Rather than physically walking and praying in Mason City, I have been walking interior pathways. I have been organizing my maps. I have been figuring out my route going forward. Part of that pathway has involved deepening my spiritual expertise and accepting the responsibility of spiritual leadership. So here is the sermon I preached, in written form. I have included a youtube video, which is well worth watching and which significantly formed my message:
Scripture: Mark 12:41-44
I Don't Know Where You Come from, but I Am Really Glad You're Here
Before I was a Christian, I used to play piano for a small American Baptist Church in my hometown. I loved the people there, even though I thought their rituals-praying, communion, and Sunday School-were a silly waste of time. I found it hard then to believe that grown-up, adult people took this religion stuff so seriously. As though standing in a circle holding hands was going to cure cancer or alleviate financial woes. I really did not believe that thinking people could accept at face value the kinds of things I heard there: stories about virgin births, bodily resurrection from the dead, the Rapture, and a burning, tormenting eternal dimension they called Hell.
I remember that almost weekly, while I sat in the pews and listened to the sermon, I had an urge to take my shoe off and throw it at the preacher. Pastor Byron Schaffer really seemed to get that reaction from me a lot. He was good preacher with a lot of energy-he had a kind of warm fire of a voice which made you want to lean in and believe him, but the words he said-the ideas he shared-I really did not care for those.
One week, particularly, I got so worked up by his sermon, I almost couldn’t contain myself. He told this story about a woman who, at the end of vegetable growing season was really short on funds. She was a mother and her children ate primarily out of her garden. Over the winter they would be fed only if she could can the vegetables from her garden. Now, this gal, according to Pastor Schaffer, was a good, Christian woman, and she found herself between two tough choices: use the last of her money to buy canning supplies and feed her babies, or give the last of her money to her church and trust that God would supply for her need.
Now, do you see where this story is heading? Do you see the end? We just heard the story of the “Widow’s Mite,” right? We know the correct answer to her dilemma, and Pastor Schaffer, God love him, in his suit, with his expensive smile, his gold watch, his light colored skin, his shiny shoes and his masculine authority, lifted up the woman’s righteous choice to give her last money to the church as the shining example of Christian behavior.
And all I could think, while controlling the urge to unlace my tennies and wing my shoe at him was “What a pile of bullshit! Any God worth worshipping would want that woman to buy her canning supplies and feed her children, and what’s more, any church worth supporting would have already stepped up so that she would not need to struggle with that choice.”
Christian faith, for me, is most aptly described as a wrestling match. Like Jacob, I find myself in conflict with this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit Fire, and what is being asked of me, or what is being said. I often find myself deeply angered by the self-serving ways in which we interpret Scripture, or supremely baffled by this choice so many seem to make of abandoning rational engagement with the world as it is for the practice of shouting truth claims at geology and physics as though to change their minds. I don’t rest easy with this tradition I’ve adopted, and the story of the “Widow’s Mite,” especially as interpreted by Pastor Schaffer, really seems to get my hackles up.
You see, I imagine my own experience into that story. I imagine Jesus sitting across the street. I imagine my friend Barb Embry, walking by that treasury box on her way to the store to buy coffee with the last few dollars of her monthly Social Security check. As she passes the box she sees this sign which says “We are $1500 short on our capital campaign. Please consider upping your pledge if you have not already done so.” And she feels so guilty about her church’s money problems that she gives up her own pleasure-her morning coffee-to put that money in the treasury. And Jesus, across the street, calls his buddies over to him-his CPA buddies, his landowner buddies, his shipping venture buddies, and his pastor buddies, points out Barb’s sacrifice and says, “Would you look at that? Now, that is how a church member gives.”?!?
Doesn’t that kind of make you want to throw your shoe at Jesus? I mean, if all the church needs is $1500, two mites, why does that have to come from the small, simple-living grandmothers among us? I mean, why is Jesus so excited about that? Why does he celebrate her poverty, especially from his place of privilege. After all, he is not an elderly woman getting by on her dead husband’s pension check. He doesn’t have to think about his next meal. In the scripture it says that there are some women providing for his ministry out of their means. He doesn’t have to worry about his coffee budget, because someone else is picking up the tab. In fact, it is probably a group of well-meaning widows giving up their last two mites so he and his layabout friends can have a hot meal after a long day discussing philosophy across the street from the temple.
And why the heck doesn’t Jesus get up, approach that widow and tell her what I told my friend Barb: That that sign isn’t talking to you-that your pledge is as it should be-and that last $1500 dollars is on someone else-someone who can better afford to pay? Why doesn’t Jesus get off his butt, run after that woman and give her back her two cents-surely he has something extra squirreled away in his robes-He is the Son of God after all. Why does he sit there? How can he simply let her go home without the wherewithal to buy the flour with which to make a loaf of bread? He could at least send Matthew after her to give a few bucks out of his and the disciples’ petty cash account, couldn’t he?
It is enough to make me want to take off my shoe and throw it at his head!
When I sent my slides and worship title to Pastor Jim, he mentioned that Hillary Clinton had a shoe thrown at her recently. I went online and read a few stories about the incident. The woman who threw the shoe is characterized as being “mentally unstable” and is looking at two years in federal prison. The media and the law’s reactions seem a bit extreme. After all, as I have just admitted to you, I totally get that desire to lob something at the head of someone whose words or actions are getting on my nerves. Right? (gesture holding that shoe up)
During the second Iraq war, an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at then President George W. Bush. There were tons of articles about the depth of the insult as understood from an Arab worldview, and lots of analysis about the intent of the thrower. It was a political incident, but not really a criminal one from our point of view. President Bush seemed to take a “sticks and stones but not a shoe” attitude toward the whole thing. We really just laughed it off as a rather uncouth and ineffective expression of free speech.
My husband, who is a UM pastor, thought there might be something Biblical about throwing shoes so I looked into that as well and learned that covenants were made by taking off a shoe and giving it to the person with whom you entered that covenant. You would walk home with one shoe off, to feel the hard truth of your promise through the soles of your bare foot. Go ahead. take a moment and feel the floor with the foot that doesn’t have a shoe.
Some sources suggest that shoes were thrown at oathbreakers. This is indicated In Psalm 60- "Moab is My washbowl; Over Edom I shall throw My shoe; Shout loud, O Philistia, because of Me!" and again in Psalm 108:"Moab is My washbowl; Over Edom I shall throw My shoe; Over Philistia I will shout aloud." A suggestion that Edom broke the covenant and God was giving back the shoe, disgracing the oathbreaker. Leverite marriage-the obligation of a man to father children with his deceased brother’s wife-could be renounced by throwing a shoe at the man, publicly shaming him in the community, but at the same time freeing him of the duty.
In Ruth 4 we learn that "( . . .in earlier times in Israel, for the redemption and transfer of property to become final, one party took off his sandal and gave it to the other. This was the method of legalizing transactions in Israel.)" So, In the Gospel of Mark,when John the Baptist says “After me comes the one who is more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.” he is indicating that he is somehow not important enough to enter into a covenant relationship with Jesus. Shoes then, it seems, are kind of a powerful metaphor for people and have been for quite some time. I am in good company with my urge to toss shoes at people.
In an interview with Jon Stewart, Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani woman who was shot by the Taliban for advocating for the education rights of girls and women, shares about her reaction when she discovered she had been placed on a Taliban hit list for speaking out: (interview shared below) “I started thinking about that, and I used to think that the Talib would come and he would just kill me, but then I said “If he comes what would you do, Malala?” Then I would reply to myself that “Malala just take a shoe and hit him.” But then I said, “If you hit the Talib with your shoe then there will be no difference between you and the Talib; you must not treat others with that much cruelty and that harshly.”
When I started thinking about my message for you today, I was going to do something about the differences between men and women and money-the widow and the rich young ruler-Jesus and gender dynamics, but for some reason, I got to thinking about throwing shoes instead. My reaction to pastor Schaffer on this widow scripture, and the interview with Malala Yousafsai where she equates using her shoe to hit a Talib with the beatings, and terrorizing behavior which the Talib used against her. I mean-this young woman was shot in the head by these people and she won’t even consider hitting one of them with her shoe. It seems ridiculous. After all, what is a shoe? It is not a gun. It is not a fist. You have one in your hand right now. You could toss that shoe at me, and even if it makes contact, it is unlikely to do me any kind of real harm.
Yet when Malala finishes that story-when she shares about using her shoe against the Talib and the audience laughs-when she quite simply and honestly says that for her that act became unthinkable, Jon Stewart drops his jaw and loses his breath. I did, too.
I was struck, if you will pardon the violence of the image, at how easily and casually I can contemplate hitting another human being. That the idea of tossing a shoe at Pastor Schaffer was an amusement for me.And I am convicted in my own violence when I hear her commitment to such a radical peace.
It was, in fact it still is, shaming for me-because in her statement, I hear Jesus telling me to love my enemies. To offer my other cheek for abuse, to bear the injustices and humiliations of my oppressors with, primarily, compassion for them. It is as though even the thought of throwing my shoe at Pastor Schaffer is a violation of these commands. If I hadn’t heard Malala Yousafsai say those words with my own ears,I don’t know that I could have believed that I, as a grown-up adult person was supposed to take this religion stuff so seriously.
And I wonder if that is maybe what Jesus is pointing to when this widow drops her last bit of money into the Temple treasury. Maybe he calls his disciples over not so much about the money, but the sheer insane, radical, and irrational faith that gesture embodies. Not only a faith witness that is kind of crazy-clearly, the sane thing to do is to buy the canning supplies-but a faith witness so full of generosity and humility that it takes your breath away.
Maybe Jesus isn’t so much saying look at how a faithful person gives? What if he means for us to simply see how a faithful person lives? What if he is saying, “Look! There.That is the thing I have been trying to tell you about!”
There is no reason for that widow to give to that Temple. There is no reason for Barb Embry to increase her pledge to her affluent church. There is no reason for Malala Yousafsai to keep the shoe on her foot, and there is no reason for Rachel Corrie to let the bulldozer run her down. Yet they do, and because they do, I find myself suddenly seeing the world as it might be: a place of faith, a place of trust, a place of peace, a place of compassion, and a place of generosity and joy.
I see, too, the times and the places where I choose not to live in those ways. Those times when I sit in my head and imagine letting my shoe fly. Those times when I make light of people for standing in circles, holding hands with one another and bowing their heads to pray. I can see, for a split second how those seemingly insignificant choices add stature to a world of greed, violation, oppression and fear, and I find myself, like Jon Stewart, saying, “I don’t know where you come from, but I am very glad you are here.”
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