Hebrew Scripture Reading—Psalm 127: 1-3
The first seven months of Eva’s life entailed little sleep for her parents Scott and Ruth. They lived “in a second-floor apartment on the nosiest avenue” in town running east and west. Eva was a light sleeper, and despite the best efforts of her parents, she awoke with great frequency twitching and wailing as sounds intruded from the street. Ruth would nurse Eva into a dreamy state, only to have a pickup truck roar past without a muffler. In turn, Scott would coax and rock Eva into a slumber, only to have a bus rudely belch into the night. “Night after night,” Scott sang his way through a book of North American folk songs from “cover to cover and back again, while carrying Eva in circles over the crickety floorboards.” He would spend “hours of singing and miles of walking to lull her to stillness” only to have “a siren or diesel [truck]…undo the spell in seconds.”
So it was that after “seven nearly sleepless months,” Ruth and Scott stared at each other with bleary eyes across the breakfast table and muttered together in one breath, “We’ve got to move.” Soon, they began their search for a home. Each had quiet different visions of their dream house. Having grown up in a city, Ruth wanted a sturdy house “within a few steps of the place next door, in a neighborhood of sidewalks and flower beds where folks traded recipes and sat on their porches and pushed babies in buggies at dusk.” Having been raised in the country, Scott “wanted a log cabin beside a pond [amid] three hundred acres of woods bordering on a wilderness. Failing that,” he would settle for a run-down farmhouse on a dirt road unknown to maps.” Ultimately, the two compromised. They bought “a house in town that was as badly in need of repair as any cabin in the country.”
What made the house particularly attractive was that it was located within “a two-block sanctuary of silence, cut off at one end by a cross-street, [and] at the other end by woods.” There were “no trucks, no sirens, no hustling jalopies. You could hear the birds in the big trees, crickets in the grass, children on screened porches.” Heaven, however, sometimes comes at a price. In the “cheery lingo” of a realtor, the house was “a fixer-upper or a handyman’s dream.” (Maybe that’s what our church is: a handyman’s dream.)
A month after Scott and Ruth moved into their new house, Scott’s parents came to visit. His parents might be described as handyman and handywoman. Scott recalls, “During my childhood, they fixed up their own series of dilapidated houses, turning sows’ ears into silk purses, thereby convincing me that a place isn’t truly yours until you rebuild it with your own hands.” When Scott’s parents visited, they had two things on their mind: to fawn over Eva and to closely inspect the fixer-upper. “As soon as” Scott’s father “could bear to put” Eva down, he went into the basement, opened the fuse box, hummed ominously, “then came back upstairs and removed the faceplate from a light switch and peered inside.” With a frown, he then turned toward Scott and said, “Son, you’ve got to rewire this house. I won’t have my granddaughter sleeping in a firetrap.” They began work that afternoon. Ruth and Scott worked for months on the job after Scott’s parents left. They went from room to room replacing “every outlet, every switch, every wire, fishing new three-strand cable down from the attic or up from the basement, driving copper stakes into the soil to drain away any loose amps.” By the time they were done, electricity could reliably flow through their house without incident.
The next winter Scott’s parents visited once again. This time his father “ran his hands over the walls in Eva’s room.” Ominously, he hummed. “He lit a match, blew it out, then held the smoking stub near the window beside her crib.” Scott knew what was coming next. “Son,” his father declared, “you’ve got to insulate and weatherstrip and caulk, or my baby’s going to catch pneumonia.” Scott later recalled “that job took two years” to do properly. At one point, Scott “pried away the lath and plaster next to where [Eva’s] crib had stood,” only to find on the wood “a message scrawled in carpenter’s chalk”: “Billy Wales is a stinker! June 12, 1926.”
What I am relaying to you this morning is just the abridged version of some of the adventures Scott Sanders shares about his house in his book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Scott’s purpose in telling this story isn’t just to entertain. The story of the first and only house he has owned is a spiritual story. The question that drives his reflections is how and “by what alchemy does a house become a home?” Scott writes 20 years after he first moved into the house with his family. He has watched his daughter Eva grow-up and leave for college. He has watched his second child Jesse grow-up as well. He recalls that as he and Ruth overhauled their abode “inch by inch,” they were driven by concern. First, a concern for Eva and then later a concern for Jesse as well. With this history, Scott replies to the question of how a house becomes a home. He says, “The short answer is that these walls and floors and scruffy flower beds are saturated with our memories and sweat. Everywhere I look I see the imprint of hands, everywhere I turn I hear the babble of voices, I smell sawdust or bread, I recall bruises and laughter. After nearly two decades of intimacy, the house dwells in us as surely as we dwell in the house.” Scott then spells out how God is at the heart of this process of a house becoming a home. He shares that the Bible states in negative terms what can also be said positively. The Bible says that a house won’t stand without God. In other words, God is there in all the actions, cares, and concerns that enable a house to withstand the storms of life and thrive as a family’s home. God is there in the “work of many hands.” God is there in “the wishes of many hearts.” God is there in “vision upon vision” from one family and one generation to the next.
As I read what Sanders had to say, I remembered how the best lesson I have been taught about stewardship came not from a book, a seminary professor, or a veteran pastor. It came from talking with Gertie Hettman during Bob’s final weeks. At the time, I was wrestling with what I would possibly say during this capital campaign. In writing my dissertation, I spent enough time listening to other pastors talk about money that I knew what I didn’t want to say. Who wants to be chided or scolded into giving money to a church? Who wants to be given false promises about how God will give you a tenfold return for whatever you give?
But there I sat next Bob and Gertie hearing the best sermon on stewardship I had ever heard. Gertie had painted for me a picture of how Bob would crawl up and down the rows of lettuce hour after hour, day after day. She then told me how on Saturday morning Bob would deliver his lettuce to the market. At that point, I think most of us would probably have gone home for a nap, but not Bob. Bob would go to the church where he would work through the afternoon taking care of this place. Of course, I had long heard the legendary stories about Bob climbing up on the roof and caulking the skylight. What I hadn’t heard was that we used to have plants along the edges of this sanctuary and Bob would catwalk along the edges watering and grooming them.
What struck me in hearing these stories was how freely Bob gave of himself to the church. No one chided him into working on Saturdays, and he didn’t belly ache about doing it. He simply did it with a generous spirit. When I would visit with Bob, I would try to uncover what it was that made him tick and do what he did. I wanted to mass produce whatever Bob had, so I would ask him questions about what motivated him. Full of heartfelt emotion, he would say, “Because it’s my church.” His voice would almost crack with teary affection when he said “my church” in the same way that others might speak of their special loved one. I deeply appreciated the tenderness behind Bob’s answers, but I will admit that a part of me at the time secretly felt unsatisfied by his brevity. I wanted more insight. Back then, however, I don’t think I had fully come to understand what I know now. I think what Bob was saying in his own way was that our church was not just a house to him. It was a home. How did it become home? Through all of the loving sweat, he put into this building. Through all of the caring concern, he had for us here.
Bob was one of the many vessels through which God has cared for this church. In room after room of this church are the sweat and memories of those who have given of themselves and made this church a home, a home in which God’s love can shine forth through the windows from heaven above, a home in which God’s love can shine forth on each one of us. Amen.