Last Sunday morning I had a dream about the Chicago Temple. Sally and I were staying with friends in Cape Cod after having attended a family wedding in Connecticut. You see, even when I am a thousand miles away I cannot get you out of my mind.

It was a disturbing dream, really. I dreamt that I was walking along Washington Street from Dearborn toward the Temple, but when I passed the County Building next door I saw that the Chicago Temple building was gone. It has been demolished. There was just a big hole in the ground, and the wrecking crane was knocking out of the last of the stained glass window in the south wall.

I was in tears and went over to the building maintenance man standing in the rubble and cried, “What have you done?” He answered, “I didn’t like the building, so I had it torn down.” I looked down into the basement, now open to the sky and saw off in the southeast corner an opening large enough to drive a car through, and beyond the opening I could see an underground parking garage. I shouted, “We will rebuild the Temple . . . this time with indoor parking!”

Later last Sunday morning we went to church, a Congregational meetinghouse dating back to 1717. Clear glass windows, white walls, original and extremely straight-backed pews, a high and lifted up pulpit, a pain in the neck to look at, but the preacher was not a pain to listen to. So different from this place, yet still a church. And I began to sing to myself the verse of a song by Richard Avery and Donald Marsh that I learned from them in a workshop back in the 1970’s. It is in our hymnal, #558.

“The church is not a building, the church is not a steeple,
      the church is not a resting place, the church is a people.
      I am the church!  You are the church!  We are the church together!
      All who follow Jesus, all around the world!  Yes, we’re the church together!”

The church is not a building; the church is a people. I love this building. Its location is perfect; its architecture is stunning; its adaptability for many uses is extraordinary. Yesterday afternoon we had 400 people here to listen to Dr. Mary Beard of Cambridge University tell us what made ancient Romans laugh. And then Ian Frazier read to another gathering of 300 people some of his hilarious essays from “Lamentations of the Father.” This afternoon hundreds more will gather at the Temple to hear Dr. Robert Goff draw parallels between the unlikely pair, Buster Keaton and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And later, the works of people in the Neighborhood Writing Alliance, a project for adults living in low-income neighborhoods of Chicago. And for all of those events the beauty of this space and the attention of our members, volunteers who offer direction and hospitality, extend the love of God to a public unprepared for what it finds here. 

But from 1831 until 1924 the people called Methodists on this corner did not have the Chicago Temple. And there will come a time, I hope not in any of our experience, when the Temple will stand no more. Now, our building trustees are making major decisions about how to preserve this glorious structure well beyond our lifetimes, but ultimately the ministry of Jesus Christ is not about this building. It is about us. The church is not a building to maintain but a community called to serve others. “I am the church! You are the church! We are the church together!”

And so, to the gospel reading of the morning and with a different angle of approach, at least for me. This is a very familiar episode to any of us who have been around the church for awhile, having lived through many stewardship seasons. The customary sermon focuses on Jesus watching the impoverished widow put her last two coins into the temple treasury and then saying to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.” Go and do likewise.

But, Jesus does not say, “Go and do likewise.”  The preacher giving the stewardship sermon says that. “Be like the widow; give it all to the church. Trust us to do good things with your money and be assured that God will reward you for your faithfulness.”

But that cannot be the moral of this story. Look at the context. What comes before and after? Before, Jesus is vilifying the temple authorities, the scribes and Pharisees. “They walk around the marketplace in long, flowing robes, demanding respect and privilege from everyone, while using the money the people have donated for their own purposes.” How does Jesus put it? “They devour widows’ houses.” What a damning thing to say, “They devour widows’ houses.”

And what comes after this passage? We will read it next week, but here is a preview. As they leave the temple precinct, Jesus says to his disciples, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” He is predicting the destruction of the temple; he is making the astounding claim that he himself is the temple. “The church is not a building, the church is a people,” the people being the Body of Christ.

Given the context, Bonnie Thurston writes in her excellent commentary, Women in the New Testament, “If Jesus is against the scribes’ devouring widows’ houses, how can he approve of what he sees here? Is verse 44 a word of praise for the woman or of lament over a religious system that would lead such a person to give away all she had? . . . What are we to think of a religious system that would encourage a vulnerable person to sacrifice what security she had for its institutional manifestation? Isn’t the offering backward? Shouldn’t the temple be giving to the widow?” (p.74)

In Jesus’ day widows were special objects of God’s concern Thurston observes, because they were considered “disposable.” She notes that Japanese feminist theologian Hisako Kinukawa claims that widows are typical victims of temple-centered religion, and that it may have been this widow’s silently bearing unjust systems that influenced Jesus to give all that he had, his very life, as she had given all of hers.

From this angle of approach, it is not that the widow’s mite is admirable but that her plight is lamentable. Jesus condemns a religious system that creates devotion by guilt and coercion. So, for us today – if you are down to your last two coins, do not put them into the collection plate today. Use them for your own well-being. 

The church, today’s manifestation of the ancient temple, must not exist only for the sake of keeping the institution going. The only purpose of the church is to transform the world. Therefore, if the church provides you opportunities to share the love of God with the world as you have discovered it through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then give your money, your time, your expertise, and your prayers. Give generously, even extravagantly. The world does not exist to support the church; the church exists to transform the world.

This is stewardship season in most congregations, including this one.  And for interpretative purposes, we have reformatted our operating budget to show the purposes to which are resources are committed.  We have a line-item budget, of course, and we live strictly by it. That is what we review every month; that is what the auditors evaluate every year. But a line item called “staff compensation” does not translate into ministry. The faithful question is, how do we deploy our staff? What do they do? And so, using a basic scheme of dividing the ministry of the church into four categories – worship, education, personal care, and mission – we have estimated how much time each staff person spend per week ministering in these four areas and divided into the compensation. 

A line item for printing. How much of that cost goes to bulletins for worship services, to Sunday School flyers, to announcements of the grief support group, to special offering envelopes for projects in the Philippines, Chile, and Ghana? 

And so, for the leasing of copiers, the charge for telephone service, candles, Communion bread, Bibles for children, choir music, clergy travel expenses . . . how do we distribute these costs across the four areas of ministry so that the budget can read as a mission statement as well as a financial statement? It is a bit of a guess in many instances, I admit, but our stewardship materials give the reconfiguration as 37% of our $1 million budget to worship, 17% to education, 18% to personal care (counseling, hospital calls, and the like), and 28% to mission. Much of those percentages represent staff time allocations. Most of our mission support is raised outside of our operating budget, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 for this year.

That is all to say, every dollar we give must go to ministry in one form or another. It is not good enough just to keep the institution going for its own sake. When people say to me, as I usually hear it three of four toasts into the wedding reception, “I do not believe in organized religion,” I agree with them. Jesus said the same thing to his disciples after he saw the widow “bet the farm” on the temple. It is lamentable.

But we have a unique opportunity here at the Chicago Temple. Because of the foresight, outrageous imagination, really, of those who configured this building, almost all of the costs of the structural needs are borne by the income from the building and the invested funds faithfully stewarded over the years. The reality for you and me as members of this congregation is that almost all of our money that we offer to the church goes to ministry . . . not to roof repairs, not to electrical upgrades, not to new air conditioning systems, but to flesh-and-blood ministry with people seven days a week here on the public square.     

So, let us look with new eyes at the widow, maybe admiring her piety but lamenting an institution that would rob her of her very subsistence. And then, let us look at Jesus, the living temple, one not made of stone, but constructed by loving, by truth-telling, by justice-seeking, by mercy-giving. There is where our hearts are to be. There is where are treasures are to be. 

The church is not building; the church is a people. “All who follow Jesus all around the world! Yes, we are the church together!” Amen.