“Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell”. Those words are poor poetry; but they sum up the ethos of the man who founded the missionary society for which Moira and I worked back in the 1980s: single-minded to the point of obstinacy and utterly devoted to the task, deeply flawed and controversial yet clearly inspiring.

Charles Studd was brought up in luxury. His father had made a fortune as an Indian tea-planter and bought a mansion in Wiltshire; his sons went to Eton and Cambridge University. The three brothers all played cricket for both Cambridge and England and were members of the team which infamously lost to Australia in 1882, creating the legend of the Ashes and “the death of English cricket”. Although his father had become a fervent evangelical Christian, Charles didn’t really share his faith. However while he was at Cambridge one of his brothers became seriously ill; this made him reconsider his faith and turn to Christ. Furthermore, although it meant abandoning his cricketing career, he decided to become a missionary in China, one of the famous “Cambridge Seven”. He later served in India and then Africa, where he died in 1931.

Studd knew that, when he reached the age of 25, he would receive a substantial inheritance from his father’s estate: £25,000, worth more than £3m today. He felt that he should give most of this away to various Christian missionary organisations and charities, but kept £3,400 – still a substantial sum – to put towards his future married life. His fiancée, however, whom he described as a ‘real Salvation Army hallelujah lassie’, was having none of it said, “Charlie”, she said, “what did the Lord tell the rich young man to do?” “Sell all”. “Well then, we will start clear with the Lord at our wedding”. And they gave the rest away, keeping only £5.

I don’t know what you make of that story. Should Studd – who had become well known because of his cricketing success – have stayed in Britain and become an evangelist among young people and students rather than “burying himself in China”? Some people certainly thought so. And although the charities to whom he gave his money clearly benefitted, should he have held onto his inheritance rather than launching onto a “life of faith”, which basically meant poverty and reliance on hand-outs from his supporters? What he and his wife did certainly seemed extremely rash: they deliberately pulled the rug of financial security from under them. Was their faith in God misplaced?

I’d like you to “park” your views on that as we think about the two women who featured in our Bible readings. One lived in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus while the other lived over eight centuries earlier and nearly 200 miles to the north in Zarephath, a city on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon. This means that, while one woman was Jewish the second was probably a Phoenician who would have followed the Canaanite religion. So the women were very different; but, apart from both being mentioned in Scripture, they had two things in common. One was that they were widows, which meant that they fell out of the bottom of society and were the poorest of the poor: both would have found life a struggle although one lived in a time of plenty and the other in a time of drought and famine. And, of course, they are both anonymous: well, I’m sure that they had names but we have no idea what they were!

Let’s look more closely at these women; and let’s start at Zarephath. I’m sure you know the story: Israel at this time is being ruled by the evil king Ahab (and his equally evil wife Jezebel). The book of Kings is pretty damning about Ahab: not only does it say that “he sinned against the Lord more than any of his predecessors” but tells us that, after marrying Jezebel who wasn’t a Jew but (yes!) another Phoenician, he started to worship the pagan god Baal and even placed an image of it in the temple at Jerusalem. The book of Kings concludes, “He did more to arouse the anger of the Lord … than all the kings of Israel before him”. This is the context in which Elijah the prophet bursts onto the scene, prophesying doom and judgement – more specifically, a deadly and lengthy drought – if Israel in general, and Ahab in particular, do not mend their ways. Although we would regard drought as a natural phenomenon rather than a punishment for sin, that’s not Elijah’s interpretation. He has no doubt or difficulty in declaring a spiritual cause for this calamity.

Now Elijah is a faithful servant of God; and God doesn’t abandon him. He is first sent to a brook called Cherith where he can quench his thirst, and where (we are told) ravens bring him food. Eventually even these sources become exhausted: Elijah is becoming a victim of his own prophecy. But God wants him to live and so sends him to apparently bump into a random woman in Zarephath who, with her son, is dying of starvation. The town has been severely affected by Israel’s drought, yet this was a Gentile area with which God had no covenant relationship. The only reason for it to be punished is because one of its own has drawn king Ahab into pagan worship. Apart from that it is suffering what we might call “collateral damage”, which seems utterly unfair.

I wonder how the widow felt when this stranger – a foreigner, to boot – asked for food and drink. Did she recognise him as a prophet and, if so, respect him? We can’t tell – though she does talk about “the living Lord, your (not my) God”. What is clear is her resignation and despair: “I might as well do this one good thing before I perish”. This woman literally has nothing except the flour to make one last loaf of bread – yet, instead of keeping it to herself, she freely offers it to Elijah. For what does it matter? After all, tomorrow she and her son will be dead. The miracle that follows is something she couldn’t have anticipated in her wildest dream.

Let’s now fast-forward eight centuries or so to Jesus and his disciples watching people placing their offerings in the Temple treasury. There were apparently 13 different donation chests, and one can imagine some folk making a great show of putting a large sum into each. The poor widow can’t do that, of course: she puts in a tiny amount, which has been estimated at about 1/64^th of one day’s basic pay for a labourer – say about 70p. What we do need to notice is that she puts in two coins: in her poverty she could justifiably have kept one back for herself but she does not, such is the strength of her devotion to God.

I have the feeling that the disciples had been looking at the rich people and hadn’t noticed this quiet, even mousey, lady. But Jesus had; and he started to explain that God’s value system works in very different way to ours. For although the “widow’s mite” was insignificant in monetary terms (the Temple wouldn’t have missed it even

though “every little helps”), its value to God was incalculable and much greater than the flashy offerings of the well-off. For the rich could give large sums without them making much of a dent in their finances, there was plenty of cash left in the bank. But this destitute woman was literally giving everything that she had: one writer suggests that she went home to a bare larder and, within a few days, was dead. That’s conjecture, of course – but it’s not impossible. Suddenly we are back with the widow of Zarephath and her generous, despair-filled, life-giving offering to Elijah.

Would we have said if we’d witnessed these two acts of giving? Would we have said to the widow in Zarephath, “Tell Elijah that you have nothing to spare and direct him to the foodbank down the road”? Would we have said to the lady in the Temple, “Those greedy folk at the Temple are just gobbling up money like nobody’s business, you’d be far better keeping your two pennies for yourself”? And would we have said to both, “How could you be so stupid as to give away the only security that you had”? I suspect we’d have said all that: but would we have been right?

I said earlier that Moira and I served in a missionary society. We were living, in fact, in a little-known African country called Guinea-Bissau which at the time was reckoned to be the poorest in the world. Life for many people was extremely hard, especially for city-dwellers who had no land to farm. Supplies were scarce and huge queues were the norm for staples such as bread or rice. As foreigners we did have some access to goods from abroad, but even we had to carefully conserve our stocks. Food that came in was used very carefully or kept for a leaner time.

The local folk tended to have a different attitude: if they had food, they ate it; if they had a lot of food, they had a feast. If a neighbour came asking for rice or oil, it was freely given; everyone understood that the favour would be returned, but who could tell when that might be? The consequence of all this was that people such as ourselves were often critical of the locals: “How stupid of them to use all that stuff when they don’t know when they’ll be able to get more? They’re being irresponsible, they need to plan ahead”. What we didn’t realise is that the Africans were also criticising us: “They’re rich! So why do they keep everything in their storerooms rather than sharing it? We Africans are generous: those Europeans are so stingy!” We had radically different ways of looking at life: the local people enjoyed the here-and-now and trusted the future to take care of itself, we denied ourselves in the present in order to have enough for the months ahead. So were we the ones who lost out?

Jesus seems to have had a pretty negative view of security and a positive one of generosity. He tells people who own two shirts to give one to the person who has none, and those who have food to share it; he also tells the rich young man that he must give away his money if he wants to be a disciple. Jesus declares that there’s no point amassing wealth here on earth, as it will only get stolen by robbers, eaten by moths or destroyed by rust. His ethos seems to be summed up in the Sermon on the Mount: “Don’t start worrying: ‘Where will my food come from? or my drink? or my clothes?’ – the things that always concern pagans. Your Father in heaven knows that you need all these things … and he will provide you with them. So don’t worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own”.

All this seems to fly in the face of the sensible advice we often hear, such as making sure we save a bit each month and build up an emergency fund in case we can’t work, or starting a pension plan as early in life as we can, or taking out appropriate insurance for our life, income and possessions. Many of us who are fortunate enough to have assets (and I count myself among them) aren’t willing to let them go; that’s not so much a matter of being selfish as wanting to feel safe.

Now we might ask several questions about these stories. For instance, did the widow of Zarephath feel at all ‘pressurised’ into giving food to Elijah; indeed, did the prophet, albeit unintentionally, take advantage of someone who was very vulnerable? Equally, should the Temple officials have stopped the lady from putting money into the Treasury: “It’s all right, you keep your money; your need is greater than ours”; or would that have dented the limited dignity she felt in being able to contribute ‘something’? It’s worth saying that Jesus, with his prophetic eye, saw no need to prop up the Temple institution: its leaders were more interested in status than in faith and its impressive walls would soon be destroyed.

So what do these stories tell us? I’m not sure. Do they tell us to sit more lightly to our resources, being more willing to empty our bank accounts and larders than to hoard stuff for that ‘rainy day’? Do they tell us that we should be “storing up treasure in heaven” rather than making prudent provision for our future? Do they say that we should recklessly give away what we have and trust God to provide for us? These aren’t easy questions to answer, especially as the Bible’s world is so different to ours. But there do seem to be two challenges, certainly for me: one is to be more of a ‘giver’ than a ‘hoarder’; the other is to depend on God more than on money in the bank – but what does that mean in practice?

Two quick thoughts before I close. One is that some churches and their leaders have taken advantage of poor people, saying, “Give all you can to us! God loves a cheerful giver and will reward you richly!” There are pastors who have become very wealthy as a consequence, and I think it’s horrible and a misrepresentation of Scripture. My other point concerns the resources of our earth itself. Here we can and must not be reckless; three centuries of industrialisation have caused untold damage and we can’t afford to waste any more of creation’s heritage; we have a duty to think of the future. However this subject, topical and important as it is, has little to do with the stories we’ve been studying today.

I started by telling you about Charles Studd who gave away his inheritance and flung himself on Christ’s mercy. He was cantankerous, eccentric and even extreme; but he had a motto in life which we would all do well to ponder on: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him”. Jesus gave his life for us when he could have saved it: any offering we make is tiny in comparison.