What to Do at the End of Your Rope

Sermon

It has been a week, so let’s just acknowledge that most of us have experienced a lot of emotions: fear, anger, disappointment, grief, disgust, disbelief, horror, self-pity. Two weeks ago, when I needed to choose a preaching text for today so that the rest of the folks involved in worship planning could do their work, we still had hope. Two weeks ago, with things up in the air, I looked at the lectionary texts and chose stories about two widows, two women at the ends of their ropes. Once election results were known, the trick was to listen for a word of grace. Because I believe, now more than ever, that’s what we need: a word of grace.

Because it’s part of the regular lectionary rotation, you may have heard the gospel lesson before, and I’ll bet it has usually been in conjunction with stewardship season. What’s not to like? A penniless widow piously giving her last two cents, for the love of God. That “give ‘til it hurts” interpretation of both these stories is pretty revolting to me. Frankly, I’m tired of poor widows being the ones to shoulder the responsibility for setting the pace in generosity. I always wonder if the widow in the Temple overheard Jesus using her as the object lesson to critique the rich and powerful who were institutionally responsible for her poverty. But then, I get distracted by considering the growing gap between the working poor and the super-rich in this country, the ones who buy newspapers and influence, whose taxation rate is as low as 1/10%, while those of us who have jobs pay 25-35% of our income, which is significantly lower in real numbers, but proportionally staggering by comparison.

While you may have heard before that story about the two-penny offering being worth so much more than anyone else’s gift, what you may not have heard before is the story of the widow of Zarephath feeding the prophet Elijah. While the widow in the Temple probably gave out of a religious motivation toward the God of Israel, that sure wasn’t it for Elijah’s benefactor. Her risky generosity seems to have been motivated by the simple desire to do the decent thing in caring for another person in need.

When scripture gives us a widow, we’re supposed to pay attention and remember that God loves the lowest and most vulnerable. God never ridicules them and chooses them to be recipients of particular blessing. Liberation theologians call this a preferential option for the poor, and that runs absolutely counter to the prosperity gospel, currently working to make us great again. It is poignant that two widows might have something to say to us, post this election.

The widow of Zarephath ministering to Elijah is surprising on so many counts. She’s a Phoenician (Israel’s sworn enemy), a Gentile, the same nationality as infamous Queen Jezebel, Elijah’s arch-nemesis. What scandalized the original hearers of this story wasn’t that a woman with so little means shares with a stranger. What shocked them is God working outside the boundaries of Israel. That God loves all people, not just the covenant people. That God loves and cares for immigrants and non-natives and people not just like us. Not the sort of thing to make Israel great again.

And then there’s the widow in the Temple. A theological premise of Judaism is that God’s creation is sufficiently rich to provide enough for all of creation to flourish. But zero-sum scarcity logic also assumes if there is poverty, it’s because someone has filled their pockets first, thus depriving others. This is the nature of the Temple widow as an object lesson. It’s a social commentary, a critique of an institution which is supposed to care for widows and orphans. This is not a feel-good object lesson if you happen to be part of the Temple elite.

You probably know that I hang around with Franciscans, and that Franciscans are known for their counter-cultural view on poverty, which goes all the way back to their founders, Francis and Clare of Assisi. Both Francis and Clare came from monied families. During their lifetimes, 800 years ago, the corruption of the Church was evidenced by its great wealth and land holdings. Franciscans resisted that corruption by voluntarily embracing poverty. The point was voluntary poverty, not poverty as the result of oppression. Franciscans could live simply, not grasping anything, because they believed everything was a gift. Each day’s needs would be met, one day at a time, and those gifts were to be received open-handedly, without hoarding for the next day.

In our culture, we are taught to acquire resources and insurance policies so that we are never a “burden” to others, always as self-reliant as possible. As an extreme example of this, The New Yorker published a piece recently about groups in this country preparing for a civil war. To be honest, not all the preppers think there’s gonna be a civil war. The article was researched and written prior to the election and, while many of the preppers seemed fueled by a fear that their guy wouldn’t win, they also fear a nuclear or climate disaster. These are people who have gone beyond wondering how much toilet paper to stockpile and whether the pandemic-era canned goods are still edible. The single salvageable piece of advice I gleaned from the preppers is that individuals perish, but neighborhoods and communities survive. Francis and Clare understood this and urged their followers to live inter-dependently with the communities they served.

So we finally come around to this audacious sermon title: “What to Do at the End of Your Rope.” I’m not going to give you a checklist for surviving the coming days or put you in touch with preppers, despite having spent the last week listening to directees who, in the light of this election, are questioning their life’s purpose. I want to assure you, in the words of Walter Brueggemann, you have allies, you have purpose, you have work to do. My friends at Dandelion House, the Catholic Worker house in Milwaukie, wrote in response to election results, “Our task remains the same: to cook, do the dishes, and love the people around us; to organize, build community, and resist Empire’s assaults, no matter who occupies the White House.” That goes for all of us. Our task remains the same, even in this time and place. Another Catholic worker writes, “We do not need to wait for systems, governments, social structures, or circumstances to change and make it easier for us, or to bear the burden of the responsibility . . . We can make a conscious, deliberate choice to bring the kingdom of God into the one particular portion of history which is ours and ours alone to touch.” Cook, do the dishes, love the people around us, organize, build community. That is what to do at the end of your rope.

When Lindsey and I spoke on the phone this week, I told her my go-to strategy for carrying on in hard times. Mr. Rogers says to “look for the helpers.” That’s a worthy practice, and I commend it, but my go-to is to look for the beauty. I told Lindsey that, during the hardest times in my life, I would make sure there was a flower in my house. During these uncertain times, I commend to you the practice of beauty. Make beauty, experience beauty, practice beauty—beauty, whether or not it is useful. Franciscans are sort of squishy on whether beauty comes from love or love from beauty, but they are firm about beauty’s relationship to justice. In fact, they believe justice is “the restoration of beauty to that which is broken.”

On Tuesday night, instead of watching election returns, I read excerpts from Alexei Navalny’s prison diaries in The New Yorker. In some mystical way, Navalny’s prison insights are filled with beauty for me. They give me hope, which makes about as much sense as a widow feeding some itinerant stranger before sharing what will be her last meal with her son. As you remember, Navalny was the Russian dissident who challenged Putin and was poisoned for his troubles. Treated at a German hospital, Navalny chose to return to Russia, where he was arrested before he even got off the plane. Subjected to trial after rigged trial, carefully calibrated to break his will, Navalny knew he would perish in his solitary prison cell located above the arctic circle. I don’t know how the diaries were smuggled out to be published in the West, but he shares wisdom with his supporters. It is critical, he says, “that we live lives of truthfulness.” We do this for each other, he says, reminding his readers (like Francis and Clare) that, in our poverty, we share an essential interdependence with our community. Despite being kept from regular human contact beyond that of his jailers, Navalny assures his readers, “We are not alone.” Each person, each being, has value, he says, and reminds us that love is the only thing that has ever changed the world. Love as the motive. This is coming from a man tortured and oppressed who still sees love as the most precious and essential connection. Not revenge. And, as if taking a page from Francis and Clare, he says we must learn how to consume less as an act of love. “Don’t be afraid of anything,” he concludes. “This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children.”

Navalny writes, of course, of Russia. But his beautiful sentiment is so touching, and (I believe) so universal. We need to hear these sentiments post-election as surely as Navalny’s Russian supporters need to hear them. The piece Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann posts online also assures us that we are not alone. We have allies, we have each other. Our lives have value and purpose. And together we have work to do. Our work, he says, is peace-making, truth-telling, justice-doing. So as we go out from here today, my friends, I urge you (even at the end of your rope) to live honestly. Be truthful. Be peace-makers and justice-doers. Be humane toward others. As Medgar Evers used to say, “No one ever changed unless they thought they were loved.”

It is doubtful that you will be asked to give away your last meal as the widow of Zarephath did or your very last two pennies. But you are asked to remember our task. It is not yours alone; we accomplish it together as a community. This is so counter-cultural, but believe me when I tell you that, whether or not you feel at the end of a rope, your life has a purpose. And that, my friends, is to the glory of God. Amen.