A few weeks ago I held a garage sale. Now some people, you may be one of them, are the kind of people who hold garage sales regularly. Springtime comes and all those things you’ve thrown in the box in the corner of the garage are put out on tables to be dispersed throughout the neighborhood or taken to Goodwill. I, however, am not one of those people. The last garage sale I had actively participated in was about twenty years ago. When you add to that the fact that I have a tendency toward sentimentality, you will not be surprised when I tell you that it ended up being a big garage sale. For several nights all I did in the evenings was sort through boxes of stuff. Pulling out each thing one after another. Considering a number of questions. Do I have a place for this? Does it have purpose and use in our life as a family? Is it some piece of the past that is so treasured that I can’t bear to part with it, even though it is seldom, if ever used? Or should I pass it on to someone else? Twenty years of accumulated things – which all in their day had served a valid purpose – just not necessarily any longer. It wasn’t easy work, remember, I’m sentimental, and so my mother and sister came over to help by saying those ever important words – “Heather, you don’t need to keep that…put it in the sale.”

Interestingly enough, I also have been reading a book about rummage sales this summer – rummage sales of a different kind. Phyllis Tickle in her book, The Great Emergence, posits that about every five hundred years or so the Church feels compelled to hold a giant garage sale. Now, because this is a summer Sunday, and my guess is that you would like to be home before dinner I’m going to oversimplify – but if any of you are interested and would like to borrow my book and discuss, just let me know. Anyway, Tickle points to several major upheavals within the life of the church, or as she would term them “rummage sales” of the church.  Times when circumstances and changes in the world and in humanity had built to such a point that the church felt compelled to pull the different pieces of its theology, its governance, its understanding of God and humanity and the relationship between the two, its understanding of authority…out of the box. Pull it out, consider and examine it. And then decide – is this something to lay aside, to transform, or to keep? 

Travel back to the years around 500 AD and you hear the church considering - who is this Jesus Christ? Fully human and fully divine? Or divinity encased within a human shell? The Oriental Christian Church – think Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian or Syrian Christianity –is born. And monasticism begins its rise to authority and prominence over and against the clergy structure.

Jump 500 more years ahead and you land squarely in the middle of the Great Schism and the question of – who is the Holy Spirit? And how does it fit within the Trinity? The Eastern Orthodox (or some call it Greek Orthodox) church is born.

Leapfrog 500 more years and, you guessed it, Reformation. Luther is nailing his 95 Theses on the door of Wittenburg. Calvin is setting up the city of God in Geneva. And John Knox is preaching reformation fire from the pulpits of Scotland. Who has authority – tradition and Pope? Or scripture alone? Another brand new expression of the Christian faith is born – Protestantism. 

One more hop and ta-da – here we are…

Now Tickle would be the first to say that these garage sales don’t just happen, they take some preparation. Forces of culture, society, politics, economics and technologies build and shift in ways that put pressure on how the church has structured and understood itself in years past. At some point that pressure releases and new expressions of faith and understandings of Christianity are born, older forms are renewed and refreshed, and the gospel is spread. 

And the pressure has been building, hasn’t it. Over the last 150 years the church has been pulling out and considering again and again many of its pieces. New understandings in the sciences, biology and physics, Darwin and Einstein, have changed the way that we look at our world and the way it works. New discoveries in history, archeology and sociology have given us greater insight into the world that formed our scriptures and, for some, have changed the way we look at them. Psychology and psychiatry have altered the way we understand our humanness and how we relate to each other and God. Technologies have changed the way our society is structured and our ability to interact with different cultures, viewpoints and religions in a global sense. 

And in the midst of it all comes a parable…

In Luke’s gospel, Jesus is increasingly coming into conflict with the scribes, Pharisees and other authorities. In fact, at the end of the immediately preceding chapter, Jesus has called the authorities to task for practicing the letter but not the spirit of Jewish law, all the while loading the people with a burden of law and religious practice that is hard to bear. Jesus claims that they have been paying more attention to rules that concern the weave of the clothes that you may wear than they have been paying attention to the justice and love of God. The chapter ends with the authorities’ growing hostility and their commitment to lay in wait for a misstep on the part of Jesus.

While this is going on, however, the crowds are gathering by the thousands and people are coming to Jesus for advice and arbitration – seeing an authority in him that is placed not within the official Jewish religious system, but comes from God. And Jesus shares this parable:

“The land of a rich man produced abundantly, and he begins to have a problem. His current barns are not large enough to hold the excess. Instead of sharing out of his wealth, however, the man comes up with a scheme – he will pull down his existing barns and then rebuild even bigger ones. It is in his bigger, improved barns that he will store all his excess grain and goods. And then he begins to dream – to say to his soul – “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink and be merry.” But God comes into the picture, admonishing the man for his foolishness because his life was to come to an end that night and all his treasure, all his food and provisions, were going to come to nothing anyway. They would be subsumed into the community with which he had refused to share.” The man chooses not the life-giving experience of sharing with those in need. He makes the mistake of thinking that the bounty and abundance that he is experiencing are the result of his efforts alone and are for his use, his enjoyment, his security alone. He chooses to store up treasures for himself, rather than being rich in the ways of God.

Now there are a number of things that could be said about how this parable speaks to the ways in which we as individuals, as people experiencing abundance, should order our lives and, dare I say, our investments. But today I want to consider what it might offer us as a community, as a church – First Pres, or as the Church (big C), living during what Tickle calls a “hinge time” in the midst of a giant rummage sale.

For I think that this parable can serve as an important reminder as we look through the boxes of who we are as a people of God and what we are to be about. Remember how I said my mother and sister came over to give me encouragement that it was okay to let something go? Because I could hold up a little dress that the girls had worn and tell you where it came from and where they each had worn it, and how it was the first-day-of-school dress for Mackenzie and Jo had worn it in for some pictures and that the little dab of nail polish on the bottom hem came from Allie painting her toes…  But I didn’t need a box of those dresses, did I? The meaning and the memory weren’t the thing itself, the treasure – which is love and family. 

It is a natural impulse for us to want to conserve, protect and preserve the treasures that have been given to us. We do it in our lives – we do it in our churches. And we do have treasures. Presbyterians have a rich and varied history of learning and engagement with the gospel in a serious and intentional way. This congregation pulls deeply from that tradition in its educational offerings for adults and youth. We have a rich treasure of music and preaching and hymnody that reaches back for generations and has inspired and enriched the faith of countless individuals. There was this moment at Triennium during the Friday night worship service where an offering had been received and the guitarist up front played the first few notes while the word “Doxology” flashed on the large screen up front. In unison 5000 kids from around the United States stood and broke into the doxology – united by a shared song and a shared understanding of thankfulness before God. We have a rich tradition of beautiful buildings and wonderful facilities, amazing sanctuaries with soaring ceilings and stained glass that lift our hearts and minds to God, kitchens and fellowship halls that enable us to feed others in the name of Christ every day of the week, Sunday school rooms that give children place to move and learn of God’s great love.  And we’ve been given an amazing message about a God who loves us and desires a relationship with us, who came to be present among us, who died and rose that we might know that love and experience God’s kingdom, and who continues to dwell within us in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Rich treasure indeed.

But what does the parable remind us? That all these riches are not really ours. They are not our buildings. It is not our worship. It is not our history. It is not our gospel. It is not our treasure. It all belongs to God. And so our response should not be to build up bigger barns, to store up God’s treasure for our own comfort, our own enjoyment, our own security. To make sure that everything is safe and protected and just so. That is what the authorities of Jesus’ time had forgotten. They had so protected the law, that instead of being a life giving practice, it had ossified, hardened, into something that was life-draining for the people of God. No, our job is to share it, to give this treasure, God’s treasure, away. That is being rich toward God.

Which means we’ve got some hard work ahead of us. It’s hard to even throw out a table in the garage sale. To look through our stuff that’s accumulated in our boxes. To ask the hard questions – does this have a place? Does this have a purpose? Does this help us share our treasure or does it build the barn that gets in the way? Is this something that is essential to our church’s very nature, or is it negotiable? And we’ve begun the process of asking those questions, doing that work. The Deacons have been considering what is helpful and what is not helpful when we think about hospitality to our visitors. The Mission Committee is asking questions about how and where our church is involved in mission in the local community and the greater world. The worship committee, the CE Board and the session have been struggling mightily as they’ve considered adding a second service to our Sunday morning worship offerings. That new service will be beginning in the fall. We’re trying to figure out how best to share our treasure, God’s treasure.

Now this theme is going to continue over the next couple of weeks, since I’ll be preaching the next two weeks till Ted gets back. Next week’s scripture is the Lord’s Prayer and we’ll be talking about the things we choose to keep out of our boxes – the practices and beliefs that are essential to who we are. The following Sunday we’ll hear Jesus urge us to “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit” while we wait for God’s presence, and we consider how we can be open and responsive as a church to the ways God might be working in the world around us. So come on back –

But for now I want you to think this week about what kinds of things in the life and practice of our church you consider essential…what things you would be willing refurbish or repurpose…and what things you would be willing to put out in the rummage sale – not for your comfort and security, but that the treasure of the Gospel, the message of God’s love, forgiveness and power might be shared with our friends, our neighbors, our community and our world. 

And may we all be rich in the ways of God. Amen.