Mark 12:38-44

Teaching in the temple, Jesus 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 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.”

James C. Christensen’s “The Widow’s Mite”

On the surface this passage seems pretty straightforward; religious leaders who walk around looking for prestige and position are condemned. And then a widow who gives all of her money is praised. The lesson here is that we should humble ourselves, and give everything we have to the church/God. This is how I was taught this passage growing up. It belonged with the “give until it hurts” mantra. There was also an underlying message that if you gave until it hurt you would either get more back or, at the very least, be taken care of.

In reading this passage again I see some new things. I notice the repetition in the mention of widows: In the first part the religious leaders are chided for devouring widows’ houses and in the second part the widow gives everything she has to live on. What if this story of the widow isn’t an example to emulate but instead a specific illustration of what it looks like when religious/political leaders devour widows?

At the same time there is a question here raised about charity: Do those of us who give, give our of our abundance? And if we do, does it actually do any good? This is a question that is for people with wealth and power. It’s a question about the system. When you give out of your abundance you aren’t actually changing anything. You might help the people who receive your gift, but the systems in place that keep people in poverty haven’t been changed. There is still a great disparity in wealth. For things to change the rich might have to give until it hurts so that the widow has enough to live on.

This is why some people of power, wealth, and privilege get so stressed when we talk about changing things; because they know that in order for everyone to have enough they might have to have less. For someone who has less, this is good news; this is the promise of all being fed and clothed, of everyone having the health care they need.

Are we one human family? Are we willing to have less so that everyone can have enough? Are we willing to take to account the people who hoard wealth and goods while others go without? I don’t want any widows to give until it hurts, but I do want the wealthy to do that. I don’t think Jesus is praising the widow in this passage, I think he is chiding the wealthy. He is bringing a critique on a system that has a widow giving all that she has while the powerful and wealthy do nothing to help.

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Mark 10:35-45

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to Jesus and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”

When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”

In “Binding the Strong Man” by Ched Myers he spends a lot of time pointing out the various calls to discipleship throughout the Gospel of Mark. He says that over and over again the followers of Jesus are revealed to not really get it, to not really understand what is required of them. Over and over again Jesus calls them back to commitment. (And, by proxy, us as well.)

This is another one of those episodes. People arguing over who gets to have the good seat in the Kingdom. And when Jesus scolds James and John the rest of the disciples are more pissed that they didn’t think to ask first. They still don’t get it.

I often don’t get it either. I don’t get what is actually required of me. Or I do get it but I don’t want to do it. My ego gets in the way, my pride. I want attention. I want to be seen as a good person, doing good work.

Or sometimes it’s just laziness. Or wanting to be comfortable. The daily mundane. I get deluded into thinking there is nothing I can do to change things. Or that doing this little thing won’t make any difference (for good or ill).

It can be easy, in North America, to feel powerless to change anything. Or to be paralyzed with privilege or guilt about said privilege.

So what is the solution? I don’t know. Maybe being aware of it. Maybe recognizing these impulses in ourselves. Maybe serving as much as possible. I am trying to be aware of the ways in which my life doesn’t match up to the values I say I hold and trying to take steps to change that.

What does this passage bring up for you? What are you thinking about for your sermon next week? What other resources might you bring in? What questions do you have?

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Mark 10:17-31

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” And the disciples were perplexed at these words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” They were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

Peter began to say to him, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.” Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age–houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions–and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” 

I’ve been teaching through the Gospel of Mark this year and it has made me realize something I never realized before: whether or not the Gospel of Jesus is heard as “good news” very much depends on where you are standing in the power structures or the world. The call to leave everything and follow Jesus is good news to the people who have nothing left to lose. It’s good news that things might change, that justice might be done, that there is some kind of hope.

It might not sound like good news to someone who is secure financially or socially. The call to give everything up and follow Jesus can sound like a threat or a burden. It can bring on fear and uncertainty. And so we spiritualize it: Jesus doesn’t really want you to sell everything you have, he just wants you to be willing to sell it all. You just can’t let money control you, but you can totally still be rich!

What if the reality is that if you are rich, secure, and comfortable Jesus does demand that you sell all that you have and follow him? Can we just admit that we just don’t want to do it? That we’re not willing to follow Jesus that way? I feel like if we could at least be honest with ourselves, then we can begin to have a conversation about what it means to really follow Jesus. Then we can deal with what is at the root of our justifications of this text.

I am a contradiction: I believe that our struggles are bound up together, that unless we are all free that none of us are free, and yet I am unwilling to sell all I have. I don’t always spend my money on the right things. I often am wasteful and selfish. And then I make up excuses as to why I’m not really wasteful or selfish.

The Gospel can be a hard message to those of us with privilege of any kind. It calls us to a deeper commitment and to radical change. It can’t be spiritualized away. I think we do people a disservice when we try to eliminate the hard truths found in this passage. Sometimes we need to sit with the discomfort. Sometimes feeling good about ourselves isn’t the best thing for us spiritually.

How do we begin to reframe the conversation so that we see giving up material security as a positive thing? How do we begin to understand that if everyone has enough, if the world is a better place for all of the people who are most at risk this is a good thing? How do we begin to look out for everyone instead of just looking out for ourselves? How do we learn to think communally instead of individualistically?

What are your thoughts on this passage? Are you preaching this text next week? What are you thinking through? What resources are you planning on using?

 

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My first thought when reading the texts for next week was “Wow, what a weird mix!” There’s the Genesis 1 creation story, a praise psalm, the sign off of a letter to the Corinthians, and a scene from Matthew where Jesus gives the great commission. Honestly, it’s like someone went through and found a couple of the places where the words “holy spirit” were used in English and tacked them into a lectionary day and then threw some stuff in from the Hebrew scriptures for good measure.

One of the things that jumps out to me is the Matthew passage where Jesus has the disciples on the mountain and it say “the disciples worshiped but some doubted.” I love that throwaway line. I wonder who that was a dig at? I wonder what was going on that after all they had seen and experienced there was still doubt. It’s an interesting notion.

It strikes me from looking at these texts that we are in murky water when talking about the Trinity. I always found it to be the least convincing of my systematic theology sections. It’s a doctrine that seems cobbled together. One that we really, really want to make work but that doesn’t necessarily hang together like we’d like it to. It’s messy and kind of incomplete. Some of it is based on conjecture. And then we weave metaphor into it and we get this idea of the Trinity; the triune Godhead, three persons in one, etc.

Why is this doctrine so important to us? I’ll show my hand early and say that I don’t know. I’m not overly concerned about the doctrine of the Trinity. I’ve long since given up on trying to have it make sense intellectually. But there is something appealing to me in the metaphor of it all.

God seemed so distant and unknowable. Or maybe God got sick of people distorting the nature of God. And so God sent Jesus. Jesus was a person who really got what it meant to be in relationship with God. He understood how the kingdom should actually work. He was able to recognize and celebrate the divine within himself. But then Jesus dies. And the world loses that unique representation of God. We feel that loss and so we get the promise of God’s spirit breathed out upon all of us. We get to carry God with us, inside us, moving us to compassion and action. To me it’s all about God wanting us to know God and wanting us to recognize the holiness within ourselves.

How do we recognize God? We look at the life of Jesus. How do we do the work of Jesus? We recognize the Holy Spirit working in and through us. It’s still all murky to me, but I can appreciate the beauty of the metaphor.

How are you planning on preaching these texts next Sunday? What strikes you?

The following is a sermon I wrote for a chapel at my seminary. It’s definitely specific to that place, but I think there are thoughts within that can resonate to people elsewhere.

2Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation— 3if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.

9 But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.
10 Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.

We hear a lot about this seminary as a community. Both about the ways in which we succeed as a community and the ways in which we fail. I think there are a lot of us who came to this place because of its promise of community. Its tradition of being a haven for heretics, its tradition of being different.

I know that I came here expecting a utopia of sorts. A place where I would be welcomed and heard. A place where I could bring all of myself, and all of myself would be okay. But this place hasn’t quite been that way. Sure I am accepted, but I don’t quite feel celebrated in the ways that I thought I would. As one of only a few transgender people on campus I sometimes feel like people don’t quite know what to make of me. I have been supported, but not fully. I still question where I fit and which bathroom I should use.

I have poured my heart out in classes and in papers only to turn around and have classmates and professors continually use the wrong pronouns for me. I have heard transphobic speech in classes. There have been moments when I have felt downright rejected here.

And I think if this seminary, this liberal, supposedly inclusive place, rejects me, then what is the world going to do to me?

I have a feeling that I’m not the only person on this campus who has felt rejection. I could list all of the ways in which we may have felt rejection, but I think there are too many. We all hold some moment of rejection in our hearts.

This passage in 1 Peter that we’re talking about today calls people living stones. This metaphor for building and community where each person plays a part. Each person is a brick in the building. All are needed in order to build something beautiful. But not just that; in this passage it’s the stone that is rejected that becomes the cornerstone on which all else is built.

What does this mean? What does it mean to build a foundation on the people who have been rejected? What kind of a community comes out of that?

How do we shape our rejection into something that can be built with?

I know for me, when I experience rejection, I want to reject back. Push the people who have rejected me away. Protect myself. But if I do these things, then nothing can be built. If I walk away, the building falls. If the cornerstone isn’t strong enough to withstand the rejection, the community crumbles.

So we’ve gotta face the rejection head on, continue to engage. Continue to be brave enough to put ourselves out there to face rejection again. And as I say this I realize that it seems like I’m making it too easy. And I am. But I don’t know what else to say. It seems stupid to say that you have to keep putting yourself out there even if you get knocked down. I know that. It seems like you are somehow abusing yourself. And in the midst of the rejection sometimes it is necessary to withdraw, to make sure that you’re getting taken care of.

But you can’t withdraw forever. There is an element of risk in building something beautiful. There is a weight that will sit on your back as you educate other people about your life, as you become the foundation for community.

And if we all bear a bit of that weight and that burden, then maybe the load will become lesser for others. I hope that my experiences here will make it easier for other trans people to walk these halls in the future. And I realize that this sounds trite and cheap and doesn’t really hold the deep pain of rejection. But know that I hold that pain in my heart. And still I stand convinced that on my back, and on the backs of others rejected, this community is being built. Or at the very least transformed slowly into something beautiful.

We are living stones; and the stones that the world rejects will become the cornerstones. We are living stones. Our rejection makes this place tremble, but ultimately it will make this place stand.

1 I love the Lord, because he has heard
my voice and my supplications.
2 Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
3 The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
I suffered distress and anguish.
4 Then I called on the name of the Lord:
‘O Lord, I pray, save my life!’

12 What shall I return to the Lord
for all his bounty to me?
13 I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord,
14 I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.
15 Precious in the sight of the Lord
is the death of his faithful ones.
16 O Lord, I am your servant;
I am your servant, the child of your serving-maid.
You have loosed my bonds.
17 I will offer to you a thanksgiving sacrifice
and call on the name of the Lord.
18 I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people,
19 in the courts of the house of the Lord,
in your midst, O Jerusalem.
Praise the Lord! (NRSV)

The Psalms have always spoken to me. As a child and teenager they seemed to resonate with me in a way that sometime other parts of the Scripture did not. Especially as an angsty teenager I turned to the Psalms. It seemed then, with my limited knowledge of the depths of the Scripture, to be one of the few places where the honest truth of the heart was laid bare. It was the place that got away from all of the theology and rhetoric and instead was just about a person or a community pouring out their hearts and longings to God. As I grappled with my own queer identity I found solace in the honesty of the Psalms; the ways in which the Psalmists could say things like “The snares of death encompassed me!” (What angsty teenager doesn’t love stuff like that?)

As I moved away from my literal understandings of the Scripture I stopped reading it all together for a while. As I make my return I find that solace in the Psalms again. Here I can get away from theology and doctrine and can instead just have a conversation with God. Laying it all out there. Joy Ladin, a wonderful Jewish theologian and poet wrote a book of poems in which she reimagined the Psalms, reading them especially in light of her transition. I love her work with these texts and the way in which she reclaims this part of the Scripture. She says, this tradition belongs to me as well. You cannot exile me from the text. (Joy will be an upcoming guest on the podcast and I am so excited to have you all meet her as well).

The Psalms give us permission to grapple, to be open and honest, to grieve. They give us permission to shout and cheer and to celebrate. They give us permission to be. I love the Psalm for this coming Sunday’s lectionary. There is so much that resonates with me and my transition. The idea of being in the grave and being entangled in death, the knowledge that now I walk again in the land of the living. The ways in which God has shown up in my transition and saved my life. How good it is to be able to say “I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted’.” And now as I think about my calling, those last stanzas call to me: “What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.” That is how I see my ordination, my call to ministry. A giving back of what has been given to me; given to the people.

I am thankful that the Psalms allow us entry, even when we are wounded, especially when we are wounded. Thanks be to God.