Souvenirs

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
August 22, 2004

Souvenirs
Galatians 1:6-9
Luke 12:22-31

At Westminster Presbyterian Church in Buffalo
the stained glass windows along the north side of the Sanctuary
capture scenes from the Old Testament.
There they all are in luminous colors:
Adam and Eve;
Noah, Jacob, Moses,
Jonah, David and Goliath.

In a small part of the window near where I used to sit when I worshipped there,
by pew 148, the pew my grandmother regarded as hers for more than 60 years,
there was a small gold object, about a third of the way up the window.
From a distance it looked like a small chest, a trunk;
the kind of trunk used by a magician:
you know the kind: he steps inside,
closes the lid, seconds later the assistant opens the lid
and the magician is gone!

I never paid much attention to the little gold trunk
until 1981, when I saw the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Do you remember that movie?
Harrison Ford stars as Indiana Jones,
the adventurous archeologist
who goes searching for the Ark of the Covenant
in a race to find it before Hitler’s Nazis can claim it.
I realized after I saw the movie that the gold trunk in the stained glass
was the Ark of the Covenant.

Indiana Jones’s adventures may have been fictitious
but the ark itself was quite real.
Just turn to Exodus, chapter 25 to find God’s
detailed instructions to Moses
as to how he should build the ark of the covenant.
The Hebrew word that we translate as “ark” means “box” or “chest”
and that’s what the ark of the covenant was:
a box, a box covered with gold plating
and a solid gold top.
The two stone tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments,
God’s law, God’s covenant,
were to be placed inside the box.
The top of the ark was to be the seat
where God would sit.
The ark was to be kept in the Holy of Holies,
the room in the very back of the Temple.

It was King Solomon who built the Temple and
who saw to it that the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies.
That was more than 900 years before the birth of Christ.
The Ark remained there for more than 400 years
until the Temple was destroyed
when the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar
routed all of Israel and Judah.

The Ark disappeared. Disappeared without a trace.
The children of Israel were eventually restored to the land
and the great Temple was rebuilt, but the Ark of the Covenant was gone.
It is likely that the Ark was taken back to Babylon,
melted down and the gold turned into gold jewelry for the king’s wife
and other members of the royal household.
In 2d Kings we read that Nebuchadnezzar “carried off all the treasure
of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the kings’ house;
he cut in pieces all the vessels of gold
in the temple of the Lord.” (2K24:13)
The stone tablets were probably considered to be
so much Hebrew gibberish by the conquering army
and tossed in a scrap heap.

Twenty-five hundred years later though,
there is a still an active business in the search for the Ark of the Covenant.
Many are convinced that it still exists
and that someday they will find it.

We’ve turned the Ark of the Covenant into an idol,
something we consider to be precious
and even to have mystical powers.
We have turned the Ark of the Covenant into a souvenir.

Back in my college days I spent one summer traveling around Europe
visiting museums and churches,
and I saw so many slivers of wood that purported to be pieces
of the “true cross” that I suspect that
if they had all been glued together,
the “true cross” would have been at least 50 feet tall!

Of course, the ultimate souvenir, the prize of prizes,is the Holy Grail,
the cup Jesus and his disciples drank from at the Last Supper.
The third installment of the Indiana Jones series focused on the Grail.
Do you remember the scene in the movie
when Jones and his nemesis enter a room in a cave filled with cups?
The cups were guarded by an 800-year-old knight Templar.
It was believed that the cup of Christ, the holy grail,
would give the person immortality.
And so in the scene in the movie, the evil villain looked over the array of cups
wondering which one to choose.
He then took an elaborate gold cup,
saying that it indeed was the cup of the King of Kings.
He dipped the cup into the spring in the corner of the cave,
took a drink….and then aged 50, 60, 70 years in seconds.
Within a minute he was dead, a pile of dust on the floor.
The frail knight turned to our hero and said, “He chose… poorly.”
Then it was Indiana’s turn to make his choice.
He looked at the dozens of cups and then picked up a tarnished bronze one,
a cup that anyone else would have ignored.
It was humble, like our Lord himself.
He dipped the cup into the spring, took a drink,
held his breath…. and was fine.
The knight tells him what we already know:
He chose….wisely.

In a recent edition of Bible Review, Professor Ben Witherington argues
that is highly unlikely that a metal cup,
or any kind of special cup would have been used
by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper.
After all, they were visitors celebrating the Passover meal
in a borrowed room in Jerusalem;
they would have used whatever utensils would have been
made available.
It is more likely that the cup they all drank from was made of local sandstone,
a material that broke easily.
It probably ended up a pile of shattered dust.

The disciples would have put no special credence in the cup
that was used at that meal;
it was Christ who offered redemption,
not the wine they drank,
or the cup from which they drank.
It was eternal life with Jesus in heaven,
and not immortality on earth,
that Christ offered through faith in him.

We seem so eager to believe the stories and the legends that surround
searches for the Ark of the Covenant, Noah’s Ark,
the Cup of Christ, or pieces of the true cross.
Do you remember the controversy a few years back
about a piece of cloth referred to as the Shroud of Turin?
Many believed it was the burial cloth in which Jesus
was wrapped following his crucifixion.
Tests showed that the cloth was probably less than 1,000 years old,
however. But people still argue over just whose ghostly image
seems to be burned into the fabric.

The controversy this summer is over the various claims
put forward by Dan Brown in his best selling book, The DaVinci Code.
I read the book. It is a great read, a real page turner.
But first and foremost: the book is fiction.
It is a story.
There is no truth to the many different claims he puts forward.

The most controversial claim
is that Jesus Christ might have been married to Mary Magdalene,
and that together they might have had a child.
The Bible doesn’t tell us a great deal about Mary Magdalene.
What we do know is that she followed Jesus faithfully
and had been cured of “seven demons”.
She was the first to go to the empty tomb on that first Easter.
Matthew and John both tell us that Mary
was the first to see the risen Christ.
Over the centuries she has become known as a prostitute,
but there is nothing in the Bible that supports that idea.

Brown bases his fiction on the apocryphal Gospel of Philip,
a book written about 200 years after the death of Christ.
In that book, we find these words, “And the companion of the Savior
is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples
and used to kiss her often on the mouth.”
The book was not included in the Bible because no one thought of it
as the inspired word of God.
It was filled with too many statements and claims that made no sense.
It was also filled with statements that directly contradict our faith.
As just one example, the book states,
“some say, Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit;
they are in error.”
The writer of this gospel rejects the very notion that Mary conceived
by the power of the Holy Spirit, a central tenet of our faith!

In the early years of Christianity, there were many books purporting to be gospels,
stories of the life of Jesus Christ,
stories of his teaching, his healing, his travels.
The vast majority contained all kinds of fanciful stories,
much like the gospel of Philip.
And there were many who claimed to have the “true gospel”,
the only gospel.

People seemed so eager to believe anything they read or heard.
Within 30 years of the death of our Savior,
things had got so out of hand in Galatia
that Paul felt compelled to write the believers an angry letter:
“I am astonished
that you are so quickly deserting the gospel…”

Paul’s words are timeless and could just as easily have been written to us.
We are so eager, so ready, so willing to turn away from
the central messages of the gospel,
from the teachings of our Lord and Savior
We are so eager to believe gossipy accounts,
fanciful accounts,
the more scandalous the better.

We are more like souvenir seekers, looking for little totems
we can put on our shelf:
Better to have a piece of the true cross,
or go looking for the Grail
than to do that hard work of reading the gospels,
listening to Jesus, and then following his word.
As Nancy Bruscino reminded us last week,
we are all looking for “cheap grace”.

Think about the lesson that Jesus teaches us through Luke.
It could not be simpler: Don’t worry….Have faith and don’t worry.

But we are nation of worriers: we are chronic worriers.
We worry about everything.
We get ulcers, we lose sleep
we feel filled with anxiety
We spend billions of dollars on medication and treatment.
We worry.
We don’t trust Jesus
We don’t trust God.
We strive to find souvenirs of faith,
little items we can put on the shelf,
rather than striving – working – for the kingdom of God.

Why are we so ready to believe rumors,
yet so slow to take things on faith?
Why are we so ready to believe that Jesus might have been secretly married,
that he might have even fathered a child,
but so slow to believe him when he tells us
not to worry,
that he will lift our burdens from us
that God is watching over us?

We’ve got just two weeks of summer left till Labor day is upon us.
If you want a good read, a good story,
pick up the DaVinci Code.
But for every page you read in a novel like the DaVinci Code.
why not read a page in the Bible,
especially your One Year Bible.

We all love souvenirs, little mementoes of our journey along the way.
But souvenirs are made of dust, and to dust they will return.
They are things of this earth.
Seek first the treasures of heaven.
Seek first the things of God’s heavenly kingdom.
That’s not fiction, or fable or fancy.
That’s the word of the Lord.

Amen