Quick info
Services:
Sundays
9 am during summer
Child care provided
Office hours:
Tuesday - Friday
9 am - noon
Location:
5705 Lacy Rd.
Fitchburg WI 53711
View map
Phone:
608-273-1008
Calendar
Our events
Contact info
Names, e-mails
Become a fan
| Touch the Earth Lightly |
|
By Pastor Phil Haslanger (Questions and comments welcome.) October 11, 2009 Mark 10: 17-31 More light, more truth is breaking from your word. More light, more truth, Holy Spirit help us hear what needs to be heard. (From a song by Christopher Grundy) I’d like to invite you to listen to about a two-minute clip from a recent edition of All Things Considered on National Public Radio. It’s about a guy who clearly was enjoying all the stuff and all the status that his money could buy him. When it all went away, it wasn’t because he was responding to a call from Jesus. But it still makes the point pretty graphically about how the love of money, the love of prestige can take over one’s life. The introduction to the segment comes from NPR reporters Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson. They are telling the story of Glen Pizzolorusso, who started working in his father’s mortgage firm when he was just 14 and worked his way up to head of the subprime mortgage sales team. He was incredibly successful by the standards of our culture – until the bottom fell out. ++++++ He was bringing home more than $100,000 a month, choosing each day which of his five cars to drive, shuttling between two luxury homes, partying in expensive New York City nightclubs. Pizzolorusso, still in his 20s, was living the glamorous life. "We rolled up to Marquee at midnight with a line 500 people deep out front," he said last year in the special This American Life episode called "The Giant Pool of Money." "Walk right up to the door: 'Give me my table.' Sitting next to Tara Reid and a couple of her friends. Christina Aguilera was doing some 'I'm Christina Aguilera and I'm gonna get up and sing' kind of thing. Who else was there? Cuba Gooding and that kid from Filthy Rich: Cattle Drive. What was that kid's name? Fabian Barabia? “We ordered three, four bottles of Cristal at $1,000 per bottle. They bring it out — you know they're walking through the crowd, they're holding the bottles over their heads. There's firecrackers, sparklers. You know, the little cocktail waitresses. You know, so you order three or four bottles of those and they're walking through the crowd and everyone's like, 'Whoa, who's the cool guys?' We were the cool guys. They gave me the black card with my name on it. There's probably 10 in existence. You know? And that meant that I spent way too much money there." The good times lasted until the subprime mortgage bubble burst. Pizzolorusso entered his own personal financial crisis. He lost everything. His company is out of business. He lost the Porsche and the other cars. He lost his home to foreclosure. He can't afford to rent a place, so he's staying at a house his dad owns, the one where he grew up. "I have been humbled," he says today. "I mean, I've been forced to be humbled. I have a different outlook of what is important. I used to think that it mattered; it doesn't. None of the monetary stuff that we are preconditioned to think is important matters." +++++ If the successful Glen had heard that a wonderful teacher was roaming the streets of New York City, bringing people a new sense of self worth and purpose, I’m not sure he would have approached him the way the man in today’s story approached Jesus. Like Glen, this man clearly was used to getting things done. Unlike Glen, the man in the Gospel tried to live a life in harmony with the commandments. He could check off each one. He didn’t kill anyone. He was faithful to his wife. He didn’t steal or lie or cheat. He treated his parents with respect. Surely there were other things he could check off on his list to make sure his future was in heaven, that he would get eternal life. He was asking the question that is so common in our day. It was all about him, about his future, about what he needed to do to get into heaven. But that’s not what Jesus was about. Jesus’ focus was not on what you or I need to do to get into heaven. It was on how to make God’s realm a reality in our lives. That realm stretches from now until forever. What comes in the forever is up to God, not up to us. “So what can I do?” the rich man asks Jesus. This is not a trick question, like the religious rulers had been posing to Jesus in the sections of Mark’s Gospel before this episode. Everything about this man suggests that he is quite sincere. He has been trying, really trying, to live a good life. He knows that God must be pleased, because wealth has come his way. That was one of the measures of a virtuous life in those days. Maybe in our day as well. There are preachers of what is called the “prosperity Gospel.” If you do what God wants, God will reward you with material blessings, they say. And somehow, doing what God wants often seems to involve donating money to the preacher. That’s not the gospel Jesus was preaching on this day. He looked at this person before him, someone sincerely seeking to do yet another right thing. Jesus looked him hard in the eye – and loved him. No one else gets that response from Jesus. Jesus offers a plan to free this person from all the stuff that keeps him tethered to his own ego, to free him from the illusion that he is in charge of the future. Sell what you own, give it to the poor -- not to Jesus. And then, the ultimate invitation – “Come, follow me.” I can’t hear this story without it prompting a lot of soul-searching on my part. There is no shortage of stuff in my life. I really admire folks who can walk on the earth much more lightly than I can. One of my favorite spiritual writers is a woman who grew up in Texas, a member of the Seneca-Iroquois tribe. Her name is Jose Hobday. She became a Franciscan nun and spent much of her early adulthood in Wisconsin. She died this past April at age 80 in Tucson, Arizona. Jose understood the idea of being free of stuff. Now, of course, she was single. She did not have responsibilities to a family. She was part of a community of women that helped provide for each other. So she never judged what others had. She simply wrote about the freedom she felt in not having a lot of attachments. Two stories. In her book, Simple Living, she wrote about a spiritual practice known as “giveaway.” She described it this way: “Always have your hands open to a gift. Either you’re giving it or you’re receiving it with the possibility of giving it away again.” Now I know, we’ve all gotten those gifts that we’d like to pass along to someone else. That’s not what Jose is writing about here. She goes on: “You never receive a gift with a clenched hand… You have been listening to the needs of the many, so that gift may come to you with the sure message that it is to be passed on. That’s a spiritual understanding of recycling.” The second story hits very close to home for me. I counted the books I have in just one room at home – there are 375 there. Those are just the books about religion and scripture and theology and such. There are hundreds more books elsewhere in the house. So here’s Jose. ”I need books for what I do for a living,” she wrote. “I need a small library that goes with my work world. Those books help me so I don’t need to run to the library every time I need to check a reference.” Ah, I think, here’s where this advocate of living simply and I can find common ground. Then she asked the unsettling question: “If I work in various areas, how many books do I really need? I whittled it down to 36.” Oops. I guess I’ve got a ways to go. Her library was fluid. When she needed a new book, she passed another one along. If someone gave her a book, she gave herself three days to read it and pass it along – or to keep it and pass another one along. And then every few months, she took inventory to see if a couple of extra books somehow managed to slip into her collection. I think Jose understood the message of Jesus to the wealthy man. To the degree we get trapped by our stuff, by our wealth, it is so much harder to respond to Jesus’ call to serve others. That doesn’t necessarily mean having nothing. It means holding what we have with an open hand, being willing to pass it on as it is needed by others. It might be money that we pass on, it might be something as simple as giving an extra changing table to a nursery. There’s another dimension to this as well, one that Jose understood and that surely the pre-crash life of Glen Pizzolorusso illustrated very well. The more stuff you have, the more you are using up the earth’s resources. It is easy to ignore the consequences of consumption. For Glen, having five cars was a status symbol, not a misuse of the earth’s resources. But it’s hard to make the case that he needed five cars. Last week when I was in Seattle, I had a chance to meet Chris Jordan, an amazing photographer who was opening an exhibit called “Running the Numbers.” He used creative photographic images to illustrate the extent of consumption in our lives. Take a look at this familiar Suerat paining of a Sunday picnic in a park. Chris recreated this painting using 106,000 aluminum cans – the number used in the United States every 30 seconds. Or take a look at the fascinating geometry of this photo. It looks like the pipes and tubes of an elaborate machine. What you are seeing is part of a photo of 1 million plastic cups – the number used on airline flights in the U.S. every six hours. We consume a lot in our society. Some of those cans and cups may get recycled. But many of them will just get buried in a landfill. They are emblematic of a society wealthy enough to be wasteful. They are emblematic of most of us who, when faced with the call to live more lightly on the earth, react the same way as that man facing Jesus. We walk off with a heavy heart. We can’t do everything at once. But maybe we can hold things with our hands open. Maybe we can put a limit on one category of things we possess. Maybe we can find one more way to reduce our consumption. We don’t need to be the ones to walk away. Jose knew how to walk lightly on the earth. She could bring together the freedom of living with trust in her companions on the journey to look out for one another, with dedication to help those trapped in a poverty they did not choose and with respect for the natural resources around her. To wrap this up, I’d invite you to listen to a song written by Tony Alonso, with the words coming from Shirley Emma Murray. It’s called “Touch the Earth Lightly.” |