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August 8, 2010
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16; Luke 12: 32-40

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen.

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 maybe 70 years ago in the very poor household of a family that was part of the Seneca-Iroquois tribe. Jose told the story of that night as one of the many ways she used her own experience to illuminate some of the deep truths of life.

I have long considered Jose to be one of the wise people in my life. She is a Native American woman who became a Franciscan nun. I mentioned her briefly in a sermon last fall.

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 managed to get kissed by actor Richard Gere on the very same day.) And 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 a year ago in April at age 80.

I think this story from her childhood sheds a lot of light on our two scripture readings today.

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 know that sense of anxiety. For some, it is a recent anxiety as their lives have been dislocated by this 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.

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 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. It’s the issue the writer of the letter to the Hebrews was addressing to members of the early church.

What does it mean to have faith in God? How does that affect the way we live?

The opening line in the letter to the Hebrews in many ways says it all: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  It’s not a list of belief statements, a checklist of things required if one is to have faith in God.

It’s a sense that God is there, that the hope we have for living in God’s presence – in other words, here and in the future living in creation the way God intended it and us to be – that such a hope will become reality.

It’s not something we can know for sure. It’s one of those “things not seen.” So we look to the stories of our ancestors and to the stories of those we encounter in our lives and to our own experiences to decide if we can trust in God.

The letter writer drew on the well-known story of Abraham’s trust in God – a story that has been played out here in various ways this year. It formed the core of our children’s musical last spring and was at the heart of the skit Molly Jetzer and I acted out last Sunday.

Abraham understood that God has promised a very different future than he could ever imagine. Along the way, Abraham was always a bit unsure, yet he still had enough sense of God’s presence that he trusted God along the way. Even then, he only got glimpses of the people who one day would claim him as their spiritual ancestor.

So how do we know that God is there? Well, I think that first of all, “knowing” is something we do with our minds. That’s important. It helps give shape to the faith we have in God.

But faith begins much more in the realm of experience than in the realm of study.

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, that sense of God can be a fearful thing. The sense of divine power is threatening, 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. And this, after all, is one of those stories that reflected the sense of the early Christians that Christ would return at any moment and the new age would begin.

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: “Sell your possessions, and give alms. 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 you or you family members are out of a job,
if your anxiety is high over how this whole economic storm is going to end,
the idea of not being afraid and giving away what you have might seem ludicrous.  

Some people do try to act out the giving away of everything in the most literal sense.

I think most of us, though, might hear these words not as a call to voluntary poverty, but at least as a call to be not so wrapped up in the making and accumulating of money that we lose our sense of what really matters in life.

It’s not our net worth. It’s how much strawberry ice cream we can buy. But that only counts if we buy the strawberry ice cream to give 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. That doesn’t mean we don’t worry about them – we just don’t let that anxiety rule our lives.

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.

Kelly and Jeff are going to lead us in a song that captures the central message of today’s Gospel, a message that calls on us to look whether what we do with our treasure aligns with where are our hearts are calling us to be. So please join in as you let the words of this morning’s service settle into your being.