There’s a really pitiful scene in the movie Schindler’s List as the Nazis are liquidating a ghetto.  A Jewish family has gathered around the dining table one last time for a very strange meal.  The father has spread the family diamonds out on the table alongside a loaf of bread.  One at a time, he takes a chunk of bread and stuffs a diamond into it.  Each member of the family, including the children, is given a piece of diamond-studded bread to swallow.  You can hear the sound of soldier’s boots and rifle shots growing closer.  The family’s fate is just outside the door.  And, here they are swallowing their diamonds.  As though where they’re headed it will matter how much they’ve been able to stuff their gut.  As though, by clinging to their wealth, they can cling to their lives.  As though it’s possible to cling to any sense of normalcy when insanity is kicking in your door. 

What we know tells us they were wasting their time.  But, we have the luxury of perspective that only history allows.  We know what the Nazis finally did to all the Jews they could lay their hands on.  So, we know that stuffing your gut with your diamonds when someone is coming to take your life is a very pitiful way to spend your last moments together as a family.  We know that, right? 

Six weeks ago, insanity kicked in the door of normalcy for us.  Even our everyday vocabularies show it.  Honestly, before September 11, can you remember the last time you even said the words anthrax or small pox?  I’d actually forgotten that little scar on my left arm that looks like a miniature moon crater.  The one the docs tell us is no good anymore.  All of a sudden, we’re dusting off the history books.  Europe, mid to late 1300’s.  Black Death.  20 to 30 million dead.  You know, I’d love to change the subject.  But, the subject isn’t mine to change.  I’d love to get back to normal.  But, what’s that? 

Nancy and I took a little one-night trip to Salado this past week.  It was our fall foliage tour, without the foliage.  We just needed to get away.  I’ve been feeling that a lot lately.  So, we did one night in a bed and breakfast.  The next morning we went and did some of what the ladies call shopping.  And, we found this G. Harvey we’ve wanted for a long time.  A beautiful little church in the wildwood scene.  The kind of painting you wish you could just climb into.  Nicely framed reminder of simplicity and serenity.  Nicely priced, too.  We passed.  Right now, it just doesn’t make sense.  Refugees by the tens of thousands living on plastic sheets in the Pakistani desert.  Starvation coming with winter just around the corner.  G. Harveys just don’t make sense right now.  Someone kicked in the door.  I’m trying to figure out what normal is.  Oddly, that’s also what makes G. Harveys so tempting right now.  Like, owning the painting means owning the peace in it.  It’s just a strange price to pay right now when insanity is kicking in the door. 

So, I’ve tried other things less expensive.  Like just reminding myself that I don’t fly that much anyway.  And, thank God, I don’t live in New York City.  And, we have a good military.  And, a brave President.  And, smart scientists.  And, the CIA and FBI.  Strangely though, saying all of those things to myself, I feel like I’m just swallowing diamonds when someone is about to kick in the door.  No matter how much I swallow, in the morning the headlines will change and this too shall pass.  Or, if nothing else, the mail will come.  Vulnerable.  That’s it.  That’s what I feel.  Touchable, from anyone, anywhere at any time who can afford a thirty-five cent postage stamp.  This past week, after a second wave of catastrophic terrorism didn’t visibly materialize as threatened, one local FBI agent was quoted as saying that very soon now we’ll be able to return to “a normal state of heightened alert.”  A normal state of heightened alert?  Why am I strangely not comforted?  Is heightened alert the new normal?  Do we have any other options?

It was in the middle of all this dietary and normalcy rethinking that I found myself in the middle of this scripture for the morning.  “‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.  For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.’”  Where your treasure is, what you choose to value above all else, Jesus said, that’s where you’ll find your heart. 

All of which seems to mean at least this much.  If we can control it, if we can hold it, store it, save it, smell it, taste it or swallow it, it can’t ultimately help us.  And, if we’ve set our hearts on believing it can, then anyone big enough and mean enough to kick in our door and take our stuff can take our hearts, too.  Do we have any options?

As a matter of fact, Jesus has given us one, the gift of perspective that only faith allows.  “‘Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal,’” Jesus said.  We can try getting back to normal.  But, when you think about it, the old normal wasn’t all that great anyway.  Kind of like the airline industry, if normal was that easy to topple, was it that solid to begin with?

Did you know that the animal responsible for more human deaths every year in the United States was not the rattlesnake or Grizzly bear or brown recluse or even the shark?  Last year, more Americans lost their lives to, of all things, the white tail deer.  One hundred thirty people, to be exact.  More people died from run-ins with deer than any other animal.  Just driving home from work or on vacation, out of nowhere, a Bambi-like thing bounds into your life and redefines normal in less time than it takes to slam on your breaks.  We’re pretty easy to get to, aren’t we?  The old normal wasn’t all that great after all.  At least not in terms of a safe place to leave your heart.  We do have an alternative. 

“‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life . . . or about your body.  Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?’”  There’s one problem with this.  Telling a Schmucker not to worry is about like telling a pig, standing in front of an overstuffed trough, not to eat.  So much neurosis, so little time!  How many people do you know who actually keep track of how many people die deer-related deaths each year?  So, these words of Jesus words, standing alone, don’t help much.  Thank God, Jesus’ words don’t stand alone.  They go with these his other words.  “‘Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.’”  You see, you can’t just not worry.  It’s a double-negative.  It cancels itself out grammatically and spiritually.  There is only one way not to worry.  We have to put something in its place. 

Jesus was simply and profoundly saying that, if we will want his kingdom for ourselves, not a castle and a moat but a relationship and the rule of his love and justice in our hearts, we will never do without anything we really need.  Anything we absolutely must have.  Which has nothing to do with any of the stuff we can control, or touch, or hold, or wear, or eat and swallow but his character, his very heart, in ours.  The old normal is to stuff our gut with the stuff that passes, or that someone can steal along with all the heart we put into getting it.  The new normal, the normal Jesus wants for us, is to want for ourselves what God wants for us, which is something no one can ever take away from us.  And, what God wants for us, he’ll give us if we will decide that wanting what he wants is more important than what most people would normally want. 

Our only real alternative is paganism.  “‘What shall we eat? or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’”  If those are the primary questions that stir at the center of our being, if our questions about life don’t reach any further than that, Jesus was saying, then we are in the truest sense of the word, pagans.  A pagan isn’t necessarily someone wearing a grass skirt dancing around a fire and chanting demonic incantations in a third world country.  A pagan is anyone who chooses to live as though there were no God.  Anyone whose primary questions never reach any further than what’s for dinner.  Lots of three-piece-Lexus-driving-bed-and-breakfast-G. Harvey pagans walk this planet.  Pagans not because they are incapable of knowing better or because they didn’t score high enough on their SAT to get into A&M.  They are pagan because, out of choosing to worry more about what they can control and others want to steal, they forget the God who promised to care for and love them no matter what.  To be pagan is to live as though there is no God. 

That’s why Jesus also said, “‘The eye is the lamp of the body.  If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.  If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’”  Obsessive worry about the material world blinds a man’s soul to the eternal world.  To be blind to what is eternal, to only stumble around in the darkness of selling our souls and giving our hearts to what is only physical is to be, in the truest sense of the word, a pagan.  Clothes, food, shelter.  We don’t have to believe in God to be good at getting those.  But, if we give our hearts to getting and protecting those things alone, then we can’t give our hearts to God.

I think that is what bothered me more than anything this week.  Not that I might get an anthrax-tainted letter, but that, in my worry that I might, I would become nothing more than “‘the pagans (who) run after all these things.’”  Out of fear that someone might take it all away, I might actually start believing that all I have is something someone can take away.  What if, after all is said and done, we don’t get back to normal?  The old normal.  What if we came out of this with a new normal?  Not one defined by what we can control and protect but one defined, at its core, by faith in a God who is in control even when we are not?  Not one who will cheat us by simply restoring our God-bless-America material wealth but one who will bless America and us with the privilege of redefining wealth in terms more spiritual than material no matter what we gain or lose.

One alternative is paganism.  Another alternative is to do what Art and Robbie Daniel have started doing.  In light of our church’s current conversation about what we value most, the Daniels decided to sit down, as a family, and prayerfully consider what they value most.  So, now we have two images to work with this morning.  One family desperately swallowing diamonds out of fear that someone would take them.  Another family prayerfully considering what it chooses to eternally value.  In one case, a family desperately seeking a way to hold onto a normal to which they hoped to someday return.  In the other, a family deciding to rethink normal.  Which image fits most closely the words Jesus has given? 

When Tom Rutledge got married years ago, Mary and James wanted to pay for the honeymoon suite.  But, after the wedding, they couldn’t remember if they’d given the hotel their credit card number.  So, they called the hotel where Tom and Susan were supposed to be staying only to discover that they had not checked in.  So, they began calling every hotel they could think of trying to find the couple.  Finally, they landed on the right one.  But, when the operator answered, and before Mary could explain that she only wanted to give the hotel her credit card number, the operator put Mary through to Tom’s suite.  Any number of things you might expect to happen on your wedding night.  The phone ringing is not one of them.  Your mom being on the other end of the line when it does is the other.  It doesn’t seem normal for you mom to call just at that moment.  So, when Tom answers the phone, all he can say is “mom??!!!”  Some voices you just don’t expect to hear at that moment.  Your mind is just not set to listen for them.  Unless a son understands that there is no place he’ll ever go his mother’s heart won’t follow.

Before we get back to normal, can we stop, look around and listen.  Jesus has given us a beautiful image of peace and hope.  A picture of “‘the lilies of the field (that) grow (and) do not labor or spin (and) the birds of the air.’”  It’s such a picture so beautiful you just want to climb into it.  The caption reads, “‘Are you not much more valuable?’”  It’s a picture that keeps telling us not to worry.  Not because there’s not plenty to worry about if that’s what we choose.  But, because, there is no place we can ever go and nothing that can ever happen to change the fact that the heart of our “‘heavenly Father’” won’t follow. 

By, the way, this picture is nicely priced.  It’s not too pricey.  It’s free.  As free as faith for the asking.  And, faith is nothing more or less than saying to God, “Here’s my heart.  Please take it and keep it safe.”

Amen.