It may have been the most gracious wedding toast I ever heard.  The father of the bride got up after the usual toasts by the (2) best men and (2) matrons of honor.  What everyone in the room knew was that his daughter had left everyone she knew to follow her fiancé to Michigan.  They all knew how difficult that had been, not only on the daughter, but the dad, mom and his entire family.  Yet when dad got up to speak, all he could say was how grateful he was for the good man that Tony was, how much his daughter loved him, and how happy he was for the life they were beginning together.  It was what was NOT said, I think, that was so gracious, so generous.  No words about how bittersweet this was for him, no words about how he wished they could move back to St. Louis SOON, no words about how sad he was that he would not get to spend much time in the foreseeable future with his daughter.  Generosity looked like a father of the bride, hosting an amazing celebration for his daughter and wishing only the best for wherever that journey would take her and her husband. 

Generosity looked like a family opening their home to some last minute guests who showed up in London unannounced for a wedding they weren’t invited to.  (Oops!  We were young and stupid at the time, and had no idea what kind of scrambling around others did because of that.)  They found us a family where we could crash on the floor, we made our introductions in this small living space, dropped our stuff, and met up with another volunteer from Germany as we took a walk around the town and had a few beers.  When we came back, there was a whole Turkey on the table with all the fixins waiting for a group of college students these folks had met for all of 5 minutes.  Generosity looked like a family opening their home to strangers. 

Generosity looked like an impoverished widow, in a town suffering under a horrendous drought, sharing the stuff of her last meal with a stranger, fresh off the road.  Even after having explained her situation to Elijah, that this was all she had, Elijah was insistent about the food.  And the conflict within the woman was very real – Hospitality is a core virtue in the time of Jesus, as was her desire for an intimate ‘final meal’ with her son.  Should she trust Elijah’s God and this vague promise that the jar will not go empty, nor the oil run dry?  Should she be generous to this stranger who made such an insensitive demand upon her?  Faith and generosity shared all she had with the man of God.   

Generosity looked like a widow throwing in her last two coins to the temple treasury.  The gifts were tossed down this copper kind of siphon, emptying below the level of the temple into the treasury.  The bigger the coin, the louder the sound as it goes in.  The woman’s two coins could hardly be heard, they were that small.  Yet commenting on her gift, Jesus notes that she gave so generously.  The Greek words used in the story literally mean: “She gave her whole self.”  Not holding back anything from God, generosity looked like giving her whole self to God –all she had to live on– out of a simple, but deep faith.   

This story of the widow’s mite, set just days before Holy Week, prepares you for Mark’s final story of what generosity looks like.  Generosity will look like a man choosing not to run from a death he could have avoided upon a cross so that others could be free. A brisk 10-15 minute walk over the Mount of Olives would have allowed Jesus to disappear into the wilderness.  Jesus, like the widow, will give his whole self, his body and blood – all he had to live on, for the sake of the many.  This, too, is a choice made from a place of simple, yet profound trust in the goodness of God to work beyond the smallness of our vision and seeing.  Generosity looks like Jesus nailed upon a cross. 

True generosity, it seems, comes not as an instinctive response to stimuli, but from a practical choice to put your trust in God into concrete behaviors to meet the needs of the individuals, communities and the world in which we live in.  So what will YOUR generosity look like in your world this week?