I was sent to a stewardship seminar when I was in seminary. One of the sessions was presented by two young lawyers married to each other. I just happened to be that the woman was the son of the diocesan bishop. They were talking about tithing - giving 10% of household income to the church. They said that when they were only making $75,000 tithing was tough, but now that they made $250,000 it was even harder. Our household income that year was about $15,000. So, I didn't walk away with any encouragement to tithe.

This young couple had a lot. I don't know how badly they were mortgaged or anything like that, but compared to me, they had abundantly more. I sensed, though, that they lived an impoverished life. By this I mean, they focused on how much they could give without feeling it.

The widow in today's Gospel was terribly poor by any measure, yet she gave what she had. To me, this is a life of abundance. She knew what she had and she knew where it came from. She gave back to God not out of an abundance of resources, but out of an abundance of faith.

She knew that God would provide for her. She knew that God lived in her life. She knew that no matter how precious that money might be, her relationship with God was even more precious. My guess would be that this widow was familiar with the story of the widow and Elijah. Both her story and that from 1 Kings are not so much about wealth and resources as they are about faith.

I need to say a little about Elijah to set the context of the story of the never ending oil. We meet Elijah for the first time in the paragraph before ours. God called Elijah to go into the wilderness where he was fed by ravens. It was a time of solitude and reflection to prepare him for his ministry. From there, God sent him to the widow in Zaraepath. Following this story, the widow's son dies and Elijah brings him back to life.

So, this widow would not have known who Elijah was. He wasn't a known wandering prophet yet. He was just some guy telling this beleaguered widow to feed him. Heck, the birds did, why shouldn't she? The woman refuses giving the story of her poverty as an excuse.

Elijah said, "do not be afraid". For some reason, the woman trusted Elijah. Trusted him in terms of his being sent by God and trusting in the promise of God implied in Elijah's request. She had an abundance of faith and a lack of resources. But by combining the two, she had an abundance of both.

We don't know anything about the widow in Mark's Gospel, other than she was poor and she put in all of her money. We don't know if her life got better. We don't know if she ever learned who that strange teacher sitting across from the treasury and pointing at her was.

What we do know is that she had enough faith in God to give over the last of her physical resources believing in her heart that God would return it to her abundantly. She was poor in resources, but rich with faith.

I wonder what Jesus would say about the wealthy who strive to live a life rich in faith. The scripture is often filled with hyperbole, exaggeration for the sake of a point. Mark sort of lumps everyone into two categories rich and poor. John has Jew and believer.

I wonder how Jesus would categorize us. Rich, certainly some of us. Poor? We certainly have people living with very modest incomes or no income at all. Society even has a value which defines poor. I think it's now $16,000. If you make less than that, you're in poverty. Above it, your not. I doubt Jesus looks at out tax returns.

There's been a bit of a back and forth in the letters to the editor in the News-Press. Someone wrote that on a global basis, there were no truly poor in this country. Someone wrote back and said that anyone who made less than $16,000 was, by definition, poor. I think they're both right, and their both wrong. A nice Anglican way of resolving the argument.

I've seen the slums of Detroit and the slums of Tegucigalpa Honduras and there is no comparison. We have the social "safety nets" in place that Hondurans don't. But I don't want to diminish the hardship of the relatively poor in this country.

I want to tell you a story of a woman who, while incredibly poor in resources, lived an abundant life. Rose Mary was the domestic servant of a very wealthy family. She didn't make much. She lived up the hill in a run down, segregates neighborhood. Her house hadn't been painted in decades. Plywood scraps covered holes in her floor. She supported a couple of her adult children and several grandchildren as a single mom in a tiny, run down house.

We made a habit of taking any food we had left over after a party or church event to Rosemary. I remember the first time. We took some ham and other things. While we were bringing the food into her house, she told one of the little ones hanging around to go to several people's homes and tell them that there was food for them at Rosemary's.

If Rosemary got enough for 4, you know she fed at least 8 with it. She made the best chocolate cake I have ever tasted. The last time we passed through, she heard that we were coming and baked a cake for us. Still feeding folk out of her abundance of faith.

When I worked at the homeless shelter, I frequently got phone calls, mostly anonymous, asking why I was helping a bunch of dead-beats. I can't remember how many times I heard, "I work for my keep, and no one gives me anything." Now, there is a point when your generosity stops helping and starts enabling a welfare mentality. But that's not what these angry calls were about.

That type of anger comes from a life of poverty. Certainly no poverty of resources, but of faith, or perhaps more likely, a poverty of hope. There are conditions on their generosity, if there is any generosity at all.

In Charles Dickens' classic, A Christmas Carol, his Scrooge is the personification of an impoverished soul. He's not greedy because of a love of money, rather out of a hatred of life. His character had become so corrupted with hate and envy that generosity had no place. He saw the giving as the loss of something that was his.

After he had the tar scared out of him, he started living a life of abundance. And that made all the difference in the world.

A life of abundance sees the potential in people, things and situations. It sees the hope of a better tomorrow. The glass is not only half full, it's getting fuller. Now, I'm not trying to describe a Pollyannaish attitude. Just because you look at life with hope doesn't mean you can't see the real suffering in the world. Truth be told, I have found that some of the most abundant livers are living with great pain and suffering. The difference is that they don't let their suffering define their character. They see their suffering as a part of life that really stinks, but it isn't who they are.

They know who they are. They're children of God. Children of a loving God. Children of a God that makes a jug of oil last beyond its expiration date. A God that sends strangers by with a trunk full of food.

Both of our biblical widows knew what poverty was. But they also knew what it meant to live a life of abundance. A life of abundant faith in a God of unlimited love.