The Twenty-fifth Sunday After Pentecost | November 10, AD 2024 | Mark 12:38-44 | Andrew F. Weisner |

Kings 17:8-16
⁸Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, ⁹Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you. ¹⁰So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, „Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.“ ¹¹As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, „Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.“ ¹²But she said, „As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.“ ¹³Elijah said to her, „Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. ¹⁴For thus says the LORD the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.“ ¹⁵She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. ¹⁶The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD that he spoke by Elijah.

Psalm 146

Hebrews 9:24-28
²⁴For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. ²⁵Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; ²⁶for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. ²⁷And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, ²⁸so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Mark 12:38-44
³⁸As he taught, he said, „Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, ³⁹and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! ⁴⁰They devour widows‘ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation. ⁴¹He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. ⁴²A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. ⁴³Then he called his disciples and said to them, „Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. ⁴⁴For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.“

Homily

Once upon a time, I had a professor in college who would tell a tale that illustrated, he said, how God looks out for „fools and idiots.“ (And this professor said that, at times, he qualified as both.)

Before this professor was a university professor, he was a parish pastor. And while serving in his third congregation, located on the far north side of Chicago, he decided he wanted to engage in graduate studies at the prestigious and rigorous University of Chicago – maybe even to earn a Ph.D.! But before he could actually enroll, he had to take some qualifying examinations. This professor, back in the day that he was a pastor, thought to himself, „Oh! I’ve always been rather smart! I always made good grades in theology, and since seminary, I’ve kept up reading theology, I bet I can do well on those exams even without having to take courses to prepare for them!“ (He later admitted: there was a bit of arrogance in his attitude.) So, he inquired when the exams were to be administered, and signed himself up. Then came the evening before the exams. He had a good dinner with his wife, read a bit, and decided to get a good night’s sleep before he would get up the next morning, drive from his home down to the university (about an hour-and-a-half), and take the exams at 9:00.

He was just about to go to bed, when the telephone rang. It was two of his church members on the phone, husband and wife: their son had been shot on the south side of Chicago. No one knew the circumstances of the incident, but their son was in a hospital on the south side fighting for his life. They wanted their pastor to be there with them while their son was going through surgery for the dangerous, life-threatening gun-shot wound.

So, the pastor changes clothes into the proper attire for going into a hospital for a pastoral visit; jumps into the car and heads to the Chicago South-Side. When he arrives, the young man is already in surgery. The pastor stays with his parishioners, the young victim’s parents, throughout the surgery and throughout the night, reading scripture passages, saying prayers, and singing psalms, all those comforting practices for times of trouble. By morning, there was a successful surgery, successful recovery, and sometime between about 7:00 to 7:30, the medical staff declared that they think the young man will live, that he will survive the gun-shot wound.

„Well! This is wonderful news,“ the pastor thinks to himself, „but now that this is over, I have an exam to take in about an hour-and-a-half!“ There wasn’t time, he realized, for him to drive home and try to catch a nap, change clothes and then go take the exam. So, he decided to drive over to the university where he would take the exam, wash his face to try to „freshen-up,“ get a good breakfast, and then go sit for the exam. And so, that’s what he did.

As he continues the story, he says: he went into the exam room. There were sitting all around this young – and tired, sleepy – pastor, young university students, seated at spaced-out desks, all of them somewhat confident because they had been taking courses that prepared them for this exam. The exam, this professor recalls, was distributed. The students had four hours to respond to all the questions. The young pastor read the page, i.e., read the essay questions, and that, he recalls, was the last thing he remembers. He fell asleep. In his fatigue from staying awake doing ministry whole night before, he fell asleep. Remembering the event, he raises questions: Why didn’t any one of the other students taking the exam try to wake him? Why did one not nudge him, or speak to him to wake him? Why didn’t one of the proctors of the exam walk over and wake him? Our pastor’s interpretation: They (the test-takers) were all too „cut-throat“ or wrapped up in themselves to wake up a fellow test-taker!

The pastor (exam-taker) finally woke up: after three hours. He had one hour remaining in the exam period. He „shook himself“ alert, read the questions again, quickly sketched an outline to respond to each of the questions, and then wrote furiously for one hour to fill-in the outline. In one hour, a proctor called that the exam time was expired.

The professor-pastor recalled that he left the exam room and university and drove home, feeling quite crest-fallen. Given his fatigue and the enormous amount of time he lost by sleeping through three-quarters of the exam, he was sure he had failed and would have to wait a year to take the exam again.

A few weeks passed. In the mail came the letter from the university informing him of his grade on the exam. He made an „A“. „God watches out for fools and idiots,“ relayed the professor. However, he was neither fool nor an idiot. He was a responsible pastor who did his job, attended to a family who was in fear and pain during a very critical time of need. And then he followed through with another commitment: taking the scheduled exam, even though he was tired and worn out. The real point of his story – and the point of similar stories that likely many of you could tell, events that have happened in your life – is that God takes care of us, God provides. That is the main point of the story of Elijah and the widow and her son. God provided oil and flour in order that they continue to eat during a famine. And yes, there are times when it seems that God does not provide, when it seems that God is not present and taking care of us. However, the hard-to-accept realization is that, upon hindsight or viewed from a loftier perspective, even when it „feels like,“ „appears“ to be that God is not there, indeed he is, and there is a reason for the momentary silence. The great example of this is a certain death by crucifixion on a Friday afternoon.

Yet, Jesus, the Crucified One, is raised from the dead. God the all-powerful One, the compassionate, loving God is present with us at all times. He cares for us and provides for our needs for the purposes of his story, his intentions for history, for his kingdom, at every moment and across the ages. In fact, in a short while, he shall come to us here to provide for us food for our continuing journey: the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

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Pastor Andrew F. Weisner, Ph.D.
pastorweisner@gmail.com
Pastor, New Covenant Lutheran Church
Morganton, North Carolina, USA
Faculty, North American Lutheran Seminary, Ambridge, PA, USA