Hearth & Altar

Today's Gospel is only three verses long and it names names that matter more than they first appear to. Jesus is traveling from town to town with the Twelve, and Luke adds a detail most retellings skip: some women who had been healed were traveling with them too, and they provided for the whole group out of their own resources. Mary Magdalene is named. So is Joanna, whose husband worked as a steward in Herod's own household. So is Susanna. And many others, Luke says, without naming them all.

That word "provided" carries weight. These women were not tagging along. They were funding the mission - buying the food, covering what needed covering, making it possible for Jesus and twelve grown men to keep traveling and preaching without worrying where the next meal came from. The Gospel usually gets told as if the men did the work and the women watched. Luke's own account says otherwise, in three sentences that are easy to read past.

Today is Ember Friday, the second of the three fall Ember days, and it is also the day your family's almsgiving jar comes off the shelf. Twelve days ago, on September 6, you named someone at your gate and started setting money aside for them. Tonight is when that jar gets counted and given - which means tonight your family does exactly what Joanna and Susanna did. You provide, out of what you have, for someone who needs it.

• For our family, that we would provide for others the way Joanna and Susanna provided for Christ himself, we pray to the Lord.
• For everyone whose ordinary generosity keeps something larger running, unnoticed and unnamed, we pray to the Lord.
• For all who are fasting and keeping abstinence today, that it would open their hands rather than close them, we pray to the Lord.
• For the person or cause our family named twelve days ago, that what we give tonight would actually reach them, we pray to the Lord.

Bring out the jar tonight. Count it together, out loud, as a family. Decide exactly how and when it gets to the person or cause you named on September 6, and put the delivery on the calendar before anyone leaves the table.

Keep both the fast and the abstinence today - one full meal and two smaller ones that together do not add up to a full meal, plus no meat. Say plainly at the table that today is doing double duty, Ember and Friday both.

When you count the jar, resist the urge to make it feel bigger than it is. If it is a modest amount, that is fine - the practice was never about the sum. It was about a family deciding in advance not to walk past someone, and then following through twelve days later when it would have been easy to forget. If the jar came up nearly empty because the practice slipped, say that honestly in front of your children rather than quietly topping it up before they see it. Name a practice that did not fully hold, and start it again.