Sermon for Hope and Lutheran Church of the Resurrection. Shared on July 29th. Based on Ephesians 3.
Property taxes! If there is anything that riles people up these days is property taxes!
As you may know property taxes are a percentage based on the determined “value” of our property. And there is the rub. What is the value of our homes and land? Should it be determined by the sale price of comparable homes? And what exactly should be considered similar?
Now somethings should be obvious. For example, if one home is 3000 square feet that would be not be the same as a home that is 5000 square feet. But what about a home that is say is 2000 square feet but is on a hill side overlooking the Guadalupe River? Should the view of the river be considered?
That is exactly the case in New Hampshire for example. Officials in New Hampshire in 2003 decided that all those majestic panoramas for which the state is famous are not priceless after all. Homeowners pay through their nose for what they can see with their eyes. Officials consider views as a bonus features of houses, akin to a pool or an attached garage, and tax assessors put dollar amounts on them. This, in turn, requires homeowners with a glorious view to feed the community coffers.
New Hampshire is not the only state that taxes property for the grandeur beyond their gates --- the practice has taking root elsewhere --- but it’s really began in the Granite State because of an influx of people seeking homes with impressive views, and because the state like our own state of Texas has neither a state sales tax nor a levy on personal income. So, property tax has become a primary revenue source for government operations. Heavenly beauty outside your manor means hefty bills inside your mailbox.
The irony is that from a property owner’s perspective, the more valuable view can be the one from which little inspiration and/or uplift can be drawn. Which would you rather have? A large home whose value is found in an less than onerous tax bill but overlooks a slag heap, or barren, straightforward landscape? Or would rather pay more for a small, rustic cabin with a latrine out the back but with a spectacular mountain vista and tax bill to match? It is, as they say, in the eye of the beholder. It is from our Christian perspective … a sign of the human condition.
I wonder, if all things were equal ---- recognizing that we have deliberately practiced racist redlining ---- but just go with me, without the incentive of keeping one’s property tax low, would we deliberately choose the hardscrabble, the rocky? How many of us would intentionally purchase land or a home because it has a horrible view?
Yet, guess what, when we move beyond the realm of actual real estate, that is exactly what God’s people have done time and again. We deliberately are called to choose the mustard seed, the distinctly unpromising terrain because we have a bigger view of things. The way of the cross … it is in the eyes of the beholder!
Just look at Paul’s words to the Ephesians. Consider how Paul invested himself in barren land. If we read Paul’s words in Ephesians 3 out of context --- as we do by starting at verse 14 and not verse 1, chapter 1 --- it is easy to assume that Paul is residing in some fancy digs. “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,” Paul writes. He goes on to say that he prays “according to the riches of [God’s] glory.” He speaks of knowing the “fullness” of God and then concludes with a line of benediction: “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly ...”
Such words and phrases as “riches,” “glory,” “fullness” and “accomplish abundantly” hardly leave us thinking he is speaking from a grim, disheartening circumstance, but that was the case. Paul is in prison as he writes these words. And in the verse right before our reading, he mentions his sufferings. “I pray therefore that you may not lose heart over my sufferings for you; they are your glory.”
Consider what Paul is saying. I am in prison and I am suffering, yet in this very next paragraph he begins these powerful words of praise for and confidence in God. What on earth is Paul smoking?
It’s because from his prison window, Paul says he has a great view. With the perspective of faith, Paul can see glory emanating from God and he catches a vision of the human-scape as God wants it to be, a realm in which God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” It is not that he is oblivious, but it means that his prison does not define him.
In the centuries since Paul wrote these words from prison, Christians have done the same time after time. We have come upon repulsive and heart-sickening situations, but instead of running away, we have set up camp. Think of Albert Schweitzer doctoring the disease-ridden poor of Africa and Mother Teresa caring for the dying poor of India. We also live lives of faith in the communities of which we are part think of William Booth ministering to the dirt-poor of England and the number of charities, helping organizations, 12-step groups, hospitals and ministries that began because somebody looked at bleakness but saw the opportunity for blessing.
On a more personal scale, and far less famous this same sort of thing happens every day. People take their nieces and nephews and grandchildren into their homes, volunteer to hospice, help at soup kitchens, answer hotlines for people in crises, and do the thousands of other thankless tasks that help struggling brothers and sisters make it through another day.
Returning to Ephesians, it seems like Paul, when we catch the vision of Gods “breadth and length and height and depth” we can invest ourselves in the most unpromising circumstances, have little that is tangible to show for our efforts but still see God’s grace from our vantage point. Then we can declare, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father ....” In a sense, the way of the cross calls for a kind of double vision, so that when we look out of our spiritual window upon our neighborhoods, we see two things: the faraway and the near-at-hand, the cost and the vision.
What do you think? Is this double vision as easy as Paul seems to make it out to be? Is it difficult to look outside a prison window while seeing bars, also see God’s horizons? Not in a sweet bye and bye, but in the here and now?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American philosopher, poet and writer gives us a way to think through this. One day in 1836, after walking the land around his Massachusetts town, Emerson famously returned home and wrote: “The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some 20 or 30 farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of them owns the landscape. There is property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet it is to this their warranty-deeds give no title.”
Emerson was talking about having the vision not of a tax man but as a poet who can look at the faraway sweep of what’s before him and see not tax able chunks, but the panoramic glory of the whole view.
Poetry is one kind of vision, akin to the spiritual farsightedness that enables us to “see” the coming kingdom and trust its reality. It perhaps was that sort of poetic vision Paul had when he declared, “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine ....”
Emerson does allude to the other kind of vision, too --- the near-at-hand. He mentions property owned by three of his neighbors, Miller, Locke and Manning. Their lands, along with those of others, made up the larger landscape about which Emerson waxed poetic.
But how do you suspect did Miller, Locke and Manning viewed their land? Did they wake up in the morning, cup of coffee in hand gaze from their porch and wax poetically as Emerson? Remember this was New England, known for its rocky soil, so Miller, Locke and Manning were the ones who had to dig the boulders out of the ground. They were the ones who had to plant the fields, mend the fences, tend the livestock, maintain the buildings, reap the harvest and foot the tax bill. Their view was the nearsightedness, their view was out of bent back and arthritic knees, that feeds the hungry at hand and deals with the fundamentals of daily existence. Emerson did not pay their property taxes, did he?
That is of course the danger of what happens when we take scripture out of context. Paul is realistic. Later in Ephesians, after his rhapsodic burst about the big picture, discussed with his readers about the daily nitty-gritty of the cross: “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy.”
That is of course the nub of our faith journeys isn’t it? This dual vision; We have the view of Emerson and live lives of Miller, Locke and Manning. We have the vision of Paul as well as the lives of a small, struggling congregation in Ephesus.
The hardscrabble abound, but often don’t look much like vistas. Usually they look more like overwhelming needs or intractable problems. It is often hard to see much promise in them. Our lives often don’t much match the way the kingdom of God is described in the Bible --- because I don’t know about you but when we walk out these doors it doesn’t seem as a place where death, mourning, crying and pain will be no more, and where God himself will wipe every tear away.
Instead it may feel more like that view that Emerson had that is now long gone. Because that land in Massachusetts that Emerson wrote about is no longer tended fields with stone walls. Why? Well because the children of Miller, Locke and Manning traveled west where farming was far easier! If you go back to those fields that Emerson told us about the land has been reclaimed by brush and trees.
Faith that comes by grace means that God’s kingdom isn’t here yet in any complete way. Rather in the meantime, we live in the hardscrabble with a vision. In this meantime we may want to curl up and wait for the undergrowth to cover us in a canopy, or we move into the unwelcoming terrain and to join in the wiping of the tears.
There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about Igor Stravinsky that illustrates this point. Stravinsky was considered by many the greatest and most versatile composer of the 20th century, but he was also known for writing extremely difficult passages into his works. One time the story goes that he created a violin interlude so formidable that a master violinist declared to Stravinsky that it was impossible to play. “Of course,” Stravinsky replied. “I don’t want the sound of someone playing the passage. I want the sound of someone trying to play it.”
That is what gives you and I hope because by God’s love and grace in places of great need, indeed in life itself, that is the definition of our faithfulness to God’s call, a vision while simultaneously a full awareness of whose and where we are. We are not asked to be successful or effective or even feel blessed and bury our emotions and foreswear our reality, rather we are asked to tend the fields of our rocks and see the wildflower. There is holiness in the now! For no matter where we find ourselves, we can declare, “What a view!” and “For this reason I bow my knees before God ....” Amen.
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