Mud Between My Toes
Sermon Delivered January 19th, Gordon Pullan
Refections on Baptism
Sermon Delivered January 12th, 2020, Rob Powell
Sharers in the Promise
Sermon Delivered January 5th, 2020, Gordon Pullan
Things Do Not Change, We Change
Sermon Delivered December 29th, 2019, Gordon Pullan
Christmas Eve Message
Sermons Delivered December 24th, 2019, Rob Powell
Singing Christ Into Birth
Sermon Delivered December 22nd, 2019, Gordon Pullan
Waiting
Sermon Delivered December 15th, 2019, Rob Powell
Guide my Feet
Sermon Delivered December 8th, 2019, Gordon Pullan
Living in the Days of Noah
Sermon Delivered December 1st, 2019, Gordon Pullan
Living Boldly
Sermon Delivered November 17th, 2019: Rob Powell
What Matters
Sermon Delivered November 10th, 2019: Gordon Pullan
Sycamore or Sick of More
Sermon Delivered November 3rd, 2019: Gordon Pullan
Fall Back Into the Spirit Stream
Sermon Delivered October 27th, 2019: Gordon Pullan
The Gift of Wisdom
Sermon Delivered October 20th, 2019: Robert Powell
Bare, Bear Bare
Sermon Delivered October 13th, 2019: Gordon Pullan
Impossible Dreams
Sermon Delivered October 6th, 2019: Chris White
On Nannies, Pigs, The Beatitudes, and the Opportunity Mars Rover
The following sermon was delivered by Chris White at the North Hadley Congregational Church on February 16, 2019.
It’s 1910, London. Two children, Jane and Michael have been cycling through Nannies. Their father thinks it’s because he hasn’t found the right Nanny, but as viewers we’re pretty sure it’s because the children are constantly acting out in an attempt to draw their father’s attention. These attempts are in vain, since the father is a low-level executive at an Edwardian bank who works long and scrupulous hours to keep his family in their comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle on the fashionable Cherry Tree lane. Through some combination of happenstance and magic, they hire a nanny who instills several moral foundations into the children, including to use your money to ease the suffering of the less fortunate, to spend time with those you love, and to embrace the delight and whimsy embedded in the details of the surrounding world. These tenants run headlong into the father’s values in such a way that gets him fired from his job at the bank. However, the father has a change of perspective, embracing the teachings of the nanny; and, through a combination of happenstance and magic, not only gets his job back but secures a promotion.
On first blush, the moral is obvious. Don’t let the quest for wealth and prestige get in the way of what really matters: time with loved ones and stopping to smell the proverbial roses. But, thinking about the story for one moment more blurs its moral. The father’s actually not a workaholic at all. As explicitly stated in the first song, his schedule allows him to spend time with his children every day after the bank closes. Are we supposed to conclude that he should leave his bank before it closes? Or work at a job with fewer hours? Are we all supposed to work at jobs with fewer hours? Certainly, the moral can’t be that we’re all supposed to work minimal hours to spend maximal time with our children, thus crippling the economy? How would we afford comfortable lives for our children, let alone magical nannies?
One spring morning, a little girl named Fern Arable pleads to her father for the life of the runt of a litter of piglets. Her father relents, and Fern names the pig Wilbur. Once Wilbur becomes an adult pig, he’s sold to the girl’s uncle, but Fern still visits her pig-ward quite frequently. In his new locale, Wilbur struggles to adapt, but befriends a spider named Charlotte. As he increasingly becomes a full-grown pig, it becomes increasingly apparent that Wilbur is going to be slaughtered for sale to the butcher. The spider, however, connives a plot to save Wilbur from the slaughterhouse. The next morning, Charlotte’s web reads “Some Pig,” praising Wilbur’s graces. Over the next days and weeks, the spider’s loomed phrases encourage Wilbur’s new owner to enter him into a competition, at which Wilbur wins a prize. The spider –being an insect– dies in the fall, but Wilbur makes sure her eggs are cared for, and looks over them as they hatch and depart the barnyard.
On first blush, the moral is obvious. Have compassion for the less fortunate. Use your talents to help others. But, when you think about it for a couple for moments, it’s not clear what we want our children to take from this story. Is everyone who reads this story to their toddlers trying to foster future vegetarians? Are we trying to say that sacrifice for the greater good is wrong? Surely, farmers –and our whole agrarian economy– would suffer if we saved every malnourished runt, and would suffer worse yet if we lavished every plant, animal, and fungus that caught our affection with years of affection and resources. Our food supply would collapse, all because of some pig.
Jesus approaches the mountaintop. He tells his the gathered crowd: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your reward. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
On first blush, the moral is obvious. Help the poor, don’t flaunt your wealth, speak what you know to be true, and Christianity has rewards for those who don’t find them on earth. But, when you think about it for another couple of moments, it’s just not clear what the moral truly is. What Jesus does not say is that you should actually help the poor. What Jesus does not say is that you should not be wealthy. He does not say that those in power should stick up for the oppressed; he does not advocate giving away your wealth, he does not say that you should feed the hungry. Instead, he says the hungry, poor, and oppressed will have a happy ending. No more detail. Now, of course at other parts of the gospels he says more specific things. Luke 3:11– And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” But this is also the Jesus who, when his disciples suggest that instead of him using an expensive perfume, it might be better sold to help them feed the poor (They say: “Why this waste? This perfume could have been sold at a high price and the money given to the poor” [that’s Matthew 26:8-9]). To this, Jesus chides them, and encourages the lavish use of this expensive perfume. He says in the following verse, “The poor you will always have with you.”
“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” But, “the poor you will always have with you.” The poor are blessed, but –followers of Christ– do not always immediately worry about alleviating their suffering…. After all, there will always be poor people. The moral is just not obvious.
Now, I want to recognize that there are many contradictions in the Bible. But, what’s simply true is that when Jesus is given perhaps the biggest platform of his career he doesn’t advocate for social change. He doesn’t advocate for redistribution of wealth. He doesn’t suggest political reform. He doesn’t even say that we should care about people less happy, less fortunate, or more oppressed than we are. All he says is that it’ll turn out all right in the end for them.
And it’s not trivial that this is one of the biggest platforms we give Jesus. What’s Jesus’s most famous sermon? The sermon on the mount. When we think of takeaways from the New Testament, we think about John 3:16, and we think about the passages about loving God above all else, and we think about the Beatitudes. One of the most highlighted parts of Jesus’s message doesn’t tell us how to help the poor, meek, and oppressed. It doesn’t advocate for regime change, it doesn’t tell us to redistribute wealth, it doesn’t even explicitly tell us that we should help those in need. It just tells us that the poor, meek, and oppressed will…. eventually, somehow, be fine.
Now, I –as much as anyone– want to believe that Jesus would be pro-Universal health care. I want to believe that he would be pro-immigrants’ rights. I want to believe that he would advocate for a higher minimum wage if not a guaranteed base income. I want to believe that cruel and oppressive governments are anathema to Christianity. I also want Mary Poppins to be an anti-capitalist parable. I want Charlotte’s Web to be about human and animal rights.
But here’s the thing: they’re not. They’re just stories. They don’t need to tell you what to do. That’s not their job. Their job is to help mold kids into empathetic, sensitive, and idealistic adults– adults who stop and give a dollar to a homeless person in the park and who think critically about the politics of eating meat. Who wonder if guaranteed universal income is the right and proper things to do. Who wonder about how their vote affects their fellow humans. And this is a beautiful and valuable thing. The world is a complicated place, full of situations where it’s actually quite ambiguous what the right thing to do is. This is why ambiguous morals are so important, because they help us approach ambiguous situations– these stories don’t tell us exactly what to do, but they tell us how to think about what to do.
Don’t we want our children to approach the complex problems of this world with abstract –impractical, contradictory– but idealistic, good, and kind precepts? Don’t we want our children to grow up with “Feed the Birds,” “Some Pig,” and “Blessed are the poor” tugging at their hearts as they make tough, practical, and necessary decisions?
And as adults we not only benefit from these impractical and contradictory ideals, but we continue to crave them. 15 years ago, the Opportunity Mars Rover began its 90-day mission to gather information about Martian geology. To scientists’ surprise it kept working on day 91, day 92, day 93, and continued to analyze Mars’s surface and beam back its information. And it did so for the last 15 years, lasting more than 5,000 days longer than it had been projected to. This week it finally died, beaming back its last message, “My battery is getting low, and it is getting dark,” thus ending its remarkable mission and its life span. The Internet immediately made this a parable whose moral was about gumption, selfless service, and jobs well done. Of course, if you think about it a moment longer, it doesn’t make sense: Opportunity is just a machine that lasted better in space than its engineers estimated. But I (like, apparently about half the internet)… I cried when I read, “My battery is getting low, and it is getting dark.” I, like so many of us, crave these incongruous and illogical beacons of hope, morality, and goodness.
This is why the Beatitudes are so special. They give us these idealistic gems that become embedded in our conscience and morality. The poor are more blessed than the wealthy. If you experience hardship, you’ll get through it. If you are ridiculed for your beliefs, you’ll be justified one day. Now, practically, we as individuals might use these moral gems to decide upon certain actions, or to support certain social programs, or to vote a particular way on a particular topic. And as Christians, there likely are indeed certain social and political programs that we should probably support– but that’s a topic for another day– and it’s not what the Beatitudes are about. They, like the best children’s stories, lodge the impractical concepts of kindness, charity, mercy, and hope into our hearts and minds, so that we can walk through our messy, practical, adult society with these ideals tugging at our decisions and pulling us toward Christ’s message.
Amen