Readings for the Twenty Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 27 Year B)
1 Kings 17:8-16
Psalm 146
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44
This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday November 11, 2018.
It is good to be with you all on this veteran’s day weekend. This is an opportunity for me to catch my breath a bit in between some traveling. It is also an opportunity for all of us to catch our breath together, to count our blessings and to pray in the midst of a whirlwind of chaos and tragedy. The most destructive fire in California history along with many other devastating fires are raging through our state, forcing thousands to evacuate, wiping out an entire town, and causing several deaths. A few days ago, just as we were grieving over the recent shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue, our nation witnessed yet another mass shooting in a bar not too far from where I attended college. The fact that the shooter was a marine veteran makes this Veteran’s Day especially poignant, compelling us to pray all the more for our veterans and work to ensure they receive sufficient mental health care. Also, we held an election this last week that reminded us yet again of our country’s deep divisions, including the deep divisions we have regarding gun violence.
We gather together today in a spirit of humility and love to catch our breath, to pray, and to lay all of these concerns before the throne of our most gracious God. We gather to seek wisdom and guidance from our sacred Scriptures, fully aware of how overwhelmed we feel in the face of such daunting and terrifying challenges and disasters. I personally feel aware of my finitude, my human limitations, and my utter fatigue, and my smallness in the face of forces far beyond my control. But I must say that I am comforted by this morning’s readings because they emphasize the divine and world-changing potential in that which is small and seemingly insignificant: a handful of flour, some oil and a couple of sticks, which the widow of Zarephath uses to make and share cake during a severe drought. Two small copper coins, worth only a penny, given to God out of a widow’s poverty. These are the small things that God seems to find enormously valuable and significant. God seems to find great delight in these apparently small acts of kindness and generosity and sacrifice.
These small acts of kindness and generosity in Scripture remind me of a story you may have heard before of a young girl walking along a beach, after a terrible storm had washed up thousands of starfish. When she came to each starfish, she picked it up, and threw it back into the ocean to save it from dying. Starfish can only survive for so long outside of water. People watched this young girl with amusement and one man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t save all these starfish. You can’t even begin to make a real difference here!” Initially, the girl was crushed and deflated by these words, but then, after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied, “Well, I made a difference to that one!” The old man looked at the girl inquisitively and thought about what she had done and said. Inspired, he joined the little girl in throwing starfish back into the sea. Soon others joined, and all the starfish were saved.
God finds great delight and world-saving potential in apparently small acts of kindness and generosity and sacrifice. Many of us might not feel like we can do or give all that much in the face of such overwhelming need, but the Scriptures teach us that whatever we can do or give (even it seems small and insignificant) is enormously valuable in God’s eyes.
This morning, I invite us all to be like the widow of Zarephath, like the poor widow in Mark’s Gospel, like the young girl on the starfish-strewn beach. I invite us to practice a small act of kindness and generosity and watch how it might help change the world.
My original plan was for us to collect an offering for the Episcopal Church’s newest diocese, the Diocese of Cuba (La Iglesia Episcopal de Cuba), in which the clergy’s pension dues are in arrears after decades of separation due to geopolitical tensions. Someone calculated that the Cuban clergy pension could be fully funded if each Episcopalian gave $1. So I was going to invite us to give at least one dollar and see how that simple dollar can help bring about abundance. But sometimes the Holy Spirit has other plans. I received an email last night as I was driving home from Diocesan Convention in Redding. The email was from our own Anna Smithler, who used to live in Paradise CA, a town essentially destroyed by the Camp fire this last week. She has close friends whose homes have been lost and whose lives have been severely altered and she feels she must do something to help. So Anna and her husband Nick suggested a gift card drive, explaining that gift cards are easy for the victims to use to purchase what they personally need and they are inexpensive to ship. Father Richard Yale at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Chico is a close friend of Anna’s and a trusted colleague of mine and has been working with displaced families and he can make sure that the gift cards get into the right hands.
So although giving to the diocese of Cuba is still important, the need right here is more pressing so this morning, we will collect two offerings. The first offering will be our regular church offering. The second will be for Anna’s gift card drive for victims of the horrific Camp fire, the most destructive fire in our state’s history. Please give what you can.
A handful of flour, two small copper coins, one simple dollar, one starfish thrown back into the ocean. It is in these small gifts that God finds great value and it is through these small gifts that God wants to save the world.
These small gifts are important to God because they represent our willingness to surrender ourselves completely to that ever-giving flow of divine generosity. They represent our willingness to offer our whole selves to God. Jesus did not honor the poor widow simply because she gave two small copper coins to the temple. Jesus honored the poor widow because that was everything she had, all she had to live on. Elijah blessed the widow of Zarephath and her son because they were willing to share with Elijah what they believed would be their final meal before they died. For the widows, these small gifts represented their whole lives. Like Christ who, according to Hebrews, offered “the sacrifice of himself,” these widows offered everything they had.
A couple days ago, as I drove from the Community of the Transfiguration in Cincinnati OH to Louisville KY, I followed Sister Teresa’s advice by driving along parts of the beautiful Ohio river, where I briefly visited some quaint little towns with wonderful names like Aurora and Rising Sun and one called Patriot. In these towns, I saw several statues and memorials dedicated to our veterans, which often included the phrase, “All gave some, some gave all.” Today we remember and honor our military veterans, who all made enormous sacrifices for us and our country. We have some veterans here among us and we thank you for your service and sacrifice. And today, we give special honor to the veterans of World War I (that war to end all wars, in which millions of people made the ultimate sacrifice) because today is the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, when the armistice was signed between Germany and the Allies on November 11th 1918 at 11 AM. So at 11 AM this morning, we rang /will ring our church bell 11 times in honor of all those who gave some and all those who gave all.
What does it look like for you to give God your all? Does it mean risking your life, like those millions of brave soldiers we remember and honor today? Does it mean offering the sacrifice of your whole self? Or maybe it looks like making a cake with a handful of flour and some oil and sharing it with someone in need? Sometimes what appears to be “just some” is actually one’s “all.”
What are the two small copper coins in your life that might represent everything you have? Can you offer them to God? What starfish can you throw back into the ocean? Whatever act of kindness, generosity or sacrifice you can offer today or in the weeks ahead, no matter how big or small in the world’s eyes, please know that, according to Scripture, God will take great delight in it because often what we dismiss as “small” God sees as holy and beautiful and “all;” and because it is through these gifts that God is in the habit of saving the world. Amen
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 