First Things First
The Rev. Samuel Schaal
First Congregatinal Church of Wauwatosa
May 25, 2008

Isaiah 49:8-16a
Psalm 131
Matthew 6:24-34

Back in the 1970s I was just married and graduated with a journalism degree, my wife and I were restless to make our way in the world and we decided it would be great to move across the state. We were in the panhandle of Texas, in Lubbock, and wanted to relocate across the state to Dallas, where there was greater job opportunity and a more urban lifestyle.

I was working at the newspaper in Lubbock, so I sent resumes to the newspapers in Dallas as well as to the city magazine. And I got no response—nothing.

So we came up with the idea of just moving to Dallas without jobs, and getting jobs when we got there. We had saved up the grand fortune of $500 which would be our nest egg. We rented a U-Haul and on one crisp January day in 1978 we put everything we had in the U-Haul and drove across the state, some 350 miles.

We arrived there and began hunting for apartments. At the first apartment, the manager, as she was showing us around, inquired about our jobs. And it hit me (for I was a very smart young man) that she didn’t really care about what we did, she cared that we had the income to pay for the apartment. Oh, we hadn’t thought of that. People expect us to have jobs if they will rent to us. So there we were with a U-Haul full of our worldly possessions and the likelihood of finding a place to live now more challenging than we had supposed.

As we continued apartment hunting, I began to mask the fact that we were unemployed. When we finally found the apartment complex we wanted, I sat down with the manager of that complex and told him honestly that we didn’t have jobs yet, but that I was bettering myself by seeking employment in the growing city of Dallas and that I would of course provide for my wife because I was a solid, honest and loyal person who would meet every jot and tittle of my lease. And he bought it. And we had a home for the next year.

We did get jobs without too much trouble and a year later we moved out of that apartment, into our first house and we were off and running to fulfill the great American dream of upward mobility.

I look back at that experience and can’t imagine what we were thinking of. We were, somehow, not worried about what we would eat, what we would drink, what we would wear, and it never even hit us that we should have planned for where we would live. But we successfully relocated to a place where we wanted to start our life together; we successfully laid the foundation for a good life. And I’m glad we did it.

That is perhaps the romantic idealism of youth—moving to where you want to live even though you don’t really have the resources to do it. Ever since then, it seems, I have been more mindful of all those things; of what I’ll eat, drink and wear, where I’ll live, what bills I’ll pay when, how I’ll save for the future, how I’ll help educate the kids, how I’ll meet the demands of a career, how I’ll take care of an aging parent, how I’ll meet all the demands of my life. And ever since then, all these demands have eroded my former idealism.

Through those years it has been far too easy to get sidetracked. It is been too easy to pay less attention to the first things in my life and more attention to the second things which are more urgent but really less important in the long run.

Many has been the time, if I am honest, that I have stood here and elsewhere and preached the everlasting love of God, that we are grounded in the spiritual reality as children of God, only to return to the demands of my own life and worry—worry about lack of provision, lack of direction, lack of relationship—worry about a host of things that occupies the worry cells of my brain. And in my ministry I see others dealing with the same day-to-day struggles.

It’s difficult for me and I imagine it’s difficult for most of us in dealing with life to remember that we are, indeed, loved by God and that we exist, indeed, in a divine-human relationship that should be primary in our lives.

The prophet Isaiah in today’s Old Testament lesson is speaking to a people in exile, living in a land occupied by an imperial power. They are a people who yearn to return to their homeland and Isaiah tells them that indeed they will be brought home. He admonishes them to “come out” of their darkness, their thirst, their hunger, because God will not forget God’s people.

To underscore this deep relationship that God had with Israel, and that we have today with God, Isaiah characterizes God as a loving mother. While most of the Hebrew Bible uses masculine metaphors for God, here Isaiah employs a feminine symbol. Even though people think God has forgotten them, Isaiah says, God is like a woman nursing her child. This suggests that we have an incredibly close and intimate relationship with God. And yet this metaphor isn’t quite strong enough, he says, for in reality sometimes a mother can forget her children, but Isaiah says in the divine voice, “I will not forget you.”

The Psalmist likewise uses a feminine image as the psalmist describes trust in God’s care as again, like a child to one’s mother, like a child who is weaned, but returns to the comfort and security to the mother’s loving embrace.

So this is how these Old Testament texts describe our relationship to God. Some people think of Jewish theology as primarily of law and that God is a distant God. While some texts do support that, a fuller understanding of Old Testament theology shows that God’s intimacy is not lost in the Hebrew experience.

And in the New Testament, in this wonderful selection from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus continues to speak of how we are grounded in God’s love and uses metaphors, not of the love between a mother and child, but metaphors from nature.

Today’s Gospel lesson begins with that much-dreaded instruction we hate to hear: You cannot serve God and wealth.

When I think of the struggle that so many of us have when it comes to a spiritual understanding of money, I think of a person I met as a teenager. She was an elderly woman named Gertrude Behanna. Gert was the theme speaker one year at an annual weekend Alateen youth retreat. (Alateen is the program for teenagers with alcoholic parents.) Gert told her story of growing up as the only daughter of a very wealthy east coast family. In mid-life, having been through too many marriages and far too many bottles of gin, she admitted her alcoholism and met a couple of Christians that eventuated some time later in her conversion to Christianity.

One unusual thing about Gert is that she wrote a bestselling book about it back in the 1950s under the pseudonym of Elizabeth Burns. Her book was called The Late Liz, referring to the Liz that had died and the Liz that had been reborn. (In 1971, Anne Baxter played Gert in the movie version.)

She was somewhat of a minor celebrity having written a book about her life. But here’s the really unusual thing about her. Having known nothing but wealth all of her life, once committed to Christ, she gave away most of her money, keeping only what she needed. This, the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in the country. She rented an apartment in San Antonio, and drove a little red Volkswagen Beetle, and began a career of talking to churches and AA groups.

In that talk, I remember what she said about money: “Money is a mere commodity like bricks. You can build a shrine or slug someone to death.” (1)

Money in and of itself is neutral and in fact is needed in our lives and in the life of the church. But money in and of itself is a second thing. It serves us well, it serves God well, but it is not the first thing.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes on to expand on how God will care for our needs if we keep God first. This passage can sound hopelessly idealistic, like we can just sit back and let God fulfill our most primary needs without us doing anything.

Perhaps, though, this is a text encouraging us to put God first and to use our human resources in the service of God. And as long as we do that, all is well. This is a text about Christian simplicity, about keeping first things primary and second things secondary. This doesn’t mean we won’t struggle or suffer. This means that God will care for us and provide for us.

Certainly this doesn’t mean we don’t play an active role. As God has done to us, we should reflect to others. So as God clothes and feeds and cares for us, so are we responsible for sharing this beneficence with others, for clearly in the warp and the weave of Scripture, there is a preference for those in need. Merely believing in Christ is not enough. It’s a good start, but the Christian life is also a life of response to the divine initiative. Right works naturally follow right belief.

So our relationship with others and with all of creation, is or should be a reflection of our relationship with God. Our human relationships should reflect our divine relationship.

Today’s texts, in fact, are primarily about our relationship with God. Just as our relationship with our parents is so formative, is a first thing of our lives, so is our relationship with our Divine Parent. So a primary way of understanding God, a primary metaphor for divinity, is that of relationship.

By staying grounded in God, by seeking first the kingdom of God, not the myriad kingdoms of the earth, our needs are met and our anxieties melt away in the face of this divine reality.

But it’s easy to forget that. Steven Covey of Seven Habits of Successful People fame says it well. He says: “I've learned that the good is the enemy of the best when the first things in our lives are subordinated to other things.”

This is perhaps why we need church. This is why we need a spiritual discipline in our lives. This is why we need each other, to remind ourselves and each other of first things. And in another lesson later in Matthew (22:37-40), Jesus answers the lawyer as to which commandment is greatest, or what is the most primary first thing for the Christian:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

As God has loved us, so we should love each other and self. God, held first in thought and deed, gives us what we need to love others and self, to care for others and self.

I have not always been mindful of first things but occasionally am reminded of them. Before I was in ministry I would frequently drive home from work with my head full of the abstract problems and struggles of the day. And in the drive home I would pass by a memorial park. On some days, at least, that graveyard would wake me up to what’s really important, to remind me that the problems of the day were, in the long-run, minor indeed.

I can’t say that I remembered this often enough, but I remember it now and then, and I recall it to us today, so that our striving might be in right directions. So that we can remember that we are held by something beyond us, something that sits at the heart of life—a presence and power and mystery that is good and perfect and true, known to us as God . A God in whom we are grounded, who has loved us first and brought us and all into creation, a God who gives us what we need, for today.

So may it be. Amen.

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(1) For a recording of a similar talk Gert Behanna gave in 1962, go to www.aabibliography.com/gertbehanna.htm. Click the “God Isn’t Dead AA Talk” for her standard story.