The Downtown Presbyterian Church

Sermons

Vampires, Living & Your Last 2 Cents

Mark 12:38-44

Rev. Kenneth M. Locke

32^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

November 9, 2003

Do you want to live? Do you really want to be alive? I don’t mean eating and drinking and breathing and going to work or school every day. I mean adrenaline pumping, breath rushing, fist-clinching living. I’m talking jumping up and down shouting living.

Think about those times in your life when you could feel life rushing through you. Was it getting married or having a child, graduating from school or getting a big promotion, maybe you were at a play or movie that moved you, perhaps you finished a tough race or you were caught up in the excitement of a rock concert or a ballgame.

Three young men in their 20s live next door to me and they love football. When they’re watching a game I know about every touchdown and every fumble even when I’m in my house with the windows closed and air-conditioning on. I don’t know about their lives the rest of the time but those men are alive when they’re watching football.

Do you want to be alive? Do you really want to live?

The widow in our story seems an odd choice for jumping up and down, fist pumping, exuberant living. Poor old woman, on her last legs, nothing but a few pennies, dottering her way to church. Certainly Jesus’ audience would have thought her an odd choice for a moral lesson. In Jesus’ time being a scribe meant you were pleasing God. Riches meant you were living right before God. The rich were not rich from hard work but because God blessed them and everyone would have assumed all the rich people putting their huge sums in the treasury were really alive to God, God’s breath was blowing through their lungs, God’s Spirit was with them.

But Jesus says, “No.” Those rich people aren’t really living.

I’ve told you before how much I enjoy “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the TV show about a high school student in Sunnydale, California who kills vampires. In the show, one of Buffy’s friends is a vampire. But he’s a good vampire. He has a conscience. He doesn’t kill people or drink their blood. Sometimes he even kills other vampires. But for all that he still doesn’t have a reflection and he doesn’t breathe. Appearances to the contrary, he’s dead.

In one episode Buffy has drowned and the vampire and one of her human friends find her face down in a pool of water. They want to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but the vampire says to the human, “you’ll have to do it. I don’t have the breath.” I don’t have the breath. I appear to be alive, but I don’t have breath.

The scribes saying long prayers and the rich people giving God what they can afford to skim off the top are walking and talking but the Spirit of God, God’s breath, is not in them. Appearances to the contrary they are dead.

But this widow has the breath of God flowing through her lungs. The widow has the Spirit of God in her life. Poor old thing, dottering to church, giving all she has to God’s work, she is so committed to God, so full of living for God, she is alive in a way the Scribes and rich will never know. Appearances to the contrary, she is roaring with life despite the fact she’s now going to die.

Make no mistake, this woman is on her last legs. No man to care for her, no man to guard and watch over her and protect her, this woman is a nobody. Widows were supposed to get help from religion, not give help to religion. They didn’t give money to the treasury, they got money from the treasury.

But this woman is different. She’s giving, and she’s giving literally everything she has. She won’t have to put off buying new shoes for a month. She won’t buy shoes at all. She won’t have to do her shopping at the Dollar Store. She won’t shop at all. She won’t have to skip going out to eat one night this week. She won’t eat this week.

But she’s alive. She’s alive in the visceral, pulse-pounding way most of us never know. She’s alive because she knows unless we have something to die for, we aren’t really living. Unless we have something we’d gladly give our all for, and then give our all for it, we are simply the walking dead, life’s rails greased with the hypocrisy of social respectability, but entirely without breath.

So here’s the obvious question: are we alive, or are we dead? Have we found something we’re willing to die for, give our all for? You’d think this is an easy question but most of us are pretty good at fooling ourselves most of the time. I always think of Hemingway’s “Short, Happy Life of Francis McCromber,” a man who thinks he’s alive all his life, until the day before he dies when he realizes he’s never lived at all. Or if Hemingway doesn’t resonate with you, think of the Matrix movies that are so popular. A whole civilization of people who think they are alive and free but really are just slaves to a world of machines.

So let me put it this way, do you remember standing up for your Christian principals at work, even when it made you look bad, or got you on the wrong side of the boss? Do you ever roll out of bed and go to worship, even when you don’t feel like it and no one else is going, because you know it’s the right thing to do? Have you ever forced yourself to be kind and gracious to someone who has cut you down and squashed you like a bug? When you filled out your pledge form and dropped it in the offering basket, did you pledge what you could skim off the top and never miss, or did you give so much you’re going to need God’s help to get by? Did you go up and offer to pray for the co-worker who suffered a tragedy? Did you screw up your courage and invite your neighbor to church? Did you turn the other cheek, walk the extra mile, return good for evil, love your enemies?

Are we alive or are we dead? Are we ready and willing to die socially and economically, letting go of our power and prestige and respectability? Are we giving God our very last two cents of time and energy and love and emotion and money and mind and body and soul? Is God’s breath a raging wind flowing through our lives?

If there’s one thing Christianity is, it’s full commitment, it’s being willing to die for, giving our all for, God. So much easier to settle for respectability and comfort and sociable Christianity. No breathe, no shadow, no emotion. But that’s not life, that’s death.

Life, real life, is this widow, dottering to church, giving her last few pennies, fully committed to God.

Henry David Thoreau famously suggested most of us live lives of quiet desperation. Nowadays I think we live lives of frantically busy desperation, keeping busy either because we think it will make us feel alive or because we know we’re dead and we don’t want to face it.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can live lives of full, rich excitement, the breath of God roaring through us, by committing ourselves wholly and completely to God. Real life is within the reach of all of us, even the least of us. Just look at the widow.

Do you really want to live? Then you know what to do. May God be with us this day and every day as we decide what to do. Amen.