“The Horse is a Vain Hope for Deliverance”
A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
August 12, 2007
Psalm 33:12-22, Hebrews 11:1-3 8-16, Luke 12:32-40
Rev. Larry Lange
Grace Evangelical Lutheran Congregation
Green Bay, Wisconsin
Like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Hjalmar Storr-Vukku Johnson desired a better country, though not a heavenly one, so when he was a strong, strapping lad of twenty, he came to America.
Like most of the rest of the Norwegians who came to America, Hjalmar arrived by steam ship at New York City, but he didn’t stay there; he just kept going; Norwegians didn’t settle in New York City; though you’d think the streets flowing with people at the base of the stony cliffs of skyscrapers would have reminded them of fjords, apparently they didn’t. No, the Norwegians just kept moving further and further west.
Hjalmar Storr-Vukku Johnson was a bit different than most Norwegians, however, he carried as much baggage in his last name as he had in his steamer trunk, and he was anxious to get rid of it. Storr Vukku is an obscure geographical feature in an obscure part of Norway near which Hjalmar’s family had lived for centuries. Johnson indicated that Hjalmar was the son of a fellow named John who lived near Storr Vukku. Hjalmar abandoned Storr Vukku and called himself Johnson, because he thought it sounded less foreign and exotic.
Still he stopped his search for a homeland at a fork in the road called Foxhome, Minnesota, just south of which numerous Norwegians from Storr Vukku had settled.
When forming a church in 1890, like Hjalmar, those Norwegians dropped the exotic part of the name Storr Vukku and called their church Vukku Lutheran Church, a nice, simple, American sort of name—or so they thought.
But Hjalmar felt that if he actually settled among all those respectable Norwegian farmers, it would have been like not leaving home at all, something he had been trying to accomplish. So Hjalmar stayed up in Foxhome, a town famous all over Minnesota for its gunfights and dancing girls and rowdy Germans. And that was Monday nights. Hjalmar must have had some sort of wild blood in him, some sort of animal-herding, Laplander Finnish blood, because he started selling horses there in Foxhome, because they used horses out on the prairie in Foxhome until the early nineteen forties, so there was a whole generation of farmers to sell horses to and apparently a lot of money to be made doing so, because Hjalmar soon built a grand, two story, white farm house on the southwestern edge of Foxhome—not in town mind you— Hjalmar knew no respectable Norwegian farmer would be caught dead coming into a rowdy German town to buy horses, but that the edge of town would be acceptable. Hjalmar planted trees around the house that became grand shady oaks, and he built a large broad board fence around the whole southwest corner of town part of which was a corral for his horses, part of which ended at a grand gateway to his property.
As tractors began to dominate farming in the forties, Hjalmar found himself in a bind; he had never needed much land; he had not been able to purchase any land during the Depression, so during the wartime rebirth of the agricultural economy, Hjalmar had a useless commodity in his horses and very little land upon which to farm. He did what he could, working night and day, taking odd jobs, buying fields as far as six miles from home, but he was already in his fifties and the strain killed him. He had never given up dabbling in horses; he kept a special breed of small horses—the kind of horses you see at fairs for kids to ride—and his son Donald kept up the family tradition—not because it made any economic sense at all (which it didn’t)—but because he loved the horses as much as his father had. Donald loved horses so much he wished horses could have been his livelihood instead of dirt farming which, like his father, Donald had never liked, but which was all he knew how to do and which he felt obligated to hand down to his sons.
There comes a time in many of our lives when the raspy breathing of the Grim Reaper gets louder, when we realize our time is running out, when we wonder how we ended up with the sort of life we have, when the things we did in our youth strangely become clearer and nearer and dearer to us. Sometimes these frustrations and nostalgic longings form themselves into a grand plan—a plan for something we feel we just have to do before we die. So you remember jumping your bicycle off wooden ramps when you were seven, and so when you’re fifty-seven, you buy yourself a Harley; or you remember backpacking in the mountains when you were 14, and when you’re my age you’d like nothing better than to move to Alaska and watch the glaciers melt.
Sometimes, however, it’s not a very clear plan, just a vague hankering, a desire for a better job, a better life, a better country, a feeling of being ill at ease, not quite whole, like someone killed your inner child and you desire to raise him or her from the dead, and then suddenly a story or an image will cause that longing to crystallize into a treasure to throw everything into seeking.
This latter experience was the case for Donald. When Donald bought his first TV and first turned it on the first flickering bluish picture that gradually came into focus was Roy Rogers, King of Cowboys, and Dale Evans, Queen of the West, and their horses Trigger and Buttermilk. Donald’s wife Dorothy came home from the Vukku Ladies Aide and Mission Quilting Society at 4:30 p.m. in time to meet the school bus and she and the kids found Donald in the parlor with Roy and Trigger, in the dark, the only light the grey light of the TV.
The kids, of course, were jublilant to be among the first in Foxhome to have a TV and they joined their father there in the parlor none of them noticing how his gnarled, dirt farmer hands were wet from wiping away tears.
There was a time after the grain harvest and before the corn harves during which several fall craft bazaars and soup suppers were held in Foxhome, and Donald began prodding and cajoling all the people he knew (and he knew all the people) to combine the craft bazaars on one Saturday in September and for his part, he would make his horses available for rides for the kids in the morning and for a game of pony baseball in the afternoon, and he would arrange at considerable expense for a concert by a local family country western group in the evening.
Just in case you didn’t know, pony baseball is like regular baseball except when batters hit the ball they jump on a pony and try to get the pony to run the bases.
Now there’s two things about the ponies in Foxhome that made the game both fun to watch and illegal in most states: one: the ponies were much too short for adults to ride. And two, the ponies were part Norwegian and wanted absolutely nothing at all to do with playing baseball for a crowd of drunken Germans. In other words, even a good Norwegian like Barry Bonds could hit the ball halfway to Minneapolis and still not make it to first base.
The first year Foxhome Western Days was a grand success, and over the years it attracted people from all over the west seeking venues for various, dubious horse acts. There was a flea market, pie baking and pie eating contests, a Cowboy King and Queen costume contest, and eventually even a traveling, mechanized carnival ride company.
In order to attract more Norwegians, Dorothy organized an ecumenical western style church service and potluck dinner at the Lutheran church. Dorothy did this over Donald’s objections who said that Western Days was one thing, and church was quite another and ne’er should the twain meet, and Donald said this not out of respect for the church, but out of his concern that Western Days could be torn apart by some petty religious squabble.
Western Days and his horses were his religion, the treasure his heart had been seeking the better country he desired, the kingdom he had founded. Planning Western Days began to consume a greater and greater portion of Donald’s time and energy and possessions: it was a wonderful daily distraction for Donald from the dirt farming he had always despised, more and more of which he passed off to his sons.
When Donald died, a double share of his winsome powers of persuasion and powerful gifts of organization were passed on to his wife Dorothy and his daughter Carol. Though son DeWayne did absolutely no work on Western Days at all, he carried on his father’s showman role, and his pony baseball antics were legendary, until the year he was trampled by a pony and pony baseball was suddenly revealed to a gasping crowd as the dangerous, inhumane, stupidity it had always been.
And the next year there was no appetite for it in Foxhome, and Western Days died.
Despite all Donald’s fretting about the evils of religion, (most of which of course he was right about) the Western Days ecumenical service and potluck went on for years thereafter since it represented a desire for a better country than Western Days, since it represented a desire for a heavenly country, a heavenly city the foundations of which the architect and builder is God.
A bit after today’s lesson from the letter to Hebrews, its writer makes explicit what kind of kingdom those worshipers were receiving together in those ecumenical Western days services, the same kind of kingdom you are receiving in worship today. The writer of Hebrews believed that today you’ve come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels in festal gathering, to the assembly of the firstborn from the dead who are enrolled in heaven. You have come, today, to God—the judge of all—and you’ve come to be with the spirits of the righteous made perfect who are the communion of the saints. You have come, today, to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. You have come, today, among a people who are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken: for we believe here we have no lasting city; for we believe also what the psalmist wrote:
“there is no king who can be saved by a mighty army,
(no matter what all our politicians are saying)
for the horse is a vain hope for deliverance; for all its strength it cannot save.
And a strong man is not delivered by his great strength.”
Amen