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Acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Our text for this morning comes from both the Old Testament and the Gospel lessons. You may be seated.
We’ll let it pass. Ah, it’s 11 o’clock. How much do you trust God? Do you worry about your clothes, what you’re going to wear? Do you worry about your food, what you will eat? After this past Tuesday’s elections, do you have any more worries that come to mind? I became a little more worried about my property taxes in the coming years. It’s hard not to worry. When someone tells you not to worry, does that help? If someone tells me not to worry, my first thought is, well, what is it that I’m not supposed to worry about?
We worry about our health care, our retirement savings, our debts. Then there are those other concerns of life: our health, our loved one’s health, our relationships, our country. We worry about our health, our social media reputation, terrorism and crime—the list seems endless. On top of worries, sometimes our priorities in life can become askew as well. We may have a hard time discerning between what we want and what we actually need. And so we may worry about things that we don’t even need.
And then come these two lessons, these two widows: the widow at Zarephath and the widow who puts her entire life savings into the offering plate. What do they teach us? What do they have to say to us about trust in God? Now, not trusting God for all of our earthly needs is no doubt a problem we all have from time to time.
Now, the attitude of the widow in our Old Testament lesson may be one that you’ve fallen into. She assumed that she and her son would eat their last meal and then die of starvation. She had given up. She saw only her poverty. And so God sends his messenger, the prophet Elijah, to provide a very unlikely food source, namely the practically empty jar of oil and the almost spent jar of flour. God attached his word to those things. And then instead of being a reminder of her poverty, they become a source of life.
The widow doesn’t receive a lot. She doesn’t become wealthy. But God gives her enough—enough to feed herself, her son, and the prophet for many days. Then we get the widow in the gospel lesson. And she seems to be in a different place spiritually. Yes, she’s poor, but she has so much trust in God that she gives back to God all that she has given her, down to her last penny. That gift is more than all the rich people’s offerings combined because she gave from her poverty, not a little bit from the excess. She gave back to God all that God had given her.
And who would doubt that God continued to care for her? For her, God was enough. Somehow she knew that she would be taken care of despite her poverty. Oh, that we had such faith. We realize that from time to time we may be stingy with our material possessions, or at least from time to time we may be anxious about them. We like to plan things out in our lives. We like to have a financial plan.
And I suppose that there’s a fine line between being good stewards, being wise with what God has given us, and not trusting that God will provide for all of our needs. For example, as you may know, it used to be considered a lack of trust in God to buy insurance or to install a lightning rod. Times have changed a little bit since then.
But I think if we’re honest with ourselves, our mistrust runs much deeper than simply not relying on God for all of our earthly needs. What about our spiritual needs? Do we trust God in that area? Or do we hold back a little bit of our spiritual selves from God as well? If God is enough for our earthly needs, will he not much more provide for our eternal needs? Do we trust God that he’s enough for our spiritual lives, even as he is for our earthly ones?
What does that mean? How do we rely on ourselves instead of God in spiritual matters? Well, I think there are several ways. Perhaps we, like the scribes at the beginning of our gospel lesson, are intent on showing off our own righteousness to others and to God. Look at me, God. Look how good I am. Or look, God, I believe the right things. I go to the right church. I come from the right family. I can answer all the tough questions.
Or perhaps our self-righteousness is a little more smug, intent to look down our noses at those sinners over there and puff ourselves up with our own holiness. Or the other extreme—perhaps we tend to punish ourselves for our own sinfulness, wallowing in our self-pity and despair. We might even ruminate on past sins—things that we can’t change—and lament those missteps we’ve taken in our lives. Or maybe there’s one little sin that we want to hold on to. We really like it. God can have the rest, but not that one. None of these attitudes impress God.
And it’s as if we’re holding back a bit of ourselves, not willing to give all of our ugliness and sin and brokenness over to God. We’d rather hold on to it just a little bit. But praise be to God that our holiness and our righteousness does not come from inside ourselves. It doesn’t come from us. Our earthly possessions are gifts from God, and our heavenly possession is as well.
God gives us everything we need to support this body and life, and he gives us everything we need to be partakers of eternal life. The connection to our Lord Jesus Christ is simple. He gave up everything. He held nothing back. He even gave his very life into the treasury, and then the Father handed the treasury over to us.
In our baptisms, he is like the widow in the gospel lesson. In that widow, we see a picture of Jesus intent to give up everything. She trusted that God would provide what she needed, and Jesus trusted that his Father would be faithful. Christ trusted that the Father would raise him from the dead and would seat him at his right hand. He trusted that it wasn’t for nothing, that everything he gave up would be handed over to us for our benefit.
I don’t know about you, but more often than not, I see myself more like the widow of Zarephath than the widow from our gospel lesson. We doubt. We doubt God’s provision for our lives. We doubt that God is enough. We doubt God’s provision for our deaths sometimes. And so God lovingly sends his prophets, his pastors, his teachers, God-fearing friends, God-fearing family. These messengers are blessings from God, and they are God’s instruments to care for us, to remind us that God is enough.
And so we come here. We come here to see and hear—to this place that seems like a very strange food source indeed. We come to feast on Christ’s Word. And we come to this altar where the jar of his body for you is never spent. Yes. And where the cup of his blood shed for you never runs dry. This meal, it looks meager. How can a little bread and wine do such things? Because it is from God. God has connected it to his word. It is a meal blessed by God for our lives now and eternally. It is a meal purchased for you on the cross to provide for your needs.
It doesn’t look like much, but it is enough. Christ’s body and blood shed for you is enough. And so there is no need to rely on ourselves for our heavenly food, just as there is no need to rely on ourselves for our daily bread. There is no need for us to hold anything back from God because he is faithful and he gives all that we need.
We don’t need to be puffed up in our faith, for even that is a gift from God, not from ourselves. We don’t need to lord our knowledge of the truth over others, but share it with them in gentleness and love. We don’t need to punish ourselves for our own sin because Jesus was punished on our behalf. We don’t need to hold back that one sin, that one thing we don’t want to give to God, because trusting in him means we’re better off without it.
We can’t add a single hour to our life by worrying about what we will eat or what we will wear. And we can’t make God love us more by what we do or fail to do. Because God in Christ is enough. He is sufficient for all our needs of body and soul. He is enough for this life. He is enough for the life to come.
And so may we be generous to others, even as God has poured out his riches upon us. In the name of Jesus, amen.
And may the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
