The Widow’s 75% of a Can of Beer (Mark 12:38-44)

In Ashley Mears’s book, Very Important People, a sociological approach to the party and spending habits of extremely rich people, she paints a vivid picture of waste. Summon in your mind’s eye a single, three liter (Jeroboam), bottle of extremely expensive Champagne. At a trendy night spot for the ultra-wealthy, a single Jeroboam of pricey bubbly can set you back $40,000. Mears describes a scene where two members of the 0.01% get into a Champagne buying competition. One guy buys something like 10 Jeroboams to serve everyone in the club. The bottles arrive via a bottle parade carried in by models and preceded by fireworks. The other guy, to save face in the competition, does the same but with even more Jeroboams, that again, each cost the same as a mid-spec Subaru Outback. Around a million dollars gets spent on this expression of Champagne-based exuberance, and most the drink goes to waste, as no one in the club needed an oil drum’s worth of additional fermented grapes.

Mears compares these consumption festivals to Potlach rituals from certain tribes in the Pacific Northwest. In some versions of a Potlach, leaders would destroy objects of value and challenge rival leaders to meet or exceed the amount destroyed. They would also give away gifts to those in attendance, deepen community ties, and use a festival of gift giving to celebrate major life events. Modern, super-rich people, Potlaches lack the more wholesome and community oriented aspects. The economic ability to waste in ways that 99.99% of the population can only imagine serves as the primary purpose.

I grew up adjacent to the Potlach. No one that I knew dropped a cool million on Dom Perignon or had bottle parades at their birthdays. Instead, I occupied a world where I parked my several year old, purple, Saturn LS (nicknamed “The Grape) next to brand new, high end, sports cars by Lexus, BMW, and Infiniti, in my high school parking lot and where people, with some frequency, missed school shortly before Prom in order to get certain surgical enhancements to their physique. The day that I met the young lady that did her best to ruin my life, she received a brand-new Pontiac Firebird, as a gift, even before she had a Driver’s License. She felt disappointed because her parents gave her older sister a similar car but with a bigger engine. I even tried my hand at a version of life by obtaining a flashy British hatchback and traveling the world, eating at as many of the nicest restaurants as possible, on not my own dime.

In the end, Mears ponders where the Potlach kings are any happier or fulfilled than the rest of us as a result of their wasteful rituals. I certainly found that whole world fairly hollow and meaningless. I love food, art, fancy things, and being able to afford health care. Don’t get me wrong. However, you will always have new Joneses to keep up with until you’re blowing a Lamborghini worth of cash on comically oversized containers of French sparkling wine. It doesn’t end. At some point, I felt that and fled to working in some of the poorest communities in the country and in the world hoping desperately to see something of greater meaning.

Praise God. I found it in the other kind of Potlach – the one where you share gifts with your community. When I worked in Paraguay, the neighborhood men’s soccer team, which seemed to just be most of the adult men that I knew, won a tournament. The community itself was one of the poorest in South America. It sat on the flood plane of the Paraguay River, and during the day, these same men scratch out a living picking trash from the mountain of waste that served as the area’s defining geographical feature. However, on that night, they drank from the cup of glory. More specifically, we had twelve beers to share among 15 people. We sat in a semicircle in the street. The trophy sat in the middle. The team captain opened one beer at a time and passed it around. Each man would take a moderate sip from the can and pass it to the next person. When one can ran out, the captain opened the next can. In that way, everyone got some beer, and the night took on the normal patter of victorious men celebrating – laughing, boasting, teasing, and recounting the game in excruciating and presumably exaggerated detail. I got mocked for wearing Ray Bans. I had a great time. I felt a profound sense of connection to those guys and that community despite being a delinquent rich kid from the Northwest suburbs of Houston, only sort of speaking Spanish, not speaking any Guarani, and never having picked trash a single day in my life. The Holy Spirit, in the guise of genuine love, care, and joy, has that power.

In Mark 12, the scribes and the wealthy live a religious life of conspicuous display. They rob from widows to put on their shows of self-importance and acquire fancy new clothes in an era where most folks had one set of clothing total – voiding their religious devotion and putting on the wasteful and competitive kind of Potlach. It’s all hollow and frivolous. They get condemnation in the heavenly quarters. Their long robes belong at the head of the First Century version of a bottle parade.

The widow does the opposite. She gives what she has for the sake of her community and her devotion to God – not for show. It’s genuine and life giving – a celebratory night enjoying 75% of a can of beer and finding joy even in the hardest existences.