Roger Ray, pastor
July 31, 2011 Proper 13
Isaiah 55:1-5
55:1 Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. 2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. 3 Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.
I began making trips to Nicaragua in 2003 and over the next four years I made a total of eight trips to visit the most impoverished areas of the western hemisphere. I'm no stranger to poverty, having seen a great deal both in my professional and personal life but Central and South America is the only place I have ever visited where everyone in a village lived in a dirt floor shack made out of scrap material, jungle vegetation and mud.
People have often asked me why I went all of the way to Nicaragua to help the poor when there are so many poor people right here in Springfield. Of course, no one who has ever been in rural Nicaragua would ever ask that question. Poverty in America is rarely like poverty in the third world. On my first trip up onto the mountains of Matagalpa, the residents were suffering from the results of a protracted drought. Their usual food sources were unproductive and malnutrition was common and actual starvation was not uncommon.
My heart was broken by their plight and helping to provide assistance to those rural villages became my life's focus for the next several years. But you see different things as you make repeated trips to the same places. Immediately I saw the dirt floored shacks, the hungry children, the absence of older people in a place where the difficulties of life and the lack of medical sources cuts nearly everyone's life expectancy in half.
I saw the lack of opportunity, the scarcity of education and transportation and I saw the vulnerability in which everyone lived.... Vulnerable to violence, abuse and exploitation.
On almost every trip I took a team of church member volunteers who helped to build houses, worked with the medical teams and in education. But at the end of each day we would retreat to a hotel which was protected from Nicaragua by an armed guard and razor wire. While the people we came to serve finished up their daily ration of beans and rice before the sun set and darkness descended on their world, my traveling companions and I visited a restaurant where we sat at table cloth covered tables and ate very well.
We retired to the hotel bar or lobby and sat and talked. What I began to notice on each trip was that the talk quickly left Nicaragua and began to be more personal. A lot of the stories were not happy..... unhappy at work, marriage problems, difficulties with the kids, challenges with divorce settlements, inheritance issues and health problems.
The ironic contrast became more evident to me with each trip I made into the jungle. In the villages, where they have nothing, the people smiled, sang songs and the children often danced and were eager to read their poems to us or to tell us about their hopes for the future. Inside the razor wire, though we North American travelers had every essential creature comfort at our ready disposal, there was distinctly less joy than there was outside of the fence.
I have taken a lot of people on mission trips and some were able to really see the ravages of poverty but, at least it seems to me, most returned fairly unscathed by the adventure, returning to relative opulence punctuated by sheer human misery. Why are the rural poor of Nicaragua, people who have to carry their water up from an open creek.... People in live in shacks with no floor or closets, no electricity or plumbing and generally no doors, whose children often have no shoes and no toys and food is repetitive and frequently rare..... how do those people dare to be happier than we are?
Or as the prophet Isaiah words it, "Why do you spend your money on that which is not bread and your labor on that which does not satisfy?" Because, we are full.... We have even changed our architecture to have walk in closets and bigger garages. The rental storage unit industry has sprung up and spread. We have more clothes than we could wear out in a lifetime. We have every kind and color of shoe imaginable. We have every kitchen appliance ever known which gather dust while we go from restaurant to restaurant looking for a new dining experience..... but we are not satisfied.
In recent years, the modern phenomenon of hoarding has become so common that there is even a television show dedicated to it. When I first encountered hoarders the most common explanation was that they were people who grew up in the depression and they were so fearful of going without that they couldn't throw anything away.
Of course, my parents grew up abject poverty in the depression but they kept the most meticulous house you have ever seen and they refused to keep anything for which they did not have an almost immediate use. As the hoarding issue has passed to a post Great Depression generation, we have learned to see it as something else.
In the most severe cases, it is caused by and obsessive compulsive disorder but unlike a strict clinical mental health diagnosis, hoarding is often passed down from one generation to the next and, in a family, it has to become a shared value between spouses and children.
Old newspapers, canned foods long out of date and almost certainly deadly to anyone who might try to eat the contents, worn out car tires and thread bear clothing pile up until certain rooms of the house can no longer be lived in. Only a pathway to a chair in the living room remains between stacks of papers and magazines. They have to leap over boxes of half used cleaning supplies to get to the toilet which is surrounded by empty toilet paper rolls being saved for future unknown pre-school art projects.
Throwing something away causes great distress but saving everything causes great shame. It would not be hard to conclude that possessions make people sad and having nothing makes people happy but that is not substantially true. I would be very willing to fight anyone who said that the evidence of happiness among the poor should relieve us of any obligation to bring education, food and health care to them. Poverty is a form of violence and no decent person should ever allow themselves to be dismissive of that fact.
But what we can very accurately conclude is that possessions do not make people feel either happy or satisfied. I've heard it said that the people who believe that money can't buy happiness simply don't know where to shop. And, sure enough, there are things you can buy and do and eat which are quite enjoyable.
But if I ask you to remember the most remarkable meal you ever ate, if you pull that memory of your very favorite dining experience, isn't it true that the company you shared at that meal is crucial to it having been your most memorable meal?
I share my home with my 22 year old, very socially active, daughter which means, in essence, I live alone. I certainly take most of my meals alone and I always have my morning coffee alone. If there is a movie I want to see, I almost always go alone. I have often traveled alone in Europe and America.
It doesn't bother me to be alone but I can tell you this, the first time I went to England I was by myself and I went to the British Museum which is one of the world's finest historical collections of things stolen from every nation of the world. I have a natural interest in both history and archaeology so I was absolutely thrilled to be there.
But I can remember the moment that I first saw the Rosetta Stone as if it were yesterday. The experience of finally seeing this item which I had heard of all my life, which opened the door to translating the wealth of Egyptian hieroglyphs was amazing.
I was surrounded by a British school children, chirping about like a flock of starlings, but there was no one even approximately my height that I could turn to and say, "Would you look at that?" And though being in the British Museum is one of my absolute favorite things in the world, I recognize that no experience which is not shared with someone you care about has the same depth as when you experience it in connection to someone else.
I have sat in a beautiful Las Vegas theater and watched the breath taking performance of Circ de Soleil but, in terms of impact on my life, I remember more profoundly the first time a group of elementary school students in the poverty stricken village of San Ramon, Nicaragua came out and tried to perform a dance routine to a recording of a Britany Spears tune.
Which is to say, that to be satisfied.... That is, to have a life that is worth living, simply having, acquiring things, experiences, consumables, is just a part of the picture. Having social connections is also just a part of the picture. Having some spiritual depth, some expression of genuine connection through compassion and empathy.... That, I believe, is what makes the difference.
The belief that American consumerism is killing off our spirituality is not simply a liberal or a progressive soapbox. Even the famous evangelical preacher and close friend of George W. Bush, Tony Campolo, has recently written:
"We all know that we Americans spend more and more money to buy more and more things we don't need in order to impress more and more people we don't know. In short, we have turned away from the lifestyle prescribed by scripture, failed to be good stewards of God's creation, ignored the needs of the poor, and, in the words of scripture, 'spent our money on that which does not satisfy.' The time is at hand for repentance--not only for Wall Street tycoons and self-serving politicians--but for all of us."I trust that you remember the famous Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, whom I have often quoted in the past. He wades in on this topic from the perspective of the Exodus instruction to the Israelites about the manna from heaven that they were to only "gather enough for the day." They were not to hoard or try to take away their dependence upon God's mercy and grace for the next day or the next week. In the presence of scarcity of resources, there can be no hoarding. In a true community, there is no need for greed, theft or brutality of any kind because people share what there is to be shared.
But Brueggemann goes on to say that the consumer culture we have become is inextricably connected to militarism because you can't consume the majority of the world's goods without a strong and aggressive military to force the world to serve at your table. Brueggemann calls it a sickness or a kind of madness.
He says: The central promise of the gospel is peace that is God's good gift (John 14:27). But it is clear upon any reflection that the ways of consumerism do not lead to peace, but only to anxiety. The ways of militarism do not lead to security, but only to destruction, violence, and dehumanization. And in the midst of this mad scramble toward death are Christians, the church, with this conviction that the crucified risen One matters even here, because this One, and only this One, is Lord and Savior.
Isaiah speaks poetically, asking people to consider the fact that they have sold out their lives for a standard of living which leaves their houses full but their lives empty.... They eat and eat but they are always hungry.
Jeremiah is rather less diplomatic. He says: "From the last to the greatest of them, every one is greedy for unjust gain; and from prophet to priest, every one deals falsely. They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall..." says the Lord.
Jeremiah looks at the scandalous, unaware consumerism of his people and he says, very frankly, "they don't know how to blush." We have anesthetized our conscience to such a degree that we don't even know to be ashamed of ourselves.
One of the common psychiatric treatments for hoarding is to ask your patient to stop by a store on the way to their appointment and to buy a couple of the most recent editions of their favorite magazine. Then, in the midst of therapy, the therapist takes one of the magazines and begins tearing one page out at a time and tearing it up and throwing it away.
This will create a great deal of anxiety on the part of the patient but the therapist keeps reassuring them, "see, you can live without this.... You don't need this.... This isn't hurting you."
Of course, it does hurt because in the extreme, we get so attached to things that we think that we need them.... We think that we love them.... But that is only because we're kind of crazy. Eventually, the therapist will ask the patient to take the other magazine and begin to destroy it, telling themselves that they are ok.... They don't need this magazine, they can live without it, it doesn't hurt to destroy it.
I have known several people who have been treated for OCD, some successfully and many more unsuccessfully. If I were to be allowed to address a gathering of the American Psychiatric Association, I would have a theological suggestion to make. I would like to suggest that rather focusing on teaching people how to destroy and throw away that they might try to focus on learning to give away.
I never personally knew the millionaire recluse, Jeanette Musgrave, for whom the Musgrave Foundation is named, but I knew her accountant very well. Joe Clark was a good friend of mine and over the years he shared with me how, when Mrs. Musgrave had inherited millions of dollars from her brother, that long lost relatives, neighbors and strangers all tried to get her to give them some of it. She had always been a bit of a recluse and she had been very frugal.
But over the years Joe talked Mrs. Musgrave into reading a story in the paper about someone who had lost everything in a fire and he would say, "Wouldn't it be nice to help those folks out a little bit." Now and then, she would let down her guard and give someone twenty or thirty dollars. And when she did, Joe would bring it up again later and say, "Didn't it feel good to know that you were helping a stranger with a serious problem?"
And she acknowledged that it did feel good. And over time she began to charge her accountant to find other people who could be helped with some gifts of money and eventually she was persuaded to help the entire community by donating the money to build our art museum additions and in the end she put her entire estate into a trust fund which continues to make many important charitable causes happen in this city.
She never had children and she died with virtually no remaining relatives but she was lovingly and powerfully connected to an entire city through her ability to find meaning out of helping other people.
What Joe Clark did for Jeannette Musgrave is what I wish we could do for America..... to cure our madness.... To heal the sickness of consumerism and to stop the violence of militarism which keeps our shelves lined with cheap shoes, bananas and coffee. I want for us to teach America how to blush again.... How to remember that we are a nation built largely out of the victims of European classism and African slavery and Central American feudalism.
Our culture tells us to eat when we are not hungry and to buy products that separate us from other people. Our faith tells us to say "no" to our appetites, no to consumerism and yes to one another.
