First Parish Bedford UU

“Foot Warmers and Furnaces:
Stewardship and Tough Times”

A Sermon by Rev. John Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, October 19, 2008

at First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts





This sermon had its origins at our Parish Board retreat last month.  The Board, you understand, is the strategy and policy arm of First Parish. (By the way, I have heard a few of you make good jokes about our experiments in new governance as we’ve adopted a Board for policy matters and a Leadership Team for operational matters, and there’s also a Council and there are new clusters of committees and we’re riding our horses in many directions at once, looking at – among other things – by-laws and finance and building renovation and whether we should have two Sunday morning services…and one of you asked me recently, “How’s it going with the, uh, Parish Senate and our new Electoral College?” and, indeed, our heads can spin.

 

Truly, I can say we are attempting to do some things differently – looking further ahead at what First Parish will look like to the next generation, how we can sustain our remarkable growth, how we can do things that take into account the “time starvation” so many of us feel and not burn out our volunteers, and how we can remain spiritually, intellectually, and ethically relevant to our challenging times.



Well, one of the things the Board knows is that – if we are to do the things we imagine, the things we really need to do – we need to renew and deepen our sense of stewardship.  

Stewardship is a funny word and too often it is just a euphemism for fund-raising.  Sometimes when people start talking about stewardship they’re just talking about innovative ways of picking your pocket; and you can almost hear the sound of wallets snapping shut.

An older Christian said to a new Christian, “Brother, if you had one hundred sheep, would you give fifty of them for the Lord’s work?”  “Yes I would.”  “Would you do the same if you had one hundred cows?”  “Yes, I would.”  “How about if you had one hundred horses?”  Would you do the same?”  “Sure I would.”  “Now, if you had two pigs, would you give one of them to the Lord?”  “No I would not!  And you have no right to ask me, for you know I have two pigs!”



Well, yes, a part of stewardship is fund-raising:  if we are to remain a welcoming church…and I believe there is a moral imperative to being welcoming every bit as important as our imperative to feeding the hungry, because we are asked to feed those who are hungry for an inclusive safe haven – where you don’t have to check any part of you at the door (neither your brains nor your heart nor any aspect of your identity) and, yes, if we want this place to live out progressive values in the next generation, then we will need to feed and fuel this place with more funding because we really do need to have a full-time assistant minister (not someday but now); we need to make our balconies and those rooms upstairs more welcoming and functional (not someday but now); and in order for people to go upstairs we need an elevator that can accommodate the kind of wheelchairs and scooters that people use these days (not someday but now).  These are not luxuries but the sort of things we need to sustain our growth, to be truly welcoming – to feed the hungry. 



And to accomplish these things we’ll need not just more money but a renewed and deeper sense of purpose and participation and accountability.  And, while some of the time I say, “This sounds like work!  Let’s just go back to the way things were and let’s have a good time,” the rest of the time I say that this deeper commitment is what it means to live our values and to be what the poet Philip Larkin called, “a serious place on a serious earth..., ” to feed the hungry.



Now some of you might question the sanity of someone advancing the cause of stewardship this week, or this month, or this year.  My bank – the one I mentioned in a sermon two weeks ago that had lost 72% of its value in a recent single day – last week it was sold to a Spanish conglomerate and last week I learned that my savings have lost 20% of their value (it could be worse).  I wished my banker “Buenos dias” and she said that, of 12 customers she’d seen that day, 8 had made the same dumb joke!



Actually, I think this is a perfect time to talk about stewardship and here’s why.  First of all, we’re not going to be actively raising money anytime soon; our annual stewardship campaign will happen as usual in the late winter and if there’s to be a capital campaign to raise more serious money, that won’t happen for another year.  Your two pigs are safe.  For now.



But here’s the more important reason why this is a perfect time to talk about stewardship: Do you remember the first days and weeks after 9/11?  I don’t diminish the horror of those days but there was also something actually refreshing.  Do you remember how quiet and reflective and searching that time was?  The insipid outrageous junk that usually clogs our media vanished.  There was a hushed seriousness as we asked what those attacks meant, how do others see America, and how should we respond?  I recall in those first weeks after 9/11 that even the words of the hymns we sang in church took on new power: oh, I thought, those old words speak to us, now! 



Well, too soon that odd quiet was replaced by nationalist blather and braggadocio, by flag-waving and military adventurism and by criminal abuses of power…but there was, for a brief period, a wonderful odd time of curious quiet.

 

There is in America today, I believe, some element of that curious reflective quiet.  People are asking and wondering: however did we get into this economic mess?  What are the lessons of this disaster?  And, while there will be liars and speculators and criminals who should go to jail, there seems also a sense that there may be some things that all of us should be doing differently and that all our priorities need reassessment.



There have always been some among us who have advocated for “voluntary simplicity” – the green and crunchy ones who buy little on credit, who forswear extravagant holiday giving or who hang their clothes outside to dry or who ride their bikes to work or to church – those people once seemed but a fringe movement; but now it seems there is growing awareness that frugal values – what in New England used to be called “scrimy” values – are indeed sustainable values.

Stewardship is another old word – and it means more than frugal scriminess - and the truth is that stewardship is not just or even mostly about money.  To be a steward is to acknowledge that our lives are not just our own but that we are part of a larger whole and that we have a responsibility to do more than consume but, indeed, to safeguard all our resources, and to sustain the flow of energy that makes our community life possible.



Here’s where I bring in the example of foot warmers and furnaces.  When this church was gathered in 1729, New England was a rather inhospitable place and there was not much of a social safety net: every person was largely responsible for him or herself.  The churches were unheated – and the law required everyone to attend church, whatever the weather, ice, snow, mud, sleet or swelter.

 

“Behold the Sabbath: oh what a weariness it is!” complained those who petitioned the state legislature to break away from Concord and Billerica and establish the new town of Bedford.  And in cold weather each person or family carried their own foot warmer and its hot coals and placed it in their own rented box pew to listen to the sermons that were paid for by everyone’s taxes – there was no separation of church and state. You took care of yourself and you paid for what was yours: it was a stern and rugged individualist and free market consumerist culture.



That’s the way it was, but things changed.  In 1834 in Massachusetts church and state were separated – that’s called disestablishmentarianism (and the people who favored the old ways were anti-disestablishmentarians.  I just thought you’d like to know).   So in 1834 the support of churches became voluntary.  Methodists and Catholics and Jews and probably the village atheist didn’t believe that their taxes should support the Harvard-trained occupant of this pulpit; and as the larger culture became more diverse, so too the internal culture of the congregation changed so as not to favor the wealthy over the poor.  Instead of stern rocky individualism, there developed a new sense of common-weal. 

 

In 1847, wood-burning stoves were installed in this audience room, as it was called – back there in the corners - and stovepipe ran beneath the galleries up to chimneys there and there.  Up till our last building renovation those chimney chases were visible; you can still see a ripple in the ceiling where they were. 



After 1847, people stopped bringing their foot warmers but then people contributed firewood and the church owned a woodlot that fueled the stoves and paid the minister with some wood to supplement the hank of rutabagas and victuals that was his salary (our partner minister in Transylvania, you know, is still paid in potatoes and firewood.  Don’t get any ideas!).



Eventually, the stoves were replaced by a furnace in the cellar, out of sight (until a few years ago, we used to be greeted by an occasional puff of oily smoke but now it’s natural gas and we hardly notice).



There is a paradigm shift, you see, from foot warmers to furnaces:  instead of looking out individualistically only for oneself, to have a furnace is to say that all are welcome here; you don’t have to bring your own heat with you; the heat shall rise on the just and unjust alike.  The good news is that you can come here as you are, shivering and hungry perhaps and still you will be warmed and fed.  The bad news is that the furnace is out of sight.

  

As one who used to heat exclusively with wood I remember the adage that “wood heat warms you twice” - in the chopping and the burning; but truly I have no romance for wood-heat, no regrets about living with furnaces.  A parishioner once told me that central heat was the greatest thing that had happened in his lifetime; I know what he meant.



Now get this: Stewardship is the awareness that, however invisibly, we are still responsible for one another.  Stewardship is an awareness of that which is invisible but which sustains our community life:  for this community to breathe out warmth and goodness and deeds of justice, it must breathe in all our resources of good will, and participation, and contribution of energies in whatever form we possess.



I tested out some of this sermon last Thursday at our discussion group at Carleton-Willard.  For all the worries many of us have about fixed incomes and “saving something for my children” and uncertainty about the future, you should know that some of our most generous contributors – financially and most every other way – are seniors at Carleton-Willard and elsewhere.  They are exemplars of stewardship, thinking about legacy and the old Iroquois confederacy imperative to consider the impact of one’s actions unto the 7th generation.  Perhaps you noticed the recent news that Carleton-Willard has started providing some of the senior lunches in Bedford; as First Parish and other institutions try to do, they are acting as stewards of our larger community.



And when, at Carleton-Willard, I asked how the residents learned about stewardship, we heard some wonderful stories.  One of our parishioners – she is a member here, like our furnace, mostly invisible but a real heat-generator nonetheless - told a story from when she was 8 or so years old.  “I visited my grandmother,” she said.  “And my grandmother had one of those snow globes that you turn upside down and the snow floats down on some pretty scene.  Well, I really liked that snow globe and so one day, when my grandmother wasn’t looking, I took it.  And when my grandmother realized it was missing, she asked me about it.  Innocently, naively, I said I had taken it.  It was then that my grandmother taught me a lesson I have never forgotten:  “Never, never may you take without permission anything that is not yours.”  “Not even a pin?” I asked.  “My grandmother responded, ‘Not even a straight pin.’”



When one Carleton-Willard resident admitted that she felt an obligation to leave some legacy to her children, another responded, “I feel a responsibility to give to those organizations and institutions whose values will sustain my children’s’ future.”



This reminded me of another story I read recently:  One morning a dad waited with his son for the New York City bus that would take his ten-year old to school.  The father remembers:  “Passing the time, my son told me about all the different ways he and his friends scammed the bus drivers to get a free ride. They used expired bus passes; they passed a single card between them so it was used multiple times; they set up elaborate games of distraction; and so on.  Especially since I knew money was not an issue for him and his friends I asked why he did it.  He answered with his own question, ‘Why should we pay when we can get it for free?’  Feeling like a teaching moment had arrived, I explained that in order for the city to have buses in the first place, it required all citizens to share the burden of the cost, and paying a small fare was the price.  He said, ‘Yeah, I know, but still, if I can get away with it, why shouldn’t I?’  I spent the rest of the morning thinking about his question.  I knew it was an age-appropriate moral conundrum for him, but I wondered just how many adults had actually learned the answer.”



Considering our current economic crisis, I wonder how many purveyors of sub-prime mortgages, derivatives, credit-default swaps and all the other ill-understood financial instruments have learned the answer.



Why should you pay when you can get heat from a furnace for free?  I’m not really talking about First Parish here, you understand; I’m talking about life in a community, life in a commonwealth.  The common good is advanced when we stoke the invisible furnaces that warm us all.  Once more, I’m not talking just or primarily about money: I’m talking about living in right relationship with one another, cultivating appreciation for one another, treating one another with dignity and respect.  This too is stewardship for our lives are not our own alone.



We live in anxious, fearful, troubled times; and there is great temptation to pin our hopes or our opprobrium on one or another candidate or party or crook or corporation.  There is temptation to withdraw, get under the covers and hoard what we’ve got in our mattresses.  What I’m suggesting to you today is that now is the time for us to invest in values and purposes that are larger than ourselves and that represent our hopes for a better world.  That’s the antidote to fear and anxiety.



Don’t take without giving – not even a straight pin.  Treat one another with utmost kindness, respect and dignity as is deserved by every human being, and as you deserve to be treated.  And, in our common life, may we stoke and tend to the invisible furnaces that warm and sustain us.  Amen.