Sermon delivered on May 29th, at Unfinished Community in Ashiya, Japan
It’s funny, really, where our blind spots tend to be when it comes to our faith, isn’t it?
I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this passage preached, both of these passages really, and whenever they come up it’s always the same things that seem to just…quietly slip under the radar, conveniently unmentioned and forgotten about.
These two passages are incredibly well known, concise, eminently quotable Bible passages - the sort of thing one might find on a devotional card, inscribed on the back of a Bible given to some unsuspecting and unknowing teenager as a present for confirmation, graduation, or some other moment of note in their lives.
Together, these two passages read kind of like a secret recipe for peace on earth. First comes reading the room - knowing when to plant and when to harvest, when to weep and when to laugh, when to mourn and when to dance - and then comes that profound, spiritual understanding that the purest form of faith is when the most destitute and vulnerable unquestioningly give the last little bit they have to wealthy, religious elites who don’t even realize or care that they were in the temple to begin with.
Because that is what happened here, right? I’m not the only one who sees this?
When we read this story, it is our default instinct to hear the voice of Jesus as praise for the poor widow, uplifting the gift of her poverty and extolling it over the gifts given by others out of their abundance. It is our instinct to spin this story on its head, to make it all about the poor widow’s excessive, personal faith, rather than what the story is written to be - that of an angry Jesus highlighting the great and terrible faithlessness of a community of wealth, power, and privilege treating the house of the Lord as their own personal, social playground at the expense of those most in need.
Consider that just before he sat down across from the temple treasury in verse 41, he had stood in the temple itself, right among the wealthy and powerful scribes who administered that same temple, and said of them,
“Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect
in the marketplaces and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at
banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.
They will receive the greater condemnation.”
In this moment, in this context, Jesus sounds positively divisive. It sounds as though Jesus is the one who is tearing the community apart, raising up rebellion and disunity where there ought to be peace and fellowship. It sounds as though Jesus is speaking out in favor of bringing the powerful down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. It sounds as though he’s talking about filling the hungry with good things, and sending the rich away empty.
It sounds like he’s being exactly who his mother said he would be, all those years ago.
But how do we square this image of an angry, protesting Jesus with our long-running understanding of Jesus as the Prince of Peace?
It’s simple - we face up to the fact that our understanding of peace has always been shaped by the most powerful among us, for whom “peace” is a world where they can do whatever they like.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told by wealthy, powerful Christians in the communities I’ve served over the years that this sort of talk against the wealthy and the powerful is an act of disunity; a rebellion against God’s established authority and order in the world, and a slap in the face of Jesus himself. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told that injustice is terrible, of course, but you can’t bring a community together by alienating the rich and powerful.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that if everyone could just stop making such a fuss, stop fighting, then we could simply live in peace, unity, and happiness.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that the secret to God’s peace is working with the wealthy, the powerful, the corrupt, and the unjust, rather than against them.
And at times, especially when things are most difficult…I begin to wonder if they might be right. After all, I’m known for being something of a firebrand, if I’m being honest. Maybe it really is true that the bulk of our problems are caused by those like me who would choose to argue a point rather than simply agree to disagree. Maybe it really is true that if we simply support our leaders, yield to those in power, and drop our two coins into the treasury without complaint, then we could be unified by our faith.
Maybe we could finally have peace in our communities, if we just stopped…fighting.
And then, in one terrifying moment, I look out and I see the cost of that kind of peace.
I see the cost paid in the bodies of teachers and children in Texas, beautiful hearts and minds full of God’s potential lying dead because it was easier for us Americans to just sit back, and allow people to agree to disagree on the issue of guns rather than hold leaders accountable for every drop of blood unjustly spilled - every drop of it an insult against God that should never have been allowed to pass.
I see the cost of that kind of peace being paid in cities burning across Ukraine, Syria, and any number of other places across the globe, as refugees flee from oppression and genocide because we couldn’t be bothered to speak up against leaders who profit from war, and who see genocide as growth market for the expansion of profit.
I see the cost being paid in the Philippines, as corruption spreads like wildfire because all of us, in nations around the world, found it more convenient to kick back and watch the next video on YouTube than to hold companies and leaders accountable for profiting off the spread of disinformation.
I see the cost being paid locally, as churches, governments, corporations and other community organizations crumble under the weight of corruption, as people bend to leaders who spin honey’d words about shared greatness and unending prosperity while making backroom deals that benefit only a select, privileged few. I see religious leaders preaching of a faith that gives us everything we wanted for ourselves, while asking nothing of us in return.
We pay that cost all the time in our daily lives, and in exchange we get peace.
Or do we?
My friends, when we are talking about that social condition where everyone is happily getting along, where no one is upset or complaining, where the rich and the poor sit down together in harmony and no one feels the need to raise a voice in anger or in protest…that thing we’re imagining - it isn’t actually peace.
It’s quiet.
In Alabama in 1957, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to town, a preacher of the Gospel known for bringing with him agitation to the status quo, he said this of his God-given calling to bring peace:
"I come not to bring this old peace which is merely the absence of
tension; I come to bring a positive peace which is the presence of
justice and the Kingdom of God. Peace is not merely the absence of
something. but it’s the presence of something."
Consider that for a moment, if you will.
True peace, God’s peace, doesn’t come when we subtract tension, but when we add justice.
True peace, God’s peace doesn’t come when we avoid confrontation and allow corruption to flourish, but when we stand up to oppression and fight back against injustice.
True peace, God’s peace doesn’t come from silenced voices and the cool chill of spirts desperate to avoid offending or disrupting those powerful enough to complain. Peace is forged in the fire of confrontation, dug out from beneath oppression and injustice, and expressed in every cry ever shouted against those who would profit from the suffering of others.
Peace isn’t something amicably negotiated between insiders - it’s shouted from across the temple courtyard at a system built on injustice masquerading as faithfulness and kindness.
A moment ago, I talked about our bind spot when it comes to today’s passage in Mark, but I neglected to mention where that blind spot is when it comes to Ecclesiastes and this one, I think, is perhaps the more important of the two to confront.
We find this blind spot when we happily embrace only the beginning and end of verse 8, and quietly gloss over the two lines in the middle. We tend to treat this verse like the scriptural equivalent of a contraction - like don’t, can’t, or won’t - only we take the phrase “a time to love,” and then quietly slip an apostrophe in there so we can skip over everything else before landing on “a time for peace.”
We don’t want to see that there is a time for hate, and a time for war.
In our heart of hearts, we like to see ourselves ourselves good, righteous, loving, kind, and above all quietly peaceful Christians. And if that is how we imagine ourselves, then it becomes all but impossible for us to imagine a time where a good, Christ-following, Bible-believing Christian can stand up and say, with the fullness of God’s love and mercy on their side, that there is a time for fire, and that time is now.
But it is quickly beginning to seem as though we are leaving the comfort an era where we can safely embrace the image of a placid Jesus, sitting cross-legged on some hilltop far removed from us in space and time, dispensing wisdom with a passive spirit and a placid grin. Our world today seems to be one where we need to embrace the Jesus who stood in the midst of the temple and spoke fierce condemnation against those who profited off the suffering of others, then stepped back and with a broader lens exposed the very systems of exploitation and oppression these powerful people had built to prosper only themselves while selling it to the masses as faith.
So I suppose that is where I want to leave us all thinking this week:
Where are the places in your life, now, where God might be calling you to stop avoiding confrontation and bring the fire? Places where confrontation isn’t something you want, but is something God’s justice needs?
What are some of the places where you’ve witnessed systems of oppression, like the temple treasury in Mark, that convince us that it is more faithful to cooperate that to stand up to an unjust system?
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