Deuteronomy 26:1-3, 10-11; March 9, 2025; First Sunday in Lent
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If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?
Hawaii? Tahiti? Cincinnati? Or perhaps would you be right here, at church today, at Grace, here in Jenkintown?
Where would you be if you could be anywhere?
By chance, does anyone imagine themselves being at Barn Elms?
No? Hmm… might it be fair to say that you don’t even know what or where Barn Elms is? That’s okay. I didn’t either; at least, not for a long time.
See first picture below
Yup, there it is: Barn Elms, today, London, UK. A soccer pitch and a playing field. I imagine this picture is giving some of you PTSD stemming from all of those Saturday mornings and afternoons you’ve spent in a place just like this watching a tournament, or ten.
And so, yeah, I’d wager that no one here thought of these particular grounds when asked where in the world you’d prefer to be today.
But you see, that wasn’t always the case. For this place, and these grounds, were once the very height of society, The place to be. The club to belong to if you were an anybody aspiring to be a somebody.
Yes, my friends, Barn Elms was once the home and estate of famous dignitaries and leaders, perhaps most notably Sir Francis Walsingham, Secretary of State and Chief Spymaster for Queen Elisabeth. And boy, it was once majestically picturesque!
See second image below.
Ooh… just lovely, right?
Yeah, you wouldn’t have been crazy then if you conjured a place like this when thinking on where in the world you could be today if away from here… heck, I’d love to be there myself right now.
More interestingly though, this lovely estate was also the place where the famous, but since forgotten, Kit-Kat club used to meet.
And yes, you heard me right, the Kit-Kat club!
Their story goes that in the early 1700’s a group of philosophical and literary men would meet in a local tavern to discuss the issues of the day and how they might better promote the arts.
The tavern’s owner, Christopher Kat (yes, that was his name) would serve this club his special homemade mutton pies (yes, mutton… pies…) which he affectionately called Kit Kats. And this group of men just ate them up. They loved them! So much so that they adopted the name for their meeting, their group, so becoming, the Kit-Kat club.
And soon after one of their members rose through the ranks of society and was able to purchase the Barn Elms estate for himself; and subsequently invited the Kit Kat club there with him, to these grounds, to continue to meet and discuss.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, a century or so later, an English entrepreneur with a flair for history, fell in love with this story and this club, and so divined to manufacture a small bit of wrapped chocolate for the “sophisticated, working man” — a snack that could be enjoyed quickly without making too much of a fuss or too much of a mess (though I would personally counter that my hands are always a bit smudged, and I never feel very sophisticated either during or after).
Yes, these Kit-Kats, my friends… this is their story! Now, who would have thought that this brightly, orange-wrapped candy, mostly known for being thrown into Jack-O-Lanterns on Halloween, would have had such an impressive back story, am I right?
And more, that it derived from such a serene and celestial estate, at Barn Elms, upon whose grounds now stand noisy soccer pitches outside of a loud and bustling modern city.
The things we forget. The things we forget over time.
Especially when life changes, and when the ground shifts under our feet.
Sometimes when we inherit something — houses, grounds, towns, companies, monies — we forget why, or don’t have a complete understanding of who or how.
Sometimes we forget then that the grounds upon which we stand today have a richer history beyond anything that we see now.
The once bright flower bed that’s since been reduced to weeds. The colorful shards of pottery that were once vases, now lodged in the mud. That bridge, once crossed over by lovers, now laden with rust and deemed a hazard.
You know, at one point, about a century ago, SPS was the place to work. It was the industry that brought in families to Abington and Jenkintown, that sent kids to our schools, who then became our teachers, leaders, and CEOs elsewhere.
Today though, I’m not sure anyone remembers that history or is at all interested enough in caring.
And, don’t hear me wrong – I am not defending SPS Technologies, ignoring their recent violations or possible delinquencies, nor am I suggesting that they should be without question granted a new lease to rebuild near our town whose grounds are now so visibly different a hundred and change years later.
But I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is yet history here all the same, upon these grounds where we stand within a mile of that place, upon these grounds that perhaps we’d benefit from not entirely wiping clean from our memory.
In the back there, in the narthex of our church, there’s a dark and somewhat dusty bit of stained glass, that I first noticed on my initial visit here with the PNC. It immediately stood out to me. And upon closer inspection, I read that it was donated by the Argue Family who were apparently members of Grace here in 1884. …That’s not what caught my attention though. But rather that underneath that date, it notated that they had lost five children who were a year-old or less.
I can’t imagine that. And yet, even though that was their awful reality, this church yet became their family. Enough so to leave to it, to donate to it, to be stewards of it, and to create a history here and in that window. And though I’d wager that no one here remembers that or them, they are yet memorialized in grace for eternity.
But…not just because of some stained glass that will one day break and fade away, but because they were first and will always be God’s. Who walks with them now upon a sturdier shore in Heaven, but who also walked with them down here on these ever shifting sands of Earth.
The good news then, my friends, is that even as the world turns, as estates become pitches, as companies burn to ash, and as we ourselves become the dust from which we were first formed, we are yet and have always been God’s own; and this ground, this Earth, is God’s creation, given to us.
And though this creation will undoubtedly never be perfect, this world is yet ours, and there’s no other place I’d rather be than here, save for eternity. But until we get there — to eternity — let us remember the words of Deuteronomy and together “bring the first of the fruit of the ground that our LORD has given us; setting it down before our God and bowing down before our LORD” – Deuteronomy 26:10-11
For God has indeed been good to us, my friends, and has left us this great inheritance. And so, it is our responsibility to carry forward its legacy, and to be part of its long and changing history.
Whether it’s chapters are complicated or simple; or whether it’s delights are just downright tasty (like this Kit-Kat bar)… we should give thanks all the same, for God has made us the co-authors and stewards over it.
Amen
