Mark 12:38-44 Grace 11/8/2009

We can already see it in the stores. Christmas is approaching and many of us are already thinking about what we’ll buy for friends and family. And when you don’t know what to get Uncle Frank or the cousin you see every 10 years, a good option is the ever-present gift card. Drop one in a Christmas card, and you’re done. It’s an easy way to keep our responsibility in giving.

The town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, using the gift-card concept without the plastic, has developed its own kind of currency. The “BerkShare” (a wordplay on the Berkshires region) looks a lot like Monopoly money. For every 95 cents, local residents get one dollar’s worth of BerkShares they can use to buy goods and services from one of 400 participating businesses in the area. BerkShares aren’t legal tender anywhere outside Great Barrington.

“Local currency helps to keep the money flowing between friends and neighbors, local businesses, which helps everybody to have a better life,” says Asa Hardcastle, president of BerkShares Inc. In these difficult economic times, this community has found a way to keep local money in the local area thus boosting the local economy.

The folks in Great Barrington aren’t alone in their currency creation. From Detroit to North Carolina to upstate New York, at least 12 other communities are trying to encourage people to buy and spend locally by printing up their own greenbacks (or pink-backs, or mauve-backs or whatever color their Monopoly-inspired money is).

It turns out that a similar kind of currency kaleidoscope characterized the economy of first-century Israel, the scene of this week’s text. A closer look at Mark 12 gives us a glimpse into the different coinage that circulated around the temple. In verses 13-17, we read the famous “render unto Caesar” passage, in which Jesus has the Herodians and Pharisees produce coins from their pockets with the likeness of the Roman Emperor Tiberius stamped on them.

The coin in question, a silver denarius, was worth about a day’s wage, so it was no small change. Imperial coinage was circulated throughout the empire both to standardize trade between Rome and its various conquered territories and to promote the current emperor’s reputation and divinity. Around the likeness of Tiberius on the coin was the inscription “Augustus Tiberius, Son of the Divine Augustus,” while the flip side displayed the likeness of a female figure representing “peace”. To righteous Jews, such inscriptions were idolatrous, which makes it interesting (and scandalous at some level) that one of the Jewish leaders confronting Jesus had one in the first place.

To avoid those idolatrous images, most first-century Jews continued to use the local Jewish currency, some of which had been in circulation since the Hasmonean dynasty 100 years earlier. The most basic coin of this period was the bronze or copper lepton (plural lepta), which avoided violating the second commandment by inscribing natural or man-made symbols instead of human or animal likenesses. At the time of Jesus, a very common lepton featured an eight-rayed star or sunburst on one side and an anchor on the other. It was likely this coin that the money changers exchanged for Roman currency in the temple (Mark 11:15).

The lepton’s monetary value was pretty small at the time — so small, in fact, that it may be one of the least-valued coins ever struck. Take a look at one and you notice right away that it looks like the image was just stamped haphazardly in a tiny dribble of molten copper or bronze — kind of like what happens when a kid stamps something in a piece of Play-Doh and leaves the edges untrimmed. The coins aren’t rounded or finished and weigh next to nothing, making a U.S. penny feel like a British pound coin by comparison. Truth be told, a lepton looks like the kind of currency anyone could make.

It was very likely two of these tiny lepta, or “mites,” that the widow dropped into the temple treasury. Compared to the wealth of Roman coins that the religious leaders and other rich people seemed to be carrying around the temple, those two rough-stamped coins were about as valuable as Monopoly money. And yet, this isn’t a story about the value of coins but rather about the value of loyalty, commitment and sacrifice.

BerkShares are about a community taking care of its own, keeping the wealth within the community for the benefit of the whole. In Mark 12:38-40, Jesus condemns the community leaders of first-century Israel for doing exactly the opposite. The “long robes” of the scribes and their VIP seating arrangements at local parties are indications that they’re more concerned with themselves than their community.

Moreover, they “devour widows’ houses,” which was a way of saying they preyed on perhaps the weakest and most vulnerable segment of society. Some commentators have suggested that the scribes may have acted as guardians for some of these widows, and as such may have exploited for themselves the property that the women’s husbands may have left them. So much for following the Exodus 22 decree against abusing widows.

So when Jesus makes his remark about this poor widow dropping her two tiny coins in the temple treasury, “all she had to live on”, the context may suggest that he’s continuing his condemnation of the religious leaders and the exploitation that would cause her to donate her last two pennies. While the text is often preached as a stewardship sermon, imagining Jesus smiling at the woman’s generous sacrifice, it may be just as likely that he was shaking his head sadly as he said it.

At the same time, though, the text gives no indication that the widow is being forced to give up those lepta. In fact, we don’t know anything about her motivation other than she just dropped them in. Jesus recognized that her offering, while insignificant by amount, was far more valuable than the sum total of all the other coins offered up that day because of the sacrifice it represents. The text presses us to ask: What would cause a person to voluntarily give away her last two pennies, especially to a community and a political-economic system that may be exploiting her?

Perhaps it’s because the widow still believed. Maybe she still believed that regardless of all that had happened to her, everything she was and everything she had still belonged to God. Despite whatever corruption may have been going on in God’s name there in the temple, somehow God was still in charge. So the widow continued to invest in her community, a community of faith, by giving her last two coins for the good of the whole. And what we see is that her faith is demonstrated in her giving. She isn’t just dabbling in spare change. She is, to borrow a poker term, “all in” with God, unlike the scribes and others.

This is a great Sunday to be challenged to think about how much we’re investing in our community of faith as we come to our pledge commitment Sunday in two weeks. It’s easy to look at our difficult financial times and say ourselves, “I’m going to hold back giving my money.” But the widow invites us instead to focus on the currency of loyalty, commitment and sacrifice, trusting that God will take our hearts and move us to give for His glory rather than just what’s in it for us. It’s that commitment that turns all our mites together into a mighty witness for God in our community and allows us to reach beyond it as well!