How do you un-hear something? That seems impossible -- yet, I am asking you to un-hear this Gospel text that you have heard all of your life. 

  I love this story and at times, I have held the widow’s mite in my hand – given as a gift to God from one who could afford least to give. They have always given with the same, generous smile. It humbles me.    But as I said, we have to un-hear this story in order to understand it better.

   The first part of the text is the most important part. Unless you hear what Jesus has to say, the rest of it just seems schmaltzy because Jesus is making a public statement about the leaders of his community.

   The scribes – scholars of the law and trained in expertly writing and  interpreting i – had circumvented it. They knew all the loopholes and took advantage of them. They loved the honors and the public respect accorded to them. They must have dressed quite well.  But Jesus infers these leaders are crooked as a snake.

    It wasn’t that Jesus had an axe to grind against the scribes; it was that he saw right through them. While they made a public show of piety and position, they were devoid of conscience. They were into getting theirs and using their position to do it.

    There are people without conscience and we call them sociopaths. They believe they are a law to themselves. They do what they want without remorse and ultimately someone has to stop them or there is no end to the hurt and damage they cause.

   But these men Jesus refers to are not sociopathic. They would tell you the law, its meaning and finer points in a heartbeat. They don’t see themselves as breaking it. They have found ways to dull their conscience and to desensitize themselves to its meaning. That process of desensitization allows us to create our own loopholes – which in the end, tend to hang us. 

   Often someone in a financial office finds themselves a bit short and dips into to the petty cash, promising to put it back. But that never happens. It’s a short step to borrowing other sums of money and rationalizing that. Rationalization quickly becomes embezzlement. Soon, it is out of hand.  It is easy to turn off our conscience.

   You take a trip to see a Broadway play. It is cold; the panhandlers are everywhere. They first few get to you. The next few get some change. After that, you stop seeing them. I am surprised at how easy it is to turn off compassion. 

   We don’t see the mountains of trash that could be recycled, because it’s too much trouble. We don’t see the future generations to come that will have to clean up our mess. We don’t see that our actions have longer-term consequences. We do that with our health. We do it with relationships. We do it with politics.  We just conveniently turn off that part of our conscience and once you do that, it gets easier to do. We do it with God.

    How can we un-hear this text? What you generally don’t to hear is the background. The people were paying a yearly temple tithe, an obligation of every faithful person. But those running the temple were out for bigger game.

   The temple was effectively, the national bank. It was not only the religious center of the people, it was the place where land titles, notes of indenture and mortgages were held. Those running the temple, outwardly religious, were grabbing up land and property through defaults and then making great sums through high-interest loans as well as from renting the land to the farmers who once had owned it. Because of the temple system, farmers were reduced to being serfs. Widows and children were living homeless and hungry. The rich were getting accolades and looking ever so pious doing it. That has not stopped even in our day. Some churches lavishly spend on themselves with no thought of their true purpose in the Gospel. You dull the conscience and soon, no one pays attention to God.

     The disciples were too obsessed with getting power of their own. The rich were too big for the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed. The religious authorities were protecting their own interests with intense jealousy and forgot their interest is to be interested in what God wants. Later, that attitude would lead them to murder Jesus – and justify it! Their conscience was simply turned off.

   They never saw that there were needs all around – needs they were called to care about.  Every scribe and all of Jesus’ disciples could have quoted what Isaiah, Jeremiah and Zechariah had to say about those who devoured the widows and made slaves of the poor. It didn’t matter. Their conscience found a loophole around it.

   So, Jesus is trying to awaken the conscience of his disciples. That is where the widow figures in this story. It isn’t a story about … faithful giving and we all ought to give more. It is a story of someone who had a heart for God and a conscience that cared. Jesus cares – that widow cares – enough to give whatever she has – even if it is her last two cents!

   It is all too easy to have a dulled conscience. One can even sear their conscience so that it is incapable of feeling at all – as I Timothy 4:2 warns us.  But our conscience is vital. It is shaped by our values and even by culture, but often it is the way that the Spirit of God will speak to us. That inner voice, which helps us distinguish right from wrong; that inner hesitation which asks us to reconsider an action or a word is what reminds us we are made in the moral image of God.

   I believe that everyone needs a decisive spiritual experience. These are experiences, whether nor not they are dramatic, that take us to the place where we recognize our need for God and we decide to say yes or no.  We believe that the Spirit of God is behind that decision, and brings us to that place of acceptance.   When you say yes to God a quiet but amazing miracle takes place.

   You become more sensitive to the things of God. You begin to see people in a new light. You begin to see the hand of God in many places you never saw it before. You become aware that the Spirit is at working your life and a process of transformation is taking place. You feel drawn to study the Bible. You desire to be in worship. The sacraments begin to be precious. The Spirit of God sensitizes your conscience to care for this world though your everyday living.  It is as though your eyes are open for the first time, your heart feels what it never did before and you begin to care about others and the kind of world you live in. The Spirit of God is using that process in you to lead you to be involved and to do something about your world.

   That little widow with her two cents was all about that and did what she could. Jesus blessed her faith and the heart she had for God. But he also lamented the fact that so many had seared their conscience that no one cared about her two cents. And that was the real point of this story.

   And that is the point for us, as well. Can we unhear this text and hear it afresh?  Do we care – will we care – enough – to have a conscience sensitive to God and God’s direction for our community? I can only hope and pray so. Amen.

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