Sermon by Rev. Russell Daye
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax

Where Your Treasure is...

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20; Luke 12:32-40

In the last year and a half, I have witnessed the end of two lives that exemplified in a profound way an imperative that Jesus states in Luke 12. Jesus says, 'Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes nearer and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.' The two people I'm thinking of were both born to wealthy and established families, one of them in Cape Town and the other in Manhattan.

Many of you will have heard me speak on previous occasions of Bill Coffin, the Yale chaplain, Riverside minister, and well known peace activist. Bill was born into the Sloane Coffin family of New York, a high society clan of merchants, developers, philanthropists for the arts, and theologians. He was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, into a Park Avenue penthouse, private schools, full-time nannies, and limo drivers.

A perfect economic storm, that included the sudden death of Bill's father, the stock market crash and Great Depression, heavy investments in low income housing just when the working poor were not able to pay their rent, and a compassionate refusal of the family to evict those tenants, led to the financial devastation of Bill's immediate family. While Bill certainly never suffered poverty, his late childhood and early youth were lived in middle-class normalcy in Carmel California before his uncle Henry, the wily theologian who maintained his wealth during the Depression, restored him to private schools and an Ivy League educational path. I don't know if this time in California is what changed Bill, but I do know that for the rest of his life he pursued non-material treasures, first the riches of adventure, and later the bounties of social justice.

The other person I'm thinking of was my mother-in-law. It is probably rare for a preacher to devote a section of a sermon to discussion of his mother-in-law, unless of course it is a sermon about oppression, suffering, and injustice! But what I'm going to offer here is praise. Like Bill Coffin, Valerie Kilpin, later McAdam, was born into a very wealthy and visible family, in her case in pre-apartheid South Africa. Like other Cape Town debutantes, she went to expensive schools, traveled to Europe upon becoming a young lady, and spent time in the halls of Oxbridge. Unlike other rich young adults from Cape Town, she was able to see how oppression and exploitation generated the wealth that sustained her privilege.

At a young age Val turned to confronting the system that had now formally become apartheid. She used her position, and her family's mansion to organize dinner parties subversively designed to convert people to the anti-apartheid cause. She married a young Brit equally committed to racial justice and they broke all convention by holding the ceremony in a church reserved for nonwhites. Together they joined the underground resistance to the apartheid state. Eventually their actions caused them to be driven out of South Africa, and Val left with four small children and only a few steamer trunks - her fortune behind her in South Africa - to start a new life in Québec. Val and David bought a farm whose house had been abandoned for 30 years. In the Canadian October they covered their children with ponchos, and moved them into a house with no glass in the windows and no plumbing.

I had the good fortune to spend leisurely hours with both Bill and Val in the months and weeks before their deaths and to help lead services that celebrated their lives. What was striking, as people came to say goodbye, where the stories shared by admirers who had so many tales of care given, justice pursued, risks taken, and love shared.

Val and Bill were very different people in many ways. Bill was extroverted and bombastic, while Val was introverted and gentle, but their deaths, and the marking of those deaths by their friends and families, had deep similarities. To be a witness to the end of either of these lives was very moving. There was a profound sense of treasure. Not monetary treasure certainly, for these had been cast off, but a sense of the bounties of goodness and love and truth generated by lives lived with courage, compassion, and vigour.

You will have to forgive me for indulging in commentary on the lives people close to me, but I think these two lives can serve as parables for our churches. To explain how this is so I want to make reference to the Isaiah passage read earlier. For some churches the temptation is to orient themselves toward monetary riches. For other churches the temptation lays in status or prestige, another kind of worldly treasure. But perhaps the most deadly treasure that captures the hearts of churches today is the love of a kind of ritual and ceremony that speaks to long time members but is increasingly incomprehensible to those with no experience of church.

The Isaiah passage gives voice to God's anger expressed when the worship of God has come to be primarily about something other than worship of the ever living God whose will for the world changes as life in the world evolves. Listen to this anger: 'hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of your God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? I have had enough of burnt offerings of Rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New Moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation -- I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen... Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphaned, plead for the widow.'

The great danger for worshiping communities of any faith is to fall into a love of our liturgies above love of our God. That danger today is especially pronounced in a society populated largely by the unchurched. Do we think that God is pleased by liturgies that offer meaning only to those familiar with our halls? Do we think that God is pleased with sanctuaries decorated with symbols that speak only to the initiated? Isaiah teaches us how to respond when the rituals of worship have become something less than worship. He does not design prayers for us; he does not design sanctuaries for us; he does not write hymns for us; rather he establishes principles for renewal: learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphaned, plead for the widow.

Both our churches, St. Andrew's and St. John's, are pretty good at pursuing these principles out there in the community outside of Sunday morning. But it is there not a special mission in the drawing the oppressed, the orphaned, and the widowed (and here I mean this more than literally) into our worship? Is there not a special mission in drawing the spiritually hungry into our worship? If we are to do this, if we are to offer liturgies of faith that feed a broad spectrum of people, then we may have to abandon a treasure, at least in some measure.

The traditions of word, sacrament and song that have been handed to us are indeed treasures and I do not assert that they be treated carelessly, but I think these treasures need to be deployed afresh. They need to be spent in ways that enrich not only us but all of God's children who could be drawn to the teachings of Christ. For this to happen we will need to take an approach to treasure similar to the approaches of Bill Coffin and Valerie McAdam. We will need to surrender the treasure that gives us special place, special wealth, and special identity. We will need instead to seek a bounty that comes from pouring out our treasures of word, sacrament and song into a community that knows little or nothing of them and seeing how they spend those treasures. I suspect that such a pouring out would not only bring the great wealth of Christ's wisdom to a much broader community but would also enrich our churches immeasurably.

The question I have is 'are we up to this challenge?' Do we have the faith and the strength to do this? Some of Jesus' most powerful parables teach that the hoarding of treasure leads to its loss, while its investment leads to bounty. The choice between hoarding and investment is clear today when it comes to our worship. What is not clear is what choice we will make. To make the right one, we will have to do something that both Bill and Val did. We will have to conquer fear and move forward in faith.