Rev. Carol Luther
Proper 14 -- Year C
August 8, 2004
In the early 1990's, while I was still working at Guide Dogs, I found myself in
the midst of a huge organizational transformation. If Guide Dogs began in 1942 as a small visionary
non-profit, by the time I arrived on staff, it had become a major enterprise. Total strangers would
leave us two million dollars in their wills. An organization like this with a multi-million dollar budget
needed more than puppies and dog trainers to sustain it: it needed financial officers to oversee the
accounts, skilled managers to supervise increasingly complex operations and wise community relations
people to reach out to thousands of visitors and supporters. In short, I was privileged to experience
in microcosm an entire piece of American history: the evolution of a little underdog into a corporate
major league player.
Today, I can call being a part of this upheaval a privilege, for it taught me
some of the most important lessons in life. At the time, however, and in the thick of that
transformation, I was as confused and frightened as anyone else who worked there. It is in the
nature of dogs -- and all of us were dog people -- to value routine and security. In a corporate
reorganization, even a nice one, often the first thing to go is the sense of routine and security.
Reorganizations are, by their very nature, rife with uncertainty, politics, conflicting agendas and
all the weirdness that true transformation brings.
I was lucky. Early on, a very nice boss took me under his wing. Sensing my
confusion, he gave me a book to read, which is such a classic in its field that it’s likely
you’ve read it, too: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey.
It was a very helpful book because it turned my mind from looking out there at the corporation,
and helped me to focus upon my role within it and name my motivations for doing what I was doing.
I had to learn to be proactive and, in the words of Covey’s second principle, “Begin
with the end in mind.”
You may think that this is obvious, that to be an effective worker a person
needs to work towards concrete goals, but to me at the time my only goal was to get through this
as unscathed as possible, and to dispatch a certain rival, although my faith gave me real trouble
with this. I had been conditioned to live according to faith. I hoped that it would be sufficient
as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, to “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit.” It
is all too easy to imagine our relationship to God as a passive one, what we call “blind
faith” that everything will turn out all right as long as I put my trust in God. In my
case, however, this simple trust led only to the Sunday/Monday split. On Sunday I brought my
best self before God, because on Monday, if I went to the office and sat back in the same healing,
but ultimately passive, glow of God’s unconditional love that I enjoyed in church, my
unscrupulous rival across the hall would have my corporate head on a platter.
All of the upheavals of this time came back to me as I pondered this week’s
set of readings, which are all about having faith on the one hand and setting goals on the other.
First faith: We hear perhaps the classic definition of faith in the Letter to the Hebrews,
“ Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as
an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.” This seems a great
distance from the self assured advice to Begin With the End in Mind. Abraham may have known
what he wanted which were descendants, but he had not the slightest idea beyond that. He just
set out. If he had any end in mind, it was to settle down and raise his numberless descendants,
but 15 years out, none of his goals had even begun to pay off. So when we meet Abram in today’s
first reading, far from being a goal, God almost seems to be playing with him out there, promising
him descendants and a land and then letting him wander around his own promised land for
years “as in a foreign land, living in tents." How many of us would have that kind of patience?
At the other end of the spectrum, Jesus seems very clear about what we should do.
Jesus names a goal: “Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do
not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For
where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
But as we listen to this passage, it too presents difficulties. What does it mean
to lay up unfailing treasure in heaven? Do you know what such a treasure looks like? Or is it, as
some have suggested, Jesus’ worst pie in the sky teaching? The religion I grew up with was
not a lot about heaven. It was about ethical behavior right here on earth. It was about loving your
neighbor in the here and now and not taking too many liberties with boys. There was not a whole
lot of room in this vision for “heavenly treasure.” Too much interest in the heavenly
kingdom was even a way of avoiding our duties to this earthly one, or even worse, because my early
life included a great deal of 19th century materialist philosophy, the heavenly kingdom was a
sinister fiction that oppressors had used for centuries to keep poor people enslaved, saying that
no matter how horrible your life is, you can be consoled by the mythology of the hereafter.
Even read very concretely, this passage is difficult. Did Jesus mean by selling
possessions and giving alms that we should give up all our earthly goods and live like St. Francis?
I had a good Christian tell me that holy poverty was completely impractical in our day and age, that
it was just as oppressive as lying to the poor about heaven except that this time I would be
oppressing the honest taxpayer who would have to assume the burden of my support. Oh dear.
Whatever way I looked at this teaching, it seemed, I was going to oppress someone with it.
“Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where
no thief comes near and no moth destroys.” I didn’t get it at all. And that would
have been OK -- I don’t need to get everything -- had it not been for the last part, the
reason for these mysterious heavenly treasures. “For where your treasure is, there your
heart will be also.”
Since I had no way of understanding what it meant to lay up treasures in heaven,
I decided to do the only thing in this passage I could do. I decided to focus upon my heart. In
Jesus’ time, the heart, and not the brain, was considered the center of consciousness.
It’s an interesting exercise to move from the ideas and distractions of the brain into the
silence of the heart. My brain speaks, my brain objects, but all my heart does is beat, or break,
and so to listen to my heart, I had to cultivate silence. I had to learn to pay attention. The
heart is the source of life. All living creatures have hearts, even ants. Maybe God was like my heart, silent,
but present. And if I practiced the presence of God, I would not need to worry about what to do,
because God would lead me. Or as the letter to the Hebrews says, “Without faith it is
impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and that he
rewards those who seek him.”
All this was going on as I was reading The Seven Habits and trying to see
my way through a reorganization. So, following the advice begin with the end in mind,
I set a spiritual goal in addition to my corporate ones. My spiritual goal was that I would start
looking for the invisible hand of God, not only at Church, but in my own daily work at the office.
Which brings us to another very interesting thing about our scriptures.
For the most part the Bible is not a set of spiritual teachings set apart from the rough and
tumble of daily life; it is not Buddha atop Vulture Mountain surrounded by 10,000 arhats and
Bodhisattvas. The Bible’s spiritual teachings are deeply connected to that rough and
tumble. Abraham does not retreat to a monastery on a distant mountain to talk to God, he talks
to God in the midst of his wanderings. He talks to God while tending his flock and arguing with
his wife. “By faith Noah, warned by God about events as yet unseen, respected the warning
and built an ark to save his household.” The Bible assures us over and over again that
our daily life matters deeply to God. It is full of characters who confessed that they felt
life to be perplexing and difficult and so reached out beyond the obvious and when they did,
nothing was ever the same again.
In almost no cases was the transformation instantaneous, either. Transformation
takes time. It’s often rife with politics, conflicting agendas and a great deal of weirdness.
Imagine Noah out there in a dry field building his ark. Imagine the servants in
Jesus’ teaching waiting for the master to return at his unexpected hour. We, too, live in
a very transformative time. We have no idea how it will turn out, except that it will be
unexpected. But as Jesus says, “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father's
good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
So for now, just think of the door to the kingdom of heaven as being like a
corporation that is going through a reorganization. Everyone is scared that they will lose their
job. People are grabbing at promotions and trying to influence people and it seems that
everything is going to fall apart and that no one believes in God. And some cling to their status
like drowning people clinging to a sinking ship because they are afraid of transformation,
mistaking it for death. Some, trying to beat the system, succumb to temptations that they cannot
resist. Still others throw in the towel. But some, realizing that God’s wisdom, compassion
and blessing are just as present in a board room as in a church, are able to prevail and find
great blessing even in the midst of the whirlwind.
For to begin with God’s end in mind is to begin with
faith in life. Not just our life on earth, but the heavenly one, too. That,
too, is real. And if we begin with that end in mind, no matter what
difficulty we might face, and no matter how competitive and “secular” the
environment, we can run the rapids of change and emerge in God’s still
waters whole and fine, our hearts alive with a treasure beyond all price.
God knows what we need, if we can but trust God. “Do not be afraid, little
flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
AMEN.