Go Further
a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine
on Sunday, March 5, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
“Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning.”
– Natalie Goldberg
READINGS:
1. Our first reading is from Dave Barry’s new book, Money Secrets, and this excerpt is from a chapter called “Teaching Your Children about Money”:
If you’re a parent, one of your most important jobs is teaching your children about money. As a boy, I learned about money from my dad, who was a Presbyterian minister. The most important lesson I learned from him was: if you want to have money, you should not be a Presbyterian minister.
I’m not saying we were dirt poor. We were more what I would call “really bad car” poor. We never had a new car, of course, but my dad couldn’t even afford a used car built by a normal car company. We were the only American family that I know of ever to own a Hillman Minx. The Minx is the only car that can absolutely be relied upon, when the chips are down, to not start. My boyhood memories of family car trips involve all of us sitting in the car, ready to go somewhere, listening to the familiar sounds of the Minx going rrr-rrr-rrr and my dad saying non-Presbyterian words.
My dad finally got rid of the Minx. That was the good news. The bad news was that he replaced it – just when I got old enough to drive – with a used Nash Metropolitan. This was one of the silliest-looking cars ever made – it is not a car designed for grown-ups. This is a car designed to be the lead character in a children’s cartoon book entitled Curtis the Car Goes to the Circus.
The first time I ever drove my own self to pick up an actual girl on an actual date, I was at the wheel of the Metropolitan. I was already insecure and self-conscious enough without having to show up at my date’s house driving a vehicle that could easily have been stolen by squirrels. And it did not help that my dad had cut my hair. I am not asking for your pity here. I had wonderful parents and a fine childhood. I’m just saying that we did not have much money. That was a good thing, because it taught me that, if I wanted something, I had to work for it.
2. Our second reading is a selection of a few familiar verses from the Sermon on the Mount. They are from the sixth chapter of Matthew:
Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them. Whenever you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as [some] do so they may be praised by others. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so your alms may be done in secret... Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.
Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. Therefore do not worry, saying “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
In the opening scene of the movie, Crash,
a police detective and his partner are in the front seat of their car on a Los Angeles freeway;
they aren’t moving because they’ve just been rear-ended and spun around twice.
Neither of them is hurt, and before they get out to deal with the driver who hit them,
the detective behind the wheel is musing about what just happened,
and in a very quiet tone he says:
“It’s the sense of touch. In a real city, if you walk enough, you brush past people,
people bump into you... In LA, nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass.
I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other
just so we can feel something.”
And so begins the story of a day in which people from different worlds crash into each other.
I think Crash was one of last year’s best films, and The Constant Gardener was another.
They are now both available to rent and watch at home.
Both of them have something important to say about who we are,
and both are sometimes very hard to watch,
but there are scenes in each of them I will never forget,
and they’re both nominated for Academy Awards in tonight’s festivities.
The Constant Gardener is based on a book by John le Carré,
and it, too, is about different worlds crashing into each other:
a very reserved botanist named Justin marries a young, activist woman named Tessa,
and together they go to a remote part of Kenya so he can study exotic plants and flowers.
She spends her time with people in the poverty-stricken villages,
helping in the makeshift hospital and doing whatever she can to make life a little better
for people who are the poorest of the poor.
She ends up in the hospital herself, and on the day her husband drives her home, she is exhausted –
but as they drive they pass hundreds of villagers walking along the roadside,
and Tessa recognizes a mother walking with her two small children.
She knows they are headed for a village which is 40 kilometers away – it will take them all night.
So she asks Justin to stop and give them a ride.
He looks over at her and says, “Be reasonable. There are millions of people – they all need help.”
She answers, “But these are three people that we can help.”
He knows this woman who he loves is notoriously unmindful of her own needs.
Where he can stay detached, off in his own world,
she is passionately engaged with the world around her: he knows this request is important to her.
And for a moment he wavers.
But he also knows she needs rest – it would be a long ride on a very bad road.
So he says, “I’m sorry – I have to put you first. I have to get you home.” And he drives on.
But if you see the movie, you will find that he never forgets that moment.
In The Constant Gardener, different worlds crash into each other,
not only First World whites and Third World blacks,
but a drug company which is testing an unapproved new drug on the African villagers,
who don’t understand the risk involved.
The company knows some people may die because of the drug,
but in their grander scheme of things, these people don’t really count –
because they are invisible to the rest of the world,
and anyway, no one is there to count them.
Last week, much closer to home, two other very different worlds crashed into each other.
On Tuesday morning in the Great Hall at the Statehouse in Boston,
almost 40 people from this congregation listened, along with several hundred others,
to people who have been homeless – and invisible – talking about how it had happened to them.
I was struck by how often illness was the deciding factor in their stories.
These were people who had families and jobs –
jobs that paid them just enough to get by on what they earned,
which meant there was no room for anything to go wrong.
So when a parent or one of the children got seriously ill, a choice had to be made:
they had no health insurance,
so it was pay the doctor or pay the rent.
I could imagine it happening to me.
There have been years in my life when I worked for very little pay and had no health insurance.
I was just lucky.
Last Tuesday we learned that many legislators still think that homeless people
are somehow to blame for their plight – that most of them are just lazy drunks.
Even when they’re told that most of the homeless people in our state are women and children,
too many of our lawmakers just drive on –
they pass just enough legislation to make sure the invisible people stay that way.
But on Tuesday morning the invisible people were there at the microphone in the Great Hall,
and we listened to their stories, and later that morning our role was to make sure they are seen –
to speak to our elected representatives on their behalf;
to say: these people do count, and they are being counted –
and the shame of it is that here in our own state, which has a $400 million surplus this year,
their numbers are still growing every month.
The next day, back here in Lincoln,
I started working on this sermon, and here was another crash:
Jesus’ words from the sermon on the mount.
“Do not worry about your life,” he says...
“Do not worry about what you will eat or what you will drink,
or about your body, what you will wear. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”
Still fresh in my mind, as I read those words,
was the story of a young mother who was evicted along with her children
because for three months she had paid her son’s doctor bill rather than the rent
and in that context, Jesus’ words sounded not just oblivious, but cruel.
They also don’t sound like the best possible message for a stewardship sermon, do they?
That’s what this is supposed to be – a stewardship sermon.
Most of you have just received an envelope in the mail – this envelope –
with a strong letter from our Stewardship Committee, a very informative brochure,
and a pledge card.
We are all being asked to increase our pledge to the church – many of us significantly.
Some of what Jesus has to say in the sermon on the mount works great for a stewardship sermon:
store up treasures in heaven, give to the places that touch your heart,
and don’t make a show of it.
All of that works.
But what about those lilies that neither toil nor spin?
How are they going to help us pay the gas bill or fix the roof or give to a worthy cause?
I think it helps to remember that during the last year of his life, Jesus himself was homeless.
He wasn’t welcome in his own hometown, and his family thought he was insane.
He wandered the hills of Galilee, counting on the kindness of strangers for food and shelter.
Like Tessa in The Constant Gardener, he was notoriously unmindful of his own needs.
There are many scenes in the gospels in which his disciples are feeling very anxious
about their situation and his – and so in his riff about the lilies of the field
he is saying: don’t be so anxious – it will tear you up.
He does not say, “don’t worry, be happy, kick back and God will provide.”
What he says is: “Strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness.”
And if you do that, God will give you what you need.
He had a vision of one kind of world – the world God intended in the first place: a world at peace.
That’s what Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God” – the world as God intended it to be.
He wanted us to realize that the seeds of that world are actually present in each of us.
They are a divine potential we are given at birth.
He wanted us to help them grow.
That’s what he did with his own life.
He was constantly stopping by the side of the road to say, “These are three people that we can help.”
In the end, he crashed into powerful people with a different vision of how the world should work,
and they killed him – but people remembered his vision,
and his example has now inspired millions.
That is one of the reasons we’re all here.
And this is a watershed year for us.
We’re adding an Assistant Minister to our staff.
We’ve stuck our neck out to do it because it’s an expensive thing to do.
I can tell you that in the past month I’ve met some wonderful people who are interested in coming here.
They can see that this is a good church.
The fact that we are a good church is both our blessing and our curse.
The blessing is that we have co-created a church with a marvelous sense of touch.
You touch each other’s lives in memorable ways.
And as a congregation, we touch the lives of people we will never meet.
We could do better – much better; but we’ve got the right idea.
We are not a non-starter like the Hillman Minx, going rrr-rrr-rrr.
We refuse to let ourselves become paralyzed by the sheer scale of human need in the world.
We are willing to say, along with Tessa, “These are three people that we can help.”
These three. These ten. These fifty families.
And we also know how to step back and take care of each other.
Our curse is that because we are a good church, we might settle for the status quo.
The first book Natalie Goldberg ever wrote was called Writing Down the Bones –
it’s a book for people who want to learn to write, and she has a chapter entitled “Go Further.”
She says, “Push yourself when you think you’re done with what you have to say. Go a little further.
Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning.
Probably that’s why we decide we’re done – it’s getting too scary.
It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
I give this advice out of pure experience: go further than you think you can.”
So please, don’t let this envelope gather dust on your mail table.
Open it, read the letter, and give some real time to the brochure – you’ll be fascinated by what you see –
and then consider what you can give to help us go further – to be the best we have it in us to be.
Amen.
Note: On Sunday night, Crash won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Rachel Weicz won the Best Supporting Actress award for her portrayal of Tessa in The Constant Gardener.