Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

August 12, 2007

Sermon by Pastor Joy Bussert

The Holy Gospel according to Luke. (Luke 12:32-40)

Jesus said: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit; be like those who are waiting for their master to return from the wedding banquet, so that they may open the door for him as soon as he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. If he comes during the middle of the night, or near dawn, and finds them so, blessed are those slaves.

But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

The Gospel of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Our loving and gracious God, you call us to a radical faith for your kingdom. Give us faith that is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.

Amen.

So “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” This simple phrase from the Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews was written in confidence that faith was possible against all evidence to the contrary, that hope could be sustained without proof, and that conviction has little to do with what can be seen in the visible world, but everything to do with trust in what cannot be seen; and that is an intangible but never failing benevolent and gracious God who hovers over all of our best efforts, against all evidence to the contrary, for a better world.

Here is a remarkable story against all evidence to the contrary. In 1952, scientists, interested in observing the life and habits of a colony of Japanese monkeys on the Island of Koshima, routinely dropped sweet potatoes on the sand as a way to bring the monkeys closer to the shore. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they disliked the unpleasant dirt from the sand. One day an 18-month-old female monkey named Imo discovered that she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in the water before she ate them. She soon taught this trick to her mother and several of her playmate friends, who in turn taught their mothers to wash the potatoes as well. As the scientists observed, this new idea and cultural innovation was gradually picked up and learned by sheer imitation, or so the scientists first thought, by other monkeys on the island. Between 1952 and 1958, in just six years, all of the young monkeys had learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them taste better. Only the adult monkeys who paid attention to their children learned this social skill as well. The other grown-up monkeys went right on eating the sandy potatoes.

Then something startling and scientifically unexplainable happened. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys on this island were washing sweet potatoes; the exact number is not known. Let’s suppose when the sun rose on that particular morning that there were 99 monkeys who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. Let’s further suppose that later that morning the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes. Then it happened—some sort of critical mass phenomenon. By that evening, almost every monkey in the colony was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough. But even more remarkable was this: the most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes over on this island here spontaneously jumped over the sea. All at once, colonies of monkeys on other islands began washing their sweet potatoes, all independently of one another.

If faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, then it is the high calling of each and every Christian to be, if not the first, then at least that one-hundredth monkey, the one that provides the breakthrough, that demonstrates with the conviction of things not seen that things can change for the better; that if enough of us become aware of something, all of us might become aware of it—especially if we are attentive to the younger generation in our midst—and not only become aware, but make a change for the better, for a better world.

What in our world today is the equivalent of unwashed sweet potatoes? What in our world today is burdened with the weight of needed change? I would suggest many things. But in 2007, I would suggest at least this: that it is a pervasive and insidious indifference for what was once called a collective will for the common good.

At our annual “Day on the Hill” last March, where the Jewish, Christian, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and now Islamic communities gathered together to hear about the quality of life in Minnesota, and what the religious community might say about it, I listened to a keynote speaker, who was the minister from St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in St. Paul, and he asked this question: “What has happened to a collective sense of the common good?” I was so startled to hear a phrase that I had not heard in public debates much of late that I began to take note. And he told us that one night he was up late and unable to sleep—he was thinking about the condition of the world in which we live—and because he was not able to sleep, he finally gave in at two o’clock in the morning and switched on the TV, where they were, on CNN or something like that, replaying a speech delivered in 1973 by none other than Richard Nixon. 1973. In that speech delivered in 1973, the President of the United States called on Congress to raise the minimum wage, to fully fund federal education mandates, to establish universal healthcare for all, and to ensure the quality of life for all Americans, especially the most vulnerable. And all in that speech in 1973 he said, “for the sake of the common good.” Both conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, in 1973 took concern for the common good for granted. They just advocated different strategies on how to get there.

When this speaker asked our assembled religious community of over one thousand people, “When did concern for the common good evaporate?” “When did the vision embodied in the Bill of Rights, guaranteeing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not just for a few but for all, disappear?” “Can we in this nation,” he asked, “recover our collective soul?”

I prayed a lot this week, because in prayer, as Henry Nouwen used to tell us, his students, “In prayer you do not hear a voice so much as acquire a voice, your own voice, to learn to speak comfort to those in distress and to speak truth to power.” I prayed a lot this week in order not to lose my ability to believe in a better world, to not lose the fundamental Christian sense that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen, so as not to lose heart, but to keep striving for peace, defending justice, and informing good people, so remarkably indifferent, that there is another way.

And I gave thanks this week for those in a moment of crisis at the collapse of something so normally dependable as a bridge; those whom I mentioned in my sermon of last week, whose names I did not yet know; those who opted to expand their circle of awareness to include those around them before their own instinct for safety and security. The two young people I give thanks for this day were Jeremy Hernandez, who rather than flee for safety helped 61 others off of a school bus; and a young woman, known only to the victim who she assisted as Jenny, has turned out in later meetings and interviews to be a young woman in medical school, seeking a life of service for others.

We are living not only in dangerous times, but fragile times. And we would do well to remember the words of Einstein, who understood, perhaps more than any scientist of his time, how essential it is that we learn the art of faith and hope, with an ever-expanding circle of awareness and compassion for one another. “A human being,” he wrote, “is part of the whole, called by us the ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. Here she experiences the self, their own thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and instincts and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” “Our task,” he says, “must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of the created order in its beauty.”

As I mentioned earlier, a task force at Immanuel has put together a new series to begin in September, and run all the way through May. It is entitled “Aging Splendidly.” One of our keynote speakers later in the year will take up the theme of Leaving a Legacy. Richard Anderson is a Lutheran pastor, who up until recently spent years at Thrivent assisting good Lutherans in estate planning. In the description of his forum, he sent this bit of information: “A survey among octogenarians”—those are people who are 80 years old and above—“A survey among octogenarians asked: ‘If you could change anything about your life, what would it be?’ While many people looking back over their lives were happy with them, there were three common answers to the question. (1) ‘I would reflect more’; (2) ‘I would risk more’; and (3) ‘I would do something that would have lasting value.’”

If Einstein was right, that our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, if our elders can be beacons of wisdom for us, pointing to the human longing to leave a legacy of lasting value before it is too late, if our children can teach us innovations like the 18-month-old Japanese monkey along with the hundredth monkey showed the way to make the world a better place, then isn’t it time for us as Americans to abandon not only its violence and injustice, but worse yet, indifference, and begin washing the sand off of each and every one of our sweet potatoes? For in the end, the common good as well as our common humanity is not something we are called to create, only something that God asks us to recognize as already there, for to tread on the soul of a single person is to tread on the collective soul of the whole, for God made each of us created in God’s image and with a common humanity and a common destiny, inextricably bound up now and for eternity.

“Do not be afraid, little flock,” Jesus said in our Gospel for today, “for it is your Heavenly Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” And if enough of us believe that as such a thing as a critical mass could occur on an island with monkeys learning to wash sweet potatoes, then surely those of us given the keys to the kingdom, individually and collectively, can make a better world; for faith is still the assurance of things hoped for; it is a conviction of things not yet seen.

Amen.