Geneva Presbyterian Church

Weekly Sermon

November 12, 2000 - "God Doesn't Need Our Money, God Wants our Hearts"

Reverend Anne Benefield
Geneva Presbyterian Church, November 12, 2000

I Kings 17:8-16; Mark 12:41-44

Mark 12:41-44 41 He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. 42) A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. 43) 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. 44) 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." Prayer: Heavenly Father, when we hear the story of the widow's mite, we struggle to understand. Open our very spirits to your word so that we will understand and be inspired. Through your Holy Spirit, may we each hear a unique word to us. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen. This is a story many of us have heard before. Despite its familiarity, I never know quite what to make of it. It is unsettling. It is powerful, but where does it lead? It reminds me of a passage in Annie Dillard's book Teaching a Stone to Talk. She writes: "Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?… "On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return." [Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, (New York: Harper Perennial, 1982), p. 58] If we really listen to this story of the widow and her pennies we are likely to be drawn out to where we can never return. This story is explosive. I struggled with how to approach it. On one hand, I didn't want to tone it down. Let's face it, according to Jesus the widow put her last two cents into the offering plate. She left without anything to live on. She left with nothing except her complete trust in God. That is dramatic. But if I don't tone it down, tame it, make it a more manageable message, we will all get scared off, including me. I know, for example, that if I don't give you a picture in which you can see yourself, you are not likely to respond. But can you see yourself giving up everything? We are all very practical people. We know better than to ruin ourselves, right? So I stand before you with a dilemma. How to preach the gospel without scaring everybody away? The best I can do is to admit my confusion, pray for guidance, and go from there. I began by thinking about what we could take from this story. The most important thing I realized was that this story is more about commitment than money. What God wants is our hearts. God doesn't really, actually need our money. Sometimes our ability to give money even separates us from God. We are so proud of our material gifts that we forget to bring our hearts along to worship with us. The result is that we approach giving from a position of superiority. When we were talking about this passage at the Sunday evening Bible study, I remembered something that had happened to a friend of mine. Her name is Jane Dasher. She is the pastor at the Poolesville Presbyterian Church. Her church and our church often serve together at the Lord's Table, a soup kitchen. The first time that Jane went, she made a point of sitting with the guests. Since no one from Geneva knew her, they kept trying to serve her. Jane kept explaining that she wasn't a guest. Slowly it dawned on Jane that by emphatically explaining that she herself was not a guest, she was separating herself from the guests. Her heart wasn't in it. She told me it was a great revelation to discover that her sense of superiority was separating her from the guests. God wants our hearts, not our ability to do good. If we "do good" without our hearts, we aren't really doing good. It isn't our money, our prestige, or our superior talents that God wants. It is our hearts. Still sometimes when we start truly giving of ourselves, we become afraid that rather than looking too good, our gifts will look too shabby. There is a modern-day version of this story that is worth sharing: Ted Turner arrives at the United Nations with a gift of $1 billion. As he presents his gift, reporters surround him, recording the event. There is a huge brouhaha. Just at that moment, a women, thin and rather shabbily dressed, steps behind the cameras, reaches into her worn wallet, takes out all she has and quietly places it in a box marked world hunger. Nobody notices… Or maybe someone does notice. Maybe God notices and to God a gift from the heart is never shabby. As a matter of fact, God can take the shabbiest, smallest gift from the heart and create a miracle. Isn't that what the world saw in Mother Teresa? There is a lovely little book about Mother Teresa called Something Beautiful for God. It is by a British journalist named Malcolm Muggeridge. In 1971, the BBC sent Muggeridge to Calcutta to do a TV special on an Albanian nun whose ministry was picking up the wretched dying from the streets of the city and taking care of them in the hospice she had established. Muggeridge, a skeptic theologically who had very little good to say about religion generally, was swept off his feet. He observed the disciplines of the Sisters of Charity, watching them work for the simple purpose of "bringing the dying within view of a loving face." Muggeridge chuckled as Mother Teresa told him that the Indian government had given her a free rail pass but what she really wanted was a free airline pass to visit her many convents. When they refused, she offered to work as an airline stewardess in exchange for one! Mother Teresa communicated the claims of our Christian faith without preaching. She knew that people understand the truth by seeing it lived, in the same way that crowds of people were enchanted by Jesus because what he said and did was not austere, rigid, judgmental religion, but love lived out by accepting, affirming, and touching all who came within its magnetic pull. With so many problems in the world, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. We know we have more than a widow's mite, but does it really matter what we do? Can we ever really make a difference? I think we can make a difference. I think we make a difference when we bring our hearts into it. Last night as I spoke with Sheri Sankey, it was hard to know what to say. As they search for Dave's plane and some word on his safety, I prayed with Sheri and Sara over the phone. As we hung up, I said, "We are all praying for you. The Geneva prayer chain was notified this afternoon." Sheri repeated the news to her daughters. I heard Kyla say, "Geneva prayers bring miracles. That's what my mother always says." Our prayers join with the Lord's prayers and miracles happen. That is because Geneva has a big heart, a heart that rests in the heart of God. I read a wonderful story some years ago about a man who decided to volunteer to work with children who are terminally ill or burn victims. His hope was to go into the wards and try to cheer up the kids. He says he wanted to "spread around some giggles." Piece by piece he put together a clown outfit, finishing up with "some nifty, tremendous wing-tip shoes, about two and a half feet long, with green tips and heels, white in the middle. They came from a clown who was retiring and wanted his feet to keep on walking." The man found that it wasn't so easy sharing giggles. The children were in pain and frightened. Then he "got the idea of traveling with popcorn. When a kid is crying, [he dabs] the tears with the popcorn and pops it into [his] mouth or into his or hers." He says, "We sit around together and eat the tears." [This story is drawn from one told in Dass and Gorman, How Can I Help?, pp. 51-54.] Popcorn is pretty cheap, but a heart that knows how to use it to soak up tears is a very rich heart. Won't we give our hearts, too? I pray we will. Amen.