Mark 12:38-44, 1 Kings 17:8-16
Ordinary people
When I was a child growing up on the Isle of Wight, we knew a builder, Jimmy M, with a sense of humour. One of our family stories, that became a sort of folklore to us, was of the telephone conversation
Jimmy had with one of two elderly sisters who lived together at the top of our road. ‘Mr M, Mr M. You said you’d come and repair my wall in June’. ‘Ah yes, Miss Johnston’ said Jimmy, ‘but I never said which June’. Jimmy was a community person, and served for many years as a County Councillor on the Island, the political opponent of someone else who lived up our road, Johnny G’s Dad. I don’t remember much else about Jimmy, apart from the fact my Mum told me once that he was among the infantry who liberated Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. A day that Richard Dimbleby, who saw the scenes, described as the most horrible of his life. Jimmy would, I suppose, have been in his mid-20s, about the same age that my son is now.
My wife’s from Massachusetts, and her father was the son of German immigrants to the US just after the turn of the last century. He gave his sons (and he had several) good German names: Friedrich,
Hermann, Rudolf, Gustav, Emil, Karl. They grew up helping on the family farm and running the town (we would say village) butchery, in winter cutting ice from the lake to bring back in a horse-drawn sleigh to pack into the ice house in the ground. My father-in-law, Emil, was in the US Air Force during WWII and was stationed in England, just up the road at Alconbury. He used to like to tell me the story of how, one time on leave in London, he decided he wanted to see Piccadilly
Circus. So he took the Underground to Piccadilly Circus Station and came up the steps and looked around. ‘So I walked up to a bobby and asked him, “Where’s the circus?”, and he said, “Piccadilly Circus?
You’re standing in it, mate?”’ Emil was a radio man flying missions over Germany in a B17 bomber, you know the plane popularised in the film Memphis Belle. At the same time, Emil’s cousin (or second cousin?) was doing pretty much the same job flying missions over
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England on a German bomber. Emil was in his late 20s, about the same age as my daughter is now.
We remember today ordinary people who have sought to do their duty in extraordinary situations. People who have faced the uncertainty, the fear, the pain and sometimes the sheer horror that war can bring.
Ordinary people who have believed that there are some things more important than risk to their own life. People who would not have regarded themselves, and do not now regard themselves, as heroes.
Some remember a sense of failing to do what they felt they ought to have done. Some who returned have a sense of guilt that they survived while others died. Some served and serve in roles that did not take them to a front line. Some retain a sense of loyalty to their close comrades while also asking whether the cause justified the sacrifice. Some, whether serving in the armed forces or not, put themselves in danger by trying to prevent bloodshed. Some live lives that continue to be blighted by what they have seen and, in some cases, done. Ordinary people, whose stories seem too ordinary to make headlines.
In our gospel reading this morning we have a stark contrast between, on the one hand, public leaders with eye-catching, impressive actions and the ordinary, anonymous woman whose action is by any normal standards insignificant, worthless. The leaders use their religious position to gain respect and influence. Their giving is substantial but not generous: it’s self-seeking, designed to impress, to reinforce their status.
The widow is at the opposite end of the social scale. As in many places today where there is no welfare safety net and the role of women is tightly circumscribed, she lacks the means to earn a basic livelihood. Presumably she doesn’t have grown-up children who can take care of her. Presumably she doesn’t have parents who can take her back in to the family home. We know from elsewhere in Scripture that her position was recognised as especially vulnerable. The Law demanded protection and charitable provision for widows, together with orphans and aliens. The tension in the story of Ruth is caused by the poverty that she and her mother-in-law Naomi face because they
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are widows. In the New Testament, the letter of James with its emphasis on practical faith includes this: ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress.’ And the first major conflict that the early church has to deal with in the book of Acts is all about a breakdown in the provision of support for widows from the Greek-speaking ethnic group.
And this woman of low status comes to the Temple treasury after the rich people have made their ostentatious offering and she unobtrusively puts in her two coins. You couldn’t get more ordinary, less impressive, less worthy of attention.
But Jesus pays attention, and he exalts the ordinary. And he does so not because it is ordinary, but because, being ordinary, the motive for her action is pure, her action can only be motivated by a sincere desire to offer what she has to God. There’s no risk of her motive being contaminated by the desire to impress others because she has nothing to impress them with. It’s hard for those with position, power and wealth at stake to act with a pure motive, to set aside the instinct always to be taking care of business, always to have a care for the respect of others, always to put self-preservation before sacrifice. It’s hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom. You have to become like children. Or widows.
Our reading from 1 Kings also exalts the ordinary: the sacrificial sharing of the widow of Zarepath with the man of God, Elijah, at a time when she didn’t have enough to feed her own household. And she receives the reward she certainly doesn’t expect: God’s miraculous provision. And you may remember that Jesus gets into trouble with his home town for emphasising not just that this faithful woman was a widow, but that she was an alien, a foreigner. Now that’s really the bottom of the social scale. Someone who couldn’t have expected that we’d still be talking about her simple, sacrificial hospitality 3,000 years later.
There’s a remarkable series of four short pieces on subject of What
Makes a War Hero on the BBC website, by David Botti, a veteran of the Iraq War. In one part he interviews a veteran from the Vietnam
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War, Karl Marantes, who describes how he came to win two medals.
In the first case, his unit was under fire and one marine cried out that he had been hit. Marantes decided to go and rescue him with, he says, a double motive: partly because he wanted to help the young man but partly also because he thought it could be an opportunity to win a medal. He successfully reached the man, firing his weapon to keep the enemy machine gunners at bay, and carried the man back. But when the medic tried to resuscitate the wounded man he noticed a bullet hole in the man’s head and realised that he wasn’t going to make it. And Karl says, how could the man have cried out, ‘I’m hit’ if he had a bullet in his head? To this day he wonders whether the man was hit by a bullet from his own gun as he ran to rescue him. And he says, ‘And the lesson from that is, I would feel way less sad about it, or conflicted about it, if I had done it from totally pure motives ... I may have gotten this medal because I did something that ended up killing a guy.’
In the second case, under fire he decided to run ahead to do what he could to tackle the enemy and then suddenly realised that the entire unit was following him. As it turned out, the action was decisive and that earned the medal. But the lesson he draws was that in the second case his motives were pure: he never expected the others to follow him; ‘I was just trying to get us out of a pickle’.
What do we commemorate today? Ordinary acts of dedication, of courage, of sacrifice, most of them done away from the public gaze, recognised at best by close comrades or family and perhaps not even then. Acts that perhaps were not hugely significant or influential, maybe not even successful, but acts that were offered at some cost to the giver with the intention of serving others. Acts that may have been done for all kinds of reasons but which, at their best, were done without the expectation that they would bring recognition or reward, but because they seemed the right thing to do at the time.
May all who face the pressures of life as they make their ordinary choices know the wisdom and grace of God to choose the way of truth, love and life.
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