“Gifts Given and Received: Cultivating an Advent of Generosity,” Week Two
It is a scene so common as to be rote—a couple piling into a taxicab on their way to a motel. Even though they are vital in many cities for getting people from point A to point B, cabs aren’t necessarily known for profound life moments. I don’t really hear of people proposing to one another in taxis, or planning a cab-themed birthday party. But, profundity is just as common in the back of a taxi as anywhere else. To illustrate, I need to turn to a favorite author—Steve Dublanica.
Dublanica is a writer and former waiter who has written a couple of books on working in the service and hospitality sector that alternate between wickedly hilarious and vividly poignant. But he is also a former seminarian, and so he could get through telling you about a story that happened at a restaurant and immediately tie that into a Bible story as adroitly as any preacher.
He did that in his book on tipping, Keep the Change, in which he is shadowing a Las Vegas cabdriver named Luther, who picks up an impoverished couple likely in active addiction who need to make a couple of stops along the drive, and I’ll let Dublanica’s narrative take it from there:
After we travel about a mile the couple starts murmuring to each other. “Yeah,” the girl says. “We have to. It’s only right.”
“Hey man,” the boy says the Luther. “Pull over.”
“We’re not at the motel yet.”
“Yeah,” the boy says, “But we’ve only got ten bucks. There’s eight on the meter and we’ve got to tip you.”
“That’s okay, guys,” Luther says, his demeanor softening. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll get you guys to the motel. Even if the meter runs over.”
“No, man,” the boy says, handing over a crumpled ten. “Keep the change.”
When the girl and boy get out of the cab I look at Luther. He’s dumbfounded. “Holy (bleep),” he says. “That was a twenty-five percent tip, and they couldn’t even afford it.”
There’s a story from the Gospel of Mark that’s one of my favorites…(of) a poor widow putting her last nickel into the box…when that lady gave up her money, she suffered. She gave until it hurt. How many of us are willing to do that for anything or anyone?
That’s what the couple did—and they put the rich and powerful of Vegas to shame.
This is a four-week sermon series for the season of Advent—not the Christmas season, that will come later—but for the four Sundays we spent preparing for Christ’s birth. As a preparatory season, Advent has its roots in penance, in us being penitential. It is why Advent shares liturgical colors (specifically purple) with Lent, just as Christmas and Easter share liturgical colors as seasons of celebration of new life.
In twinning this sermon series with our Advent devotional theme for this year, “Gifts Given and Received,” I considered whether any of us might need to do penance for any of our past gift-giving. That isn’t an invitation for public confession or self-flagellation, but rather, to ask ourselves, are we good gift-givers? Do we give thoughtfully and generously, in ways that put the receiver before us as the giver? Our devotionals allow us to consider such things in relation to Jesus, and I want to invite us over the next four weeks to reflect on those questions in relation to one another as well.
Because this is a pretty common thing, really! You probably know someone who is a subpar gift-giver! Maybe you are one yourself! (Again, I am *not* asking for public confession here.) So lets talk these next few weeks about the faithful spirit behind gift giving, and we began last week in Genesis 4 with the first gifts given to God by humanity: the fruits of Cain’s crops, and the firstborn lamb of Abel’s flocks. Today, we come to a similarly well-known story that both Mark and Luke convey: the widow giving two copper coins at the temple.
Just as we have coins of different denominations—the penny, nickel, dime, quarter, half dollar, and dollar—so too were there coins of differing denominations in Roman-occupied ancient Israel. The coin you are probably most familiar with is the deniarus, because it functioned as a basic unit—one day’s pay for an unskilled laborer.
The copper coins given by the widow here are not denarii, but lepta, coins with far less monetary value because copper by itself was relatively common and worth much less than silver or gold. It was only when you combined copper with tin—a much more difficult metal for Ancient Near East societies to obtain because it had to be imported—that the copper created something worthwhile: bronze. Copper and tin made bronze, and without the tin, copper was a common metal. A useful and important metal, yes, but not as prized as bronze.
So the copper coins are almost material stand-ins for the widow herself—widows were very common in the Ancient Near East as their husbands would die in war or labor or by disease, and it was often difficult for a widow to remarry. They were common and not perceived as particularly valuable—just like copper.
The two coins represent, then, not just all the widow had left to live on, they represent her. And I realize that is a problematic, even un-Christian thing to say. We should not associate people simply with their net worth. What I want us to see here is how the metal itself—not the coins, but the copper the coins were minted from—is so emblematic of the widow. Copper was seen as maximally worthwhile if it could be added to with tin to make bronze. In the same way, the widow is seen as worthwhile only if she can be added to via marriage—by adding a husband to the mix. That is why both testaments of Scripture have repeated exhortations to protect the widow—society was not going to protect them otherwise, because society never protects what it deems to be without value.
And by giving both the coins—instead of, say, giving one and keeping one—this widow is giving her entire self over to God and relying completely upon God for her life and future. Such was her level of desperation.
That degree of desperation might make you uncomfortable. It should. In fact, when preparing for this sermon, I noticed that a couple of my commentaries just skip this story altogether. Still others tackled this story but subverted it completely, saying, in effect, this widow is no moral example, do not be like her! These approaches compound the widow’s plight by ignoring her story, either in its entirety or in its lesson, just as we close ourselves off to the needs of people experiencing poverty today by ignoring them, shutting ourselves off to what their voices and stories have to say, or both.
But we are preparing for the birth of a child who chose not to come to earth as a king or a prince, but as the son of a tekton, a laborer or carpenter. Jesus, in His earthly form, is cut from very similar cloth as this widow: common, impoverished, and perceived as lacking value to society.
Bronze without tin so lost its value that to this day, the least valuable coin we mint is the one plated in copper: the penny. Money functions explicitly as an expression of value, and for millennia we have expressed our valuation of copper—and of the people the copper represents.
An Advent of generosity, then, is an Advent in which it is incumbent upon us to give until it hurts so that others might not hurt. It is not only Dublanica who says this in his anecdote of the couple he meets in Luther’s taxicab—no less than C.S. Lewis argues in Mere Christianity that “the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare…if our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.”
That is precisely why Jesus had so little regard for the vast sums being donated by the very wealthy. Even those vast sums did not pinch or hamper their donors. They were not giving more than they could spare.
But the widow is. And for this to be an Advent of generosity, so must we. The gifts we give—to one another and to complete strangers—are not perfunctory gestures, or at least they should not be.
When we talk about gift-giving, going as far back as Abel’s sacrifice of his firstborn lamb, it is meant to be generous. We do not give our leftovers, we give our best.
Put another way: my late grandfather insisted that there is only one Christmas fruitcake in the world, and it just happens to get regifted every year.
Don’t give someone else your Christmas fruitcake.
Give them—and give God—the best of what you have to offer in this world. Even if—especially if—you feel like what you have to offer is not very much, know that just as Jesus saw the widow in the temple that Jesus will see you—and your generosity—as well.
Even if nobody else does.
Especially if nobody else does.
For, as Jesus would grow up to teach us, God who sees in secret sees such generosity, and in time, rewards it beyond measure.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
December 5, 2021