Rev. Edmund Robinson   
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
November 14, 1999

At the opening Sunday Service in September, Bob Allman talked about a presentation he had heard at General Assembly by A UCC Minister named Stephen Gray on "The Myth of Scarcity and the Reality of Abundance," and Bob was so inspired by this that he asked for a chance to present the salient points to the Board of Management at our retreat in August. Mr. Gray is indeed an inspiring speaker, and he had also spoken to the minister’s gathering at GA. Here is one story he told:

It seems that Matilda and Bert were visiting the Blue Hills Fair, and there was an open-cockpit airplane there with a sign on it that said – "rides for two: $10" Matilda said, "Oh, Bert, I sure would like to take one of those -- I’ve always wanted to fly and see this valley we live in." Bert says, "I don’t think so. Ten dollars is ten dollars." Matilda says, "But Bert, I’m 73 years old and might not get the chance again, Let’s do it." Bert says

"I don’t think so. Ten dollars is ten dollars."

So the pilot is hearing all this and he steps forward and says, "Tell you what, folks, you seem like such nice people, I’d be willing to take you up for free as long as you don’t say one word during the flight. But if you say anything, you owe me ten dollars." They agreed and got in the plane and took off.

Well, that pilot was determined to make then say something and he took them through loop-de-loops and barrel rolls and stalls and steep dives, but nothing worked. he was just amazed that they seemed to be able to hold their tongues. He got the plane back down and turned to Matilda and said, "well, I guess I misjudged you lady. I was betting that you’d have to say something during all that." She replied, "well, I was about to say something when Bert fell out, but then, ten dollars is ten dollars."

Now the humor in that story might be that Matilda is glad to get rid of such a tight-fisted husband, but I think it’s more a satire on the tight-fisted attitude itself. No matter how much we value money, we’re not going to value it over life, or are we?

I said a couple of weeks ago that the word worship comes from the word worth, and that the act of worshiping something is the act of according worth to that thing. Some of us indeed worship money, and I suggested that that worship might be idolatry, even in our liberal denomination. Others of us worship the things that money can buy.

Things have no intrinsic worth in themselves; they only acquire worth as we are willing to give them worth, either by the esteem in which we hold them if they are not for sale, or in the price we are willing to pay for them if they are. There is a story – I think actually it is a country music song – about an old violin which is about to be sold at auction. The thing doesn’t look like much, all covered with dust and grime, and the best that the auctioneer has been able to get for it is Ten Dollars. But in this story, ten dollars isn’t ten dollars. As the gavel is descending for the third time, a stranger in the back of the room shouts, "wait." All eyes are upon him as the moves to the front, dusts off the violin and tunes it, and draws a bow across the strings. He proceeds to play the most beautiful music anyone there has ever heard. He leaves the instrument there, and the bidding is reopened and the instrument sells for $10,000. What was it worth? Well, it’s worth to that collection of bidders was very different before the performance than after.

And I’ll give you one more story about worth. As many of you know, my significant other Jacqueline Schwab has been privileged to play piano on the soundtrack of many of the PBS films of Ken Burns. About six or eight years ago, he produced a film called Baseball which exhaustively examined our national pastime. He asked Jacqueline to play a number of period tunes. One of these was a tune called, "The Minstrel Boy Has Gone to War," which was composed in the early 19th Century decades before baseball was invented, and whose only connection to baseball was that Ken Burns included it in the film. Now if you ever look in old hymn books or books of popular songs and tunes, you realize that the number of tunes that die is much greater than the ones that survive. The fact that anything is old does not by that fact alone make it valuable. We have all kinds of Nineteenth Century books on philosophy and theology in the next room, for example, and I expect that few people here have ever been curious enough to open one.

Well, the Minstrel Boy was like those old books, a relic of a bygone era, until Burns saw fit to include it in the Baseball film. Because he did so, however, an advertising agency became interested in the tune to accompany a commercial and that was how Jacqueline got asked to re-record the tune for MasterCard. You may have seen the commercial during baseball games in the last two years: an adorable little-league team is being taken to their first major-league game, and the announcer is saying, "tickets, $27.50, popcorn $15, big puffy hand $4, their first major league game, priceless – there are some things money can’t buy – for everything else, there’s MasterCard." Well, the heart-warming piano tune that plays behind this heart-warming set of images and words is "The Minstrel Boy," and its rediscovery by the advertising agency got Jacqueline more money than she had gotten for the whole Baseball film in the first place.

Well, the worth of things is not in the things themselves, but in how we value them. But the commercial is right, there are some things that money can’t buy. Many of the things that we value in this church and about this church are things money can’t buy.

Cornel West, one of our leading social critics, says that the most fundamental problem with American culture at present is that we have surrendered too many of our values to the marketplace. We are pressured at every turn to value those things which are expensive and to disregard those things which cost little or nothing.

We also look to the church as a refuge from the market forces that grind us so in the other aspects of our lives. It is getting impossible for an average family to find a place to live, whether renting or buying, in the current real estate market. The price of food is going up steadily, and our reliance on more expensive prepared foods goes up as our time to prepare shrinks. Education for our children has gone through the roof, as has medical care and drugs. The church is one place where you can be accepted whether or not you can pay an admission fee. Your worth here is not measured in how much you make.

Yet the church is part of our value systems, and is part of our lives. And to some extent, the worth that we place on the church can be measured in money. Not just in money, but money is one measure. Jesus said, "where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." So much of our money has to go to things like food and shelter and education, but don’t we want to also put our money where our heart is?

Giving should not be a negative thing or a guilt thing. Pledging to this church is an expression of faith and hope and gratitude. So I would like for each of us to get a pledge card from Vicki, and to consider this week as you contemplate your cards, How much do you value this place. What is this church worth to you?

What is the worth of your encounters with Alva Fullum, the encouraging words, the "hello dear?" What is the worth of having Ellen Allman and now Susan Paino help in raising your children? What is the worth of all the Christmas plays, the Halloween parties, the choir music, the sermons, the coffeehouses? What is it worth for there to be support in your own search or ultimate meaning in life, that doesn’t tell you what to think but encourages you in what you find? What’s it worth to you for this town to have a liberal church when all the others are strictly orthodox?

These are worth questions you have to answer outside the market. Church pledges aren’t bought and sold. But you still have a measure in your own mind.

In my Gleam column this month, I crunched a few numbers, and they indicated that if the average income of this church approximated the average income of Wakefield in 1990, we would have a total household income of over Two Million Dollars. Greg has advised me that the actual figures are probably higher than that. But even with that figure, our budget’s pledge figure of $26,000 represents only 1.2%. I don’t have any magic number to suggest to you, I suggest that at 1%, there is considerable potential for growth in our pledge base, even if we don’t add new members this year, and we clearly are adding them as we saw today.

Now I’ve talked about worth in terms our your past experience with this church, but pledging is also about the future. It is about hope and faith and what you would like this church to be. If you want this church to grow, you can make that happen. If you want this church to increase its programs, you can make that happen. If you want this church to have a full-time minister, you can make that happen.

Any investment in the future requires faith. Faith is worth played out over time. We’ve talked before about how change is scary, but change can also lead the way to better ways of living, indeed to a better world. This church can be an important resource for this town in the future. We could be the place where serious discussion takes place about the quality of our lives and what we want the town to look like. We can have a church that matters to our own futures and to the futures of our neighbors. You can make this happen.

Of all the words written about Jesus in the New Testament, modern scholars feel that his preaching about the Kingdom of Heaven might be the most likely to be the words that Jesus actually spoke. But what is this kingdom of heaven? In two similes, Jesus describes it in terms of worth:

"The Kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and then hid; then in his joy he goes out and sells all he has to buy that field.

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it." (Matt. 13:44-45)

Now the Kingdom of Heaven is the ultimate religious goal in Jesus’ teaching. Certainly you would think that such a thing would be far removed from the market, one of those things that money can’t buy, in the words of the MasterCard commercial. Yet here Jesus describes it in market terms.

But it is a mistake to think that Jesus is talking about money here. He’s talking about worth. He’s using material things as a metaphor for worth. What do we value? How much do we value it? What’s it worth to us? Would we sell all that we have to buy it? Would we put our money where our heart is?

Amen.