly hypocrisy, but it is more a
dissonance. We know that the scripture asks us to resist injustice, and we
sense ourselves to be both agents and victims of injustice. It can be difficult
to know where to stand and how to act.
This is how the scripture spoke to me this week. We must work at times from frighteningly limited resources. Tapestry finds itself in that predicament periodically, as do many of us in our own lives. And the scripture assures us, first, that suffering is not God’s will for us, and second, that there is beauty and grace even, and maybe especially, in our places of deepest need. God did not send Elijah to a lavish home for a feast of beef and wine and Sleep Number bed preprogrammed for him, but into the arms of despair. And God sent Ezekiel to a desert of dry bones to practice resurrection. God deliberately asked the prophets to work from sites of crisis as nourishment and as promise. And today we see, in the widow’s tiny kitchen, God’s hands working to convert nearly nothing into sustenance, and sustenance into justice. May it be so for us as we pray over the future of this ministry and as we reach out to the urgent need that surrounds us.
This is how the scripture spoke to me this week. We must work at times from frighteningly limited resources. Tapestry finds itself in that predicament periodically, as do many of us in our own lives. And the scripture assures us, first, that suffering is not God’s will for us, and second, that there is beauty and grace even, and maybe especially, in our places of deepest need. God did not send Elijah to a lavish home for a feast of beef and wine and Sleep Number bed preprogrammed for him, but into the arms of despair. And God sent Ezekiel to a desert of dry bones to practice resurrection. God deliberately asked the prophets to work from sites of crisis as nourishment and as promise. And today we see, in the widow’s tiny kitchen, God’s hands working to convert nearly nothing into sustenance, and sustenance into justice. May it be so for us as we pray over the future of this ministry and as we reach out to the urgent need that surrounds us.
