Seeking First

SJF • Epiphany 8a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

I’m not sure about you, but as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t have quite the ring of, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.” But whatever the translation, old or new, authorized by King James or revised in the late 20th century, the sentiment is as clear as day, and what a sentiment it is! On this eighth Sunday after the Epiphany we come to the end of our readings in Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. It really does end on an up-beat doesn’t it?

But let us not mistake the upbeat quality of this passage. It is not merely the cheery optimism of a Bobby McFaren sort of world where we can all just sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Let us not mistake it for the kind of blind optimism displayed in Voltaire’s book and Bernstein’s musical Candide — in which the principal characters keep on smiling through plague, kidnap, pirates, mayhem and murder because they believe themselves to inhabit the best of all possible worlds! It is not blind optimism we are called to, but a careful and perceptive seeking after what is of true worth, a careful and persistent seeking and striving for God — and God’s righteousness. It is in that holy quest that we will find all things added unto us.

There is much more to Jesus’ teaching in this passage from the Sermon on the Mount than looking on the sunny side of the street or letting a smile be your umbrella! No, my friends, this teaching is about a life based on what is important, focused on the right goal, and leading to the right end, under the grace of God: to strive, as we saw in last week’s gospel passage, after God’s perfection and holiness.

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So let’s follow that advice, and take a closer look, and start at the beginning. Jesus begins by warning us of the impossibility of serving God and wealth. Notice he says, “serve.” How many people who seek after wealth find themselves serving their wealth rather than enjoying it or benefitting from it. I have to say I feel a bit like that in relation to my computer: in principle it is supposed to work for me, to help me do my work, but there are times that I feel like I am serving it. I carefully protect it from viruses and spam, I patiently wait for it to install its never-ending stream of updates and patches letting it complete its work so that I can actually get to some of my work!

So when it comes to the things of this world, including money, the question, “Whom do you serve?” is a good one to ask — it is a good reminder that money exists to serve us as a medium of exchange, and we are to employ it, and not to be employed by it — or worse, be enslaved by it.

Jesus follows this up with a “therefore” — always an important word when looking to implications — since we are obviously called to serve God rather than wealth, therefore we are not to become worried — about our life or food or drink, or what we will wear. If we serve God, God will provide for his servants.

Think of what happens to people who spend their whole life thinking or talking about nothing but food or clothing — apart from the fact that it’s really boring! — are they any better off in the end than those who simply wear what is suitable and comfortable and eat what is set before them?

Jesus offers a startling pair of images: the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. The birds are not farmers, nor do they store up a supply of food. (It’s a good thing Jesus didn’t have squirrels on his mind, or Aesop’s fable of the grasshopper and the ant!) Birds don’t store things up; they eat what they can find day by day, whether its an early bird catching the worm or a flock o pigeons pecking up birdseed on the sidewalk, or geese carefully trimming the grass on the Bronx River Parkway. Jesus reminds us that God provides for them — and don’t we mean more to God than birds do?

And look at the flowers in all their glory of their color and finery — I mean it: check out the Bronx Botanical Garden some time if you want to see some spectacular beauty — for none of which did the flowers do a lick of work. If God provides such beauty to clothe things that live for a few days or weeks, how much more will he clothe and adorn us — we of little faith!

And so, again, therefore: do not worry about what you are going to eat or what you are going to drink or what you are going to wear. These are the things the Gentiles spend all their time worrying about — and by “Gentiles” Jesus really means people who don’t know God. These are the people not just of little faith but of no faith at all because they worship idols and false gods that are no gods: the literal idols of stone or metal, or the more insidious idols of wealth and fame and glamour — the junk food of the soul. They are far from God and God’s righteousness because they do not seek God or God’s kingdom; they seek only to grab what they can and fill their bellies with what they can amass.

But you — that’s us — do not strive for, do not seek, these things, Jesus assures us. God knows well enough that we need food and clothing; and God will provide. Strive for and seek God and the righteousness of God and all the rest will be thrown in.

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C S Lewis, the author of the Narnia stories, once made a sound observation. He said that if you study world history, that study will show “that Christians who did most for the present world were those who thought the most about the next.... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they become ineffective in this one. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither.”

That last bit may be a little too strongly worded — Lewis wasn’t known to his friends as “Bluff Jack” for nothing! and he was known to be plain-spoken and direct — but this little saying does sit well with the teaching of Jesus concerning where we should focus our attention, and what we should strive for and seek. Remember that Jesus also said, What does it profit one to gain the whole world if he loses his soul? We are called to aim high — to aim for heaven, as Lewis said. Even in earthly things, doesn’t it make sense to aim high? To let your reach exceed your grasp? To aim beyond, and to seek the higher things?

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On this last Sunday in Black History Month I want to share a story that Jesse Jackson told some years ago. It was in an article in The New Yorker (2.10.92) as he reminisced about his first day in sixth grade. His teacher was Miss Shelton, and she began the class by turning to the blackboard and writing these long words on it, words the children in that class didn’t understand and had never even heard of before. The kids all looked around and started whispering to each other, “She got the wrong class. She thinks we the eighth grade class!” Soon enough somebody in the class got the courage to yell out, “Uh, Miss Shelton. Those are eighth-grade words. We only the sixth grade here.”

Miss Shelton stopped writing and turned around. She peered over the top of her eyeglasses and surveyed the room with a keen eye. “I know what grade you are,” she said. “I work here. And you will learn every one of these words, and a lot more like them, before this year is over. I will not teach down to you. One of you little brats just might be mayor or governor, or even president, one day, and I’m going to make sure you’ll be ready!” And she turned back to the blackboard and went right on writing those long scary words.

That moment, that wonderful moment, started something in Jesse Jackson’s heart. To think that one of the children in that classroom, one of his classmates, maybe even himself, might be mayor, or governor, or even president one day — when in that town at that time there wasn’t a single African-American even on the school board.

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God challenges us, he gives challenging words to us, through Christ. He will not teach down to us. All through the sermon on the mount he has taught and sought to bring us up to him, up to his standards and his vision and his call for each and every one of us. He will speak to us sometimes of words we do not understand, of things we do not know. But he knows us, beloved, he knows each and every one of us. He knows we are worth more than many sparrows, worth more than all the botanical gardens in the world. And he calls us, each and every one of us, to seek his kingdom and his righteousness, putting our trust in him. He knows that one of us little brats might be mayor, or governor, or even president one day. And more than that, he knows that one day we will be with him where he is and live with him for ever. Aim for that, my friends, aim for that.+

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Who Is Your Master

SJF • Proper 20 2010 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.+

In this morning’s reading from the Old Testament, the prophet Amos describes a stampede of greedy merchants who are ready to trample on the needy. So eager are they to sell their wares that they can hardly wait for the new moon to be over or the Sabbath to end, so that they can offer their goods for sale. And even once they begin to sell, they cheat — with false measures and false weights, and doctoring their grain with the sweepings off the floor.

This short passage evokes many memories for me. The first, brought to mind by the verse about the sweepings of the wheat, is of my grandmother’s refusal ever to buy tea in tea-bags — she would only buy loose tea — because she insisted that the people who made tea-bags only used the sweepings off the floor instead of good quality tea. I can vividly recall her shaking her head and clucking her tongue at this minor villainy by the tea-merchants of the world. So it was always loose tea in her home! The irony is that she really didn’t drink that much tea, and far preferred coffee. And the further irony is that the brand of coffee she preferred was actually a mix of coffee and chicory — which itself was originally a root roasted by those who couldn’t afford coffee, and later as a cheap way to stretch your coffee budget! My grandmother, it seems, rejected one economical adulteration only to embrace another.

Second, and more importantly, I have lived in New York long enough to remember the day when stores decided to remain open on Sunday; under the Blue Laws dating back to colonial times — and I don’t go back quite that far! — the merchants were not allowed to trade on the sabbath; fancy that! It was in the early 70s that one of the big department stores — I think it was Macy’s — until then like all stores except pharmacies closed on Sunday, announced that they would be open for half a day on Sunday. The other department stores expressed indignation — but they quickly followed suit — and shirt, and tie, and a second pair of pants! In very short order all of the stores were open on Sunday; and not just for half a day, either. And now, 40 years later, you will even find liquor stores open on Sunday — the last of the old Blue Laws has faded like a pair of old jeans, colorless and threadbare, and torn at the knees — and I can guarantee you not from praying.

The third memory I have is not of merchants but of customers — not sellers but buyers. And here it turns really serious: a matter of life and death. It is the image of that crowd of over-eager shoppers who trampled someone to death a few years ago when a big Costco or Wal-Mart opened its doors for a sale — in this case it wasn’t the merchants who were in a stampede, but the customers trampling on each other — you would have thought they were refugees in flood-ravaged Pakistan fighting over a bag of rice, to see those people desperate to get the latest sale item off those well-stocked shelves in the big box store.

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Now, what do all of these — from the prophet’s curse on wicked merchants, through my grandmother’s rather milder distaste for the cheapness of the tea-companies, to the impatient sabbath-breaking retailers, and the mad rush of customers trampled and trampling in that big box store— have in common? The key is our gospel text, which speaks to the impossibility of trying to serve two masters, and that pointed aphorism, “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

The way I pose the question today is, Who is your master? By “master” I don’t man a literal slave-owner — though some of the forces at work in this fallen world can practically enslave us if we let them. What I’m getting at is, “Who or What controls your life?” What person or institution or entity do you find yourself spending your time serving? “Whom do you serve?” Let’s look at the examples I cited earlier.

Starting with the Scripture: the wicked merchants cursed by Amos are only interested in serving themselves. They care nothing for the poor, from whom they will squeeze the last penny they can get, and sell them adulterated goods at that. They worship at the shrine of the false god wealth, or to use the old Aramaic name, Mammon. Surely, the true God, holy and righteous, will never forget their deeds, as Amos says, nor forget whom they chose to serve instead of God.

And my grandmother, God bless her, whom did she serve with her somewhat unreasonable belief that tea in bags was necessarily inferior to tea in a tin, or that coffee dosed with chicory was better than coffee pure and simple. Was she a slave to these mistaken notions, these fears of being cheated, and by paying a premium price both for tea and supposedly “fancy” French coffee (which was really part coffee and part chicory, and went back to the days of the Franco-Prussian war when the French couldn’t get coffee imports and so roasted the roots of chicory plants instead) in the long run wasn’t she only serving the tea and coffee companies?

And those department stores that first dared to break the Sabbath — of course they might have said they were merely serving their customers; of which they certainly had plenty! But weren’t they in fact serving themselves, by creating more opportunities to reach into the pockets of those customers? Remember, the classic pitch of the con-artist or the scammer isn’t, “I can help you” but rather “You can help me. I need your help.” As indeed you can, if you fall for the scam-artist who tells you she is a poor widow stuck with millions of dollars from her late husband in Ivory Coast and needs your help to transfer the funds!

And what of those who trample each other to death in that mad rush in the big-box store? Who were they serving but the merchants, almost literally human sacrifices to the great god Discount, the golden calf of the cut-rate special — and that cost-cutting yellow Smiley Face begins to look more and more like a leering skull smiling down on the chaos and rampage below?

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“Whom do you serve?” You cannot serve both God and money, God and wealth, Jesus assures us, as a simple statement of fact. A life fixed on bargains, a life spent worrying and being anxious about the things that are passing away, as the collect says: attaching your heart to the things that are passing away; a life spent worrying, “am I being cheated,” even worse a life spent cheating in order to amass gain at the expense of others, or being so cheated, or so set on capturing the last toy on the shelf or the biggest flat-screen TV that you don’t care that you crush another person to death under your feet — what kind of life is that? Whom do you serve? Who is your master?

Ask yourself that question every day of your life, every step of your journey. Whom do you serve, who is your master? Whom do you serve with all your heart and mind and soul and strength? Into whose hands do you want to commit your life, your future, and your hopes? To whom do you owe your very life, your soul, your being, and your strength? Such a one is worthy of your service, and will, at the end of days welcome you, you who have been faithful, even in little things, into the eternal homes.+

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