Archive
of Letters to My Friends:
The
true spirit of recycling
|
|
The
true spirit of recycling
January
2005
By
the Rev. Jon Rieley-Goddard
Dear
friends,
The
other day, I bought a discarded library book for 25 cents at the
perpetual sale at the Buffalo and Erie County Library’s
main branch downtown.
A
week later, after posting the book to Amazon.com on the Internet,
I sold this same book to a professor who lives on an island in
Ireland. He paid $45 plus shipping.
I
love to recycle things.
I’m
sure that the professor who paid $45 American for a book that
had fallen so low would be delighted to learn that I had plucked
his coveted title from the dustbin of dustbins – the last-chance
bin at the discard counter at the library.
The
book was a real sleeper, one of the sort that I automatically
snag whenever I see them. It was a book of literary criticism
concerning the novels of Jane Austen, one of my favorite writers.
I even passed up this particular book on at least one previous
visit because the dust jacket was in terrible condition.
Who
knew that a dinged and discarded work of literary criticism from
a respected publishing house, concerning a first-sort English
author, would have such value?
In
the end, I did.
***
I
was at a meeting during this same time span in early December.
While sitting around, chatting after we had finished up our work,
a colleague turned to me while wrapping up a conversation with
another while donning a coat and muffler, and said: “And
I see your church dying with dignity.”
Maybe
I could have held my tongue; maybe it would have been better to
simply grind my teeth and silently grow a tumor. Instead, what
followed was a spirited discussion of my merits, your mortality,
and my colleague’s blind spots. And my blind spots, too,
I suppose. I won’t bore you with the heroic details, save
to say that the two of us were the only ones to hear the conversation,
everyone else having left the building. Suffice it to say that
I impressed upon my colleague, with some light and heat, a variation
on Mark Twain’s comment in response to a newspaper obituary
that had him dead and in the grave.
The
news of my demise, Twain said, has been greatly exaggerated.
***
Pierce
Avenue Presbyterian Church has landed in the dustbin of churches
that run out of reserves. That cannot be denied. What is more
important, however, is to understand and to educate brothers and
sisters who don’t know any better that this landing in the
dustbin is not a comment upon or a reflection of our worth, potential,
or future. If I can find a $45 treasure in a 25-cent last-change
book bin, then we can take a lesson from that about value, low
points, and the course of the future.
It’s
not over until God says that it’s over. And God ain’t
saying that, at least to me. What God has done is to open a door
while closing another.
God
does stuff like this all the time.
All
the time.
If all goes according to plan, at the Annual Meeting of the congregation,
on Jan. 23, the Session will present for information a budget
for 2005 that reflects a reduction of my compensation from 10
segments to 5 segments. The budget will go from $80,000 and change
to $50,000 and change.
That
is the door God closed, so to speak.
The
door that is already opening for me is my success with selling
used books on the Internet -- a job that I simply adore. I literally
can do half of this job in my pajamas, if I so choose. And it
has to do with books, which are as near to my heart as my wife,
my cat, and my truck, to name a few of my favorite things.
Rather
than feeling shame, I feel joy, because I have sought a tent to
live in as a minister for a long time, and now I have one with
room for me, my wife, and my cat.
That probably needs some explaining. You see, a minister who works
part time in ministry and part time in other things has traditionally
in our denomination been called a tentmaker
(the Apostle Paul was a tentmaker ...). And a Presbyterian tentmaker’s
tent
is the job that helps pay the bills so the minister can continue
to answer a call to do ordained ministry. Some tents are big,
some are small, and some are just right, like mine.
My
call to ministry has always been precious to me, and at the same
time I have treated my call with varying degrees of attention
and inattention. I made the Dean’s List in my first semester
in Seminary. Then I fell in love with the
Reverend, and we got married in our second
year of Seminary. I didn’t make the Dean’s List after
that first semester. In our life together, we have found that
time and again, when we are in deep and even desperate need of
assistance, that God has opened a new door for us while closing
another. At least three times since moving to Buffalo 10 years
ago, we have been convinced that we would have to leave the city
we love, because we could not make ends meet. Each time, there
have been surprising and helpful changes, late but not too late.
This has happened so many times for us that we have come to rely
on this precious knowledge to force a thin wedge between us and
the panic that sometimes presses close.
***
In
our years together, while learning to hope in the Lord and wait
on the Lord, and at the same time to push and shove our way through
life, the best we can, the Reverend and I have learned the value
of recycling:
–
an ugly trash-filled lot across the street, by our organizing
efforts and with our neighbors, became Herkimer
Hollow, a community garden.
–
Our 100-year-old-plus house on the corner, a drab two-story Shotgun
Bungalow, took on a new meaning for our neighbors when we moved
in. Enterprising renters had painted the trim black. A new coat
of paint and a bit of attention to the landscaping, with the slow
but sure spreading of the knowledge that two Creatures
had moved in, recycled our home.
–
As the year 2000 approached, the Reverend began to amass a pile
of donated computers and monitors. I turned this various pile
into computers for everyone at her nonprofit agency and a six-computer
network for the kids. Mostly from recycled parts.
***
Recycling
can be fun. There was a movie that came out a few years ago about
the comic aspects of trash collecting. Three men in overalls are
looking into a garbage bin. “Look,” one of them says,
“someone threw away a perfectly good white guy!”
***
Recycling
can be spiritually uplifting, too. When we here at Pierce Ave.
ramped up our rummage/jumble sales last fall and set dates for
quarterly sales, we didn’t impress anyone, including ourselves.
After two sales three months apart, both grossing more than $1,000,
we began to be impressed. I’ve sought to point to this simple
exercise in dusting off and re-tooling an important idea from
the past as an example of what it means to renew – recycle
– the mission of a church.
We
sell hundreds of items of clothing, in particular, for pennies
per item. The people who come at the end of the rumage sale day
to fill bags for a few dollars are not collecting clothes to make
artsy-craftsy things. They wear those clothes, because they cannot
afford to drive to the mall, let alone buy new clothes at retail
prices.
If
that isn’t a renewal – recycling – of our mission,
I’m ready for the dustbin.
***
Take
off your shoes, now, for we are about to step onto holy ground,
while still talking about recycling.
God
recycles, too. From the water that evaporates to become the rain
that falls somewhere else, to the dying and rising of plants in
their succession, and on and on and on, God closes and opens,
in a kaleidoscope of creativity.
God
does not need to run to the craft store to be creative. Everything
God needs is at hand, and no new materials need to be created.
God creates moment to moment using only the original materials
that the creation started with. Nothing has been lost, and little
or nothing save Jesus Christ is the same as it was, but the creating
– recycling – continues. This is the heart and soul
of recycling, and the reason that we can rise from the dustbin
of cast-off churches ... rumpled, chastened, and joyful. Recycled.
***
I’ve
been feeling what I am about to say for a long time, and still
haven’t found the best way to say it, but here goes anyway,
bare feet and all: The
resurrection is an example of God’s fundamental preference
for recycling.
Simply put, standing shoeless on holy ground, I say that God in
bringing God's son back from the grave, recycles Jesus for new
service in a new body and spirit that still resembles the old
in all the important and outward ways. Divine economy.
If
it seems silly – or worse -- to call this recycling, perhaps
we have not yet redeemed this fundamental and essential word and
activity. And if we still have work to do in understanding the
depths of what it means to recycle, it may mean that we are still
learning about the New
Thing that God has been doing, is doing, and will
do in us, among us, with us, and for us. Recycling is generally
seen as a means of salvation for the global good and economy.
Recycling is also our salvation.
***
Did
you notice a few paragraphs ago that I mentioned that our neighbors
slowly came to realize that two Creatures
had moved in on the corner?
The house next door to us is a rental, the sort that in Buffalo
is called a Double.
Traditionally, the owner lives on the first floor and rents out
the second. A Double is a vertical duplex. One day, I was working
outside and a little girl next door called out to me. “I
hear,” she said, “that there’s two Creatures
living in that house. The lady upstairs said so.”
I
thought for a moment, and it dawned on me. “No,” I
answered, “there’s two preachers
living here, my wife and I. We’re preachers,
not creatures.”
A lot of good that did. A few years later, little Red,
a Dennis the Menace lookalike who used to live in that house next
door, flew by on his bike, past the Reverend and I. He offered
a variation based on, and extending, the previous conversation
with the little girl.
“Hi,
Mrs.
Peach! Hi, Mr.
Peach!” he yelled.
***
If
you wish, you can recycle that story, and if you do, I guarantee
that you will bless those who are listening to you.
What
more could you wish for? Recycling is a saving grace.
Blessings
and peace
Pastor
Jon
