August 11, 2019, Baraboo UCC
It was a Saturday night at Jose Hobday’s family home in Texas. Her brothers were playing outside. She was sitting in the front room doing her homework. Her mom and dad were in the kitchen with their money spread out on the table, trying to figure out how much they had to live on for the next week.
The scene could have been played out in many houses in many eras. This was about 75 years ago in the very poor household of a family that was part of the Seneca-Iroquois tribe.
I have long considered Jose to be one of the wise people in my life. She was a Native American woman who became a Franciscan nun.
She spent the early part of her life as a nun teaching in various parts of Wisconsin. She tangled with those who wanted to draw narrow boxes around the understandings of Christianity and of God. She was the first woman to engage in dialogue with the Dalai Lama. (And she managed to get kissed by actor Richard Gere on the very same day!)
She struggled with demons of her own, ranging from alcohol to cancer. From those struggles, she helped others cope with the struggles of their own. She died in 2009 at age 80. (Here's more about Jose's life.)
I think this story from her childhood can shed a lot of light on our lives today and can amplify our scripture readings.
Let’s start with the anxiety her parents were feeling that night. They were not sure they had enough money to buy food for the family in the days ahead.
I would imagine there are many folks here who have known that sense of anxiety. For some, it may be anxiety as their lives have been dislocated by the economy. For others, it may be a memory of a tough time in the past, a memory that still can stir anxiety lest it happen again. Maybe it is a general anxiety about the state of our world.
That night at her family home, the young Jose could hear her mother making the case for holding a few dollars back for emergencies.
She could hear her father making the case for paying off the unpaid bills.
She could feel the tension in the house. She could feel her stomach muscles getting tighter and tighter. And then it happened.
Her mother walked into the living room and handed Jose several dollar bills.
She said: “Honey, go get your brothers and go to the drug store and buy some strawberry ice cream.”
Jose should have been delighted, but she was horrified.
She ran into the kitchen to talk with her father.
“Did you hear what Momma told me to do? Take all the money we’ve got to live on and spend it on ice cream?”
And what do you suppose he said?
“Honey, your Momma is right. When we start worrying this much about a few dollars we are better off to have nothing at all. Go get your brothers and buy the ice cream.”
The story doesn’t end there.
The kids went and bought the ice cream.
Her mother turned on the record player, opened the doors and invited in the neighbors.
There were bowls and spoons on the table and big brown bags filled with ice cream.
All the kids in the neighborhood gathered around. Jose’s memory of that time is vivid.
“I don’t remember what we did for money or food that week,” she said. “but I’ll never forget the party we had that night. Going out and buying that ice cream was kind of flinging ourselves into the arms of God.”
If we are going to fling ourselves into the arms of God, we first of all need to have some sense that God is there.
It’s a pretty fundamental question for those of us who gather here on Sunday mornings. How we gather for worship and what we do as a result of this time together has a lot to do with how we sense God in our midst.
Is it a church like Isaiah described, focused on rituals, or a church that reaches out to the world, that shares the strawberry ice cream - I mean the grace - that is part of our lives?
Isaiah was writing about worship that had run amok for the ancient Israelites.
“I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; …bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me…I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.”
Our ancestors in the Jewish faith often struggled with the tension between grand gestures and God’s simple but challenging demands.
Remember the story when the Jewish people had escaped from slavery in Egypt and were wandering in desert? Moses left them to go up a mountain to pray and they gave up hope in him and in God. They melted down their jewelry to make a golden calf they could worship. That did not turn out well for them.
Remember the story when the Jewish people had escaped from slavery in Egypt and were wandering in desert? Moses left them to go up a mountain to pray and they gave up hope in him and in God. They melted down their jewelry to make a golden calf they could worship. That did not turn out well for them.
Remember the story of David who lived in a palace and thought that God should have a beautiful place to live as well? God sent a message through the prophet Nathan: “I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought Israel up out of Egypt to this day. I have moved from one tent site to another, from one dwelling place to another.” A God on the move did not need anything fancy.
Remember the story of Jesus going up the mountain with Peter, James and John? After they saw him glowing with radiance along with Moses and Elijah, they wanted to build dwellings for the three of them. Jesus was not looking for a special dwelling.
In our reading from Isaiah, God says: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
In one of her books, Jose Hobday reminds us that this is not just an ancient tension. She recalls the story of worshipping the golden calf, then writes: “We worship gold...In a culture that worships money, simple living is radically counter-cultural. Theologically, it is refusing to worship the idol and insisting on the freedom to worship the one true God...Simple living calls for us to reverence all that is…Our worshipful reverence then extends to people. We make space for a handshake, for eye contact.”
Let me take you on a quick journey to Prestonwood Southern Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, just outside of Dallas. Our tour guide will be Rev. Angela Decker, a Lutheran minister from Minneapolis whose book, Red State Christians, just came out in the past week.
She was at Prestonwood for their worship services last year for the July 4thweekend. When she arrived at the mega-church’s arena space that seats 7,000, she found it covered with red, white and blue American flag bunting. On the stage were many, many American flags. The service opened with the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem. There were highly produced videos and sound tracks.
She thought about a conversation she had had earlier with Dean Inserra, a prominent evangelical pastor from Florida who had told her, “In this linking of nationalism and Christianity, we are forgetting about the message of Jesus…When we do that, we have a gospel distortion.”
I think Isaiah might have understood that.
Decker thought about that First Commandment that Moses brought down from the mountain as the people worshipped the golden calf - “I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other gods before me.” And about the Second Commandment - “You shall make no idols nor bow down and worship them or serve them.”
Decker sat in that July 4thchurch service remembering the wounds her grandfather who was seriously injured in World War II, her father-in-law who was drafted and sent to Vietnam in 1968 and she was filled with pride for her nation. But then she added, “ My love for my country and my love for my God warred within me.”
What would God make of these patriotic rituals that overshadowed the message of Jesus? What would God make of the ways we all get distracted by the glitter of life?
So who is the God we worship when we gather here on a Sunday morning? How do we know that God?
Maybe we sense God in the gentle touch of a parent or in the trusting eyes of a baby.
Maybe we sense God as we stand under a star-filled sky – a universe so vast it is beyond comprehension.
Maybe we sense God in the clasp of a beloved.
Or we sense God in the person sitting with us as we grieve a parent’s death or who hugs as a relationship is falling apart.
We get a sense of a power in the universe beyond ourselves and we get a sense that this is a gracious power, one whose love embraces us.
For some people, the sense of God can be a fearful thing. They feel they are dangling over a precipice held up by a very tenuous thread.
There are hints of that in the rather strange story Jesus told in the Gospel reading today.
The slaves – a term that really seems awful in our day, but reflected the social strata of the first century – are supposed to be vigilant until the master returns.
The implication is that if they lose their focus, it will go badly for them.
But there’s a different twist to this story. The master returns, puts on an apron, a serves a meal to the servants. It’s an image of a gracious God, a God into whose arms we might be willing to fling ourselves.
If we get a glimpse of that God, a God whose love is there for us, if we can nurture a sense of faith in that God, then we can begin to take seriously those challenging words of Jesus at the beginning of our Gospel: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Jose’s parents totally understood that. Their treasure was not in the meager cash that was on the kitchen table. Their treasure was in the sense of family and community that surrounded them.
I’d like to say their treasure was in strawberry ice cream – my favorite – but really, the ice cream was just the vehicle to get to the real treasure of people gathered in celebration around their table.
If your budget has been stretched to the limit,
if your anxiety is high over how all the tensions in our world right now,
the idea of not being afraid and giving away what you have might seem ludicrous.
And then we hear those words of Jesus - ‘where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
That is a call to not be so wrapped up in the making and accumulating of money that we lose our sense of what really matters in life.
It’s a call, to echo Isaiah, to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.”
After all, it’s not about our net worth. It’s about how much strawberry ice cream we can buy today. But that only counts if we buy the strawberry ice cream to give it away to others – especially to those who really need it.
We start with faith – at least a glimmer that there is a God whose love is with us, that we are not alone in the universe.
Knowing that, we don’t need to be quite so anxious about all the challenges of daily life.
And then when we can trust in God, even when we don’t have much, even when we feel what little we have is in jeopardy, we know that we are at our best when we put on our aprons and serve others and fling ourselves into the loving arms of God.
