"Have You Put Your Two Cents In?"

Luke 20:45 – 21:4

November 14, 2010 + Thanksgiving Sunday

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

A Summary of a Sermon Delivered in Pilgrim Congregational Church on Thanksgiving Sunday, November 21, 2010. I enjoy looking at people. Do you? People present themselves in such varied ways: clothing, hair styles, and, these days, tattoos and piercings! And we tend to judge people by how they appear, don’t we? But we can be very wrong. When I was recently in Connecticut visiting my son, Stuart, I also went to visit my son, David. Coming back at night in the rain I became completely lost. I stopped at a gas station and a young man there offered to lead me home by following his car. He looked like what used to be called a “hippie.” But what he said to me was simply overwhelming: “Hey, we’re put on earth to help other people.” I was ashamed of myself for the way I had judged his appearance. Jesus did not just look at people; he really saw them for who they were. In today’s scripture story he saw a poor widow put two small coins in the collection boxes at the Jerusalem temple. Jesus commented that those two “mites” were all she had and, thus, they represented far more than the large amounts put in by the rich and well-to-do.

But this story left many questions unanswered for me:

• How did Jesus know she was a widow?
• How did he know she was poor?
• How did Jesus know how much she put in the collection?
• How did he know that that was all she had?

Most important, why did she do it? That question we can answer. She did it because she was grateful. Grateful people are generous people. And poor people are always more generous than wealthy people. Poor people give their charity as a gift. Rich people give charity as a tip. To give a real gift it has to cost us something. Until it hurts to give a gift we really haven’t given much at all. We give because we are grateful. But where does gratitude come from? We aren’t born that way. We have to be taught to be grateful not just by words but by the example of family members and friends we see being grateful. When we see what others are doing we, too, are inspired to “put our own two cents in.” And when we do that we receive the blessing that comes from being a generous giver.