These are hard times. So let
me ask you, how you are doing? How are you doing, living day by day with the economic
uncertainty? Psychologists tell us that people are experiencing unprecedented
stress and anxiety. An online survey asked the question, “How is the recession
affecting you, only 5 percent answered “not at all”; 45 percent said “a little”
or somewhat and a full 40 percent said “a lot”. If there is any comfort,
perhaps it is that we are all in this together.
Two weeks ago in his sermon George
took us through a week’s worth of headlines of bad news, and the news has not
gotten any better since then. Everyone now knows someone who has lost a job.
Numbers out Friday said that the average decline in net worth for the American
family was 23% in the last year and our own investment advisor for the Church’s
endowment (which has taken a big hit) reported what we all know that this is
the worst financial crisis in the last 50 years, and then added these
descriptive words, “2008 was a year of great personal wealth destruction.”
A recent cartoon in the New Yorker Daily calendar showed a man,
a patient on psychiatrist’s couch with doctor in chair alongside him. The
patient is speaking and the caption reads, “Can you up the dosage, I still have
feelings.”
And they are some feelings
aren’t they?! A prevalent anxiety and fear. I feel sometimes that we are all
just holding our breath. It is as if we are all way up in the air in a hot air
balloon that is running out of fuel, the flame is dying , the balloon is starting
to contract and we are starting to go down, now at the mercy of the winds, desperate
for any measure that would fill up the balloon again. Will it be this week’s
stimulus package?
Many of us are losing sleep
at night as we anticipate living with fewer resources. We are checking on our grown
children and our parents. And we are concerned for our own retirement. As
someone asked recently, “How’s your 201(k) doing?”
Of course, not everyone has
it so bad. The makers of spam are doing very well as is MacDonald’s and Hyundai
the car manufacturer saw its sales rise 14% last month primarily because of its
guarantee that if you lose your job you can return the vehicle at no cost or
penalty. Quite a telling marketing ploy!
We are all pulling back, looking
for cost cutting measures.
My favorite was one I saw
yesterday (Valentine’s Day) the AJC (have you noticed how small the paper is
getting?). A person wrote in to the Vent,
“We’ve been married almost 60 years and have saved a bundle on Valentine’s cards.
We go together to the card section and pick out cards for each other. We read
the cards selected for each other, hug, replace the cards on the rack, and
leave.” (AJC, 2/14/09). I did not suggest this to my wife Andie yesterday! We
did a little better than that!
In a recent article in Sojourners magazine, entitled “From
Anxiety and Greed to Milk and Honey” Walter Brueggeman, Professor Emeritus at
Columbia Seminary in Decatur, writes that he believes our struggle in these
hard times and the source of our collective economic distress is our misplaced
worship of our own autonomy, or “the isolated, self-sufficient economic
individual.” We mistakenly believe that
we are autonomous, that we need not and should not rely on anyone else except
ourselves. For the autonomous person when things are hard, the loss of self
sufficiency, the loss of control and the assault on our pride is almost
unbearable and it results in acute anxiety.
Brueggeman writes: “Such a
person finds threat, danger, and insecurity everywhere. The only sensible
response to imagined threat is greater effort that in turn only produces a new
round of anxiety….The autonomous person, beset by anxiety, can only resolve to
do better, to get more, to arrive at full control of the future by full control
of the present. The propulsion to greed in an effort to control generates
ravenous acquisitiveness, so that life becomes a passionate pursuit of every
form of security and self worth, most particularly through more money. (Sojourners, February 2009 at page 22)
Is Brueggeman being
overdramatic? We can best answer that question for ourselves. But what happens
to us and in us when the money starts to fail us, or decreases, when our dreams
and plans for our secure future are threatened.
And it is so hard isn’t it,
for we who like to think of ourselves as autonomous, powerful , in control, it
is so hard when we have to rely on others, and when we are in a place of need;
when all we can do is receive. And yet,
these are precisely the circumstances under which the love and the grace of God
have a chance to get through to us.
It is what happened to
Naaman. The Aramean, mighty warrior had defeated
And how does Naaman react? He
is insulted. He is outraged for he expected that Elisha would have met him at
the door and healed him on the spot with a wave of his hand. His pride is
wounded, he feels disrespected and he even shows his prejudice by saying if all
it takes is a bath I could have done that in the rivers of Damascus, which
after all are much more beautiful and cleaner than the little muddy river Jordan.
Instead of humbly submitting and obeying, he turns and starts to stalk away.
But then a second word of grace comes, again from persons who in the world’s
eyes are of little esteem, his own servants, who take a risk, but who pierce his
pride by gently saying, ‘Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do
something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he
said to you was “Wash, and be clean.”
Chastened, humbled, Naaman
sets aside his pride, for his need is so great, he obeys and washes and his
flesh is restored and he is made clean. His response is one of great gratitude
and he worships the God of Israel.
You know, our pride often
gets in the way doesn’t it. When we feel so needy and vulnerable, we tend to be
like Naaman, we put up the walls of defensiveness and position and anger, and
we miss the grace.
One writer in commenting on
the story of Naaman has said, “Faith is the crumpling of pride, best achieved
through something as simple, as obvious, as unimpressive as a bit of water…and
all of Christianity is a kind of return to childhood, a training in humility.”
(James Howell in The Christian Century
February 10, 2009 at page 20)
We saw it again this morning
at the baptismal font, as Audrey (9:00) and Julia and Cecile (11:00) were
presented to the Lord, and received by grace into the family of God. God’s
grace, a free gift, not earned, not purchased, not dependent on net worth,
house location, the state of our finances, but simply offered to all on the
same terms, free. God’s abundant, generous grace.
Friends, in these difficult
times we need to remember who we are. We need to hear the word of grace. Let’s
not let our pride get in the way, but instead like Naaman in the Jordan and
like these children at the font, let us simply obey and receive.
And here’s another thought, which
came from our staff meeting this past week. Perhaps one of the blessings of
these hard times is that our eyes will be opened to the “have nots” of our
society. Maybe as with Naaman, grace will come through the understanding
compassion and the word of those with little power. Think about it, here we are
now, many of us, perhaps for the first time, feeling threatened and insecure,
but you know for last twenty plus years, every Sunday in Fifield Hall there have
been homeless, jobless men and women having
breakfast and worshipping God. Maybe these brothers and sisters can teach us something
about trust and grace in hard times.
Well, we have been talking
about the humility of grace and confessing our need, of not letting pride get
in the way - and that all is so important, but there’s something else. In these
days of perceived scarcity, how do we deal with our fear that there will not be
enough?
It is a question that we are
dealing with in our homes and even here at Church as we look to develop our
2009 budget. In fact, the Session is devoting our entire meeting Tuesday
evening to the economic crisis and a key question will be “is there enough.”
Pray for us, won’t you, as the elders seek to make wise and faithful decisions?
“Not enough.” “There is not
enough!” It is the fear that the disciples felt and spoke on that seashore long
ago. Exhausted from their day’s work of service, Jesus calls them away to a
deserted place to rest. But they can’t shake the crowd, those who longed to
hear the word from Jesus. They follow, and to the great consternation of the
disciples Jesus had compassion on the people for they were like sheep without a
shepherd. He begins to teach them.
Finally, when the disciples
cannot stand it any longer they protest to Jesus, Lord, this is a deserted place,
and the hour is now very late; send them away, get rid of them so they can go
take care of themselves and get something to eat.
But what does Jesus say?
Simply “you give them something to eat.”
Can’t you just hear them,
“What!! What are you crazy Jesus? You want us to go spend six months wages on
these people to buy bread? Have you lost your mind?”
And you know the story; Jesus
says “Well see what we have.” They check and the word comes back five loaves
and two fish (in John’s gospel it is the disciple Andrew who reports that a
little boy has “five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so
many people?”
But Jesus takes the five
loaves and two fish, looks up to heaven. He blesses and breaks the loaves and gives
them to his disciples who distribute them…And all ate and were filled, and they
collected twelve baskets of leftovers.
What happened here? What
happened?
John Claypool writes about
this miracle, “Although we cannot be sure of how this happened, some think that
others there were hiding food under their robes and were moved to share what
they had brought by the generous example of the boy. Others believe Jesus
miraculously multiplied the loaves and fishes himself. What is clear is that
the gospel says something very powerful here about the creative potential of
being grateful for what we have, even when it does not seem to be much. . .
He goes on. “We would do well…
[to] enjoy what we have in gratitude and generosity, instead of lamenting that
it is not more. When we realize that what seems quite small has the power to
multiply in the hands of Jesus, nothing is too little to be put to some kind of
redemptive use. If we focus on the half-fullness of life, give thanks for that,
use it creatively, we can start a marvelous chain reaction. Jesus can do
anything with just about everything.” (John Claypool, The First to Follow, at page 16).
What do you think?
I saw an example of this just
this week. As we as a church seek to respond to this financial crisis, two men
I met this week are showing us the way. On Wednesday, representatives of 6
midtown congregations met here at invitation of
You see, “Jesus can do
anything with just about everything.”
So what will it be for you?
What will it be for us? What do we need to stop holding back? What do we need
to put in the capable, creative and trustworthy hands of Jesus?
It may be something as small and
insignificant as five loaves and two fish.
It may be our money, it may
be our talents, it may be our time, and it may even be our unemployment. But whatever
it is, we can trust that He will take it, bless it and use it beyond anything
we can even imagine.
And how do we know this is
true?
Because we too are in his
hands.
Thanks be to God!
Alleluia!
Amen