We are talking these weeks of fall about giving. About “stewardship” which is the church word for giving. But what we are talking about today is much bigger than giving money. Lance Armstrong is the American cyclist who won back to back Tour de France bicycle races – considered by many the most grueling of any athletic competition. Armstrong was diagnosed with testicular cancer before his first victory in 1998. It metastasized to his brain. Everyone thought his career was over. But he made a remarkable comeback. Beat the disease. Won the Tour a second time last summer. I love the title of Armstrong’s new memoir: It’s Not About the Bike. If all you know about Lance Armstrong is what I just told you, you don’t have to read the book to know his story is not about the bike. It’s about the fullness of life. Each day a gift. Once focused on getting, now he lives for giving.

If there is a before and after quality to Lance Armstrong’s life, the story today from the Gospel of Mark provides a similarly striking contrast in approaches to living. On the one hand are the scribes, Pharisees, religious leaders. Power-brokers of their day. Practiced in the display of status. Wearers of long robes. Speakers of fancy prayers. Not a user-friendly image of clergy, though not inaccurate either. Compared to these people who make handsome contributions to the temple treasury is Mark’s solitary widow who gives everything she has – two copper coins. Not unlike today’s pennies. Small to us. Huge for her. Jesus’ observation that she gives out of her poverty while the others give out of their abundance is the lesson the story teaches. In the upside down world of the Gospel the poor widow is rich and the wealthy VIPs are poor.

We see Mark’s lesson all around us. One pastor friend tells the story, for example, of the CEO who came to visit him recently. “I left everything behind,” said the businessman sitting distraught in the pastor’s study. “Sacrificed everything. My marriage, my children, even my health, just to get there. And when I finally made it, I discovered that there is no there, there!” That’s what it means to be rich and still be poor. But there is hope for that CEO because his eyes are now open. Yet, so often we go through life blind to our own bankruptcy of spirit. I talked recently to a young man, between college and his commission in the U.S. Army. Hard-working, enterprising.  He was making a few dollars washing cars at a Mercedes dealer who offers customers free, life-time car washes. The dealer pays minimum wage but promises great tips. One new customer drove up in her big new silver Mercedes. Said she was on a long trip and could he remove the bugs from the grill. Certainly, he replied. It took twice as long to do her car. When he brought it around, sweat dripping off his nose, she dropped two quarters in his palm and drove away. Sometimes we are blind to our own poverty, aren’t we!

On this second week of stewardship, I’d like to probe a little bit. What enables people to live like that widow? To give out of their poverty? What would it take for us to live that way? With utter abandon? Eyes open to new life? The answer to that question has a lot to do with emptiness. Our lives have to become empty before God can fill us and enable us to give like that widow. The  philosopher Blaise Pascal once said there is a “God-shaped” emptiness in each human heart. But we try to fill it with all kinds of stuff that doesn’t fit. Material stuff. Anything frankly that gets the job done. Busyness, drugs, illness, fighting, food, sex, nice things.

You see, the emptiness in our hearts is God-shaped. Like the magic slipper – only God’s presence can fill that void. It’s not easy to acknowledge the hollowness inside. Especially for church folks. One pastor remembers his own upbringing in one of those pristine Reformed churches in northern Michigan. We were perfectionists, he said. Trying to be good for God. Families scrubbed and smiling when we walked through the church doors but fighting beforehand all the way from home to the parking lot.

Thomas Merton said the key to filling the emptiness is knowing that only God can fill it. Something has to bring us to realize that. Realize the God-shaped emptiness in our hearts. That’s what happened to the widow in today’s story. Like all widows in Jesus’ time the deck was stacked against her. Totally dependent on the charity of others for her survival. If you live on the margins of society and survival there is little to be gained by hiding any of your forms of hunger. That’s probably why Jesus consistently hung out with sinners. Treated them more gently than others. The people around him were not upright church folks. They were the outcast, the poor, the sick, wheeler/dealers,  prostitutes who called a spade a spade. That’s the company he chose. People who knew and did not pretend otherwise that it would take something bigger than themselves to fill their emptiness.

Now here’s the good news in today’s Gospel. Something amazing happens when you make that shift. When life leads you, like Lance Armstrong or the vulnerable widow, to concede that you need God. That’s when God comes into your life and fills the void. You start living at another level. A deeper level. Start giving with abandon. Carelessly even. Annie Dillard says the most important thing she has learned as a writer is not to hold back. To give and give and give, day by day by day. When she does, she says, miraculously she always finds more to give. Like an old well whose tributaries dry up unless you keep using it.

That applies to all of life. The only way to survive and not shrivel up is to become a giver. One colleague says when she lives by giving that’s when she gets a sense of full presence. Something between a Quaker meeting and Zorba the Greek. Otherwise, she says, “I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hoarding and worrying about supply.” I know how that feels, maybe you do too. In whatever you do – teaching or lawyering or doctoring or selling or plumbing or raising kids whatever it is – the lesson today is to give and give and give.  Giving from the deepest part of yourself not just when you have a ready supply of money or good cheer or lack of stress. Not just when it is convenient or affordable.

The great paradox of giving out of poverty when the chips are down, like that widow, is this: God fills us and provides us not only with what we need to survive but also what we need to keep on giving. Guaranteed. You can bet your last two copper coins on it.

It is interesting that Mark tells this story about Jesus and the poor widow as the conclusion to Jesus’ public ministry. His very next step is toward Jerusalem. Yes, he does some debating and teaching on his way along the Jordan River to the Holy City, but this moment with the widow is a kind of ending and beginning. It is as if he is using her example as an exclamation to everything he has done to date and also as a prelude to his final journey, his remarkable decision to give everything he had, his very life on the cross – even after public humiliation and desertion by his closest friends. You see, Jesus gave like that widow, out of his poverty. Like her, he gave everything he had to live on. I believe that when he saw her giving those two coins to the Temple he found new strength in his own heart to set his face toward Jerusalem. Even, I wouldn’t be surprised, thought of her as he lay on the cross.

I think what Mark is telling us today is that giving out of your poverty is not only possible. It is the only viable option for living. What God wants for your life. If we have eyes to see it, such giving is happening all around us….

There is a wonderful story, a true story about an eight-year-old boy who had a younger sister dying of leukemia. He was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight. The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl’s IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, “How soon until I start to die?”

Giving, like that story reminds us, is much bigger than contributing money. It is a way of life that gives life. It is about recognizing the God-shaped void in our souls; letting the Holy One of Israel fill that space; then giving everything we have trusting God to supply whatever it is we need to live and serve. But I must also say today that while the motive to give is bigger than any one thing we give, the things we give – particularly in our society time and money – is where this story finally leads us. True enough, money can’t buy everything – like the ability to give out of our poverty, the peace that such living bestows upon those who trust God like the poor widow, a sense of the presence of God in your life somewhere between a Quaker meeting and Zorba the Greek. But there are also things money can buy. Fifty years ago the pastor of this congregation Dr. Albert Butzer reminded our parents’ generation just what money could do. “It can help build great universities and provide a great orchestra in a community, he said. Money can maintain fifty social agencies in a city. It can clear slums and build churches, and keep those churches going from strength to strength…Money, dedicated money, said Dr. Butzer, here at Westminster, can provide music and youth ministries and Sunday School classes, it can provide family services to those living in poverty and health care in under-served areas of the world.”

A colleague remembers when she was in the midst of a personal crisis. She says she was all over the place, up and down, scattered, high, withdrawing, lost, and in the midst of it all trying to find some elusive sense of serenity. “The world can’t give that serenity,” a friend told her. “The world can’t give us peace. We can only find that peace in our hearts.”  “I hate that,” she said. “I know,” replied her friend. “But the good news is that by the same token, the world can’t take it away either.”

Giving and receiving what the world can’t take away. That’s what the poor widow had and Lance Armstrong discovered. It is what Jesus offers you today. You can’t take money or the things that it can buy with you, but you do end up taking what your money has done to you and what you have done with your money. For where your treasure is, says the Bible, there will be your heart also!

 Amen.