Good morning brothers, sisters and friends. Thanks for having me here today. It’s a real privilege that I don't take lightly.
As a church family, we’re standing at a bit of a threshold, aren't we? Looking around this sanctuary, you can almost see the layers of life that have happened here over the last 50-odd years—the baptisms, the weddings, the hard farewells. It’s a place full of sacred moments, acts of service and generosity to the wider community and deep friendships shared.
I know for many of us, it’s a bit of a gut-punch to sit down together, crunch the numbers and realize our tank is running low. It feels heavy to acknowledge that our time in this specific building may be coming to a head. There are 'what-ifs', questions swirling around the room and that’s fair enough. It’s okay not to have the answers sorted yet.
In today’s Scripture, we see Jesus sitting in the Temple, and he’s looking at things through a completely different lens than the rest of the world. He watches wealthy folks dropping in these massive, noisy sums of money. Then He spots a widow. She drops in just two tiny copper coins.
And yet Jesus stops everything.
He calls His disciples over and says:
“Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.”
That statement should make us uncomfortable—because Jesus is not doing math the way institutions do math.
He isn’t denying that large sums exist.
He isn’t spiritualising poverty.
What He is doing is relocating significance.
To anyone else, her action didn’t amount to much. It’s just a rounding error. It didn’t fix the Temple budget. It didn’t 'save' the institution.
But Jesus stops and tells us that her act was actually the most significant thing happening in the room.
He’s showing us that no act of love is ever wasted.
What gives those two coins their weight isn't the amount, but the 'upside-down', inside out logic that Jesus uses to calculate meaning.
He moves significance away from anything you can measure on a spreadsheet. He’s suggesting that the most important stuff in life happens 'under the radar'.
This goes totally against the grain of our world, doesn't it? We live in a culture that says if it didn't get 'likes' or 'shares,' or if there’s no public recognition, then it didn't really happen.
But Jesus says the actions God cares about most are often the ones we can’t quantify at all.
I think of my own mum back in Malaysia. She’s 87 this year. She’s doing alright generally, but she’s navigating the early stages of dementia. We try to get back to see her every Christmas, and one year we even made the trip for Lunar New Year in February. I’ll tell you what—those flight tickets during peak season burn a massive hole through the wallet!
But as her memory starts to get a bit fuzzy, my family and I have felt this real urgency to 'capture' our time together. If you walked into her living room today, it would look like an art gallery. The walls are covered in framed photos of trips we’ve taken, her wedding, my graduation, birthday celebrations, the grandkids' faces as they grow over the years.
We’re basically trying to build a monument against the 'impermanence' that comes when memories start to dissolve. We want something solid that will last.
But memories, as many of us know, have a way of coming and going. The photos stay put on the wall, but her connection to them slips away. She’ll ask, 'When did we do this?' or 'Who’s that in the photo?' or 'When are you coming back again?'"
Caring for loved ones with dementia is a real test of whether we can love without asking for anything to be recognized or remembered. It requires accepting that no act of love is ever wasted. Any act of kindness puts love out into the world. It doesn’t need to be captured on camera or photo framed. We don’t need to be thanked for our love to be helpful. We love, not for our own satisfaction but for the pure act of pouring out love lavishly on our loved one.
Even if our love doesn’t have visible results, that doesn’t matter. Love has gone out into the universe. And that’s enough.
Most of us have been trained to organize our lives around a feedback loop. We track results, we look for outcomes, we want to see that our effort is actually landing somewhere.
Without that, it’s easy to get discouraged. To lose heart.
We start to wonder: 'Is any of this actually doing anything?'
But Jesus’ perspective clears all that away.
The widow in the story was never even named. Jesus didn't pull her aside to tell her, “You know what, you’d be famous for the next 2,000 years for giving those few cents”.
She wasn't acting for the history books.
She’s not trying to make a point.
She was just living out of her inner conviction. Her faithfulness to what matters inside.
Her contribution didn't produce 'tangible outcomes'—in fact, that whole Temple wouldn't even be standing forty years later.
Her actions disappeared into the fabric of life.
And yet, Jesus says that kind of life matters more than the 'show-and-tell' religious leaders of her day.
That raises a real and searching question for us:
Can we live—can we move forward—without needing our actions to be validated from the outside?
I don’t know what it will look like if or when this building stops operating as it has. But that doesn’t mean we stop being God’s church, His called‑out people. The Church was never made of bricks anyway.
We carry with us the seeds of God’s love and truth wherever we go—into homes, congregations and neighbourhoods.
Wherever we go, Jesus shows it is possible to live with integrity when there is no guarantee that anything will come of it.
For 50-plus years, this church has loved God, loved each other and loved the wider community – often without applause or fanfare.
But that is exactly where faith becomes real, where faithfulness becomes uncluttered and clean — when it stops being a performance and starts being about ‘a way of being’.
In the Lord of the Rings, there’s a moment toward the very end, when the hobbits Sam and Frodo are deep in the heart of Mordor, the enemy’s stronghold. They are exhausted, starving, and surrounded by total darkness. They are just two small hobbits against an army of orcs.
In that darkness, Sam looks up and sees a single star twinkling through the thick, poisonous clouds. Tolkien writes that the beauty of that star 'struck his heart,' and a sudden hope returned to him.
Here is the key: Sam realized that the shadow of Mordor was actually 'a small and passing thing,' and that there was light and higher beauty for ever beyond its reach. In that moment, Sam didn't decide to keep going just because he wanted to be a hero celebrated in song.
He kept going simply because his heart was aligned to the Light.
Just a life of inward integrity. Even when it offers no external validation.
I know some of us here are tired yet quietly plodding on. Selflessly giving to keep the lights on in this congregation without expecting anything in return. Yet we continue to love without anyone noticing… but Jesus.
Any act of kindness we put out into the world is for the love of God and our neighbour. And that’s enough.
Your love has gone out into the universe.
No act of love is ever wasted.
And in God’s economy, that is more significant than all the world’s recognition.
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