“In Praise of Passion” 

11/12/06 Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot

 

One of my jobs when I left college was as an inside salesperson for an industrial electronics component company. I spent my days calling companies flogging our wares of resistors, capacitors, relays, cables and electronic testing equipment. I attacked the job with verve, becoming the top rain-maker for the Baltimore office. One day, to my delight, I discovered an entire new industry in the yellow pages that I knew had not been tapped. I had already covered all of the electric and electro-prefixed categories in the yellow pages. So I began my calls to these electro-prefixed companies. I would ask to speak to their buyer or their manager – and then would begin my spiel. Call after call, the people on the other end of the line would either hang up on me or ask me again what I was selling and why I was calling them. This went on for two hours. Finally, a gravelly, deep-smoker’s voiced manager must have taken pity on me. She said, “honey, you don’t know what electrolysis is, do you?” 

 

I can be faulted for what I did not know, but not be faulted for my passion.

 

There are, of course, many things we do not and cannot know about God and God’s plan.

God is not concerned about what we do not know – but God does care deeply about our passion or lack of it toward God and God’s world.

 

At first blush, our text today from Mark does not seem to speak about passion – but it does and I’ll get to that shortly. First a word about this little passage with a big bite to it.

This passage appears in the lectionary cycle right about at stewardship time, so pastors for donkey’s years have trotted it out during the fall financial campaign. The destitute widow, who gives it all, becomes the poster child for worried pastors trying to squeeze out every last pledge dollar to meet the budget. Poor Mark must be turning over in his grave each time we reduce this story to a religious twist of the arm to fill the offering plates: This woman who had nothing, holds back nothing – and the preacher thunders at his or her well-to-do congregation, “Dare you give anything less?”

 

Now that’s completely unhelpful and disrespectful to the text, turning it into an absurd moral lesson. The two stories before us this morning are directly linked. Before we get to the widow and her passion, we first encounter an outraged Jesus in the Temple. He has just had some bruising exchanges with the scribes in the Temple – but what really enrages him is their hypocrisy and posturing in the worship service in the Temple. The powerful religious leaders focus on what special privileges they can garner while surrounded by the poor, whose suffering they have compounded through their institutional practices of financial extortion and foreclosures, in the name of offerings to God in the Temple. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah railed against the religious leaders of their day for devouring the houses of widows under the guise of holiness – and for that they prophesied the end of the Temple and its oppressive institutional life. The very institution of the Temple was entrusted with the welfare of the poor, the widows and the orphans.

 

While the religious leaders strut and pose and admire themselves, Jesus watches closely as the people line up to drop their offerings into the Temple’s treasury boxes. His heart must have been aching, and then it finally breaks when he sees the least powerful person in the Temple – a woman, a widow, an impoverished widow – who gives away all she has to sustain an institution whose practices leave her destitute.

 

Here’s where we get to the passion part. Jesus points to this woman, not as an object lesson to condemn the despicable practices of the religious authorities. He sees in her an outrageous and passionate faith that far outstrips the practices of the official keepers of the faith. In this widow, Mark reminds his readers of what Jesus said earlier: “Those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” There is a profound Markan irony in this story: The disciples are too awed and bowled over by the dress of the Temple leaders and the stonework of the Temple itself to see the one disciple of note in the Temple – this nameless, destitute, widow. And so he takes the disciples outside of the Temple and says to them, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” Jesus forcefully juxtaposes the seeming power and the strength of the Temple and its leaders with his aching love for this no-account, no-power person, who was the true object of his love and passion.  

 

The widow in the Jerusalem Temple gives to an institution that has forgotten that it is to care for widows and orphans and children, for the mentally ill and for the imprisoned, for the voiceless and the powerless in our society, for the socially estranged, for the AIDS victim, and for all of those broken in body or spirit. The widow gives to an institution that no longer notices those who are in the greatest need.

 

But Jesus notices, because he loves the widow and all who are outcasts, strangers, and disenfranchised. And friends, this love is far, far more, than a simple passion for social justice – social justice is something you all understand well. What we may not yet understand is the outrageous, passionate love that God has for you and for me as well. Our passionate love for other people can only come about when we personally experience the profound and never-wavering love that God has for us. No matter how lost, how powerless, how disenfranchised we may feel, God in Christ comes to us with the love for which we have always hungered. It is when we know that we are loved that we can love, as God loves. The widow, out of her poverty, and without reservation, gives her whole living to God, out of sheer gratitude to God.  And that’s why Jesus - to the disciples and to us - lifts her up as an example of passionate faith.

 

We are called to be passionate people – because God’s passion has claimed us and gripped us. You have said over and over again that you desire to be more spiritual. What I believe you mean by that is that you desire to know God’s love, first-hand, and so be more passionate – passionate about God’s faith in you and in this church, and so passionate about your faith and passionate about being’s God’s people in God’s world.

 

I fear that sometimes those of us in mainline Protestant Christianity may have over-rationalized the Christian faith, presenting Christianity as a matter of right belief, right actions, right ideas. I fear that if we continue too long in that, we, as rational and reasonable Presbyterians may be trying to trying to kill off something inside of ourselves - Namely passion. Christianity is a passionate faith – it is not primarily about beliefs, principles and ideas. Christian faith is about people – people for whom God in Christ died, and that includes you and me. Jesus gave his last red cent for the sake of love. The passionate gift of the widow foreshadows the one Jesus is about to make: his very life. St Paul later says about Jesus: “though he was rich, yet for our sake became poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich.”

 

This is a God in whom we may place all of our trust, our love, our passion, our very lives and the life of this church.

 

Someone once said: “they are no fools who lose what they cannot keep to gain that which they cannot lose.” Jesus would heartily endorse this truth. And do not dismiss what I’m saying as being impractical or over-the-top. Listen again to the story of the widow. Why did she give it all? We are not told. Jesus simply notes the exuberant, extravagant nature of her giving. The one who had the least, gave the most. Why? What was her reason for giving? Perhaps there was no reason because what she did was quite beyond mere reason. Maybe she got carried away in her love for God. 

 

Jesus wants passion from us – because passion is what Jesus is about. Perhaps we may yet come under the control of the One who releases in us energy, vitality, and passion beyond the bounds of our measured faith. Jesus tends to do that to some people.     

 

So what does that means for you and me and for this church? Let’s stop worrying about members and money. Let’s get passionate about making disciples. Let’s not worry about pressing people into service on committees and start encouraging them instead to press on to the goal of joy in the Lord. Let’s get a little irrational exuberance going on around here and get a little carried away for once.

 

Let me tell you what that will do – it will inflame in us a new hunger and thirst for God’s love and righteousness to be made known outside of these walls – to the thousands of homeless and hungry men, women and children of Montgomery County and the District; to the genocide in Darfur; to the lonely and desperate of Bethesda, dying for some good news.

 

Let’s be the good news of God. Jesus wants from us abundant and joyful and courageous discipleship. Do we need to have a measured, rational reason for that? Nope. It’ll come when we are ourselves electrified by the One whose passionate love sacrificed all for us.

Thanks be to God. Amen.