Giving in Tough Times
Psalm 42 Mark 12:38-44
November 8, 2009
The story told in Mark’s gospel is one that fires our imaginations. We like thinking of the poor woman showing up the rich folks with her generous donation to the Temple treasury, maybe because she reminds us of ourselves. Especially today, with the economy in such dire straits, we see ourselves as having very little wiggle room with our finances. We relate to the poor woman in terms of not having a lot of wealth to spread around for worthy causes, even our church. But I imagine that if we were to speak with this woman, we might hear a very different perspective from our own. While we get caught up in scarcity and fear of not having enough, this woman is acting on faith, giving everything she has, despite the fact that it is so little. It wasn’t as if she had found a couple of pennies in her pocket and figured that she wouldn’t miss them. It was more that she gave her last few pennies because her experience had taught her to trust God with the big things as well as with the small things in her life. She saw her personal generosity as a way of saying that she trusted God to take care of her and to provide for her.
If you think this kind of thing doesn’t happen outside of the Bible, I have a story to share with you from a colleague in Canada. In one tiny, struggling congregation where Bev served during her first years in ministry, a woman in the community would make a grand entrance to the church twice a year, and each time would put a cheque for several thousand dollars in the offering plate, even though Bev said to her on one occasion, “We don’t want your money. We want you.”
In another congregation, a woman attended church faithfully and involved herself in the work of the church as much as she was able. Rachel suffered significant handicaps and was a single mother with two handicapped children. She lived on welfare which was inadequate for her most basic needs and even less so considering her handicapped children.
But Rachel tithed. Only Bev, who helped her set up a budget, knew that. From the little she had, Rachel tithed, even though Bev suggested she might give less. But Rachel wouldn’t even entertain that thought. “If I don’t do that part right,” she said, “nothing else works.” Rachel tithed faithfully, year after year until she died.
How do we manage to trust God when the signs of the times tell us to conserve and be careful? Do we dare to step out of the cultural comfort zone and do something radical and faith-based? How do we listen for God’s voice amidst the tumult of advice-givers in this day and age? Do we dare to take the risk?
I find it so interesting, that I am willing to trust God with the big things in my life, but when it comes to the small things, the everyday, nitty-gritty things, then I am less willing to let go of the reins. It is almost as if I don’t really trust that God knows enough about the details of my life to take care of me on that scale. I am able to see the details of my life quite well - probably too well. I know the ins and outs of my financial situation including loans and bills and my checking account balance. It is scary to think about giving more than I can rationally account for. If I can’t see where the money will come from, then I know enough not to promise it whether to a loan officer at a car dealership, to my daughter’s class fund-raiser or to my church’s financial campaign.
However, the big issues of life are so big that I really don’t have an idea about how to approach them, and they are also often so far away from my present reality that I don’t feel the need to manage them either. I just let them work themselves out as they need to, letting God take charge of them almost by default rather than because I have a deep and abiding trust that God will take care of them. In some ways, this is how getting the Lilly grant worked. It seemed so far off as a possibility, that my usual fears didn’t have a chance to kick in and tell me I was crazy to even consider it. Rationality probably would have told us that small, struggling churches in rural Vermont with their very part-time pastors, do not stand much of a chance of winning a prestigious national grant against what is certainly stiff competition from bigger, fancier churches and their well-deserving pastors. But here we are. Here I am. I have to change the way I think about what is possible now. Maybe we all do? After all, what does it do to a church to experience God’s hand in such a powerful and direct way? What does it do to a person to have the hopes and dreams that they dared to articulate, fulfilled?
This is where we stand right now. We have been touched by a fantastic and generous gift that came from the divine just as clearly as it came from an endowment fund out in Indiana. And, we are working really hard to figure out how to meet our budget; how to pay the electric and oil bills, how to fund the pastor’s salary and health insurance. The nitty-gritty is not taken being care of by the big grant that is sweeping us all off our feet. We need to work the little things out for ourselves. We need to dig for the pennies in our pockets, and ask ourselves if we are giving out of our abundance in ways that don’t really ask much of us, or are we giving out of our faith and our trust that somehow God will provide? Where do we go from here? Having experienced generosity, do we dare reach a bit deeper and give in a way that is generous more than it is safe or circumspect?
In so many ways, just being a part of a faith community is going against the crowd in our culture. We already give up our Sunday mornings to gather with a small circle of like-minded (most of the time) people to pray and sing and praise and listen for some good word that will help us put our lives in better perspective. But taking a further step of supporting that faith community with the funds that reside deep down at the bottom of our security, may be more than we can handle. Is tithing a realistic notion in 2009? Dare we give of ourselves and not just out of our abundance? I am so impressed when I hear stories like that of Rachel, because the concept of giving so selflessly appeals to me, but the reality terrifies me. I am nervous about giving so much of my resources that I would notice the difference in terms of the financial bottom line - money saved or being free to buy something I want or even need. As we all sit down and think about what we will give for God’s work in this coming year, it is my prayer that each of us might go a bit deeper into trust, and come a bit closer to being like the two widows held up to us this morning by Jesus and then more recently, by Bev.
God of every abundance, we come to you feeling nervous about what we can offer. We live in a time when finances disappear in the course of the night like so many numbers on paper. This scares us, even though we know money is not the only wealth, not the most important, for sure. Help us to determine for ourselves, what we can give for your work through our church and through other good works that we support. Help us to be generous enough to reap the benefits of knowing what it is like to really trust you with our dreams and with our everyday lives. Amen.