First Presbyterian Church of
Jeremiah 17
and Luke 6
“Two
Nickels to Rub Together”
The Rev.
Dr. Fred G. Garry
A man won the
lottery. It was a large win. His wife heard the news before he did and
panicked, believing his heart condition would not sit well with the news. In a moment of desperation she called her
pastor, hoping he could find a way to tell her husband he had won $20 million
without causing a heart attack.
The pastor came
over and was sitting in the living room when the husband came home from
work. The two were chatting a bit when
the pastor mentioned that there was a big winner of the lottery. The husband threw up his hands. "You know I bought a lottery
ticket. My first ever and it has bothered
me ever since. Each day I keep running
into stories of how the lottery winners all find their marriages ruined by the
money, they can’t relate to their family and friends any more, and charities
hound them to be benefactors. What a
mess. I’ll tell you if I won the money,
I would give it all away. I promise you,
I’d give it all to the church." The
pastor immediately had a heart attack and died.
Usually when
people speak of the burden of riches, the responsibility of wealth, there is
someone waiting for the right moment to interject, I know it would be hard, but
I am willing to try.
Not too long
ago Alex Velto of the Northern New York Community
Foundation asked if I would help with a little project. It turns out that
My job, with the help of some of the summer
interns, was to go door to door on the street and ask if there was anyone who lived
there met those criteria. When we found
someone it was like they won the lottery too.
All those years watching Ed McMahon at the door with a publisher’s
clearing house check and I never thought I would get to be him for a day.
With five
children many in the group were quick to suggest we relocate to North
Pleasant.
I laughed when
this was brought up, but I didn’t take it seriously. There is something strange about too much,
too easily. There is something to the
lottery winners getting a blessing and a curse at the same time. We all joke that it might be hard to win but
we would to take a stab at $20 million.
But would we if it meant our marriage?
I checked with Kathy and she suggested she would rather have our life
than a lump sum after taxes.
Perhaps it was
a firsthand experience that influences us.
We had a mutual friend who received a substantial trust fund at
eighteen. His mother died in a car
accident and there was insurance money that came to him after high school. What might have been a stake for business or
a college fund or the start of an investment portfolio quickly
disappeared. The ease of the money, what
it could provide was blessing and a curse.
And in the end as it nearly took his life it is fair to say the money
was more on the curse side.
It doesn’t seem
like it should be this way, but there are moments in life that can be both a
blessing and a curse.
A number of
years ago there was a lovely movie called Phenomenon. The story is about a man who suddenly is
blessed with phenomenal intelligence. On
his 37th birthday he stepped outside the local bar to bid farewell
to friends leaving his party when a bright light knocked him to the
ground. From that moment his mental
faculties began rapidly expanding. He
could master languages in minutes, discern code sequences the military sent
over the airwaves, and intuit the puzzles of physics.
George was the character’s name and for the
people around him this was quite shocking as he was not the bookish type. He was a mechanic and a good guy, but not
genius. All of this was amusing until
George’s senses became acute as well; he could sense the movement of the earth,
move objects without touching them and so on.
Speculation ran through his small town that
the light was some sort of alien abduction or encounter. Near the end of the movie we learn that in
this instance George’s encounter was a fast growing brain tumor that had the
peculiar effect of increasing mental activity as it grew instead of impeding
it.
Before the diagnosis, though, the story becomes
a reflection upon the way a gift can be a blessing and a curse. George has been given this fantastic ability
to understand just about anything, yet, his phenomenal abilities have turned
him into a phenomenon. And he just
wanted to be George. The gift brought
him incredible notoriety, yet in the swirl he was robbed of what had made his
life good heretofore, the simple pleasures of friends and community.
In our readings today Jeremiah and Jesus
give blessings and curses. At first
glance it would appear that blessings are what we hope for and curses are what
we hope to avoid. Yet if we look at what
Jesus calls blessing we may not be willing to sign up. He said, blessed are
the poor, blessed are the hungry, blessed are those that weep.
Although most of us have developed a diet
or two, we’re not lining up for hunger.
And while money may not define us nor drive us, having none is not an
option. Or is it?
Our daughter Laura had to write an essay
for her college applications. I enjoyed
reading it and I truly enjoyed one section in particular. She wrote about our time in Princeton, how
being in seminary was hard and poor and a bit hairy, but that no matter what we
went to a little pizza shop called Red Moon on Friday and shared a pie. For her this defined the time; it was a fond
memory.
In the background of this part of her essay
was a theme I’ve heard from many people: for some reason the time in your life
when you didn’t have two nickels to rub together are filled with lovely
memories. Somehow the challenge of the
time was punctuated with significance and clarity of what is truly important:
family and the joy of being together. It
was as if there was a blessing in being poor.
The poet Robert Frost expressed a similar
theme in the form of a languishing hope.
Near the end of his life, he pined for the simplicity of his early years
of poverty and struggle. And in a moment
that must be seen as strange, he wished this for his grandchildren, hoping that
they would know the blessing of anonymous toil for a far off goal.
When Kathy and I look back on those Friday
nights we too are nostalgic and a little romantic. We don’t dwell on how little there was. Instead we remember the moments of joy. In the years since leaving no matter if we
are passing through the area or at the seminary, we go to Red Moon. It means a great deal to us that thirteen
years later the owners are still there and are still excited to see us come in.
And like Frost I have a similar hope for my
children. I hope they will have their
Red Moons in the years ahead. I say this
and then I pause because the wish can be seen as both blessing and curse. What made Red Moon pizza such a joy was part
and parcel of not having any money, working three jobs, and fighting to carve
out one evening a week to be with my family. Hoping they would find the joy we did is in a
way hoping they would find the struggle as well.
When Jesus says blessed are the poor it is
tempting to romanticize poverty and embellish it with joys it doesn’t
have. The villagers in Chivumu where we built the school are extremely poor. They don’t see this poverty as a
blessing. Not having enough money for
basic medicine, not having the means to send their children to school, running
out of food during the dry season and watching their little ones become
lethargic with malnutrition is not a blessing.
And yet there is a
blessedness to how they live.
They know how to say hello. I
mentioned this to Gordon Bonisteel the other day as we waved to each other from
across the street. I said, in
The poverty of the Malawians is a curse,
but there is a blessedness in which they live.
People hold hands as they walk; they dance when they are happy. They don’t have two nickels to rub together,
but they have so much to give, so much to share.
There is clarity of purpose and sense of
well being to be found in the struggle.
When things are easy, when there is no hard scrabble, I am very
uneasy. When things are easy, I am
uneasy. It’s the lottery imbalance of
more curse than blessing. I trust the
struggle, the yearning for the great goal, great end. This will sound strange, but I can’t imagine
anything less exciting than just having good things happen.
For it is in the hard things where my soul
has been made right, in the struggle I have grown accustomed to what is the
spirit of life. Perhaps others have the
ability to see this in the moments of ease, but for me, it has always been the
fight where the clarity comes.
At the end of his life Thomas Edison’s
factory filled with projects and experiments burnt to the ground. The fire raged through the night and left
just a smoldering shell of the former building.
His son found him in the early light walking amidst the ashes. Worried this would be too much for his
elderly father he sought to comfort him.
Yet when he tried to console him, the elder could only say one thing, “They're
all gone. They are all gone; all of our
mistakes are gone. We don’t have to make
them anymore.”
I am not sure why I love that story so
much. It is kind of an
anti-lottery. Here was a moment where a
man has lost everything and yet he sees it as a blessing. I am not sure I want to be a poor seminarian
again, but I do hope that my life will see another Red Moon pizza. Better said, I hope I see many.
Do you know what I mean? I want the pizza for sure, but what I am
hoping for is a moment of clarity and purpose borne of struggle and a hard
fight where I see and know the people I love.
I am not looking to make my life miserable, but I am willing to step
into the fray to find what is good.
When Jesus says blessed are the poor, I
don’t think he was romanticizing poverty.
A carpenter in