Twenty Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
I Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44
On this Sunday after USA Election Day, congregations may be joyful, troubled, angry, split, or worried about the future of our nation. Some of us may be in shock, and even if the forces of division and destruction are defeated, we worry about violence, far beyond January 6, 2021, and know that the struggle for a more perfect union will continue. Many preachers will discard the lectionary and deal with pastoral and political issues in their congregation. Yet there is wisdom in these passages from long ago and faraway.
Today’s scriptures describe God’s faithfulless in times when we feel most in need, spiritually, politically, and economically. We recognize that we live in a world in which fear is used to motivate political decisions and personal priorities – that is obvious over the past several months of the presidential campaign. We are often counseled more about threats than possibilities. We have resources all around us, and yet we are told to consider what we lack and thus to live by individualistic insecurity rather than divine abundance. The most powerful nation in the world is told by a presidential candidate to fear fellow citizens and immigrants. Persons with adequate resources are asked “will you outlive your money?” focusing on limit rather than possibility and how much time we have left rather than how we will spend time the time of our lives. We can be realistic about personal and congregational limitations in time, talent, and treasure, but in God’s world, they should not determine our visions of the future. Indeed, those of us who are privileged must count our blessings and be willing to sacrifice for the greater good and the vulnerable in our midst as well as in response to climate change.
The exchange between God’s messenger Elijah and the widow of Zarephath goes against the whole ethos of isolated individualism and self-reliance and as it presents the classic tension between trusting God’s abundance and obsessing on our limitations. The widow deserves much affirmation: despite her fear and scarcity thinking, she is willing to look at her situation with new eyes and trust God with her future. She lets go of scarcity thinking to support the wellbeing of another, and discovers has more resource than she had previously imagined. Her diminished resources are miraculously replenished one day at a time. “Do not be afraid,” Elijah counsels her, God will provide. Scarcity-consciousness is about fear – fear of the future, fear of not having enough, fear of our own inadequacies to respond to life’s crises. Scarcity consciousness isolates us, disempowers us, and robs us of our imagination. We feel as if we’re on our own, without resources. Every stranger is a threat to our well-being. Faith awakens us to possibilities, to a larger world, where resources come from unexpected sources. Faith awakens us new relationships and opens our senses to resources we did not know we had.
Psalm 146 reminds us to trust God not mortals, especially politically leaders. Only God is our savior, not any ideology or politician, right or left. The divine savior is, as the Psalm says, executing justice for the poor and promoting the healing of the nation. Pray for vision, letting go of ideology, to listen for God’s voice.
Hebrews continues this theme. Mortality is the source of fear, isolation, and alienation. Our days are scarce and numbered when we depend on solely on human resources alone for our salvation. But, the true High Priest Christ has sacrificed so that we live in hope for eternal and everlasting life now and forever more. Trusting God’s everlasting life liberates us from our fears in this world. We may still be anxious and fearful. We need to respond to threats to our well-being and threats against loved ones. But we need not be afraid of our fear or demoralized by threat. The ultimate questions of life are in God’s hands and God is on our side, now and forevermore.
In the gospel reading, Jesus contrasts wealthy religious leaders with an impoverished woman. The scribes’ generosity is based on their exploitation of the poor. They can give generously because their gains come from injustice. The widow, fully dependent on God and at the lowest end of society, gives out of her poverty. She knows that everything belongs to God and that her life is in God’s hands. Therefore, she can sacrifice, trusting divine providence to care for her. Even those of us who are privileged, as I am, must recognize that our privilege is part of a larger support system that we neither earned nor created, and we need to be willing to be sacrificial as church members and citizens. We need to forsake lonely individualism for lively world loyalty.
These readings are not for the faint-hearted. Trusting God means that we may be called to get out of our comfort zones, reach out beyond our communities, and give up some of our abundance so that others will simply live. The constant caravan of immigrants coming north for freedom and survival, like the two widows, is an appropriate image for our time. While we need to be prudent in the affairs of state, in border laws, and in our personal economics, we are equally called to be sacrificial and to risk comfort for greater goods for our neighbors in need. We need to look at both our “guns and butter,” our investments and sacrifices, to recognize that our self-interest involves the well-being of others and that in letting go of our tight-fisted scarcity consciousness, we open to God’s reservoir of resource in our personal lives, relationships, and political involvement. We need to recognize that our first loyalty is to God and that loyalty to God means looking beyond nation and party to seek the wellbeing of the whole earth.
Regardless of the election outcome, there is work to be done. We must not accept the forces of evil. We must not give up our vocation to be healers of the earth. We must protest and pray and contemplate and challenge as we seek God’s realm on earth as it is in heaven, in the USA as it is in the moral arc of history.
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Bruce Epperly is Theologian in Residence at Westmoreland Congregational United Church of Christ in Bethesda, MD. A pastor, professor, university chaplain, and seminary administrator for forty years, in retirement he remains on the faculty at Wesley Theological Seminary. He is the author of over eighty books including “Saving Progressive Christianity to Save the Planet,” “Homegrown Mystics: Restoring the Soul of Our Nation through the Wisdom of America’s Visionaries,” and “The God of Tomorrow: Whitehead and Plato on Metaphysics, Mysticism, and Mission.”
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