Preached on February 28, 2010, the second Sunday in Lent, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Luke 13:13-35
The fox and the hen are both fierce animals. The fox is fierce in its pursuit of power and gain, and the mother hen is fierce in her love and protection of her children. But when the fox meets the hen, it’s not much of a contest, is it? We all know that the hen isn’t getting out of there alive. You and I know it. Those concerned Pharisees knew it, when they warned Jesus that he had better knock off his ministry and get out of town or Herod would kill him. Even Jesus knew it. He knew that even when he left town and went to Jerusalem, they would kill him there anyway. In a struggle that positions the strength of violence against the strength of love, the fox against the mother hen, we know the outcome. It’s just common sense. It’s the conventional wisdom, the kind of thing that everyone knows. And when Jesus died, that conventional wisdom looked really good for about two days. And then came Easter, when God overturned our conventional thinking about where true power lies. The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor put it this way: It was the “cosmic battle of all time, in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother's love for her chicks. And God bet the farm on the hen” (“Chickens and Foxes” in Bread of Angels).
Let’s back up a bit to that warning about Herod. ‘You better get out of Galilee, Jesus. Herod killed John the Baptist, and it looks like you’re next.’ That’s when Jesus called Herod a fox. In the past century, and especially in recent decades, we have rediscovered a lot about the history of first century Israel that helps us to understand what’s happening in the gospels. Herod was not the ruler of Galilee by popular vote or the anointing of a prophet. He had been appointed ruler by the Roman emperor, because Israel was one of the eastern most holdings in the empire. And maybe you remember how Roman emperors ruled from history class, or from Shakespeare, perhaps. These guys plotted and killed to be emperor, and that kind of power struggle went all the way down the chain of command. Herod’s father, Herod the Great, had killed people in his own family who were threats to his power. He ruled at the time when Jesus was born, and he was the one who killed all the infants in Bethlehem because the wise men told him about a newborn king of the Jews, which was another obvious threat. Thirty years later, his son Herod rules Galilee in the north, and Rome has installed Pontius Pilate in the south over Jerusalem. They’re both foxes, and Jesus knows he’s in for it in either place.
To get an idea of the power of the Roman empire, the best example would be the colonial powers of places like England, Spain, France, and Belgium. Those were distant rulers with superior military might who expanded their wealth on the backs Africans, and the natives of the Americas, and the Africans who were brought to the Americas. That’s what the Roman empire was like, and places like Nazareth, and Capernaum, and all those little towns where Jesus went to teach and to heal, were bled dry by tributes paid to Rome. That’s why tax collectors are always the sinners in the world of the gospels. They weren’t collecting taxes for the welfare of Israel; they were extorting money for the emperor. And the priests of Israel, who should have demanded justice and spoken for their people, were put out of business. The High Priest at the temple in Jerusalem was supposed to be a lifelong position, but Herod and Pilate went through dozens of priests. If they didn’t tow the line, they were fired.
It is into this history that Jesus comes, proclaiming the kingdom of God here among us, instead of the kingdom of Rome. Jesus feeds the hungry, heals the sick, and proclaims forgiveness from God, which were all things that a good ruler and a good high priest should have been doing. His very ministry was a confrontation with those foxes, and that’s why they wanted to kill him.
Did you know that people used to call the Roman Emperor the prince of peace, the son of God, and even Lord? Those were all names for Caesar. So when those names turn up in the early church and in the writings of the New Testament, it means that they are choosing the power of a mother hen over the power of the fox.
Now, here’s the amazing thing about this confrontation between the fox and the mother hen. From the mother hen’s point of view, even the foxes are misguided chicks who need to be swept up in the love and grace of God. Jesus laments over Jerusalem, sheds tears over the very city that will betray him. That is the depth of a mother’s love. Even when the soldiers carry out orders to crucify him, he forgives them, saying that they don’t know what they’re doing. Even when it seems the darkest, even when he doubts in the garden of Gethsemane, he trusts that the power of the mother hen’s love is stronger than the power of the fox.
We were reminded of this by Martin Luther King, Jr., who always taught that the violence of discrimination could not be overcome by violence, but only by love. And they stood firm, even when it looked like is wasn’t working, when they were met with dogs and firehoses, beatings and arrests, even murders. They saw the struggle through the eyes of Easter, and trusted that power of love would overcome. We were reminded of this again when South Africa finally threw off the burden of apartheid without violence and without retribution for the criminal acts of the people who had enforced apartheid for so many years. And we were reminded by the Amish community in Pennsylvania, after a man murdered their children in a schoolhouse and took his own life, when they chose to see him not as a predator, but as a misguided chick who needed the shelter of God. They attended his funeral, and cared for his family, even as they mourned the death of their own children.
It often seems that this is a world in which the fox succeeds, but only if you take the short view. God bet the farm on the hen. “O Jerusalem” Jesus cried, “how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” He said it of Jerusalem, but he may as well have said it about any of our cities, yours and mine, or any place around the world. God’s love for you is as fierce and passionate as that of a mother for her children. God’s love for us shows us a different kind of power.
I need to tell you about Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad. Robi is a Jewish woman who lives in Israel. Her son, David, was killed by a Palestinian sniper. Ali is a Palestinian Muslim who lives in the West Bank. One day, his brother Yousef was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier. Usually, these are the kinds of losses that increase each side’s anger and desire for vengeance. But Robi and Ali took a different path. They are a part of an organization that brings together Israelis and Palestinians to meet, often for the first time, someone on the other side of the conflict. They understand that they share the same pain. Ali, who is about the same age age as Robi’s son, now tries to care for her as a son in David’s place. Their message to us, and to the rest of the world, is to stop taking sides in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It will not end by one side winning and the other losing. It will only end when people look across the divide and see in the faces of stranger the faces of their own children, their own parents. (From an interview on the radio program Speaking of Faith, 2/18/2010 ).
When Jesus calls us to take up our own cross and follow him, he is asking us to follow his way, which is different from the way of the empire, the way of the fox. He asks us to take on the kind of love that a mother has for her children. There’s a wonderful example of this in the novel Plainsong, by Kent Haruf. Plainsong tells the story of a small town in rural Colorado and the lives of its people, including two brothers, who lived together as bachelors on their cattle farm. Never married and happy about it, they used their dining room table as a work station for tractor parts in need of repair. Then, one day, a thoughtful teacher at the town’s high school asks them to take in girl from the school who is pregnant and without a home or caring family. When they ask the teacher why she chose them, she says “I know it sounds crazy. I suppose it is crazy. But that girl needs somebody and I’m ready to take drastic measures. She needs a home for these months. And…you need somebody too.” “You’re going to die someday without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind, anyway. This is your chance” (Plainsong, page 109).
The right kind of trouble: that sounds about right. Jesus said to tell that fox that he was going to keep healing and teaching, because it was the right kind of trouble. Parents keep being there for their children because it’s the right kind of trouble. We keep showing up when someone is sick, we keep giving a little bit more when tragedy strikes, we keep volunteering to try something new for the sake of others because those are all the right kinds of trouble. Maybe it won’t make us more comfortable, maybe it will cost us something, but those are not the concerns of a mother hen. The fox and the hen meet all the time. And the hen always prevails.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Sermon - The Right People
Preached on February 7, 2010, the fifth Sunday of Epiphany, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.
Isaiah 6:1-8
Luke 5:1-11
The Winter Olympics begin next week in Vancouver, and I am excited. I love the Olympic games. But I’ve been thinking recently about the winter games of 1980, held at Lake Placid, New York. This was now thirty years ago, and it is getting harder to remember the tension of that cold war era, the angst we felt about the Soviet Union. Now we have cooperative space programs, and our leaders meet with each other on global issues. Russian athletes play in our country’s professional basketball and hockey teams, so it’s hard to remember that old animosity and fear.
In 1980, the Russian team had won the gold medal in every Olympic games since 1964. They were the best in the world. A year earlier, they had played the NHL all-stars and won 6-0. Then the United States asked Herb Brooks to coach the national team. The story is told in the movie Miracle, where the coach explains that “All-star teams fail because they rely solely on the individual's talent.” He recruits college players who will play as a team. When try-outs are over and he’s chosen his roster, someone looks at the list and says to him “You're missing some of the best players.”
Brooks says “I'm not looking for the best players. I'm looking for the right ones.” That was the team that finally beat the Soviet Union and won the gold medal in 1980.
So much of our society is focused on the question of who is the best? We live in a competitive culture, from little league sports, to reality shows, to the workplace and schools, and even friendships. There is pressure to think in terms of being the best. But the best person is often not the person we need. We need the right person. God needs the right people, and that means us. If we think that God needs the best people, we count ourselves out. “We’re not up to the task,” we say. “Someone else should do that.” But when we realize that God needs the right people, we realize that God wants us.
Simon was not the best person to become a disciple of Jesus. The first clue of this that we have is that he is a fisherman, along with James and John, just like their father. If Simon had been the best person to become a disciple, he would already be one. All Jewish boys wanted to be disciples of a rabbi back then. The Rabbi was the center of the community, interpreting their religion and arbitrating community affairs. The rabbi was the one you went to with a dispute, because the rabbi’s word would settle it. All Jewish kids spent their young years learning the scriptures and practicing interpretation of the Torah. After a certain age, those who showed promise continued to be schooled. They would memorize whole books of the Hebrew Scriptures, and would practice rabbinical debate with the rabbi. As teenagers, the best students were chosen to become disciples of the rabbi, and, eventually, they could become rabbis themselves. If you weren’t chosen, you just went back to learn the trade of your father. Simon was fishing. He hadn’t been chosen.
When we learn more about him, it becomes easy to see why. Simon’s real problem is that he acts first and thinks second. He speaks first and thinks second. Or maybe he just acts and never gets to the thinking part. It’s true that Simon was the first disciple to name Jesus as the Messiah, when Jesus asked them “who do you say I am?” but a minute later, Simon pulled Jesus aside to rebuke him for his bad ministry program, prompting Jesus to tell him “get behind me, Satan.” Simon was the one who jumped recklessly out of the boat and began to sink before Jesus pulled him up and said “you of little faith.” Simon promised never to deny Jesus, and then did it three times – that very night. And yet, Simon is the one whom Jesus chooses that day when he’s preaching to a crowd on the lakeshore. Simon is the one who gets a new name: Jesus calls him Peter, which means rock, and says “on this rock I will build my church.”
This past summer, the movie Julie and Julia told the stories of Julia Child and the young woman named Julie who recently found inspiration by cooking through Julia Child’s premiere cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In one scene, before she begins the project, Julie is talking to her husband about her admiration for Julia Child, and her worries that her own life will always be a failure in comparison. Her husband reminds her that “Julia Child was not always Julia Child.” You could say the same thing about Peter. Peter wasn’t always Peter. At some point, every we admire has faced uncertainty and self-doubt about a calling, just as I imagine that all of us have felt. They weren’t always the best people; they were the right people.
In 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a young minister, just starting out at a little church in Montgomery Alabama. He turned down a leadership role in the local NAACP because he wanted to focus on getting to know his church. But then a woman named Rosa Parks decided one day that she’d had enough of changing her seat on the bus. King supported a hastily organized bus boycott, and a day later, he found himself nominated to lead it. All he had wanted to do was to get some experience in a little church before deciding on the rest of his career. He wasn’t nearly the most experienced or qualified minister in Montgomery. Not the best person, just the right one.
Moses didn’t think he could speak well enough to lead his people out of slavery. Jeremiah didn’t think he was up to being a prophet, and when God called Jonah to go and speak to Nineveh, he got on a boat heading in the opposite direction. Isaiah had a vision of God while he was in the Temple, and his first thought was that he wasn’t good enough for the job. I think what happened next was God saying something like “I know you’re not the best person, but you’re the right person. Don’t worry. I’ll be with you.” That’s when Isaiah can say “here I am, Lord. Send me.”
What about you? What do you feel moved to do in the depth of your spirit? The answer to that question might be God’s call to you: a calling to heal wounds, to give comfort, to reconcile with someone, to teach, to change the way people are treated, to right an injustice, to create opportunities for recovery and growth for those who don’t have them, to lead a mission or ministry of the church. What would you do if you could get past the thoughts of “I don’t know enough,” “I don’t have the experience,” “I don’t have enough time,” “I don’t know what to say,” “I’m not the best person for that work.” Of course you’re not the best person. But maybe no one is. Maybe all that any of us needs is to be called by God, because it is God who will hold us up when we feel like we are sinking. God will set us straight when our thinking gets off track. And even when we make mistakes and do hurtful things, God will forgive us, and help us to grow stronger from those setbacks.
Remember that catch of fish from the story? After Jesus has spoken to the crowd, he tells Simon to put the boat out into deep waters and let down the nets. Simon points out that they haven’t caught anything all night. In other words – “you stick to the teaching, rabbi. I’m the fisherman here.” But he tries it anyway, and when he does, the net comes up so full of fish that the other boat has to come over to help hold them all. That’s when Simon first knows that he’s in over his head with this rabbi, but Jesus just tells him that those fish are a symbol. “Next you’ll be fishing for people, catching them up in the spirit of God that I am here to show you, and changing the world. I know you don’t believe it anymore than you believed that you would catch these fish, so you’ll just have to trust me. You’re done with the shallow waters of life, it’s time to get deeper.”
And so the call stands always before us. Move on from the shallows to the deep water. Answer God’s call to live differently, even though you’re not sure that you are up to the challenge. Make mistakes along the way, but know that you will grow from them. Answer the call, because you are the right people.
Isaiah 6:1-8
Luke 5:1-11
The Winter Olympics begin next week in Vancouver, and I am excited. I love the Olympic games. But I’ve been thinking recently about the winter games of 1980, held at Lake Placid, New York. This was now thirty years ago, and it is getting harder to remember the tension of that cold war era, the angst we felt about the Soviet Union. Now we have cooperative space programs, and our leaders meet with each other on global issues. Russian athletes play in our country’s professional basketball and hockey teams, so it’s hard to remember that old animosity and fear.
In 1980, the Russian team had won the gold medal in every Olympic games since 1964. They were the best in the world. A year earlier, they had played the NHL all-stars and won 6-0. Then the United States asked Herb Brooks to coach the national team. The story is told in the movie Miracle, where the coach explains that “All-star teams fail because they rely solely on the individual's talent.” He recruits college players who will play as a team. When try-outs are over and he’s chosen his roster, someone looks at the list and says to him “You're missing some of the best players.”
Brooks says “I'm not looking for the best players. I'm looking for the right ones.” That was the team that finally beat the Soviet Union and won the gold medal in 1980.
So much of our society is focused on the question of who is the best? We live in a competitive culture, from little league sports, to reality shows, to the workplace and schools, and even friendships. There is pressure to think in terms of being the best. But the best person is often not the person we need. We need the right person. God needs the right people, and that means us. If we think that God needs the best people, we count ourselves out. “We’re not up to the task,” we say. “Someone else should do that.” But when we realize that God needs the right people, we realize that God wants us.
Simon was not the best person to become a disciple of Jesus. The first clue of this that we have is that he is a fisherman, along with James and John, just like their father. If Simon had been the best person to become a disciple, he would already be one. All Jewish boys wanted to be disciples of a rabbi back then. The Rabbi was the center of the community, interpreting their religion and arbitrating community affairs. The rabbi was the one you went to with a dispute, because the rabbi’s word would settle it. All Jewish kids spent their young years learning the scriptures and practicing interpretation of the Torah. After a certain age, those who showed promise continued to be schooled. They would memorize whole books of the Hebrew Scriptures, and would practice rabbinical debate with the rabbi. As teenagers, the best students were chosen to become disciples of the rabbi, and, eventually, they could become rabbis themselves. If you weren’t chosen, you just went back to learn the trade of your father. Simon was fishing. He hadn’t been chosen.
When we learn more about him, it becomes easy to see why. Simon’s real problem is that he acts first and thinks second. He speaks first and thinks second. Or maybe he just acts and never gets to the thinking part. It’s true that Simon was the first disciple to name Jesus as the Messiah, when Jesus asked them “who do you say I am?” but a minute later, Simon pulled Jesus aside to rebuke him for his bad ministry program, prompting Jesus to tell him “get behind me, Satan.” Simon was the one who jumped recklessly out of the boat and began to sink before Jesus pulled him up and said “you of little faith.” Simon promised never to deny Jesus, and then did it three times – that very night. And yet, Simon is the one whom Jesus chooses that day when he’s preaching to a crowd on the lakeshore. Simon is the one who gets a new name: Jesus calls him Peter, which means rock, and says “on this rock I will build my church.”
This past summer, the movie Julie and Julia told the stories of Julia Child and the young woman named Julie who recently found inspiration by cooking through Julia Child’s premiere cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In one scene, before she begins the project, Julie is talking to her husband about her admiration for Julia Child, and her worries that her own life will always be a failure in comparison. Her husband reminds her that “Julia Child was not always Julia Child.” You could say the same thing about Peter. Peter wasn’t always Peter. At some point, every we admire has faced uncertainty and self-doubt about a calling, just as I imagine that all of us have felt. They weren’t always the best people; they were the right people.
In 1954, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a young minister, just starting out at a little church in Montgomery Alabama. He turned down a leadership role in the local NAACP because he wanted to focus on getting to know his church. But then a woman named Rosa Parks decided one day that she’d had enough of changing her seat on the bus. King supported a hastily organized bus boycott, and a day later, he found himself nominated to lead it. All he had wanted to do was to get some experience in a little church before deciding on the rest of his career. He wasn’t nearly the most experienced or qualified minister in Montgomery. Not the best person, just the right one.
Moses didn’t think he could speak well enough to lead his people out of slavery. Jeremiah didn’t think he was up to being a prophet, and when God called Jonah to go and speak to Nineveh, he got on a boat heading in the opposite direction. Isaiah had a vision of God while he was in the Temple, and his first thought was that he wasn’t good enough for the job. I think what happened next was God saying something like “I know you’re not the best person, but you’re the right person. Don’t worry. I’ll be with you.” That’s when Isaiah can say “here I am, Lord. Send me.”
What about you? What do you feel moved to do in the depth of your spirit? The answer to that question might be God’s call to you: a calling to heal wounds, to give comfort, to reconcile with someone, to teach, to change the way people are treated, to right an injustice, to create opportunities for recovery and growth for those who don’t have them, to lead a mission or ministry of the church. What would you do if you could get past the thoughts of “I don’t know enough,” “I don’t have the experience,” “I don’t have enough time,” “I don’t know what to say,” “I’m not the best person for that work.” Of course you’re not the best person. But maybe no one is. Maybe all that any of us needs is to be called by God, because it is God who will hold us up when we feel like we are sinking. God will set us straight when our thinking gets off track. And even when we make mistakes and do hurtful things, God will forgive us, and help us to grow stronger from those setbacks.
Remember that catch of fish from the story? After Jesus has spoken to the crowd, he tells Simon to put the boat out into deep waters and let down the nets. Simon points out that they haven’t caught anything all night. In other words – “you stick to the teaching, rabbi. I’m the fisherman here.” But he tries it anyway, and when he does, the net comes up so full of fish that the other boat has to come over to help hold them all. That’s when Simon first knows that he’s in over his head with this rabbi, but Jesus just tells him that those fish are a symbol. “Next you’ll be fishing for people, catching them up in the spirit of God that I am here to show you, and changing the world. I know you don’t believe it anymore than you believed that you would catch these fish, so you’ll just have to trust me. You’re done with the shallow waters of life, it’s time to get deeper.”
And so the call stands always before us. Move on from the shallows to the deep water. Answer God’s call to live differently, even though you’re not sure that you are up to the challenge. Make mistakes along the way, but know that you will grow from them. Answer the call, because you are the right people.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Haiti and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Legacy
A few nights ago, I heard on the radio the voice of a reporter who had just arrived in Haiti to cover the aftermath of the earthquake that struck the day before, devastating the capital of Port-au-Prince. She had taken an extra seat on a chartered plane along with a small team of emergency medical specialists who were flying in from this country to help in any way that they could. She described how this small team had walked off the airplane directly into a makeshift medical center at the airport where they began to do triage work. They spent hours attending to the wounded, and were still at it when the reporter finally left for the night. I don’t know who those people were, or what motivated them to travel to Haiti and work long, exhausting hours. All I know is that in them, I recognize the grace of God at work.
On my computer, I looked up the United Church of Christ emergency fund, and an organization called Partners In Health, which has a long medical presence in Haiti, and is removed enough from the capital to have mainly survived the earthquake’s damage. I gave some money; it’s not much, but I want to support the people who have the necessary experience and relationships with Haitians to muster everything they can, as soon as they can. Haiti is one of the world’s nations least equipped to handle a disaster of this kind.
I am thankful for all of the ways in which compassion and relationships are not being held back at national borders, or contained within the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and religion. We live in an increasingly interrelated world, and I believe that our ethic of love must have all people in mind when we contemplate the old question “am I my brother’s keeper?”
This week, we remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. A year before he was killed, he spoke at Riverside Church on the urgency of ending the war in Vietnam and embracing a call for every nation to develop “loyalty to mankind as a whole.”
“This call for world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men” (From "A Time to Break Silence," preached on April 4, 1967).
I am thankful for all those Haitians and Americans and others who are at work to ease suffering. They are in my prayers, because they are doing God’s work.
On my computer, I looked up the United Church of Christ emergency fund, and an organization called Partners In Health, which has a long medical presence in Haiti, and is removed enough from the capital to have mainly survived the earthquake’s damage. I gave some money; it’s not much, but I want to support the people who have the necessary experience and relationships with Haitians to muster everything they can, as soon as they can. Haiti is one of the world’s nations least equipped to handle a disaster of this kind.
I am thankful for all of the ways in which compassion and relationships are not being held back at national borders, or contained within the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and religion. We live in an increasingly interrelated world, and I believe that our ethic of love must have all people in mind when we contemplate the old question “am I my brother’s keeper?”
This week, we remember Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. A year before he was killed, he spoke at Riverside Church on the urgency of ending the war in Vietnam and embracing a call for every nation to develop “loyalty to mankind as a whole.”
“This call for world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men” (From "A Time to Break Silence," preached on April 4, 1967).
I am thankful for all those Haitians and Americans and others who are at work to ease suffering. They are in my prayers, because they are doing God’s work.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Sermon - Filling Up
Preached on January 17, 2010 at The First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC
John 2:1-11
Second Sunday of Epiphany
Dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to all those who take up the cause of justice for which he gave so much; and always to the glory of God.
Early tomorrow morning I will have a health assessment, and so, last week, I was filling out some paperwork in preparation for this appointment. There was medical background, family history, a form for my blood work, and then there was a comprehensive survey about lifestyle. The survey covered the expected areas: How often do I exercise: do I smoke? how often do I eat breakfast? how many servings do I eat of foods high in fiber, fat, or calcium? No surprises. I estimated and checked the boxes. And then there were questions I hadn’t expected: big picture kind of questions.
Do you believe your current lifestyle positively or negatively affects your health?
Do your sleep patterns promote good health?
How often do friends or relatives suggest that you should slow down, take life easier, or relax more?
Do you think your current level of stress is high enough to affect your health or quality of life?
How often do you find yourself getting irritated or annoyed with others?
How often do you feel a chronic sense of struggle with daily events?
How are you doing? What I had thought was a simple health assessment was turning into an assessment of my whole life, even my spiritual health. And I had to admit that it made sense: our health encompasses every part of our lives. These questions reminded me that health is about more than jogging on a treadmill and skipping seconds on dessert. If one’s very spirit is in a state of stress and anger and chronic struggle, it isn’t going to help to just add some new, healthy tasks on top. Real health begins with emptying ourselves of everything that makes us unhealthy so that there is room to be filled up with all those things that will care for our bodies, our minds, and our souls.
Emptying and filling up are at the center of this mysterious, miraculous story of Jesus at the wedding in Cana. The jars have to be emptied of the water they contain so that they may be filled anew with water that will become the finest wine at the wedding party. It is a story that works on many levels. To begin, this is the first sign that Jesus performs in the gospel of John, and the signs are very important symbols in John. They are always meant to tell us something about Christ. This sign shows us that Jesus has the power to transform ordinary lives like ours into lives that are rich and deep and wonderful. Another layer here is that a wedding is an old scriptural symbol for God’s relationship to the people. Isaiah says that the land of Israel is married to God, and Hosea describes God caring for God’s people as a husband cares for his wife. All weddings can be tense, because we want them to go well, but when the wedding is between God and the land, the pressure is pretty high. So, when Mary tells her son that the wine has run out, it’s seems like a bad sign for Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. But his creative solution sends a quick message to us that God’s relationship to the land and to the people will not be harmed. Jesus is here to see to that, and he does it by inviting us to be emptied and filled anew.
In this culture, we are not very good with emptiness. Our tendency is to want more when we are already full. We want a life of joy and significance, with deep and meaningful relationships. And, we want to enjoy the new episode of Law & Order, and send funny YouTube videos to our friends, and follow the stories of Tiger Woods, Jon and Kate, and the balloon boy’s father. We lose the art of discerning the difference between what’s important and what isn’t, and so we overfill our time, our minds, and our spirit. Just like those jars at the wedding, God offers to fill us with graceful abundance. But before we can fill up, we have to make room. This is hard work.
Sometimes, we become emptied against our will, by events not of our choosing. It may be illness, dislocation, job loss, or the death of someone close. These events change our perception of what is important and what is not, and usually in a way that makes us realize that all those things that we thought were so important, the things we stayed up worrying about, the things that made our necks and shoulders tense with concern, those things were not really as important as we had thought.
This happened to me three summers ago when I was in a car accident. I was driving by myself on Interstate-77 in West Virginia, on my way back from taking our son James to spend a week with his cousins. It was mid-afternoon, and the road was almost empty when I drove into a rainstorm. It was dry road one moment and a downpour the next, with water pouring across the road like it was a shallow creek bed. My car hydroplaned, spun half way around and collided, back-first, into the guardrail. I was very fortunate to walk away without a scratch, but the suddenness of it, and a look at the crumpled trunk and back seat of the car, made me experience the full force of how fragile life is. It made me understand what a gift life is, a gift to be savored by filling it up with what is important, and not wasting a second on anything that takes up room from what really matters: not worry, not distraction or triviality, not anger or bitterness or hatred.
In this emptiness, I was filled with gratitude for time with my family, my friends, my neighbors and all the people I see in the regular course of my day. I saw with new eyes the things of wonder and beauty in this world: the sky looked brighter, and the hymns I sang sounded dearer. I was filled with thankfulness for the ways that I could do good in this world: be kind, contribute to change, act with courage on behalf of others. What a gift, what a gift life is. I had been emptied and filled again.
When I shared my experience with this congregation, many of you told me the stories of your own accidents, both your close calls and the ones that did not end well at all. You told me how those times, and the memory of what happened had reminded you of what’s important, had emptied and refilled you.
Inevitably, the freshness of these experiences fades, and the routines of life make us comfortable enough to forget those holy insights we had felt so strongly. We would never wish for a new scare or hardship to remind us, so how do we empty ourselves intentionally in between the scary and tragic events that do it to us?
One way to do it, I think, is what we are doing right now. When we gather regularly for worship, it is an act of emptying ourselves so that God can fill us anew. A car accident will bring us face to face with our mortality, but so will worship, as we stand before the cross and remember how Christ told his followers to take up their own crosses. We are emptied in worship as we pray for those of our community who are suffering, and pray for the people of Haiti who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and their lives. When we meditate on the words of scripture, hear the beauty of music, and reflect together on God’s grace for us, we return again and again to the question of what is really important.
It would be naïve to imagine that distraction, worry, anger, and triviality do not enter into our minds during worship. But, when we are focused, when we do the work of paying attention to our lives, then worship is a regular practice of being emptied and being filled up anew. And that’s why we keep coming back. When we can make a regular practice of saying that this hour is more important than anything else we might do on Sunday morning at this time, it is good practice for the many other choices we will make during the week.
So, I’ll go to this health assessment tomorrow, and I’ll be thinking about those questions as an invitation to change. Do I believe my current lifestyle positively or negatively affects my health? In other words: what needs to be emptied?
John 2:1-11
Second Sunday of Epiphany
Dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to all those who take up the cause of justice for which he gave so much; and always to the glory of God.
Early tomorrow morning I will have a health assessment, and so, last week, I was filling out some paperwork in preparation for this appointment. There was medical background, family history, a form for my blood work, and then there was a comprehensive survey about lifestyle. The survey covered the expected areas: How often do I exercise: do I smoke? how often do I eat breakfast? how many servings do I eat of foods high in fiber, fat, or calcium? No surprises. I estimated and checked the boxes. And then there were questions I hadn’t expected: big picture kind of questions.
Do you believe your current lifestyle positively or negatively affects your health?
Do your sleep patterns promote good health?
How often do friends or relatives suggest that you should slow down, take life easier, or relax more?
Do you think your current level of stress is high enough to affect your health or quality of life?
How often do you find yourself getting irritated or annoyed with others?
How often do you feel a chronic sense of struggle with daily events?
How are you doing? What I had thought was a simple health assessment was turning into an assessment of my whole life, even my spiritual health. And I had to admit that it made sense: our health encompasses every part of our lives. These questions reminded me that health is about more than jogging on a treadmill and skipping seconds on dessert. If one’s very spirit is in a state of stress and anger and chronic struggle, it isn’t going to help to just add some new, healthy tasks on top. Real health begins with emptying ourselves of everything that makes us unhealthy so that there is room to be filled up with all those things that will care for our bodies, our minds, and our souls.
Emptying and filling up are at the center of this mysterious, miraculous story of Jesus at the wedding in Cana. The jars have to be emptied of the water they contain so that they may be filled anew with water that will become the finest wine at the wedding party. It is a story that works on many levels. To begin, this is the first sign that Jesus performs in the gospel of John, and the signs are very important symbols in John. They are always meant to tell us something about Christ. This sign shows us that Jesus has the power to transform ordinary lives like ours into lives that are rich and deep and wonderful. Another layer here is that a wedding is an old scriptural symbol for God’s relationship to the people. Isaiah says that the land of Israel is married to God, and Hosea describes God caring for God’s people as a husband cares for his wife. All weddings can be tense, because we want them to go well, but when the wedding is between God and the land, the pressure is pretty high. So, when Mary tells her son that the wine has run out, it’s seems like a bad sign for Jesus at the beginning of his ministry. But his creative solution sends a quick message to us that God’s relationship to the land and to the people will not be harmed. Jesus is here to see to that, and he does it by inviting us to be emptied and filled anew.
In this culture, we are not very good with emptiness. Our tendency is to want more when we are already full. We want a life of joy and significance, with deep and meaningful relationships. And, we want to enjoy the new episode of Law & Order, and send funny YouTube videos to our friends, and follow the stories of Tiger Woods, Jon and Kate, and the balloon boy’s father. We lose the art of discerning the difference between what’s important and what isn’t, and so we overfill our time, our minds, and our spirit. Just like those jars at the wedding, God offers to fill us with graceful abundance. But before we can fill up, we have to make room. This is hard work.
Sometimes, we become emptied against our will, by events not of our choosing. It may be illness, dislocation, job loss, or the death of someone close. These events change our perception of what is important and what is not, and usually in a way that makes us realize that all those things that we thought were so important, the things we stayed up worrying about, the things that made our necks and shoulders tense with concern, those things were not really as important as we had thought.
This happened to me three summers ago when I was in a car accident. I was driving by myself on Interstate-77 in West Virginia, on my way back from taking our son James to spend a week with his cousins. It was mid-afternoon, and the road was almost empty when I drove into a rainstorm. It was dry road one moment and a downpour the next, with water pouring across the road like it was a shallow creek bed. My car hydroplaned, spun half way around and collided, back-first, into the guardrail. I was very fortunate to walk away without a scratch, but the suddenness of it, and a look at the crumpled trunk and back seat of the car, made me experience the full force of how fragile life is. It made me understand what a gift life is, a gift to be savored by filling it up with what is important, and not wasting a second on anything that takes up room from what really matters: not worry, not distraction or triviality, not anger or bitterness or hatred.
In this emptiness, I was filled with gratitude for time with my family, my friends, my neighbors and all the people I see in the regular course of my day. I saw with new eyes the things of wonder and beauty in this world: the sky looked brighter, and the hymns I sang sounded dearer. I was filled with thankfulness for the ways that I could do good in this world: be kind, contribute to change, act with courage on behalf of others. What a gift, what a gift life is. I had been emptied and filled again.
When I shared my experience with this congregation, many of you told me the stories of your own accidents, both your close calls and the ones that did not end well at all. You told me how those times, and the memory of what happened had reminded you of what’s important, had emptied and refilled you.
Inevitably, the freshness of these experiences fades, and the routines of life make us comfortable enough to forget those holy insights we had felt so strongly. We would never wish for a new scare or hardship to remind us, so how do we empty ourselves intentionally in between the scary and tragic events that do it to us?
One way to do it, I think, is what we are doing right now. When we gather regularly for worship, it is an act of emptying ourselves so that God can fill us anew. A car accident will bring us face to face with our mortality, but so will worship, as we stand before the cross and remember how Christ told his followers to take up their own crosses. We are emptied in worship as we pray for those of our community who are suffering, and pray for the people of Haiti who have lost their homes, their loved ones, and their lives. When we meditate on the words of scripture, hear the beauty of music, and reflect together on God’s grace for us, we return again and again to the question of what is really important.
It would be naïve to imagine that distraction, worry, anger, and triviality do not enter into our minds during worship. But, when we are focused, when we do the work of paying attention to our lives, then worship is a regular practice of being emptied and being filled up anew. And that’s why we keep coming back. When we can make a regular practice of saying that this hour is more important than anything else we might do on Sunday morning at this time, it is good practice for the many other choices we will make during the week.
So, I’ll go to this health assessment tomorrow, and I’ll be thinking about those questions as an invitation to change. Do I believe my current lifestyle positively or negatively affects my health? In other words: what needs to be emptied?
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