New Testament Reading—Matthew 13: 10-16
Kelsey, is forty-four years old, single, and as of a little more than two weeks ago jobless. She had been working for a firm as an accountant until she received notice that she had been laid off. During the first couple of weeks, she had kept herself busy doing tasks she did not have time to do while working. Her plan was to recover over the course of a few weeks until she began to search for a new job. Initially, she told herself that it would be like a vacation.
With her first few weeks of freedom having passed, however, she now feels overcome by the sense that her life lacks meaning and purpose. She finds herself asking whether there is more to it than this. These thoughts keep her awake at night until finally an idea hits her. She will go on a vision quest. She will go hiking, not on just a short hike, but on a long, challenging hike, a hike that will last days and stretch her capacity to endure. She makes all of the necessary preparations for supplies, and she maps out where she will camp each night.
Kelsey begins her hike focused mainly on getting further ahead on the trail. Her eyes scarcely look to the woods around her. Her ears hardly hear the birds of the trees or the wind passing through their leaves. Her sites are trained solely on the path straight in front of her, so much so that her neck sometimes becomes stiff from looking down at the trail. Occasionally, she tilts her head upwards or to the side to relieve the tension. When she does so, she becomes delighted by what she sees. She regrets all that she misses by looking only at the ground before her, and she promises herself that she will look around more as she hikes.
Then, on the third day of her hike, after hiking for some distance, she experiences something most unusual. She comes across a large clearing, and in the clearing are two brightly colored circus tents. The tents look identical. They are striped with orange and blue stripes. At the top of each is a red flag swaying gently in the wind. Kelsey is curious. She sees no one around, so she steps first into the tent to her left. Carefully and with anticipation, she pulls back the canvas to enter. She expects to see something magical, or at least something that would excite her senses. Perhaps, a lion or an elephant. However, she is sorely disappointed. When she enters and looks around, she sees only ordinary things. She sees pots and pans, old sofas and chairs, a dining room table and rather plain looking silverware. Further on, she sees a rather dull looking television from the 1990s, not a large flat screen HD TV. She sees nothing fancy or new, just old bookcases, knick-knacks, and the like. There are also plants growing in pots and flowers resting in vases, but nothing exotic, nothing from say a tropical island or rainforest. In the tent, there are no wild animals to be tamed either. There is just a sleeping cat and an anxious, restless dog. Yawning, Kelsey soon turns around to exit.
She leaves hoping to get back on the trail quickly and to make up for lost time, but as soon as she pulls back the canvas and steps back into the light, she is greeted by a loud and cheerful yell. Across the way is a ringmaster standing in front of the other tent. He is wearing a tall black hat, a red coat with tales, a stylish white shirt with ruffled folds down the front, and a pair crisply ironed black pants. His face has a jolly red complexion with a black mustache that curls. In his right hand is a baton-like stick with a silver ball on the end. As Kelsey, steps out into the light, the ringmaster quickly lifts his hat with his left hand and twirls his baton with right as his seductive, booming voice calls out, “Introducing the sights and sounds that will dazzle your senses and send you home in a blissful daze! Step right in, madam, step right in!”
And, so Kelsey steps right in. Immediately, she is hit with a tidal wave of memories, smells, sights, and feelings that touch every note, every chord of joy and passion for life that she has ever felt. There to her right is a pan of her favorite cookies—peanut butter cookies, thick and moist with real peanuts. They are cooked to golden brown perfection. She sees the steam rising off of them, their sweet aroma drifting toward her. These are the same cookies her mother had made for her as a child. Her mother did not bake them for special occasions. She baked them as a surprise, and the surprise always seemed to come when Kelsey was feeling down, when she was having a rough time at school, when kids made fun of her for being a painfully shy and awkward girl with glasses.
After eating a cookie, Kelsey becomes intrigued by what she sees further on. She sees what looks like the living room where her family once gathered. She sits down in the sofa chair, the same sofa chair in which her father used to sit with her as they watched TV. The TV is on. It is playing her favorite movie of all, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Every Christmas Eve, she and her father would watch it as her mother wrapped gifts on the dining room table behind closed doors warning that no one was to enter as she worked. The movie is right at the scene where the suicidal George Bailey has finished seeing what the town of Bedford Falls would have been like if he had never existed. He pleads with God to let him live again. God answers his prayer. George rushes home, and there he finds all of his friends and family gathered together. They have pooled their money together to save George’s loan business from closing. Kelsey remembers that it was right at the beginning of this scene when she could sense her father holding his breath, his chest-tightening, as he tried not to cry. Eventually, he would casually move his hand to his cheek to wipe the tear away, hoping she wouldn’t notice.
With tears in her own eyes, Kelsey moves on. She comes to an old bookcase. She recognizes the books at once. They are the books from her days at college. There is Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead. Much to her surprise this book about prisoners had revealed more to her about the humanity of people than any book she had ever read. She could still picture the scene in which a dead prisoner is dragged off like a routine part of life. Even in death, he is still bound with heavy fetters. It is then that another prisoner inexplicably yells out, “He had a mother too!” Memory of the passage still affects Kelsey. Suddenly, her eyes then spot the first book of poetry that she ever loved. It contains a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca. She had memorized it and repeated it to herself whenever she became sad and lonely. She could still remember it. The poet offers a poem to his love because he has nothing else to give. In the simplest of language, he asks his love to keep the poem as she would a warm coat in the midst of winter. Then, liking the poem to a compass, he says, “Treasure it as you would if you were lost, needing direction, in the wilderness life becomes when mature.”
Kelsey puts the book back on the shelf. Silently, she stands for a moment, and then slowly she moves on. She comes next to a small room. It looks just like the bedroom in her first apartment after graduating from college. A bed, desk, beanbag, and dresser all packed closely together. On the dresser is a plant, a miniature fern, and above that to the left
hangs a pot of purple impatiens. Every day, she had come home to water her plants. It had felt so good to give something life after spending her day at a lifeless job typing data into a computer. That was when she discovered it was possible to love a plant and talk to it like a friend. Now Kelsey suddenly feels as if she is seeing a long lost roommate, a companion she once confided in but has not seen in years. Those plants had done so much for such a small room.
Moving on Kelsey sees what looks like the home she just left before leaving on her journey. There is her cat who loves to sleep and purr, and there is her new puppy. He is tied to a leash that in turn is tied to the leg of a coffee table. The puppy is brown, furry, almost like a little stuffed teddy bear with shiny black eyes. He is at the end of his leash, pulling on it, trying to jump a few inches further, only to be pulled abruptly back. He is curious and determined to see and discover the world that lies just a few mere feet away.
It is then that it dawns upon Kelsey. Underneath this tent are all of the things that she saw in the other tent, but now they all seem so different. They have life. It wasn’t that the other tent was dead. It was that she had been scarcely alive. She couldn’t see the meaning and beauty and the rich texture that was so plainly before her. Lost in her thoughts, her memories, she stops, and then she hears that song, that song she had heard so many times before, that song that she loved, that song that she knew by heart…
(Blessed Assurance played on the piano; the congregation joins in singing).
(After singing…)
In telling parables, Jesus took the stuff of ordinary life and turned them into keys to the Kingdom of God. In each of our lives, there are seemingly ordinary things that can be keys to the Kingdom, points of entry into the divine. Over the next several weeks, we will be doing a worship series on spiritual literacy, where we will consider different keys and pathways that lead us to God. During this series, I would like to invite each of you to submit pictures, quotes, songs, quilts, or anything we might be able to tastefully present to the church to represent the different ways in which we each have found the deep meanings of life. They could be pictures of Christmas with the family, they could be pictures of nature, they could be pictures of pets, whatever gives you a sense of profound meaning, a sense of connection to the divine. We will be collecting both digital photos on disc or via email as well as photos already developed. We hope to make a video out of the pictures submitted so that at the end of the worship series on September 14th, we will then be able to show a video presentation of the pictures after worship in Bradford Hall. Thanks to a suggestion from Pam Osborne, Virginia will also be seeking to learn your best-loved hymns and ask that you might present them either verbally or in writing over the course of both the worship series and the upcoming year. Feel free to bring into the church office anything you want to give us. More details will be in the next issue of the Link. I look forward to seeing your submissions. And, now will the ushers please come forward for this morning’s offering.