Psalm 127; Mark 12:38-44
Whether they are biologically related to us, or simply part of our community: as our psalm this morning reminds us, children are indeed a blessing from God. That makes it all the sadder when we come to this Sunday of the year, a Sunday when we remember all those, women and men, whose lives have been mutilated or cut short by war. And from the two World Wars right up to today, there are enough and more than enough to remember: soldiers, each one someone's son or daughter, some barely more than children; civilians, including children, whose only fault was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the bombs were falling; others killed or maimed by the hunger and random violence generated by a country at war; yet others whose values have been skewed for a lifetime by the fear and hatred war brings.
Though for a while, after the terrorist bombs in New York and in London, there was a faint feeling of dread pervading everyday life, I suspect that I and most of those in my generation and younger can have little idea of what it means to be at war. I don't even know what it must have felt like to be almost at war, in the Cuban missile crisis of the early 1960s, when nuclear holocaust looked imminent. Though headlines keep us up-to-date with the grim statistics of British and American troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan - much less often, I regret to say, do we hear how many Iraqis or Afghanis have died - I find it almost impossible to imagine the painful reality behind those numbers.
Sometimes voices of war do get through. In a recent letter read out on Radio 4, written to his family by a young soldier who died, he tells them not to mourn his death, though his mother comments, ‘I don't think he truly understood the impact of his death'.
And in the recent programme Wounded, following the paths to rehabilitation of two soldiers with amputated limbs, in spite of the stoicism shown by both, the mother of one of them confides to the camera: "If you could see what's in store, you wouldn't have your children." For sacrifice in war is not only of that moment in life, but of all the subsequent years of growth lost to that one individual and to the world.
But of course young people are not the only ones who are capable of sacrifice. Consider the poor widow in our Gospel reading this morning. All the well-to-do worshippers are passing on into the Temple, handing in their big subscriptions with a flourish. She is searching frantically at the bottom of her purse for the tiny coins which are all she can afford to give. And with the escalating cost of winter fuel and the diminishing returns on hard-won savings, people we know may be in a similar predicament when it comes to asking themselves just how much they can or should give to the work of the church.
Yet though Jesus commends her generosity - and it's not often enough that the contribution of older women is praised out loud in church, given that they make up a large proportion of so many congregations - he isn't so complimentary about some of the important men - the pillars of the temple, you might say - whose own generous giving comes out of their surplus income. It's not necessarily those who are up-front in what they give, he comments, but those who give until it hurts, who are really worthy of our admiration.
This part of Mark's Gospel may not be very easy hearing for high-ups in the synagogue, or in the church, come to that. In previous verses Jesus has just been demolishing awkward questions posed to him by the Pharisees, legal experts, about paying Government taxes; by the Sadducees, experts in temple order, about which of seven brothers will be able in heaven to claim the poor woman married to each of them in turn; and by the scribes, biblical experts, about the most important rule in the Bible.
And in each case, Jesus brings them down from lofty theological heights to the practical outworking of belief.
He points out to the Pharisees that the filthy Roman lucre they scorn is the same as the coins in their pockets, so not only in tax-paying but in every transaction they need to decide whether to serve God or money. He reminds the Sadducees that God's relationship with each of us is eternal, longer-lasting even than our relationships with each other. The scribe who sees the point of Jesus' choice of rules: to love God with all we have, and to love one another the way we love ourselves - is praised; we can imagine the relief of listening scribes. Yet almost straightaway, Mark puts Jesus' warning to scribes and theological experts in general: if you can talk the talk, then you should be walking the walk! If you know what it is God wants you to do, how come your life's not reflecting that understanding?
The question of MPs' expenses is back in the news this week, so the idea of people with high status getting so used to a feeling of entitlement that they forget their responsibilities to those they should be serving is all too familiar. But Jesus' question isn't directed only at the scribes, but to all of us, since we are each called to love God and neighbour and self. Given those guidelines, what should our choices be about how to use our resources?
Let's go back to Jesus' example, the woman who gives all she has to the Temple. He commends her, but is the Temple right to demand such a sacrifice of someone with so few resources, or is the religious system taking from those whom it should by rights be supporting? Take another example: should our state be asking women and men to go to war on our behalf, to risk their lives with sometimes inadequate equipment, to try to win civil wars where at times none of the factions seems worth supporting? Or would we be better to put more of our energy and resources into peacebuilding: winning hearts and minds by supporting development in infrastructure - roads, schools, electricity, hospitals - more likely to make peaceful withdrawal possible?
Public questions of war and peace have few obvious or easy answers. The question of how God wants us to use our resources is not easy either; it's one that no two of us will answer in the same way.
But these are questions we need to go on asking ourselves and our representatives, and not only on Remembrance Sunday. What sacrifices can we rightly ask, without exploiting loyalty and willing service? And are we prepared to live out our beliefs in costly action, day by day? For in war or in peace, God's gift to us of Jesus, his life, his death and his new life beyond death, shows us the greatest love we will ever know, and calls us to respond with all that is in us, as we look in hope to the time to come when war shall cease, and all be prayer and praise.