Sunday Devotions: A 20th Century Widow's Mite
Mark 12
[Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then 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. For 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.”
Mark 12:41-44
Assigned the same week large majorities of Christians just voted again for a billionaire whose tax policy favors the wealthiest Americans, it’s easy to read our gospel lesson as having included the story of the widow’s mite in order to underscore Jesus’ earlier condemnation of religious people who “devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers” (v 40). Surely Presbyterian pastor Denise Anderson is on to something when she writes that “Jesus is not simply heaping praise on [the widow] for her generosity; he’s indicting the system that keeps her poor. He’s asking us to face our greed” — in the 1st century, or the 21st.
But Jesus is heaping praise on the widow; he is paying tribute, not just issuing a rebuke. The poor woman who gives “all she had to live on” even as “the Temple-industrial complex” continues to function embodies a later apostolic teaching: while Christians honor the same wealthy men who are so often sources of oppression and blasphemy (Jas 2:2-4, 6-7), they forget that God has “chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him” (v 5).
So while we shouldn’t celebrate economic inequality or neglect its causes, we should recognize faithfulness within poverty that bears witness to the heavenly kingdom Jesus proclaimed. In that spirit, I thought I’d share a more recent story of someone like the gospels’ generous widow, one that Tim Erdel presented at last month’s meeting of the Conference on Faith and History.
A professor at Bethel University (Indiana) and archivist for The Missionary Church, Tim grew up as a missionary kid in northern Ecuador, where his father Paul got to know Wilfrido Sierra Castro — a Protestant peasant who also features in Living Poor, Moritz Thomsen’s memoir of serving in the Peace Corps.
Thomsen’s experience in the seaside village of Río Verde led him to liken poverty to “being sentenced to exist in a stormy sea in a battered canoe, requiring all your strength simply to keep afloat; there is never any question of reaching a destination…. Never having paddled on a calm sea, he is unable to imagine one.” Since poverty is interlocked with hunger, ignorance, disease, fear, and other problems, “there is no single way to smash out and be freed. A man has to break out in a dozen places at once.”
Few people in Río Verde were poorer than Thomsen’s 62-year old neighbor Wilfrido, “a man without shoes, without teeth, dressed in rags, his face burned and lined from the sun, his body as sparse and dry as dead grass.” In a material sense, he never broke free of his poverty, yet it was clear to the agnostic Thomsen that Wilfrido Sierra “loved God. His whole life was centered around God.” Having read “his Bible a dozen times a day,” he “was one of those men who not only believed the words of Christ but tried to live them…. The Bible says that man should care for the poor and store up treasures in heaven, not on earth, and Wilfrido, the poorest of them all, who probably didn’t make fifty dollars a year, but lived enflamed by the word of Christ would give all his chickens away to his neighbors.”
Paul Erdel got to know Wilfrido Sierra on his visits to Río Verde. The missionary describes how the peasant gave up his work farming tobacco (“abandoning his best and easiest means of income”) in order to have more time “to visit his friends and neighbors to talk about the gospel….” Erdel reports that Sierra never finished building his house because whatever of his scarce money that he didn’t give to other poor Ecuadorians went to pay for the education of his children: his daughter became a schoolteacher, and his son an engineer.
Thomsen doesn’t valorize a Christian who was “moved to self-destruction by his pity” for his fellow poor, to the point that “I realized eventually that I was watching a man starving to death.” (And I wish I could tell you that poverty has disappeared from Ecuadorian society; it hasn’t.) According to Thomsen, his Christian friend’s “faith began to crack”; he contemplated suicide before slipping into what Erdel calls a diabetic coma. Wilfrido Sierra died on February 18, 1969.
But while the skeptical Peace Corps worker and the devout evangelical missionary differed on some details, Tim Erdel was struck by “the major points of obvious agreement between” Thomsen and his father when it came to their accounts of Wilfrido Sierra:
We see the enormous power of a holy, transparent life of thoroughgoing integrity, one that seems to transcend cynicism or skeptical arguments. Two very different men, both with a wide range of life experiences and each very learned in his own way, were stunned by what they witnessed. There is something wonderfully parabolic about the fact that the outer walls of Wilfrido’s house were never finished, and that virtually every action he made in his home was therefore open to public scrutiny. There is also something almost overwhelming about seeing the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings of Jesus put into daily, consistent practice.
Whether or not Tim is right to suspect that Thomsen, who converted to Christianity just before dying in 1991, “was haunted to the very end by the life and witness of Wilfrido Sierra Castro,” I’m certainly persuaded by his argument that “if low Church protestants don’t canonize saints, we should at least remember that there is a place in this life for recognizing genuine heroes of the faith” like Wilfrido Sierra. I’m grateful to Tim for adding Sierra to my own cloud of witnesses; when I can’t keep from worrying about the future in the midst of my suburban security and middle-class affluence, I’m humbled by the faith of an impoverished peasant.
As a historian who so often tells stories of the wealthy, powerful, famous, and influential, I particularly appreciated how Tim put his scholarly skills in service of Miguel de Unamuno’s emphasis on “the quiet and unrecorded lives of ordinary people who are born, who work, who breed, and who die leaving scarcely a trace of their existence behind.” As Tim puts it, that perspective is “especially appropriate for those who believe Christian teachings about all humans being made in the image of God, about the significance of a poor woman giving away her last two coins…”
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 16; Daniel 12:1-3; Mark 13:1-8; Hebrews 10:11-25.