Reflection for Sunday – November 10, 2024

Readings: 1 Kings 17: 10-16; Hebrews 9: 24-28; Mark 12: 38-44 
Preacher: Margot Van Etten

The Temple is busy as people bring their offerings. The thirteen large, horn-shaped metal offering boxes resound as coins are put or poured into them. Wealthy people open their bags, pour the coins in, and as they cascade around the metal spiral the sound resembles a galloping army, trumpeting the vast amount that the benefactor can spare for the Temple. Satisfied donors can process out basking in peoples’ admiration of their generosity.

But Jesus’ attention is caught by the tiny plink of a couple of minute coins—just mites, but their sound is that of a truly generous heart, a rapture of love as powerful and extravagant as the precious jar of ointment that another woman will soon pour over Jesus’ head to anoint him.  More, for this woman is offering what she truly cannot afford, her entire sustenance. Recklessly she is offering—everything.

Two impoverished widows frame our readings today.  Both literally give everything away.  Impoverished, insignificant women without even the dignity of being named— who become touchstones of faith for their reckless generosity. 

What brings the widow of Zarapeth to share the last of her food with the scruffy exiled prophet? Her situation is indeed dire: she and her son are about to die from famine. Yet somehow she is able to trust this stranger’s promise that his God will protect them from starvation if they share the little they have, if she offers everything.

We know how the story ends: God does provide throughout the famine because of her generosity and trust. Later, because she trusted enough to share, the prophet is there to pray her dead son back to life.  Trust begets generosity which leads to life rather than death.

We have no idea what happens to the widow in the Temple.  She appears and then vanishes—but not to God. In Jesus’ eyes, in God’s eyes she is one of the great ones, one who offers all she has to God.  Others give what they can spare, their surplus. But she gives everything.

How does someone find the courage to risk everything? What lets these two women do more than all the wealthy and powerful in their world—give all, holding back nothing? What is the one thing that the rich rulers and social leaders lack?

The essence of Faith. Trust.

Perhaps because they have so little they are free to put their entire trust in God.  And trust is the core of Faith: not intellectual assent to ideas or dogmas created by human minds, but trust in that Love which surrounds us at every moment of our lives, everywhere present and pervading all things. Trust— not in money, or power, or prestige or any of the other things we so often depend on to prop up our sense of worth, identity, and security. Faith is trust in God, in Jesus.  And this trust, this faith gives us the power and freedom to love, to have compassion, to be truly generous—to be free in our hearts and minds.

At a time when our entire world seems to writhe in fear and anxiety, perhaps we lack just that one thing. We have so much to lose and seem to live in constant fear of losing it. How can we open our hearts to God and find that ability to trust, to love, to abide in the Love that sustains us no matter what is happening?

I am going to share something I have used and found so helpful that we started giving it out in the form of bookmarks to students at exam time while I was in campus ministry. It’s a meditation that was found in St. Teresa of Avila’s breviary, called (not surprisingly) “St. Teresa’s bookmark.”  If you memorize it and then mentally time it with your breath as you repeat it you’ll find that it has great power to bring you back to that center where the Spirit dwells within you. You can say it while sitting for prayer, while walking, when you wake with the 4 a.m. heebie-jeebies….  Let it breathe you, so to speak, for at least 10 minutes…or until you fall back asleep…or until you feel its power in your heart.  Let its power help you to trust.

Let nothing upset you.

Let nothing alarm you.

All things are passing.

God alone is changeless.

Patient endurance

attains what it strives for.

Whoever has God

is lacking for nothing.

God alone

is enough.