Mark 10: 17-27 (The Rich Young Man)
Food baskets are an interesting microcosm of our spiritual lives.
For seven years, I was part of a Church that collected food to give to the needy. Sorting the food into boxes for delivery was always interesting. Most of the time we found staples like peanut butter, rice, flour, beans, canned meat, stew or spaghetti. Occasionally there would be a treat like hard candy or cookies.
But, I have to tell you, I always wondered what moved a person to donate a bottle of Bar-B-Q sauce; a can of frosting (without the cake mix) or a box of cool whip mix.
Then, one day, I read in a church bulletin about the Thanksgiving food collection the year of the great cranberry scare. You remember it was rumored that the cranberry crop had been contaminated by pesticides. That year a small church in Ohio collected boxes of food for three families at thanksgiving a turkey for each, some vegetables, pies, and, you guessed it, fifty-seven cans of cranberry sauce.
A spirit of charity which gives away something we dont want and cant use is not charity or a spirit of love at all.
Winny the Pooh and Piglet tell us what true charity and sacrificial giving are. The episode is called The Blustery Day and it begins with the wind destroying Owls house. As the animals gather around the site of the tragedy, Eyeore volunteers to find Owl another house.
- It suddenly begins to rain and flood. Pooh and Piglet are threatened by rising
water, then rescued. In the midst of the relief of the rescue, Eyeore arrives to
announce that hes found Owl a house. Everyone goes gayly off until they arrive
at Piglets house the house where Piglets father and grandfather lived, the best
house in the hundred acre wood.
Here it is, says Eyeore, a house for Owl.
In near horror, Pooh and Rabbit whisper, Tell them its your house, Piglet.
No, sniffles Piglet, this house belongs to our good friend Owl.
Piglet, the smallest, most fearful of all the animals, put the most precious thing he had in the food basket.
Eternal life, whether it is eternal afterlife with God, or the eternal peace and joy of life in the present Kingdom, come not through observing the rules, the regulations or doing, even if it is doing good things. Its not that those things are unimportant, it is that even when we do all of them, we still lack one thing. One thing that good works cant get us; one thing we can never earn, one thing that comes from giving up our treasure. That one thing is the Piglet sized spirit that grows and develops as we learn to give away the most precious, the best, the things we hold on to the tightest, so our hands are free to grasp God and our spirits are free to grow.
For us it means shopping around in the Piggly Wiggly of our lives, looking at the things on the shelf of our hearts and saying, I really want to keep this, it is so precious; it is the most precious thing in my life. The thing may be money; it may be what that money can buy; it may be intangible things like image, power, social standing; it may be house, car, life-style. Our treasure can be anything anything that is so precious, we cant even consider giving it up.
We have a food basket back there in the back of the church. It will be there for food contributions every Sunday. But there is another basket, too; one that is more difficult to see, one that is often ignored. It is a basket where we contribute the food of the spirit. Not only is it in the back of the church, it goes with is everywhere. Its there every day of our lives as we choose how to spend our time and money, what to keep, what to give away.
Its the food basket of our soul, and we are fed, not by what we take out, but by what we put it. We can choose to put in the excess, the leftovers, what we dont want or cant use and then watch our soul and spirit shrivel. Or we can choose to put in whats most precious, and be fed.
Lest you think this is THE DREADED STEWARDSHIP SERMON, rest assured, its not. This is a spiritually sermon. This is a sermon about what engages, enlarges or diminishes our spirit. Its a sermon about the real treasure of life -- eternal life, eternal peace, eternal joy.
In the emptiness and loneliness of our search for meaning, in the midst of excess, possessions and a need to accumulate more and more, to have more and more, its really hard to find the treasure of eternal life, a life filled with peace, fulfilment and joy.
What keeps diminishing our spirit so that the eternal life we want remains an elusive dream? What can we do to engage and enlarge our spirit? Where do we find the real treasure that a Piglet-sized spirit brings? How do we get it?
One way is to ask and continue asking ourselves the simple food basket question.
What will I put in?
(Comments to Bob at st-james@zebra.net.)