Proverbs
1: 20-33
Preached at Prescott
Baptist Church
September
16, 2012
When we were children my brother, Stanley, and I played in
the creek down the hill from our home. A small waterway, Sweet Water Branch ran
right through the heart of Gainesville. At its deepest the creek was about four
feet deep. It widened into the duck pond about four blocks north of us.
Sometimes we took stale bread to the duck pond and scattered it for the
quacking birds. Elephant ears and ferns hung from the banks all along the creek
bed and leaned toward the water. Live oak trees and grape vines were covered
with Spanish moss in the wooded area around the creek. Stanley and I made forts
in the woods. He was the soldier and I was the cook. While Stanley fought the
enemies that threatened our fort, I made salads from rhododendron leaves and
lantana blossoms. I dug up roots from the sandy soil and put them on a plate
beside bright pieces of fungus and mushrooms. The soldier came in and pretended
to eat with me. Both of us wore cowboy
hats back then; we wore cowboy boots and we had cap guns in our pants pockets.
One day I was busy making salad when Stanley started
shouting in the distance. He came back to the fort with a big shopping bag. It
was bright blue and heavy enough that Stanley was dragging it along the path
behind him. “I found a treasure!”
And so he had! We dumped the bag on the ground inside our
fort and squealed with delight! Money!! A ten dollar bill and a five, crumpled
ones. Quarters and dimes. So many pennies. I found two tubes of lipstick. A
Bible. Comb and brush. Purple earbobs. A bill fold. An old worn pair of shoes.
Handkerchiefs. Socks. A short pencil. A bottle of perfume. We looked carefully
through everything so as not to miss any coins or bills. “We’re rich!” Stanley
shouted.
“How much money do we have?”
It took a while to gather it together and count it. “Thirty
two dollars and eighteen cents!” Stanley crowed!
“I can buy a red scooter!” I was already riding down First
Avenue in my mind, my pony tails flying straight out behind my back.
“I’m buying a Tonka truck, the yellow dirt-grater!” Stanley
danced around. We put the money in our pockets. Then we danced and clapped and
shouted our way out of the woods. There
was no place in the woods for spending money. Neither one of us said it but we
both knew we were heading for McCrory’s Five and Dime.
Our neighbor, Dr. Abbott, was in her yard and pulling weeds.
She looked up from her work as we came by. “What’s all the excitement about?”
Dr. Abbott was the grandmotherly type. She had retired from teaching at the
University of Florida and she spent hours in her yard, down on her hands and
knees, weeding, planting, mulching. She was smart and she turned her smart eyes
on us that day.
“We found a treasure, Dr. Abbott! We’re rich!” I boasted. I
could already see how amazed Dr. Abbott’s face would look when she saw me
sailing by on my new red scooter. “Look at this!” I pulled bills out of my
pocket and lifted them high in the air like a prize.
“Treasure?” She was already interested. “Where did you kids
find this treasure?”
“We were playing down at the creek and we found this bag!”
Stanley took the bright blue bag in both of his hands and lifted it up off the
ground.
Dr. Abbott stood up and brushed her knees off. She came over
to look inside the bag. She pulled out scraps of paper and looked at them.
“This is not a treasure that belongs to you kids,” she said. “This is someone’s
bag. She’ll be looking for it. Here’s a name and address right here.”
I was feeling sad and Stanley was looking confused. He said,
“No, it’s our treasure because we found it.”
“It’s not yours to keep but it can be yours to return.” Dr.
Abbott said. “I’m going in to call Franny Wells. Her name and address are
written here.” She showed us the paper but we couldn’t read so we just followed
along, feeling a little bit robbed.
Well, Dr. Abbott made the phone call and then she got the
keys to her car. “You kids can ride with me. How about putting that money back
in the bag? I know you want Ms Wells to
have her money.” I was kind of sure that I wanted a red scooter but I emptied
my pockets of the money and dropped it in the bag. Stanley did the same.
We rode in the back seat out toward Newnan’s Lake. Dr.
Abbott turned off the highway on a muddy road and we rode back into a marshy
area. The car stopped and we all walked up to a small house. A woman opened the
door just a small crack. “Yes?”
“Are you Franny Wells?” Dr. Abbott asked cheerily.
“I am. And you’ve got my bag there. I left that bag for one
minute and it disappeared.” The woman snatched her bag out of Dr. Abbott’s hand
and closed the door tightly. We heard a latch turn on the inside.
The three of us were stunned there on the porch. But Dr.
Abbott quickly led us toward her car. Stanley was mad. “She didn’t even say
thank you! We could have kept her old bag. She just left it on the ground! Some
people might have given us a reward for returning their bag.”
Dr. Abbott started the car and turned toward home. We sat fuming in the backseat. Half way home,
Dr. Abbott turned to look at us while we stopped for a red light. “Kids,” she
said, “you didn’t return that woman’s bag so she would say thank you. You didn’t
take it back to her so she could give you a reward. You returned what belonged
to Ms Wells because you’re the kind of
children who do the right thing.” The
light turned green and Dr. Abbott drove on down the road.
When we got to her house she opened the back door for us.
“You understand?” We couldn’t look at her because we did understand and somehow
we didn’t even want to hear what she had to say next. “You got your reward,
both of you. Now you know that you’re the kind of children who will do the
right thing.”
We stayed away from the creek for a few days, fearful I guess
that we might discover treasure that would have to be returned. But somehow
that experience has stuck with me. There was an enduring reward for Stanley and
me that day. We went to bed with a new understanding of what it meant to be a
good neighbor, an honest person. Wisdom lived in our neighborhood and was
willing to engage in our educational process.
Inside each of us lives a mixture of light and darkness, of
evil and good. At any point we might be the saint or the sinner. But when our
neighbors look at us and reflect back at us the light they see within us—we
begin to identify or re-identify with the light and the goodness inside us more
than the darkness.
As children we are so afraid of the monsters that live under
the bed. To let my arm slip off the mattress and dangle toward the floor was to
invite a nasty roar, sharp teeth and a life threatening attack. As we grow
older and mature we let go of our childish fears and we develop new fears: fear
of being accused, fear of being misunderstood, fear of being abandoned, fear of
living without purpose or goal. We put on our adult clothes and mask our fears
with some kind of defense. And along the way we lose touch with the treasure
within ourselves, the wisdom that lives inside us, the wisdom that reassures us
we have nothing to fear.
The incarnation was all about reassurance: a birth on earth and among us, and a life that
brought promise to all people. God chose to address our fears and our lack of
faith by coming to live among us and to show us who we really are, how
significant we are to the one who created us. We are not alone. We have not
been forgotten or abandoned. The reward of our faith is this: We can know
ourselves as people who have been claimed by Love and filled with Love’s
wisdom. We can know ourselves as people who do the right thing. It’s requires
practice and none of us do the right thing all the time. But wisdom is always
within us and among us to engage in our educational process, our faith building
process.
I had my sixtieth birthday this past week. It is so hard for
me to wrap my mind around the idea that I am so elderly now. I am among those
who have lived long enough to know something of wisdom, to have something worth
sharing with the younger people in my neighborhood and in our city. And yet I
am so aware of my continued education as I constantly realize how much I have
to learn about life, relationships, faith and death.
There is much to dread it would seem. The world is no longer
as safe as it seemed when I was four. Mothers no longer let their children go
down the street to play, unsupervised, at the creek.
This last week has been another time of religious extremism
and violence in the east and in the west. A Christian nonprofit in the United
States created a film, “Innocence of Muslims,” that characterizes the prophet
Mohammed as a womanizing buffoon and a child molester. Outraged by this insult,
the Islamic extremists have staged attacks against American embassies and
consulates in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunis. Australia has had angry protests
too. The outrage is spreading. Hillary
Clinton said, “The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the
tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”
Wisdom calls out in the streets of every nation. She is
unattached to any particular religious belief. She is Wisdom and as such she is
universal in her longing for peace and redemption of all life on earth. She
urges each one of us toward our own center where she resides.
“Do not
do unto others what you would not have others do unto you.” This
wise principle lies at the foundation and in the heart of every religious
system. Wisdom lifts this principle of compassion up high in our streets, in
our homes, in our literature, in our media—every chance she gets. Wisdom
belongs to no particular religion but urges all religious people to live in
respect and compassion for one another.
Today marks the 48th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist
Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.The bomb, planted by the Ku Klux Klan, a Christian extremist
group, killed four black children, little girls. Just days after the bombing,
white lawyer Charles Morgan Jr. spoke to the all-white Young Men's Business
Club in Birmingham. “And who is really guilty,” he asked the crowd. “Each of
us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful
compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States…every
person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several
years to the popularity of hatred.”
Tonight—as the sun sets—our Jewish neighbors and friends
will enter the high and holy day of Rosh Hashanah and ten days of atonement. Our Hindu neighbors and friends will celebrate
Rada Stami Festival this week, the birthday of Krishna’s wife. Our Buddhist
neighbors here in Memphis are inviting all of us to join them this coming week
in several events focused on compassion and peaceful living. We are not alone in our efforts to honor
wisdom. We are not the only ones who are learning how to be people who do the
right thing.
We are called to live our faith in the streets and market
places as well as in the privacy of our own homes and places of worship. We are
called to be ambassadors for wisdom, to remind one another, even when the riots
come closer to our streets and churches, when violence comes to our door, that
we hold a treasure within us.
We can live without dread because we are the kind of people
who do the right thing. We return what does not belong to us and deliver it to
its rightful owner. We hold on to the integrity of our own faith while
respecting and honoring the faith of all other religions. We are one family,
the children of Wisdom. In this life and in the life to come, she calls to us
and shows us the way to live in peace and without dread.
Amen
