Stuff & Treasure

On the window sill over the sink in my kitchen is a treasure. It’s a little brown rock, about the size of a meatball—the kind you see in chafing dishes at receptions. It’s a pretty ordinary looking rock, except…  It has a heart! 

I don’t know how it came to be, but this plain brown rock has one kind of flat side and there on the flat side, if you tilt it at just the right angle, is a perfectly heart-shaped opening. A friend who knows that I collect treasures gave me “Rock with a Heart.” She found it lying on the ground, “in plain sight,” she said.

But… on the window sill, right next to Rock with a Heart, is… well, a bunch of stuff: A pill bottle with one or two expired pills in it. One of those joke half-mugs that cleverly declares, “You asked for half a cup of coffee.” That was a treasure—briefly. Now it’s a dust collector.

On a shelf above the TV is a couple of inches of armadillo tail, picked clean of tissue such that its intricate bony architecture is clearly revealed. Why so homely a critter requires such an extraordinary tail structure I don’t know. To me it’s an exuberant, over-the-top expression of its Creator—here just for the glory of it. A treasure.

But right next to it? More dust collectors: Things you thought you couldn’t live without.. for some brief moment in the distant past. Today? Meh.

We could continue. My house is strewn with treasures. Among the rocks, bones and shells, you will also find human-made treasures, like the glass ibis figurine my sister gave me when I admired it in her home.

But for every treasure... an equal or larger portion of stuff. How did I come to have… All. This. Stuff? Lately, my house full of stuff has come to feel burdensome, stifling, a huge distraction from the things that really matter. And so I am in the process of down-sizing! I got rid of stuff this summer, but, alas, I have far to go….

One of the things that struck me about the many people from New Orleans I spoke with post-Katrina is how losing everything made them leery of collecting stuff. One woman I interviewed told me that before the storm she had every kitchen device you could imagine. She loved to cook, and she had all the equipment and gadgets the world had to offer.

But she lived in the Upper 9^th Ward, and it allll ended up in a huge, smelly pile at the curb. Now, she said, I have one saucepan and one skillet and I don’t want any more. Now, she takes pleasure in figuring out how to cook whatever she wants with one skillet and one saucepan.

Many people take today’s Gospel lesson to be about long-term planning. There’s that reference to “laying up treasures in heaven,” and so we want to make this teaching an evacuation plan for that next place we’ll go to someday after we die. ‘Be good now—moral, pious—and go to heaven later.’

I beg to disagree. Jesus tells us over and over throughout his ministry on earth: The kingdom is at hand. The kingdom is within and among you.

And today’s lesson: Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. 

The glass ibis.

 That’s all present tense! I’m reminded of how my sister gave me that glass ibis. I was visiting her and noticed it sitting on her windowsill. And I told her the story of waking up one morning to a flock of ibises in my back yard feasting on crawfish brought up by a heavy rain.

And my sister insisted on giving me the figurine. Right then. On the spot. She didn’t put it in her will, she picked it up and put it in my hands. And when I protested she said much the same thing Jesus says on this occasion: It is my pleasure to give it to you.

But here’s the tricky part. Yes, the glass ibis is a sort of treasure. But it’s not.. the real.. treasure. The glass ibis could get knocked off my windowsill to shatter on the floor today, and I’d still have the real treasure—my relationship with my sister and an act of solidarity between us that carried that relationship forward.

We humans easily confuse things, mementos, STUFF… with the real treasure—namely our relationships with each other, and with Creation, and thereby.. with God.

That’s what I think today’s lesson is all about: Recognizing and cultivating the real treasure, our relationship with God manifested in the here and now in our relationships with people and God’s Creation.

How, indeed, would we treat people if, at every moment, we were awake to the presence of God in them and viewed them as the Master coming to fasten his belt and have [us] sit down to eat? And, indeed, to serve us?

How’s that for a reversal! Let me say it again in a slightly different way. Our relationships with people are the real treasures. Our relationships are the Kingdom here and now. Relationships with each other are the purses that will last. They are the result and the medium of our relationship with God!

Now that is somewhat easy to see when it comes to family, as the story about the glass ibis and my sister illustrates. We don’t need to be admonished to be ready and awake to accept the gift of family relationships. That kind of comes naturally.

Other folks, not so much. Other folks often appear to us as one more burdensome issue or problem we must deal with. And the more different from us they are, in terms of skin color, religion, social class, work ethic, values, ways of being in the world… the less likely we are to be ready and open to the fact that a relationship with them just might be a feast served by the Master himself.

But Jesus told us, you have to be willing to leave your family behind. Jesus modeled for us a different way, a way contrary to our instincts, a reversal of our “natural attitude,” by inviting relationships with everyone he encountered.

My friends, we all have a God-shaped hole in the side of our heart. And that is the true treasure, the true treasure that makes all of the other treasures—the treasure of relationship with God, self and neighbor—possible.

But the God-shaped hole in the side of our heart often gets… well, full of dirt. Stuff falls in! Sometimes we literally cover it over with whatever we can! We wall over the God-shaped hole in our heart, and we do it for a variety of reasons.

One really big, important reason we do it is fear. We fear those who are different from us. And sometimes our fears are fanned by hateful language on social media and from people in power who ought to know and act better.  

Who remembers Pogo? I love cartoons. They so often express things we find hard to say straight up. And perhaps my favorite of all time is Pogo saying, We have met the enemy, and he is us!

But we are and can be bigger than our fears. Or our hurt. Or our anger, which often goes hand in hand with both fear and hurt. These are the things that build walls around human hearts.

But the treasure is inside us. It is a God-shaped, Love-shaped hole in the side of our hearts. And how we tend to that hole in our heart matters.

One of my favorite poets is Emily Dickinson, and she has addressed precisely this thing. Here’s her poem, “To Fill a Gap.”

To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it—
Block it up
With Other—and ’twill yawn the more—
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air.

Brothers and Sisters, we must fill the hole in our hearts with God, which is to say with Love. Because if it’s not about Love, it’s not about God.

God wants to give us the Kingdom. Here. Now. Are we ready?

It’s the anxiety, people!

Christ Episcopal Church, Bastrop, La., July 21, 2019

For those who don’t know or might not remember, in a former pre-retirement life, I was a professor of communication at the University of Louisiana Monroe. I taught public relations, writing and visual communication, graphic design and occasionally photography.

And one of the things I incorporated in several of those courses was how to make a Power Point to enhance your spoken presentation. I have to admit that I’m one of those rather tiresome people who think most oral presentations could be improved by a good Power Point!

Now I would never want the Episcopal Church to turn into one of those churches with a stage, and several video cameras, and gigantic screens… basically, where the sanctuary has become a TV studio where many of my former students did their media production internships! But I have to admit that occasionally I have felt the lack of a way to make a sermon visually interesting.

 

The Mary & Martha window over the altar at Christ Church, Bastrop, La.

 So… all that is by way of directing your attention to the beautiful window at the front of this church—a perfect Power Point slide for today’s sermon about Mary and Martha!

This story of Mary and Martha and Jesus’ visit in their home is very familiar to us. I have no idea how many sermons based on this text I have heard, but at this point in a lifetime of going to church virtually every Sunday, it has to be dozens. Does that sound reasonable? Anyone else?

And I would say most of those sermons made this story a sort of competition between Christian service, like that of Martha, and Christian study, meditation, prayer, etc., like that of Mary.

And many of those sermons make this story a reminder that we contemporary Christians have filled our lives with many, many things. More than ever before. We are busier than ever. With modern media and such, we have more demands on our time and attention than any of our ancestors, and we really need to develop the discipline to spend more time in prayer and meditation and study of the word of God.

At the very least, the preacher is going to come down on the side of “balance.” We need a better balance between service and prayer in our lives. Sound familiar? And that’s not a bad sermon! We DO need balance between service and prayer in our lives.

But today I want to direct our attention to an aspect of this story that can get lost or overlooked in that approach. Look again with me at how Jesus rebukes Martha—and it is a rebuke. A gentle one, for sure, but a rebuke.

He says to her, Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.

“You are worried and distracted by many things.” Is that not the very definition of “anxiety”? He might as well have said, “Mary, you are anxious. Calm down!”

Nothing is more contagious in human society than anxiety. Did you ever notice that? An anxious person can make a roomful of anxious people in a heartbeat!

One of the things I had to do under Bishop Bruce’s process for becoming a deacon was to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, “CPE” for short. The Jefferson Regional Medical Center in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had an excellent program, and so I spent a summer mostly in Pine Bluff, coming home to Monroe to spend the weekends I was not on call with my son.

And…, I can only think because I was older and more mature than my peers in the program, and generally speaking, a relatively non-anxious person, I got assigned to… wait for it… the hospice unit and the emergency room.

Now families with a loved one in a hospice unit have typically had some time to begin preparing themselves for what’s coming. That doesn’t mean the hospice unit is anxiety free, just that… it’s not much like the emergency room.

The emergency room is Anxiety Central! Some of you might have been there and know firsthand what I’m talking about. Bad things, terrible things, scary things, tragic things, end up in hospital emergency rooms. And so I learned a lot that summer about being what we call “a non-anxious presence” in the midst of over-the-top anxiety.

Martha’s anxiety in today’s Gospel story is not of that order, but… she is “worried and distracted” by many things. Clearly, Jesus is not rebuking her for serving. Jesus viewed himself as a server.

He said that many times in different ways: I came not to be served, but to serve. I am among you as one who serves. And he taught his followers to serve: As I have done to you, do to each other and to the least of these. So he’s not rebuking her for serving.

But why, we might ask, does Jesus care about Martha’s anxiety? Because riddled with anxiety, where is the joy of serving the Lord? Where is the peace that passes understanding of being in the Lord’s presence? Where is the gratitude for the gift of food to prepare for the table?

Riddled with anxiety, we lose sight of the knowledge that God is with us no matter the struggle of the day. Indeed, the very definition of “anxiety” is loss of confidence that regardless of what is happening in this time and place at this moment, our hearts, our souls, our lives are in the hands of the Living God.

Now, one more thing about this story gives me pause today. One more lesson I want to draw from it, and that lesson is, “Own your own stuff.” Right? You’ve heard that before, too, probably with a different word in place of “stuff”… but we’re in church today, so we’ll just say “stuff.” Own your own stuff!

Here’s what I mean. Look back at what Martha actually says: Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself.

Notice that she is not complaining about the task of preparing food. Or setting the table, or whatever else she was “worried and distracted” about. She is busy blaming her sister, Mary, for the choice she, Martha, has made. Martha is being a bit of a self-righteous martyr in this story.

Now…, the choice Martha made was not free of social pressure! It was customary, and even a principle of Jewish hospitality, that food be prepared for the table when a guest is in the house—especially a beloved guest like Jesus.

And rarely are the choices we must make on a daily basis free of conflicting pressures: social pressures, economic pressures, political pressures. That’s real. And it’s often not easy to negotiate those pressures. Many of our choices are fraught with equally good reasons to go any of several directions.

But we have choices. As I look around this room, I indeed see people of relative privilege. Our choices might be challenging, but rarely is a roof over our heads at bedtime tonight, or food for the dinner table, at stake in the choices we must make.

ALICE = Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In 2014, on average, over half of Ouachita Parish families either live in poverty or fall below the ALICE threshold, which means they are not making ends meet in spite of being employed.

Well…, in my case, food for the dinner table is a bit of a problem. But that’s not because I lack money to buy food or transportation to the grocery store or… whatever! It’s because of the series of choices I made in organizing my week.

It would be easy to say, “I didn’t have time.” I am a busy person; I do many good—and fun—things. This week I went to visit an elderly friend who relies on me for essential companionship and help with various tasks. Good on me, right! But truth be told, I didn’t make it to the grocery store because of a series of choices I made, a set of priorities I enacted.

Most of the time there’s far more at stake than an empty refrigerator in the life choices we must make, so don’t let the homeliness of that example obscure the point.

And here’s the point: Jesus speaks to us through this story. Dear people of God, he says, your anxiety is sucking the joy and gratitude and confidence of my presence from your very life. Choose the better part; make me the center, make me the first priority, and whatever else you choose to do, my love for you and for all of my children will permeate and shine through.

In the name of God, Father, son, and Holy Spirit, AMEN.