If your nephew is visiting you and you are pressed for some background to talk, I suggest Abraham Lincoln's birthplace.  It is not far down the road and there is no charge. It is an interesting combination of great poverty and sheer elegance: a log cabin of the most primitive sort as the center piece to a massive classic temple. Ancient Europe and backwoods Kentucky.

Probably the Eternal Dwelling Place is in mind, rather than the White House. One must take care in extolling the White House. After all, the Trumans had to move out lest the place fall down around them, so wretched was its condition. And when Eleanor Roosevelt showed Mrs. Harry Truman and daughter Margaret the place they were moving into, she casually remarked that there were rats in the White House. Rodents, that is.

So the temple over the log cabin had something more in mind: the Eternal Home to come, and where, hopefully, we will all meet. If there be a President for whom this could be said, without hesitation, it is surely the name Lincoln that comes to mind.

The pathos of the Vietnam Memorial in Frankfort, overlooking the capitol, is the names traced out on white granite, in calendar order, so arranged that the shadow of the huge sundial arm caresses your name on the day you died.

Or perhaps better said, on the day of your birth, for death is the passage to eternal life. That a body as far removed from us as the sun should figure in a relationship with a person's history is surely some attempt to see Heavenly involvement with our life and our death. Our names are written in Heaven and that a heavenly body should read them and note them on a day very significant to each is also a gesture of some significance. And, like gestures, a vehicle of deeper meaning. For our names are written in Heaven. There is a place for us and our names are known there.

My first encounter with death as a priest was with a young man burned in a grass fire while his villagers were hunting pigs by surrounding the pigs with fire and then spearing them when they would dart free. He got caught in a wind change and all his skin was burned from his body except for his face. He was past pain for his nerves were burned away. I baptized him and anointed him. "Will you do me a favor?", I asked him. "You'll be in Heaven before the sun goes down. Will you mention my name when you get there? Your village? Your people?" "Sure," he said. —So my name is not only written in Heaven, its been heard there!

So, writing our name on a granite slab, on a cross, on a tombstone is a human way of expressing a divine connection.

The house we have here, be it ever so grand, be it ever so poverty-stricken, is at best a poor symbol of the house that awaits us in the Kingdom.

That our name may be wholly unknown here, or widely known, maybe ascribed to a university, to a hospital, a town, or even a city, is nothing, indeed less than nothing when held up against our name being written in Heaven. For in Hebrew talk your name is you. Hence, do not take His Name in vain. "Hallowed by Thy Name." "Name above all names." To be named on earth helps us to believe we are named in Heaven. That is, are to live There.

Hence, putting a lot of money in the treasury, however handsome a sum, is but a gesture to indicate our gift of self to God. The size of the symbol doesn't matter much. What matters is what it means. Love can be expressed in many ways.

Magnificent ritual that religious people favor has its place. But if the heart is not in it, then a striking of the breast in secret is as good.

People who live in mansions have no guarantee of a Heavenly one if there is no love in the house. And a shanty by the tracks can speak as well of beauty to come when a loving heart is hidden in the poverty.

Our own departure to Heaven as monks without benefit of as much as a wooden box is no doubt as comfortable as for the one buried in a bronze casket lined in satin with a beauty-rest mattress after a decent session of viewing and a final sealing in a cement vault impervious to ground water.

Let no one abuse you for your poverty. Be proud to give what you have and give it gladly. It all matters. How many would-be, wanna-be saints does it take to make one? How many singers to create a real voice? How many artists, dancers, actors, writers to bring a real one to birth? Thousands on thousands, no doubt. Yet, those thousands are necessary, are a seed-bed for the ultimate gift. It all matters and matters very much. None of it is trifling or of small account. One day the accumulated wealth breaks forth, the birth of an extraordinary gift of God, response of many giving all to Him, all their trifles, their pennies. Praise God.  Amen.