Sermon: Stuffing Stuff
Date: November 21, 2003
Text: Philippians 4: 4-9
Kendall H. Brown Kendall's Notebook Page 36
For a decade or more, a frequent question raised by my Mom has been, “What am I going to do with all our stuff, someday?” Ma started to address that question by writing her children’s names on pieces of masking tape and sticking them under chair seats, on the backs of drawers, behind mirrors and pictures and on the bottom of lamps. Going home to visit began to feel like reading my mother’s will just by being in the house. But the nametags helped Mom. Now it was my problem and my sisters’ problems as to what would happen to all her stuff. The system didn’t completely work. When Ma and Dad finally gave up on maintaining their own home, my nephew and his wife bought their house. The cellar is still plum full of boxes of my parent’s stuff that some day my mother is going to get over and “GO THROUGH.”
Turkeys are not the only ones with stuffing problems on Thanksgiving. The stuff challenge affects every generation of my family. My aunt lives in a beautiful old house with many rooms and an attached barn with hayloft in Maine. It is the place on earth that I think of as home. My aunt, uncle and mother were all born in that house as was my grandmother in 1888 and her mother a generation earlier. My daughter went to college about 45 minutes down the road from Sisty’s house. Hannah got into the habit of storing stuff at Sisty’s during her college years. When we moved to the Midwest, Hannah moved even more stuff to Sisty’s from our home in Massachusetts. Then Hannah moved herself to California. But guess what did not move with her: The stuff at Sisty’s! Now Sisty has been a prim and proper lifetime Methodist for all her 91 years. A lot of Hannah’s things are large art artifacts from her college studio courses. Every time I talk with Sisty, she voices the question, “When is Hannah going to get those nudes out of my house?”
Stuff is sticky. It sticks to us. I suspect that my daughter’s nudes are destined to stick to Sisty for the rest of Sisty’s life!
Cheryl and I have moved 4 times in the last seven years. The positive side of that has been a considerable downsizing. I still have way too many books – that is my one weakness when it comes to the accumulation of stuff. But our moves have been accompanied by a considerable lightening of the load as we have sold stuff, thrown out stuff, given away stuff, donated stuff to rummage sales, and hauled stuff to the Goodwill Services. Most of the stuff I can hardly remember, although at the time of its departure I had to struggle with letting go. Out of that mountain of stuff we have discarded, I am struggling to remember a piece (one piece out of hundreds) to illustrate.
My brain is offering one memory picture as I write. The picture is of a large brown very nice desk pad that I had way in Seminary days and for many years after. I wrote my thesis on top of that pad, my first sermon and many sermons after that. Along each edge was a place to hold notes. Hundreds of notes moved in and out under those edges marking important moments in people’s lives. That desk pad helped to administer and keep in order countless moments of ministry at times of birth and death, baptisms and marriages, family crisis and family celebrations, funerals and graduations, and all the daily business of a parish. It has been over a decade since I last saw that desk pad. But even in this recall, I can picture a couple spots made by airplane glue dropping on the pad. Those drops remind me of some days of illness when I spent the time making a ship model on that pad which usually had much more important things happening on its surface.
How stuff sticks with us, even in our minds long after the stuff is gone. Men can vividly remember their first cars and exactly how the shift felt as one
clutched through the gears. Women have this amazing capacity to recall exactly what they were wearing at some moment in time long gone by. But the exact memory of the outfit, shoes, jewelry and hairstyle are as sharp as if it were only yesterday.
A lot of Christians have the idea that Thanksgiving is a day to be thankful for all the stuff that we have. Furthermore, the more stuff – the more reason we have to be thankful.
Jesus’ ministry and preaching offer up a challenge to our stuffiness in more than one sense of that word. It does seem that the more stuff we accumulate the more prone we are to some form of stuffiness.
Here are some things that Jesus had to say about stuff.
Matthew 6:26: “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them.”
Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you that even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed like one of these…”
Matthew 6:19: “Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes not thieves do not break in and steal.”
Luke 18:18: “A rich ruler asked Jesus what must be done to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus replied: ‘Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor and you will have treasures in Heaven.’”
Luke 12: 15: “Jesus teaches that one’s life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”
In the following verses, Jesus tells the story of a successful businessman-farmer who keeps tearing down his barns to build bigger ones and to whom God says, “Fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?”
The one person in the whole Bible, who God calls, ‘Fool’ is the one who has need of being unstuck from all his stuff.
These are just a few of the places where the Scriptures present a very clear message. The message is consistent and oft repeated, and escapes any effort to be distorted or changed by some softening of effect or interpretation. The message is that stuff is not good for you and accumulating stuff is not God’s plan for you.
If our piles of beloved stuff in our lives are so high that we cannot see over them enough to see what ever else we might possibly be thankful for, then let me suggest a couple possibilities.
I am reminded that Thanksgiving is a National holiday more that it is a religious holiday. It is a national holiday that we have religiously celebrated so much that we have come to think of it is a part of our religious life. Jesus instituted the Lord’s Table. Abraham Lincoln instituted by proclamation the Thanksgiving Table that we celebrate today.
There is something that is bothering me about Christians today. That is the large capacity that Christians are developing to think that the only thing that is good is that upon which we can place a Christian nametag. A drawing out of that line of thought is to give thanks for only those things upon which we can place a Christian name tags.
We send our children to Christian schools and colleges and even debunk the excellent education that can be acquired at superior schools and institutions that do not feel a need to carry that nametag. We need to be giving thanks this week for the many educational opportunities our country offers whether or not the education carries a Christian nametag. We read Christian books and sip our latte mocha coffee in Christian coffee houses. We will only take our families to movies that have Christian stories and viewpoints – whatever that viewpoint might be - but Lord forbid that it be Buddhist. Some of today’s bestseller books are those that provide Christian themes even thought the story line is a complete distortion of Biblical truth and understanding.
Our stuffiness gives us the idea that Thanksgiving is a Christian holiday. The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not, Thanksgivings is and always has been the most ecumenical and interfaith holiday that we celebrate, whether we close our eyes to that dimension of the day or not.
I am reminded this week of the Thanksgivings that I have spent with Cheryl’s in-laws who have become a part of my own extended family. Thanksgiving is an especially meaningful holiday for them. It is on a par with the other religious holidays they celebrate in their home and around their dining room table like Hanukah shortly after Thanksgiving. My sister-in-law’s grand-parents arrived in the United States at Ellis Island a couple generations ago. They came as Jewish refugees from Russian with only the few things they could carry in their bags. If they had stayed in their own homeland they would have been dispossessed of their property, forced into poverty’s destitution and probably would have died or been killed.
Like their faith ancestors in the days of Moses, they escaped Pharaoh’s bondage and immigrated to freedom. Thanksgiving is a special and very personal holiday for them.
Except for descendants of Native Americans and those who were brought to these shores in slavery, practically all the rest have ancestors who came to this country to escape Pharaoh’s bonds in their countries of origin. In a way this is true of some of our youngest children in our Sunday School who have been offered the freedom of this land by their new parents here.
I cannot put the name Christian on my in-laws story but I am certainly willing to believe that God is working in their stories as I am willing to believe that God is working in any story where there is the gain of freedom and movement for death to life. God doesn’t need our tags to work.
The greatness of this country is the multitude of nationalities that make up our population. If we believe that in some way God is working in our country’s history than we must also believe that God is working in lives of all these different people from different nationalities, races, cultures and religions that have been a part of our history.
Another piece of our country’s greatness is its hospitality from which we have all benefited. That hospitality is symbolized by the Statue of Liberty not far from Ellis Island, with the words “Give me your poor.”
Those words are rooted in Biblical hospitality made alive in Jesus ministry. We are Christ Church in name and in call to what we are to be and do. God is still speaking to us and through us. Thanksgiving reminds us of what God has been saying to us and wants to say through us. That message is “Welcome, welcome, one and all.”