A Widow’s Might
“She out of her poverty has put in everything she had.”
The work of Kansas-based artist Sheri Lauren stretches across multiple media, but seems to usually avoid religious subjects. Her Widow’s Mite (2013) alludes to the Biblical story only in its title. The focus of the darkly evocative panting, power of offering a broken heart out of a place of darkness and bereftness, rather than of lavish giving out of poverty in the context of Jesus’s intrusion in the bustle of the Temple. Yet this approach illuminates something deeper about the encounter. The widow is no longer an object lesson, but a character in her own right, albeit one obscured by the purple shadows of grief and loneliness. Yet in her act of charity, she experiences and receives something of the first glimmer of the luminous mystery of healing.
Christ appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.
— Hebrews 9:26
Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
Texts for This Week
Prayer
O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
O God, What Offering Shall I Give?
Another German Pietist hymn of Wesleyan retrieval, The Act of Consecration was penned by Joachim Lange in 1697, and brought into English worship by John Wesley himself in 1739. Here it is sung at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, famously the pulpit which Charles Spurgeon sometime ascended.
The hymn does not seem to have received especially broad reception … and it’s probably for the best! The poet’s intense self-oblation has a certain beauty and allure as an expression of devotion, but as an item of corporate worship, can be received as a passive aggressive goad to ever higher echelons of sacrifice.
