February 11, 2001
Sixth Sunday After Epiphany

The Costco Wilderness

I know that the hymn was unfamiliar to many of you, making it difficult to sing, but what wonderful lyrics in the hymn. Pray for the atmosphere, pray for the sea, learn from the river, the rock and the tree; Work till shalom in full harmony rings. Trust the connection of all living things. We can't find very many older and familiar hymns that have words like those because the concerns that this hymn expresses have not always been concerns of the church, have not always been concerns of people on the planet. Throughout much of our history, the history of Western Europe and the Christianity that we have known the earth has been seen in another way. Earth has been looked at as a gift from God to use as we need, to use as we see fit. We are set upon the earth that we might subdue it. We might put it to our uses as humans. So you don't find hymns that were written in the 1600's that talk about protecting the atmosphere. The sky went on forever and ever. I can remember not that many years ago when I was a child and the sea was proposed as an endless source of food for an answer to the questions of hunger for people around the planet. Now we know that scientists will tell us that the oceans are in danger, that we are killing off the schools of fish, that there is nothing on the planet that is endless and that we need to take care of the things around us if we are going to be able to survive.

The idea of wilderness, the word itself, brings to mind for many of us a positive image. So we can talk about loving to go out hiking or camping to get out into God's creation, to get out into the wilderness. We find that to be a refreshing experience, something that nurtures our souls. When we go out camping or hiking or even when we spend a week at church camp, our lives are different. We've set aside all of the routines that usually keep us busy, we've left behind most of our belongings, we've pared it down to the essentials. We go through our week enjoying friends and enjoying the beauties of nature without all of the rest of those things impinging on us, always demanding our attention and our energy. We look at the wilderness as a place to be refreshed, to be reborn. It wasn't always that way. If you think about Israel, about the Middle East, to talk about the wilderness was to talk about going out into the desert, into the arid areas, few plants growing, rocks and dirt. To go out into the wilderness was a scary idea. You were never sure that you were going to survive. You weren't sure that you would live through the wild animals or the bandits or the weather. The wilderness in biblical terms was a place of testing. So Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days to be tested by the devil. The children of Israel wandered for forty years in the wilderness of the Sinai. Wilderness is an image for testing, for purifying, for encouraging people to make decisions about what is most important.

Our difficult and frightening place for many of us is not out in the Cascades, not over on the Kitsap, but our difficult and frightening place is here in our daily lives. Think about the experience of going out shopping. Walk through the aisles of Costco and see pallets stacked up to the ceiling of the warehouse with products promising to take care of our lives, to be the solution to the problem that we didn't even know we had before we walked in. You've read about grocery stores with their special displays on the end of aisles. Displays that are set to grab our attention to move us to impulse buying so that we can not help but pick up that product and drop it into our shopping cart. Last week Costco had a line almost from here to the door of huge boxes of cereal as soon as you walked in. Piles that say, "Everybody needs us that's why there's so many of us here. Why don't you throw a couple of us into your basket?" It's hard to resist the stacks and stacks of products that are being swept off the shelf by so many other people. Stand outside of Costco once in a while and watch all of those carts roll out stacked so high. Some of them are business people that are going to be reselling the products, but a lot of them are parents buying for their family, stocking the closet, the garage, whatever space is available.

If you haven't had that experience of sensory overload at Costco, let me tell you a story. A couple of years ago our family was back visiting in Wisconsin. When Cindy and I were children, both of our families liked to go and visit historical sites around the state. We both went to visit a place that was in North Central Wisconsin called the House on the Rock. A house had been built on a pillar of stone in a rough area that had been unleveled by the glaciers. It was sort of perched up on top of this pillar of stone. There was a walkway down to it, it was a contemporary design at that time in the 1960's. A lot of open space, different levels, carpeting, it was a very interesting place. We decided to take our children back on this trip. The house was much like we remembered it. Instead of taking you out of the house to a small gift shop and the open area we remembered as children, you took a pathway down that led you into a huge complex that was a combination circus, museum and multi-media show. You went through room after room after room of dioramas and sights and sound coming at you from all directions. It made believe that it was a museum but there was no information about whether the thing that you were viewing was real or was a replica or was made up out of someone's imagination. It was just room after room of things imposing themselves upon you. When I got out of that museum eventually, I was worn out by all of it. It was more than I could handle and I didn't feel good about the experience at all.

Imagine if you have just come to Seattle from Russia. In Russia you had empty shelves when you went to the store. Here you walk into Costco and there are things piled all over the place. Well our difficult decisions are here in this life because everyone wants to give us the chance to super size it. It's so easy for us to say, "Sure another quarter, I'd like to have it." All of those things become a burden for us in our lives. We have to take care of all of those things and they own our lives. The wilderness is a place of decision and our place of decision is right in our everyday lives. It would be nice to just end with a message of voluntary simplicity and certainly that's always been a theme that I've been attracted to. In fact I joked that through out my ministry that I have a whole shelf of books in my library about voluntary simplicity. It's a difficult thing for me to live out and I've always been one that has collected things. I've always wanted just one more resource, just one more CD, just one more thing that might really be the one that I would miss if I didn't own it. When I'm involved in doing so many different things as a minister I go, "You know that book might be just the right one to put the finishing touch on that worship service. That piece of music might be something that we can really have a good discussion about when the youth get together." There's always a way to rationalize buying more and getting more. The words that come to us in the gospel passage are not that kind and they're not about simplifying our lives so that things will be easy for us.

Before I get too far into the message though I want to share with you that my purpose in talking about what Jesus says in the gospel is not to make everyone feel guilty, but instead to encourage continuing conversation about how to live your life. There's an event that I enjoy doing with youth groups and Women's Fellowship groups called Santa Claus on Trial. Santa Claus is apprehended by the state patrol and charged with impersonating God and distorting the meaning of Christmas. We divide up into two sides, prosecution and defense. We review some evidence and then people make their case for and against the jolly man in the red suit. Santa Claus is usually acquitted but in the midst of the conversation there are usually some very perceptive things that are shared. I remember a young women's group where people began to share about their childhood experiences and when they first found out about Santa Claus and what impact that had on their ideas about the honesty of their parents and what that had to do with their willingness to believe other things that people were telling them in the world. One woman said, "I bring my daughter to Sunday School all the time but Santa Claus always comes to our house every Christmas. Are we going to Hell?" My point in talking about our belongings in our life is not to threaten you with hell so that you will change and turn the right direction. Instead I want you to think about your lives and how you live.

Jesus speaks here some of the words that we know as the Beatitudes in one of the other gospels. This is a shorter version here but at the end the words come through that are very pointed. They say, "All of you who are rich, it's going to be different for you. You have already had your good life. You've already had comfort, you've already had joy, you already have had everything that you can expect to come to you." And he says, "Woe to you." We'd like to find ourselves in those who are receiving God's love, in those who are mourning, those who have poverty, those who have sadness. We like to believe that we can come and that God will take care of the problems that we do experience in our lives. The place where most of us need to find ourselves in this passage is "Woe to you who are rich." What does that mean for us? Do we do like Jesus suggested to the rich young ruler? Do we go and sell everything it give it to the poor? I don't think that's the right answer for us. The end of time that so many Christians thought was right around the corner that would allow us to give up everything we know is probably not going to happen in our lifetime. We will need to live 70 or 80 or 90 years and take care of ourselves and live with our spouse and take care of our children. We do have a life to live. At the same time, Jesus' words point to the fact that we don't live our lives in isolation. Because we live in a world that has very rich and very poor, our lives also carry a responsibility for that situation. We sign on to that capitalistic creed. We give our approval to a system that results in some people being very rich and other people being very poor. Jesus says that you can't live your life without being concerned about others. You can't just do whatever you want and buy whatever you want because you have your money and you earned it and it's yours. Instead we are called to responsible living, to prayerful living. We are asked to understand that we are related to all people, to all living things, to the whole rest of the planet. We are called on to live life gently. To live life carefully. To not abuse the blessings that we have been given. There are many people outside of established religion that are involved in the environmental movement. There are many people who find their sense of spiritual nurture in groups working for voluntary simplicity, or those trying to protect the forest or the water or the air. These are concerns that also belong to us as followers of Jesus. We need to take the words of scripture apart and be careful about how we live our lives and how we spend our money. We need to remember the call to share God's love with the world. I pray that God's spirit will be with us all in this difficult walk through the Costco wilderness.