Mark 11-13, which the church is reading through in worship right now, is a critique of the scribes and of the Temple system.

Jesus is, of course, a good Jew. He’s part of the system that he criticizes and loves the Temple enough to want it to be what it is meant to be. When religion is doing what we’re meant to do, it involves worshiping God with everything we’ve got and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

It seems, sometimes, that institutions–the Temple and churches among them–get swept up in maintaining ourselves and forget to love our neighbors. We forget that God commands us to care for the poor, the orphans, and the widows.

The widow who comes to put in her last two pennies should be cared for by the institution that she is giving to. Why is she down so low? What will she eat tonight? Where will she sleep? Does she have children to care for?

Last night, I spent some time with the Cub Scout Pack that meets at my congregation. They needed me to come talk with them about our church’s outreach efforts in order to fulfill a requirement. So I took them on a tour of the church.

We started in the Family Life Center, where the Scouts meet. Last week, a marching band came and rested there on a busy competition day. The youth room hosts the meetings where teenagers bring their friends most weeks. Upstairs, the Cathedral room holds meetings for multiple HOAs, in between Sunday School, book study, and Bible studies.

We walked around the furniture left over from the yard sale in July on our way to the kitchen, where I talked about how years ago folks in the congregation realized that there was a need for people to deliver hot meals on Thanksgiving day, when other organizations took the day off. So people cooked and baked and packaged and drove. Now, we raise the money for a catering company to do the cooking, but we still organize the routes and drive. That yard sale helped us get a good chunk of the way to the $10,000 we’ll need to take care of our hungry neighbors. The leftovers go to a local organization that will either give them to a family to set up a new home, or sell them to support their good work.

Before we left, I showed them the shopping cart with groceries for the local food pantry.

Then, we walked over to the other building. On the way, I talked about how the graveyard we have is a place of outreach. When someone dies without a pastor or a place to go, sometimes they end up in our care. The church can take care of them and their families in that way.

In the narthex (lobby) of our worship space, there’s a collection of five gallon buckets full of cleaning supplies and shoeboxes full of brightly colored toys. Other congregations have put together these kits. They’ve brought them to us so that Lutheran Disaster Response has one place to send the truck instead of many.

The classroom in the back that’s full of shelving and tables doesn’t look like much, but it does great things. Snack packs are assembled there to make sure that school kids who don’t have much at home have enough calories to make it through the weekend.

Finally, we moved into the worship space. I told the boys that what we do in worship is for everyone. We love coming together and being in our community, but we gather for the sake of the whole world. We pray specifically for things around us, and that God’s will be done in all places. Our offering supports the church and goes outside it to serve the world. We also come here to become better versions of ourselves. Church is a training ground for every day Christians to live in this holy, imperfect world.

Our buildings aren’t this congregation’s reason for being. But they serve as a hub for the service we are called to do.

What do we do with that? How do we hold the truth of needing storage and chairs alongside the truth of serving our neighbors? How does the church put its whole self in to every dollar, every budget line, every moment?

I don’t know that these questions have answers. Or if they do, they’re answers that must be lived more than spoken.

Maybe that’s the point Jesus is making. Maybe he points these things out to us–the justice and the injustice, the practicality and the potential idolatry–so that we have to think through what it means to live faithfully.

Maybe the point is to wrestle with budgets, at home, at church, and in our workplace, so that the most good can be done. And to see how what we’ve got, whether it’s buildings or other resources, can be used. Maybe the point is talk about what our mission is, what our goals are, how we best achieve them. Maybe the faithfulness is in the planning, the praying, the preparing as well as in the giving itself.