Ministry of Presence by Rev. Dr. Jay Marshall Groat on November 10, 2024, at Mount Vernon, Ohio, based on Mark 12: 41-44

So, this morning on this Stewardship Sunday, appropriately enough, one of our lectionary readings is what my Bible commentary says is, quote, the widow’s offering. In the tradition of the King James version, you might remember this is classically referred to as the widow’s mite. And Jesus sat down opposite the treasury and watched. He was watching. I wonder if the living spirit of Christ is watching us. I wonder. And if the living spirit of Christ is watching us, I wonder what the spirit of that sense of Christ is. Is it one of judgment, is it one of grace, is it one of mercy? He sat down by the treasury, and He watched. 

I was raised in the Presbyterian church; I was raised with the Apostles’ Creed. Can I see hands, anybody else? Yeah, a lot of us. We had to memorize the Apostles’ Creed in my dad’s congregation class in the seventh grade. That’s quite a task. And I have to tell you, and I say this not in a self-serving way, it’s just an honest way, I will also tell you that I don’t really do it anymore and that’s OK. My prayer life has evolved in another way, but for many years during my morning walk – I made sure that nobody was around so that they couldn’t hear me talking out loud – one of the ways that I would begin my day was praying the Apostles’ Creed. I said it out loud. There’s that part of the creed where it says that, I’m paraphrasing it first, Jesus goes down and then He comes up, and in the Apostles’ Creed He eventually ends up on the right hand of God. And then the line says, “From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Remember that? Our expression of Christianity, your expression and mine and of faith communities, is we discover a lot when we find out on what word we place emphasis. For example, tell me what you think about this energy – “From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” How’s that make us feel? That’s one legitimate way to respond to it. How about this one – “From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” Different energy, isn’t it? The Messiah, the light of the world, He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

It says that He came to the treasury, and He watched. He watched very wealthy people put a lot of money in the treasury. Jesus had very wealthy friends. Jesus had very wealthy disciples. Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, those were the two people who were there at the end. A lot of the disciples ran our of fear, God bless them. At the end when Jesus was killed, we’re told that the disciples ran out of fear and they did, and two very wealthy men who loved Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, stood up and went to the Roman authorities and said we want the body. So Jesus had wealthy friends. And then we have the widow. We’re told she has two very small, insignificant coins, and essentially all the commentators I re-read this week said the point here is she gave her all. She gave her all.

And that led me to one of the things they taught me in seminary about a hundred years ago, it feels that way sometimes. Not necessarily in a bad way, but many, many lifetimes ago I was a seminary student, and one of the things they talked about when I was in seminary is called ministry of presence, the ministry that comes when we show up. I was thinking about Stewardship Sunday, and I asked myself the question and I wrote it down in my notes this morning, I asked myself the question and I’m asking it of you. What is the most valuable thing that we have to give, on this Stewardship Sunday? And as Ian said, hey, we want your pledge. If you decide to have a faith community, if you decide to have a building, you’ve got to have some money to run things, so we want that, we need that. And in that context, I will ask the question – what is the most valuable thing that we have to give? Early in the week I thought about this, and I immediately came up with an answer and I haven’t come up with a better one, and it’s fairly predictable because I’ve already mentioned the theme, the ministry of presence. And by the way, you don’t have to be ordained to do the ministry of presence. The most valuable gift that we have to give is what? Ourselves. To show up. In a few minutes I’m going to tell you about my maternal grandfather, and one of the many things he taught me, indirectly, is the power of the ministry of presence. At times it’s a very sad story, because when we lose the presence of someone it’s an incredible reminder of the power of the ministry of presence. 

I shared with you a few months ago, I’m going to share it with you again, it was a career-changing insight for me. I was part of a Clinical Pastoral Education experience for a year right after seminary, CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. I was a chaplain at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago. I was there for a year. And the program is essentially you spend half your time on a unit serving patients and staff, and then half the time led by a gifted leader with a handful of other clergy, and every day you do group dynamics and you talk about what you’re learning. It’s a life-changing experience, at least it was for me. One of the studies that we were required to read was a study by a chaplain at another hospital. It took 10 years for this chaplain to really complete this study. He interviewed I think it was about 50 people who had been patients at a hospital 10 years prior. He interviewed them, and he asked them various questions about what it was like to be a patient in the hospital for an extended stay. One of the questions he asked, and this was what he was really digging for, he asked the patients who had been in the hospital 10 years prior, did anyone come to visit you? In most instances people answered yes. Then the next question was, can you please list the names of the people who came to visit you. Now remember, this is 10 years prior, and to a person, with rare exception, everybody could list the names of the people who came to visit them in the hospital 10 years ago. They listed them by name, they remembered. And then the next question was this, and this is my favorite part, the next question was, OK, these people came to visit you, what did they say? Nobody could remember anything. They couldn’t remember what people said. Why? Because what mattered was that they came. 

My gifted teacher, the late, great Reverend Dave Middleton, who was a Methodist pastor, told us students, he said whenever you visit somebody in the hospital as a member of the chaplain staff remember that patient has been lying in that bed all day for days and when you walk in you are the only one who is there to not talk about their body. You are the one visiting them to talk about their spirit, to talk about their souls, and he told us, don’t ask them how they’re feeling. Don’t ask them how they’re feeling. That’s not why you’re there. The ministry of presence.

My maternal grandfather, Harold Eugene Jones, was born and raised in Monessen, Pennsylvania, which was a steel mill town about 45 miles southwest of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River. By the way, there are two kinds of people in the world – those who know how to pronounce Monongahela correctly and those who can’t. The Monongahela and the Allegheny come together in Pittsburgh, right, and they create the Ohio. I’m a sports fan so I watch these games year after year, and the sportscasters never get the Monongahela right. It’s usually Mo-non-ga-HEE-la, that’s not how the locals say it. Anyway, that’s another point. Monessen was also my mother’s hometown, born and raised there, she was an only child. My grandfather, Harold, met his wife, my grandmother, Naomi, they met in grade school. Naomi was the only girl my grandfather had ever loved. We’re talking about the power of presence. I don’t normally preach this way, but I’m going to do it this morning. We should never take for granted the people who are present in our lives today. It’s the power of presence.

Naomi Crawford was the only girl that my grandfather ever loved. They met in grade school. After high school they got married. My mom was born in 1934, she passed away on the fourth Sunday of Advent in 2019. In 1954 my parents, Jack and Joy Groat, were married at the First Methodist Church in Monessen, Pennsylvania, in February of 1954. My dad was in the Army at the time. They honeymooned at Niagara Falls, they hardly had any money, they could afford to spend a couple nights at Niagara Falls. My brother Jeff was born nine and a half months later, and my dad was stationed at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. Three months after their wedding Naomi came down with a brain tumor, it was diagnosed, and three weeks later she was dead. Today I’m sure it would’ve been a different story. And just like that she was gone.

I hate to be a downer, but it’s the power of presence and we should never take it for granted. We’re told this morning that that widow showed up. Not only did she show up, she gave everything that she had. My grandfather was depressed, to say the least. I didn’t know any of this as a kid. I didn’t know any of it until after he died in 1974 and I was an adult, and that’s when my mother told us. I’m glad she waited. I didn’t know any of it. He became depressed, he moved in with them at the Army base in New Jersey, and he couldn’t function. Finally, my mom and my grandfather moved back to the Pittsburgh area for a while and he became hospitalized in Pittsburgh. My mother told the story that after one of the visits she walked out and said to my dad, we’ll never see him alive again. He had a broken heart. As a last-ditch effort they tried electro-convulsive therapy and to a certain extent it worked. It kept him alive for 20 more years.

My memories of him are once a month he would drive over to our house in Marysville, Ohio and he’d spend the weekend with us. He was the kindest man I’ve ever known, soft-spoken. He was in grief, I didn’t know, I was a kid. Every morning for breakfast he had a Pall Mall cigarette, black, burnt, dry toast, a chunk of cheddar cheese and black coffee. He lived to be 66. There’s one particular memory that I have. I was in I think it was third grade; I could tell by the house that we lived in, it was shortly thereafter we moved. I was in third grade and my grandfather and I went out for a walk. I was in third grade, I do remember saying to him, Grandpa, I want to talk to you about the ministry of presence, the power of presence. Of course not. I was raised in a very loving family and what I said to him was not unusual in my family. I could take you to the spot at 206 North Maple Street. We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, and we just finished our walk and I was this third-grade kid and I said, you know what, Gramps? And he said, what? And I said, I love you. And he started to weep, and it scared me. I didn’t do anything about it, I didn’t say anything, I didn’t panic. He started to weep, and I didn’t understand. And then a few years later I did. The power of presence, the ministry of presence. The widow showed up, she gave her all. It’s the power of presence, it’s the ministry of presence. Let’s try not to take it for granted, and we celebrate it whenever we can, especially on Stewardship Sunday, and we give a gift, our most valuable one. Amen?