Sermon: “Counting Our Blessings: 
God’s Gift of Freedom”

A lot has been said about freedom and choice over the past year leading up to this Tuesday’s presidential election, so it seemed timely to me that one of our lectionary scriptures for today was Joshua’s speech where he urges the people to choose wisely the God they will serve.  “As for me and my household,” Joshua says, “we will serve the Lord.”  (Josh. 24:15) It’s a humbling thought, you know, that the Lord God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, continues to trust us with this freedom of choice – even after we messed up so bad that first time there in Eden.  After all centuries of torture and killing we have done in the name of religion, God still trusts us with free will – to worship and serve Christ by loving God and neighbor – or to go wandering off after pagan idols.  We have this freedom to choose every day; we vote for president only once every four years.  In either case, like King Solomon, we must fervently pray for wisdom – “radiant and unfading,” as the poetry says – for ourselves and for our nation.

Each moment presents a wide range of moral choices, and an opportunity to call on God’s “still speaking” voice of Wisdom to help us decide.  We pray God will steer us away from the tempting variety of false gods available for us to worship.  It’s easy for us to shrug off that second commandment as irrelevant to us today – not many of us actually have graven images in our homes.  It’s not easy to find a statue of Ba’al in Wal-Mart, not even in big cities!  My daughter did buy a tiny pewter horse at the Yankee Fair, but I’ve never seen her worship it.  The idols that tempted our ancestors no longer tempt us. 

What other gods, then, do we worship?  Most of us, if we are honest, know we do not give our whole hearts to God.  But we may be blind to our own idolatries.  What is the thing that distracts you most from God?  Do you cast a worshipful eye on your neighbor’s spouse or on a film or TV star?  “American Idol” is no joke.  How many more people waste their minds watching that kind of show than watch church services on TV?  (That was just a brief sales pitch for you folks watching us at home!)  Maybe Jen and I should sing more – only it would take just one service before you voted me off the show...

Or maybe that face and body you most fervently worship is the one you see in your own mirror.  How much do people spend each month their gym membership?  And how much do they give each month to their church?  I know it’s hard times, and many of us don’t have many pennies to spare, but like the poor widow who put her 2 coins into the offering, we all have a spiritual NEED to give.  Jesus and the prophets before him say how we spend our money makes a big difference to God – because it shows to whom we offer our largest sacrifices.  We don’t have to examine our hearts; we can just look at our wallets – they will reveal whom we have chosen to serve.  “For where your treasure is,” Jesus says in Matthew 6:21, “there your heart will be also.”  In what direction do your tithes and offerings flow?  Does it flow toward God and neighbor with the generosity and love we are called to give?  Or is your heart in a more tightly closed circuit? 

In a recent Connecticut Conference workshop I attended, called “Stewardship as a Spiritual Practice,” one participant admitted to a naturally frugal nature – actually she called herself a “cheapskate.” But any church would love to have her – she sings in the choir and teaches Sunday School, which also meant she never had to touch an offering plate.  She had been chilled by her pastor’s suggestion that we might hope that we don’t have to present our financial records to St. Peter at the pearly gates.  She confessed that she gives so much volunteer time that she knows she uses that to rationalize not giving money to her church, much less giving it away to any other charity.  She said she had come to realize that her soul was mired down in some dark fear that holds her captive. 

We receive God’s gift of freedom when we follow that “in God we trust” advice that our founders were wise enough to print on all our U.S. currency.  Even in hard times, perhaps especially in hard times, we most need to challenge ourselves to place our trust to God and give at least some small percentage of what money we have away.  It’s in those times that we most need to the wisdom and strength to keep our focus on God, to choose God over mammon, to choose faith and hope over fear and despair.

Groups and nations and even planets also need to examine the wisdom of their priorities – which gods we choose to serve.  Budgets, for example – whether for a church or for a nation – are deeply spiritual documents, because they reveal our choices.  Whether you think the amount we spend is too much or too little, HOW we spend our money really does matter to God.  Our expenditures show what we really believe in, where we truly place our faith, and what we worship.  I read a funny article this week that claimed that if space aliens were to land on earth on a beautiful fall weekend like this one they were likely to come to the conclusion that our nation’s most fervent religion was football – what with all the wildly cheering crowds and the highly paid professionals and money being spent on tickets and sacramental beer and pretzels! 

I wonder what those same space aliens would have concluded from watching our election process here in the United States this past week?  Our political ads on TV might have led them to believe we worship things like Greek columns and American flags, or moms and apple pie, or amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties.  These days it’s hard to separate these sorts of emotional idols from the political realm, since the marketing world knows how to manipulate our hearts so well. 

We Congregationalists are rooted in the Protestant Reformation and our tradition of idol-free, plain white meetinghouses – although we have allowed the instrument of the beer halls [gesture to organ pipes] to grace our walls, an innovation of the 19^th century, and we have allowed a cross onto our communion table, however small and tasteful, and a couple of flags have sneaked in here too.  We now have the American flag on one side and the so-called Christian flag on the other – symbols of two allegiances we value highly, we hope, and not idols.

I would hope that reasonable and moderate Christians like us, are able to turn our eyes away from false idols when we worship and when we vote.  I hope we are able to make choices with a clarity of discernment that reflects our ancestor’s wisdom in giving us those traditional clear glass windows that keep us so well-connected to the world.  We are a church that not only asks our members to pray and read the Bible, we actually REQUIRE people to think.  We have always encouraged the practice of spiritual discernment, reading both Bibles and our brochures, listening to both sermons and debates, and to consider what our family, friends and news sources said very carefully – to hear in it all the prophetic and compassionate voice of our “still speaking” God. 

No matter how this election worked out for our chosen candidate,  I think we can be grateful we woke up Wednesday morning and it was all over, and no blood was shed.  We can be very proud to be Americans because we do not make our candidates and parties into idols – and thus, we do not go to war over our political principles and candidates.  Instead, we can have this orderly and peaceful transfer of power after each election that is the envy of the world.  Our brave veterans have gone off to fight not for one party or president, but for all of us and the precious gift of freedom that our Pilgrim ancestors sought for us. 

Still, it cannot go without saying on this first Sunday after the 2008 election that this is an historic moment for our nation as well as our church in choosing Barak Obama as our 44^th president.  He is our nation’s first black president, breaking a color barrier many said would never fall.  He is also our first president baptized in our United Church of Christ.  Now we Congregationalists can claim John Adams, although the evangelical fervor of the preaching of his day drove him into the Unitarian Church.  Teddy Roosevelt grew up Dutch Reformed, but apparently spent his college years as a Congregational Sunday School teacher because he couldn't quite figure out the liturgy of the Episcopalians at the nearest church.  But he ended up attending an Episcopal Church for the rest of this life with his wife.  Calvin Coolidge is the only president so far who remained a lifelong Congregationalist.  So with presidents, like other world leaders, you never know how their faith will influence their politics.

Whether or not you were in the 46% of Brookfield residents who voted for President-Elect Obama, I hope you can share the victory his election is in the long war for “liberty and justice for all” that we Congregationalist troublemakers started when we picked that first fight with King George and threw the Boston Tea Party.  Our abolitionist ancestors could never have dreamed that this day would come.  In my home church in North Carolina when I was growing up people were saying this kind of change would never happen. 

We know that no political party can ever be perfectly Christian any more than any church can be.  Christians come in all colors of the political and racial and denominational spectrum.  Like Moses and Joshua, like Jesus and his disciples, like the Pilgrims and like us, we are all called to follow and to serve God with all the spiritual and material gifts we have been given.  We can count our blessings for the great gift of freedom God has given us and continue to pray – like Solomon, perhaps Israel’s greatest leader – that we will also be blessed with the gift of Wisdom, especially our newly elected president.  With God’s help, the Holy Spirit will guide us, and our Master and Friend Jesus, our Lord and Savior and ultimate leader, will set us free from whatever sins or idolatries bind us.

Thanks be to God for this Good News.  Amen.