Honest Humility to Be Found in Uncomfortable Failure

24 Pentecost 27 B     November 8,2015
1 Kings 17:8-16  Psalm 146  
Hebrews 9:24-28    Mark 12:38-44

Lectionary Link

I find much irony in the readings that have been appointed for our public reading today.  The obvious theme to harmonize from the Scripture readings is the theme of the widow.

            The Psalmist proclaims what the Psalmist believes and confesses about God:  The Lord cares for the widow and the orphan.  Could it be that the Psalmist is angry about some actual human situation which has been observed?  The Psalmist perhaps has observed that the fate of widows and orphans was not very good and the Psalmist was distressed that human society does not always seem to care for widows or orphans.

And so the Psalmist wanted to make a declaration about the heart and concern of the Lord God.  What does the Lord God care about?  God cares for the widows and the orphans.  And if God cares for the widow and orphans, why are the hands of God's care tied by the lack of care by human beings to care adequately for widows and orphan?

Is that not the big problem with religion?  We proclaim the ideal standards of God's perfect loving and caring heart even while we know that God's loving heart cannot over-ride the human freedom of people to simply neglect, avoid or exploit the needy.

We can proclaim God's perfect caring intentions all that we want even though we throw up our hands about knowing how to deal with all of the human habits of neglecting lots of needy people in our world.  Our world is filled with many situations where there is no adequate match found between true human need and the satisfaction of true human need.

Wouldn't the world be in serendipitous harmony if there was an adequate befriending between what a person needs for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the persons and the situations for meeting those needs?  Our modern welfare systems are admissions that in the free market system, the poor and needy are not going to be adequately cared for.  If we leave care up to the freedom of men and women then the needy will not receive the basic level of human subsistence.  But even with modern welfare systems, they fall short of the high ideals proclaimed by the Psalmist: The Lord cares for widow and the orphans.  We might protest in a moment of anger, "Well if the Lord cares so much for widows and orphans, why doesn't the Lord do something about it."  Do we want God to force us to care for the needy?  Wouldn't that be theocratic socialism if we were forced to care for the needy?

The needy and what to do with them has been a long-standing human problem.  We as people of faith feel compelled to state what we believe about God's care for those who are needy even while we feel helpless to do an adequate job in helping the needy.  Our sense of failure means that sometimes we over praise our band aid attempts at charity or we feel hypocritical in hiding behind the shadows of our own failure.  And probably the worst thing we can do is to give up caring, and discount the efforts to try to do anything.

A further irony is presented to us in two of our other readings:  Elijah, a religious prophet shows up on the doorsteps of a very poor widow, and says, "I am God's prophet; now provide me food and a room."  And this poor widow's house seems to be seized like a home to quarter the troops of some visiting army.  Shouldn't religion be all about helping the widow and the orphan?  Why does the poor widow have to be the one responsible for putting up the prophet?  Get a job Elijah and provide for the widow!

And what might be the point of this encounter between the prophet and the poor widow?  Whether one is rich or poor, one still needs faith to believe and to be generous in hospitality even with the meager provisions of one's life.   Whether one is poor or rich, one still needs the experience of faith to know that God has touched one's life because one has acted in faithful generosity.  The widow in the story never got really wealthy; but what she did experience was always having enough.

Fast forward to the Gospel reading and again a poor widow doing the completely ironic thing.  It would seem that the temple tithe or tax was supposed to be collected to help the poor widows.  How is it that this poor widow feels so religiously obligated to follow the appeals of the religious authorities to give to the temple?  It would seem as though she for whom the tax should be collected is actually giving a disproportionate amount of her living wages for the temple, a religious institution.  Why?

This Gospel is even more ironic because in the next passage of Mark's Gospel which follows, there is written a judgment against the temple.  Remember this Gospel of Mark was written with the knowledge of the destruction of the Temple and so it is the confession of the failure of the religious institution to have brought about conditions where human beings have been convinced that they are to care for widows and orphans in the way that God intended them to do so.

When you and I read the Bible, we need to be willing to be confronted with the condition of living in a morally uncomfortable state of being:  Knowing that we confess God to be loving and caring for people in need, while at the same time knowing that we as human beings are not yet completely converted to the heart and intentions of God.  The Bible and a sermon needs at time to hold us in this uncomfortable feeling; the sense of our failure makes humility easy because of the sense of humiliation of not measuring up to God.  And it is not only okay for us to feel this; we should feel this.

But what do we do with uncomfortable feeling?  Some people seek the thrill of horror novels and cinema to evoke a certain artistic state of mind or mood.  This uncomfortable feeling provokes us to seek always the power of God’s higher authority since it does not give us the pride of perfection until everyone is taken care of.

We allow ourselves to enter this uncomfortable state of knowing what God requires and knowing that God’s requirement for the needy is not yet reached.  Why?  As uncomfortable as we are to live with the knowledge of God's care and our failure, each of us has our own situations of need, maybe even silent needs for which we have not yet experienced a graceful fulfillment.  Rich or poor, we have lonely needs tailored to our own situation.  But like the widow in the temple or Elijah's widow hostess, we still need to act in faithful generosity to God in the ways in which we can and in the places where we sense that God wants us to give.

And we do it in faith, to believe that God will continue to give us enough of the material and spiritual stuff needed for us to maintain ourselves and maintain others and maintain a religious institution, a parish church.  And we will continue to preach the very high ideals of God, who loves and care for the widow and orphan and for those in need because we are often ones in need but more often we can be those who have the ability and resources to help those in need.

Later in our choral anthem, we will proclaim what the prophet Micah wrote about God's requirement: Do justice, love mercy and kindness, and walk humbly before our God.  As long as there is human need in our world, we must walk humbly before God because of the unfinished work to satisfy the caring heart of God toward people who are in need.

One of the reason that I feel completely confident to ask for the maintenance of our mission at St. John's is because we promise always to be honest about what God requires of us regarding human need and our own sense of uncomfortable failure to fulfill what God's perfection requires.  Our mission is always to remind ourselves that we are not perfect in providing welfare; but we are perfectible in that we can always get better at the welfare which God's hearts requires of us.  Amen.