First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Exodus 32

“Talking God off the Ledge”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

October 12, 2008

I love sweat equity. I love the way the cost of a project can be cut in half, made reasonable, by doing the work yourself. And if I am lucky I get a new tool out of the deal.

In Ohio, just out of seminary, we moved into a manse that needed a fair amount of love. The session and I struck a deal. They would buy the materials if I did the labor. That was a great deal. In four years we painted just about everything, refinished hardwood floors, built two small decks, remodeled a bathroom, laid new flooring in the kitchen, and insulated the garage.

On the whole most projects were completed with some advice or guidance. Which is a good thing to have. We also developed a few rules for home improvement, which too have proved a good thing. If something can blow me up I have to read the instructions twice. Kathy augmented this to include tools that could sever a limb. So when I purchased a used table saw for $100 I also had to buy a book called “Table Saw Basics” known affectionately as how to use this tool and keep your digits. I am not allowed to work with voltage over 110 and anything with the word “line” in it, such as power line, main line, gas line is pretty much off limits.

With the help of a church filled with skilled craftsmen I learned a lot those four years. Mainly I learned to ask, “So what do I need to do here?” There was one project, though, where I chickened out. Remodeling a very small bathroom the hope was to put in a skylight to make it seem much bigger. And in deed, with the shaft built through the attic you could already get the feel of being in a much bigger space. The last part of the rough work was to cut the hole in the roof. I staked it out, marked it off, ran power up on the roof, climbed up to the spot, knelt down with circular saw in hand, and then froze. I couldn’t do it. I knew everything was right; I knew it was measured and marked off correctly, but I also knew putting a hole in your roof just doesn’t make sense.

Finding a neighbor who was a carpenter I explained my dilemma. “Greg,” I said, “I need four cuts.” He smiled, walked over to the manse with me, climbed the ladder, made the cuts, and said, “There you go.”

Moving to Watertown has been a great experience where sweat equity is concerned. Our house is 138 years old and it is in constant need of love. I told Mr. Stratton of Stratton hardware recently that my house is mocking me right now. Walking from project to project it is as if the house is angry about our time away this summer. It is as if the house is taunting me. With each project I hear a voice saying, “go away again, I dare you.” So as I fix and mend, caulk and paint, hang and repair it as if I am doing penance, trying to convince the house that indeed we are in this together.

The “together,” what we are working toward, is equity. If you improve the value of your house as you make your mortgage payments you will see a return on your investment. Now to see this return you need to sell the house at some point. Our house doesn’t resent this, but we tend not to talk about it. What we do is watch the Home and Garden channel. Most of the shows on this channel in the evening are all about creating greater equity in a home by eliminating labor. If you do it yourself, then you save the money you would have spent on contractors. Of course, this is a gamble as it all depends upon the value of your house upon sale, whenever that is.

One of the shows that seems to be gaining in popularity is called “what is my house worth?” Realtors come through a house, make an appraisal and tell the homeowners, “if I were to list your house today, it would be worth . . . .” At the very end of the show they have a kind of tally sheet where they list the purchase price, improvements, and then assessment. This is followed by the sum of equity gained. Unrealized gain, yes, but gain nonetheless.

All of this seems good, helpful, insightful until you start to look at the date of purchase. Now I have to say I generally pitch a fit at this point in the show. I pitch a fit because of the year of purchase. It is very common for the homeowners to be in a home for less than five years and yet see the value of their home double, even triple. I groan when I see that they invested $30,000 and yet somehow the value of their home has raised $300,000. Magic makes me nervous and this seems like a lot of magic to me. It’s just sit right, feel true.

Watching the show this week it took on a different meaning. This week it has come to light that twelve millions homes in the US are facing an assessment where there is a loss not a gain at the end of the tally sheet. They bought their house at the height of the inflated housing market, took out risky loans, and now face foreclosure. Add to this that bank after bank, lending institution and investment firm has done the same on a scale of malfeasance that causes pause and wonder if our greed has reached a whole new level. Needless to say the equity picture is not a rosy one right now.

And then, what made it really clear, in a moment of transparency and unmitigated gall one of the companies at the head of the financial fiasco puts a new spin on stupid. AIG decides to spend a half a million dollars at a retreat-junket for top executives days after the federal government gave 85 billion dollars to bail them out of bankruptcy. That was just ugly. Saturday Night Live does a news sketch where they describe a choice or misstep by a politician and then say with all incredulity, “Really?” AIG forced them to create a whole new category. The fake newscasters said, “We have a new segment called, ‘They did what?’” You have reached a pretty bad place when the cynics and comedians don’t know what to say, they have nothing.

There should be more outrage over all of this; there should be more shock at a world wild credit implosion. But we saw this coming. We did. We knew it and we felt powerless, or worse, we turned a blind eye hoping that indeed magic would create a world of largess and opulence. All we needed to do was melt a few earrings, give a little gold and get the world in return. There should be some outrage, but in a strange way I sense a general mood of catharsis. When a lie is revealed, there is a feeling of freedom from the weight of guilt. For quite awhile we have been living a lie of false prosperity, false values and now we have a chance of not living with such.

The catharsis is happening because we want what is good. We want to be good. We want to speak the truth, to offer love not violence. We do. We want to be people of justice and integrity and when we are not it weighs on us. We need to be who we are. And when we are not, there is sense of being far less, of being made less.

NPR this week was interviewing a solider just home from Iraq. The rub of the interview is that this was a woman in combat. They were asking her if the violence of combat was somehow counter intuitive to being a woman. Her response was that she believed violence was counter-intuitive to being human; it didn’t matter what your gender was. Violence was not something that made her less of a woman; it made it challenging to feel like a human being, to be whole. To be human is to want what is good, want to be good, and live in the midst of this goodness with others. That is what it means to be human.

At Mt. Horeb God doesn’t seem to remember what it means to be human and he overreacts. He tells Moses to get out of the way as he was going to wipe out all of these “stiff necked people.” He wants to kill them all. The great moment in our passage is Moses talking God off the ledge. It is as if he says, “Whoa there big fella, easy now. Easy. Let’s just calm down here a bit.” And then he appeals to God’s vanity; you don’t want to be known as the God who led his people to death. No, no, no. But what Moses really does is remind God of the people he knows: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Remember them? You know them. You love them.

You know Abraham and how his faith was unfailing even when he failed. Remember how he was willing to risk all for you and for others with no desire for return, no expectation. Remember Isaac and how he lived as his father lived, but failed to be a father. Remember Jacob how you blessed the liar, the thief, the fugitive, how you blessed him at Bethel and promised him a life he neither deserved nor understood, because for some reason, love maybe, you wanted him to be a good man. Remember what it means to be the God of these people. Remember Jacob wrestling with you at Penuel and not letting go without a blessing, without knowing all was well. He just wanted to be good man in the end, funny how that ended up.

Moses was telling God, these people, wicked, stupid, foolish, greedy, filled with avarice and deceit, yes; but that is not who they are. They are not the sum of their misdeeds. You know them: they are Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel and Leah. You know them. They are good people. You love these people.

I received a letter from the CEO of the denomination this week. Don’t be alarmed or impressed it went out to all pastors. The letter was a recognition that the current financial crisis was going to hurt people, but it was also a moment where pastors needed to challenge their congregations to repent of greed. There were websites given and links that would help pastors offer a prophetic voice.

And it is true, we do need to know and understand that despite the encouragement of Gordon Gecko greed is not good. And it is even truer that our American culture has been drunk with excess for quite some time now. We must not forget that when faced with the greatest national tragedy to befall our shores in living memory, our president told us to go shopping to help alleviate the dilemma. Yet, I am slow to play the prophet card. Not out of any reasonable fear, I wish I had more of that actually; my hesitation is that a prophetic voice is a last resort. It is a last resort for the people and the prophet as death and destruction are often nearby.

It may be that it takes years to rebuild the markets; it may be that a lot of people lose homes as we try to extricate ourselves from the mire of rampant greed and inflated (read magical) home values. In the end, if the prognosticators are correct, we will all pay. But that is not the end; that is not a moment to be prophetic. This is a moment to remember who we are. We are people who want what is good and right and true. As a church we need to be giving a word of hope, not doom. Doom is an easy message.

We need to remember God has invested a lot in us. We are his projects, houses as it were; the abodes he has labored to restore, worked with his own hands to make right. In you there is blood equity. You are not a project God despises or looks upon with disdain. Are we finished? Redemption never sees an end under the sun. No matter what the status of the project, though, when God looks at you he remembers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he remembers the people he loves.

When finally the markets stop falling and the golden calf is offered, I mean the 700 billion is put into play, it is not magic that will make us right. And we know this. We know it is not money that ever makes our life good, makes us good. What makes us right, lets us be the people we are supposed to be, is the love of God calling us, empowering us, making us to be the people who are right and true and just.

We are in the midst of a stewardship campaign that is celebrating how much we give away, not how much we hoard. Every year we try to move closer and closer to endowment independence so we can give more to others, build more schools, build more houses. That is who we are. We are people who give not horde. Is there greed? Yes. Do we fall prey to magic and the ease of affluence? Yes. But the God who reaches out to us today has learned a bit, changed his mind so to speak. The problems are things we fix; the misdeeds are redeemed; the missteps are given time to be retraced so we can find the way again.

Right now we need to be the people who offer hope not fear. There may come a day and a time to be prophetic, but now is the time for a more pastoral voice. In the end we will need to examine more than mortgage practice, other things like our conspicuous consumption and our indifference to others as we are awash in luxury. We may even need to put down the idol of oil. But we will do this not because we are ashamed, but because we remember who we are, who are in the eyes of God. We are the long project, the long hope of the Son of God to see his Kingdom God here and now. Amen.