Well, here we go again. After Tuesday, with all the anxiety of facing a second Trump administration. I rarely call out individual partisan politicians by name, but if we don’t say that name out loud today, we signal to the world that we’re as clueless as so many already seem to think.

I begin the sermon this way because I’m not sure what else to say. We have a new president-elect and millions of terrified people—all of whom seem to be wondering in unison: “Who even are we now? Anybody can make a case that 8 years ago was an accident, a fluke, a perfect storm. But after all this time and all the water under the bridge, what does it say about us that—even knowing what we know—America elected him again.”

People’s opinions are all over the place, but one thing’s for certain. For those of us anxious about what’s coming next, we’re first going to have to figure out how we’re going to look into the eyes of our immigrant neighbors, LGBTQ+ siblings, houseless friends, and the women in our lives and figure out how to answer the question that’s burning in their faces: “This is the best we can do?”

Of course, that’s not a new set of fears and anxieties. People in. Jesus’ world asked the same question every time they saw the powerful put their boot on the necks of the people least able to fight back.

Today’s text, which has precisely that question embedded in it, is difficult to interpret. As I’ve said on what must seem like countless other occasions, interpreting Scripture is a sticky process, just to the extent that we’re tempted to read ourselves into the wrong roles.

One of the most compelling ways Scripture operates is by presenting us with narratives, then beckoning us inside them to try them on for size. The way the Gospels are presented, we become part of the story by imagining ourselves as part of the story.

That’s all well and good. In fact, if we don’t read ourselves into the text, we’re not doing it right.

The problem isn’t that we read ourselves into specific roles in the text. The problems come when we consistently read ourselves into the wrong roles.

The most common readings of Scripture, and therefore the most common misreadings of Scripture, involve our penchant for imagining ourselves in the role of the most sympathetic characters in the text. When it comes right down to it, people are much more apt to see themselves as one of the downtrodden, one of the underdogs that Jesus seems constantly to be holding up to us as models of the reign of God. You know, the heroes.

In our text for today, I’d venture a guess that if somehow we held back from seeing ourselves as the widow who put two pennies in the offering plate, we certainly didn’t see ourselves as one of the scribes who devoured widow’s houses.

Granted, we have our fair share of the widowed in our congregation, many of whom give not from a storehouse of abundance. But most of us are not now, nor have we ever been, in the position of putting our last two pennies in the offering plate.

Most of us—if we’re honest—are much more likely to see similarities between ourselves and the scribes—people who’ve spent a great deal of time basking in the sun of God’s blessing.

Of course, we’re not Warren Buffet—but neither were they. Just decent folks looking for a bit of respect—that’s all. We’ve worked hard to get to where we are. And while we don’t want any more than what we’ve got coming to us, we certainly don’t want any less.

More than likely, then, if Jesus has a word to say to us from this text, it’s not going to come in the form of reassurance that we just need to keep on doing what we’re doing. That is to say, if we really want to hear what Jesus wants to say to us, we’re probably better situated to hear it if we read ourselves into the role of the scribes, rather than the widow.

Because, let’s be honest, for most of us, it’s a tough sell to cast ourselves in roles that feel better occupied by the bombed-out and beleaguered in Palestine, Ukraine, or right here in Louisville. Try to convince them that we have more in common with the woman who dumped the last bit of her Social Security check in the Salvation Army kettle before Christmas than with the Elon-Musk-wannabe-scribes who sit on the board of directors down at the temple.

What’s been going on as we approach this text in our Gospel?

Well, in chapter eleven, we learn that Jesus and the disciples—who’ve been on their way to Jerusalem for some time—finally arrive. Jesus rides into town on the back of a donkey and heads straight to the temple.

What’s the first thing Jesus does when he gets to the temple?

He overturns the tables of the money changers and calls everybody in charge a bunch of crooks.

As you might guess, that didn’t endear him to the local religious bosses. Jesus, as was his custom, didn’t waste any time rubbing the movers and shakers the wrong way. The chief priests and scribes had such a bad taste in their mouths from the whole episode that they started plotting ways to kill him.