Grace in Ourselves, by Pastor Greg

If you know me very well, you know that I am a sucker for a good night sky ... a starry, starry night. There’s little I love more than laying on my back and watching the dark and silent sky ... and watching and waiting for those magical streaks of light ... tiny bits of space debris entering earth’s atmosphere and creating little blazing streaks against the speckled blackness of the night sky. Once I begin my vigil, it’s hard for me to give it up and go to bed until I’ve seen at least one meteor ... at least one “falling star”. It affirms something within me that needs affirming ... it jangles a note within that tells me that I am not alone in the midst of the enormity of space and time. I’ve noted the kinship I feel with the psalmist who said: “The heavens are telling the glory of God ...” The streaking lights in the heavens somehow let me know of God’s presence amidst the seeming emptiness of outer space ... and the vast stretches of inner space, as well. It’s only a hint, but it’s enough of a hint for me ... enough of a hint of God’s presence ... God’s love ... God’s grace.

We’re talking about grace these first weeks of fall and here’s the working definition we’ve been using: God’s “grace” is the living goodness of God’s being and God’s power and God’s love that is offered to the world and its people without cost, without condition, without limit.

Frederick Buechner is a Christian writer and preacher who has meant a great deal to my faith and ministry over the years. He was a distant neighbor of mine in Vermont, though I’ve only met him once (in Berkeley, of all places). I like how Buechner describes grace. He says: “Grace is something you can never get but can only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth. A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace.

Buechner goes on to say: "A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. The grace of God means something like: 'Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.'

"There's only one catch” Buechner finally says. “Like any other gift, the gift of grace can only be yours if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”

These first weeks of October are a time of considering our stewardship as Christians ... our loving and responsible care and use of all that has been given to us ... all that has been entrusted to us by the loving Creator of all that is and the giver of all good gifts. We have been guided this year by these intriguing words written by the author of First Peter who said to his readers that they were to serve as “good stewards of the manifold grace of God”. Stewards of God’s grace. Stewards of Grace.

That’s us. That’s who we are. That’s what we do. It’s in our spiritual DNA ... it’s in the bloodstream of our faith. We are not only called to be “Stewards of Grace” ... we ARE Stewards of Grace. As children of God and followers of Jesus, it’s simply who we are. In other words, we are inheritors and vessels of God’s being and God’s power and God’s love. We contain these things ... these gifts ... this essential goodness. We may only be “earthen vessels” ... as St. Paul noted ... just “clay pots” with a few cracks ... but we are still being filled up constantly with God’s grace—if we aren’t too full of ourselves or too full of the debris of life and the world. If we are at all open to God’s goodness and grace, God will fill us to overflowing ... and that overflowing is for the world that God so loves.

One of our members here likes to tell the story about the battered and leaky bucket that was carried by a young girl who trekked each day all the way down to the village water pump to gather the family water. At one time the bucket had been new and strong and carried its contents proudly and securely. But now the bucket was old, cracked and worn and leaked profusely. And it broke the bucket’s heart that each day’s trek to the water pump ended with only half of the precious liquid within ... much had dribbled out. One day the bucket cried out to the God of all beings and things in its weariness and frustration, and God said to the bucket, “Do you not notice the beautiful flowers that grow and bring color and joy to the girl that carries you and brings delight to her neighbors because of the water that trickles from you as she carries you home.”

Sometimes simply “showing up” and being open to grace may be all that is asked of some of us, cracked pots and leaky buckets that we may be. God supplies the treasure ... we merely need to be open to its coming, its indwelling in order to be stewards of that treasure.

Two weeks ago we spoke of some of the ways God’s goodness and grace are at work through us in the world both far and near: Hands on mission projects of a variety of kinds ... walking and working for a variety of needs ... supporting missionaries with prayer and money ... extending ourselves to our homeless neighbors and some many others in need. God’s grace is given legs and wings through our “ditty bags” and our “dirty hands” and our “dollars and dimes”.

You may have noticed that this year’s “stewardship campaign” has come around a month early this year. It’s because during the weeks we’d normally hold the campaign, we’re going to be welcoming homeless families to our church who will make our sanctuary their home for the next two weeks. It’s one of the ways we dribble the grace that has been poured into us onto the dry ground that is all around us.

Last week we talked about Grace in the Church ... there’s another cracked and leaky bucket if ever there was one. Sometimes it’s only the flaws of the foibled church that we can sense and see. And we’ll admit it’s true in many ways. However hallowed an identity the church may have—or think it has, it’s also a terribly “human” institution with all of the warts and scabs and scars that are a part of any other human gathering. And yet God still works wonders in and through the local church as some of our humble ministries will attest. And God’s grace is at work among us, seeking to bind us together in love, seeking to mend broken souls and torn relationships, seeking to fill the empty wells of being with blessings and peace, seeking to empower us as a people and a community.

I’m thinking of particular occasions of grace in our church during the past summer and this fall ... occasions where we have paused in our busy-ness, and taken the time and the care to minister to the children among us ... particularly during Vacation Bible School and Logos. If you played a hands-on part in either of these wonderful ministries, you’ll know the grace that oozed and dribbled and showered down in abundance during these times working with our marvelous kids.

This fall I am privileged to lead our Logos kids—our “Magic Penny” kids—in the part of the Logos day called “Worship Skills”. We learn about worship and practice readings and songs in preparation for Sunday mornings. And I must say: singing with these precious and beautiful parts of God’s creation is like bathing in grace. These young “earthen vessels” carry far more of God’s gentle and loving grace within than they may ever know.  I may come to Worship Skills with bruises and burdens, but by the end of our time, as the kids sit in a closing circle with Sandy and offer up their joys and concerns in prayer, I feel like grace has taken a cleansing journey through me, the bruises partly mended and the burdens partly lifted.

You see, God’s grace is not only at work in the world and in the church. God’s grace is also at work in us ... in me ... and in you. God’s grace is not just “for the world” and “for the church”, it is also for you and me. The psalmist reminds us that we are the sheep of God’s hand, the sheep of God’s care, the sheep of God’s tender keeping. God’s care and keeping offers to us release from our fears, healing for our hurts, and resurrection and rebirth from even our greatest failings. Our “Song of Grace” that we have been singing during these weeks of stewardship expresses God’s tender care of us each:

Grace like a stream, flows gently on.

Wash over me until my fear is gone.

Gentle healing grace, show to me your face.

Wash over me until my fear is gone.

God of our hearts, burdened with care.

Help us to feel your love in humble prayer.

Gentle whisp’ring grace, flow within this place.

Help us to feel your love in humble prayer.

Gentle your touch, upon my soul,

Mold all my being ‘til you’ve made me whole.

Gentle saving grace, show upon my face.

Mold all my being ‘til you’ve made me whole.

Dear friends, know and trust we are the sheep of God’s hand, the sheep of God’s care, the sheep of God’s tender keeping. We are the children of God’s good grace.

I said earlier that I love to star-gaze and love to search for meteors ... that somehow the immensity of space, when streaked with bits of light, strangely warms me and reminds me of God’s presence and care: God’s grace. This morning I was up very, very early—even earlier than usual as there was a special occurrence in the sky that I didn’t want to miss. Each year the earth, in its solar orbit, passes through the extreme end of the tail of Halley’s Comet which won’t re-appear in its full glory until 2061. I’ll be 103. Some of you will be even older. J The resulting meteor shower is called the “Orionid Shower” because the entry point for the meteors is in the place where the constellation Orion hangs in the sky.

I sat out in the back yard very early this morning under a beautifully starry night, a blanket over me and a cup of freshly brewed coffee in hand. A light breeze rustled the neighbor’s palm tree. And I watched as tiny streaks of light graced the dark sky. The Orionid meteors can occur anywhere in the sky, but if you trace the path of each meteor back, the paths all converge in one point near Orion’s belt—they all originate from the same place.

I think it’s a marvelous metaphor for the grace of God ... grace manifest in so many places, in so many ways. Grace expressed beyond us and within us, grace worked out through us and sometimes in spite of us, grace sparkling brightly in times and places where all light seems to have dimmed and perhaps disappeared altogether. But all grace, all good gifts, all healing mercies and emerging hope originate from one place, one source and that is the loving heart of the Creator of All. And it is the night sky that hints at that loving heart, and it is also the children of Logos, and it also is your silent and supportive prayer, and it is also your gifts of time and energy and self and substance, among so many other things, that give me and gives us all life-giving and life-saving hints of the wideness of God’s mercy and the Amazing Grace and Goodness of the one who loves and cares for us all ... and even loves and cares for you ... and for me.

We have been loved and served and saved for a purpose: that we might manifest and make tangible and real the grace of God; that we might make tangible and real the living goodness of God’s being and God’s power and God’s love that is offered to the world and its people without cost, without condition, without limit. We have been loved and served and saved that might be Stewards of God’s Good and Amazing Grace.

Amen.

Grace in the Church, by Pastor Greg

Ann Lamott is a Bay Area native and a writer of both fiction as well as earthy essays on faith. She can be laugh out loud funny and she can move you to copious tears. She grew up in Marin County during a time when the phrase “only in Marin” came to be coined. It was the 60’s and early 70’s. It was a chaotic time to grow up when lives and values and families and children were sort of tossed in the air only to land God knows where. Lamott describes her coming to faith as less a leap than a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place after another. As a child she possessed a belief in God that defied her arrogantly atheistic surroundings. Describing that child-like faith, she says: “I bowed my head and prayed, because I believed ... in someone listening, someone who heard. I do not understand how that came to be; I just know I always believed ....”

A crash course through broken relationships and addictions left Lamott in a place of nearly suicidal desperation. She describes a dark afternoon where she felt at the end of her rope. A vestige of the old belief still clung to her, but she says: “I felt that the odds of my living long enough to get into heaven were almost nil. They couldn’t possibly take you in the shape I was in. I could no longer imagine how God could love me.”

In a moment of desperation, she went to a nearby church and spoke to the new pastor who struck her as being tenderhearted. When she poured out to him that she didn’t think God could possibly love her, broken and stained and tortured and suicidal as she was, he said: “God has to love you. That’s God’s job.”

It would be wonderful to report that in that one conversation Lamott was “wash-clean” and set free. But the path to new life and health and “salvation” is often not so easy ... so quick ... so painless. She was bumping around the bottom and the top was still a long ways off.

It was the first of the glimmers of grace that began to penetrate her soul, her life, her brokenness. She says: “Slowly I came back to life. I’d been like one of those people Ezekiel comes upon in the valley of dry bones—people who had really given up, who were lifeless and without hope. But because of Ezekiel’s presence, breath comes upon them; spirit and kindness revive them.”

Breath and spirit and kindness were reviving Anne Lamott, and they were coming to her through the breath and spirit and kindness of a skinny, white, middle-aged mediator of God’s grace. But she still had a long, long way to go.

By tumbles and turns, she found herself in a church one day, so hung-over, she says that she could barely stand up for the songs. But she stayed until the end and says that the last song was so deep and raw and pure that she could not escape. She says it was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful  at the same time. She says: “I felt like their voice or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to the feeling—and it washed over me.”

She went into recovery, she was baptized at the little church, she had a baby who was also baptized, and she lost her best friend to cancer. And throughout it all there was the steady and faithful presence of the little church that had offered grace to her in their words and songs and silences and actions. She says that she and her baby son, Sam, have missed church maybe ten times in twelve years. She describes the church as a wonderful old worn pair of pants. And it was home. Home. The pastor, who is still there, who became the perfect fit for that “old worn pair of pants of a home” told a story from her childhood. “When she was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car, and they frove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, “You could let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.”

Lamott says: “And that is why I have stayed so close to mine – because no matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.”

I don’t know if the Biblical writers of old struggled with addictions or hangovers or how to clean hair out of the hot tub, but I do know they knew what it felt like to be lost and lonely and frightened and in need of a home ... a home where grace was offered without cost or condition. Home, for the writers of our Bible, was the place where the dispenser of Grace could be found ... located ... leaned upon. Home was wherever God landed and dwelled among the people whom God loved and led through the wilderness and into the promised places.

In the desert, God was found in the “tent of meeting” ... it was a portable, traveling temple of a fashion ... wherever the tent was, God was. Once the people settled in the promised land, however, a Temple of hewn stone was built and this became God’s home ... it was here that God dwelled amidst the “holy of holies.” But it was never a comfortable home for God ... it led the worshippers of God to think that God was somehow captive to the home ... restricted to that home ... limited to that home. It took the destruction of the Temple and the scattering of the people and exiles of many years and many kinds to teach the people that God’s truest home was not in a building of stone or a building of any kind. God’s throne was the trusting and humble human heart, and God’s dwelling was any place and time where trusting and humble human hearts gathered and worshiped and broke bread and shared the cup and did the work of God’s own Spirit.

This is the glimpse of the “home” of God that we see in the readings this morning from the book of Acts and the Epistle to the Colossians. We think of the church as being born at Pentecost: the coming of the Spirit of God that touched and filled the followers of Jesus and gathered them into a community of worship and mission. But the church was also filled with the Grace of the One who had called them together and empowered them to be the church. These passages from Acts and Colossians give evidence of that grace ... God’s grace that is to flow into and out of every gathering of believers, into and out of every time of worship, every time of fellowship, every time of working out the continuing ministry of Jesus and God’s work of Shalom.

ACTS 2: All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

ACTS 4: Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great gracewas upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

For the writer of Acts, the church is a community of “one heart and soul” ... a community of “glad and generous hearts ... a community of “goodwill” ... and a community of “great grace” and growth in spirit and numbers. And the reading from the letter to the church in Colossae gives flesh and garments to these bones:

Colossians 3: As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God ... through him.

For Anne Lamott, the church in which she found her life again fit profoundly the descriptions we have heard in Acts and Colossians. And if there is a single word that fit what flowed into and out of the New Testament Church and that “old worn pants of a church” in Marin City, the word is GRACE. Amazing grace. Grace that is unearned, unmerited, unconditional and unlimited. Grace upon grace and grace abounding.

Lamott tells a story that has always touched me and expresses well the grace that is rightly the possession and the gift of every church in every place and time.

One of our newer members, a man named Ken Nelson, is dying of AIDS, disintegrating before our very eyes.  He came in a year ago with a Jewish woman who comes every week to be with us, although she does not believe in Jesus.  Shortly after the man with AIDS started coming, his partner died of the disease.  A few weeks later Ken told us that right after Brandon died, Jesus had slid into the hole in his heart that Brandon’s loss had left, and had been there ever since.  Ken has a totally lopsided face, ravaged and emaciated, but when he smiles, he is radiant.  He looks like God’s crazy nephew Phil.  He says that he would gladly pay any price for what he has now, which is Jesus, and us.

There’s a woman in the choir named Ranola, who is large and beautiful and jovial and black and a devout a can be, who has been a little standoffish toward Ken.  She has always looked at him with confusion, when she looks at him at all.  Or she looks at him sideways, as if she wouldn’t have to quite see him if she didn’t look at him head on.  She was raised in the South by Baptists who taught her that his way of life—that he—was an abomination.  It is hard for her to break through this.  I think she and a few other women at church are, on the most visceral level, a little afraid of catching the disease.  But Kenny has come to church almost every week for the last year, and won almost everyone over.  He finally missed a few Sunday’s when he got too weak, and then a month ago he was back, weighing almost no pounds, his face even more lopsided, as if he’d had a stroke.  Still, during the prayers of the people, he talked joyously of his life and his decline of grace and redemption, of how safe and happy he feels these days. 

So on this particular Sunday, for the first hymn, the so-called Morning hymn, we sang “Jacob’s Ladder”, which goes, “every rung goes higher, higher,” while ironically Kenny couldn’t even stand up.  But he sang away sitting down, with the hymnal in his lap.  And then when it came time for the second hymn, the Fellowship Hymn, we were to sing “His Eye is on the Sparrow.”  The pianist was playing and the whole congregation had risen--only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap—and we began to sing, “Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?”  And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and he went to his side and bent down to lift him up—lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow.  She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang.  And it pierced me.

God’s grace ... God’s grace ... through the earthen vessel that is the church and the individual members of the church ... God’s grace ... offered without cost ... without condition ... and without limit. God’s grace ... that can pierce us and make us whole and give us back the lives we thought we’d perhaps lost forever.

Let us be persons and a people of God’s grace ... for a church built on God’s grace, will always stand, will always serve, will always save, will always have the strength to sing: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a soul like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”

Amen.

Grace in the World, by Pastor Greg

Amazing grace how sweet the sound ...

Grace ... what is grace? It’s a word that gets bandied about a lot by people like us. And it’s a lively question for us this month as the word and the notionof grace are at the heart of our thinking about stewardship. Grace is at the heart what it means to offer our all in support of God’s good work in and around and beyond us.

So here’s a working definition of grace: God’s “grace” is the living goodness of God’s being and God’s power and God’s love that is offered to the world and its people without cost, without condition, without limit. (repeat)

Perhaps you can be thinking or searching for your own definition of grace in the days ahead.

For Paul writing in his epistles—his letters to the churches, grace was all about “salvation”—God’s gift of an unbreakable bond created between the heart of a human being and the heart of God and the eternity of God. But grace and salvation are not to be thought of as some kind of private transaction in which you escape with your hide and “devil may care” about the hides around you. That modern saint, Dorothy Day, was fond of saying: “None are saved until all are saved.” If Christians are only concerned for saving their own skin, their own souls, only concerned with locking up theirown “private path to heaven,” they’ve completely missed the wideness of God’s mercy, and the intended “all-ness” of God’s gift.

And let’s give up the thinking that would suggest that “grace and salvation” are strictly “spiritual” matters ... concerned only with the spirit and the soul—the ephemeral and the eternal, but not the material or the physical. Grace and salvation are also interested in other matters like health and poverty and opportunity and oppression— Grace and salvation are also interested in the neighbor in need. When hunger causes your ribs to show, when disease stalks you and takes your children, when war robs you of your neighbors and your livelihood, it’s hard to care too much about the “eternal security” of your soul. And it’s equally hard to imagine that anyone calling themselves “Christian” could ignore the “neighbor’s” plight while yet thinking of themselves as “saved” and beneficiaries of the “grace of God.”

If “grace” is particular, it is also “universal”. If it is a gift intended for “me”, it is also a gift intended for “us” and the two are inseparable. God’s gift of life and grace and salvation—in the broadest, deepest and richest sense of those terms, is intended for one and for all. To hoard them, protect them, or privatize them is to destroy them.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. ... This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

One of the things we feel we know to say about grace is that it comes to us through God’s gift of Jesus: God in the flesh, God incarnate, God upon this earth as one of us, uniquely human, yet divine. For us, Jesus is the way to God’s grace. So let’s combine that thought with the familiar words of the 16^thcentury Spanish mystic, St. Teresa of Avila:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks in

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Fellow “stewards of God’s grace”, we are partners in the “dispensing” and “enacting” of God’s grace. It is the living out of the interrelatedness and the mutuality of God’s grace for one and all, in tangible and compassionate action, that God’s grace becomes realized and made manifest.

Today is Worldwide Communion Sunday. This is a day when we symbolically break bread and share the cup with Christians the world over ... in every place and every condition. On this day of communion and grace, I would simply note three ways that we help dispense and enact God’s living and tangible grace in this world that God so loves.

ONE: Seafarer’s “ditty bags” ...

TWO: I’m thinking of the work that we support in Haiti ... and especially the work of our missionaries there, Nzunga Mabudiga and Kihomi Ngwemi, a husband and wife team who are natives to the Congo.

Nzunga and Kihomi serve as a vital link between International Ministries and the Haitian Baptist Convention. Nzunga teaches theology at the Christian University of Northern Haiti, trains assistant professors in teaching and writing books, administers a scholarship program, and visits and preaches in churches. He also administers the "Kids for Kids" goat project that provides needed school and personal supplies for children and university students.Kihomi works with families in the areas of counseling, family planning, and women's health issues. She also coordinates and advises the women's association of the Haitian Baptist Convention, representing women of all the Baptist denominations of Haiti at international conferences.

Nzunga and Kihomi are also deeply concerned about the merciful medical ministry of the hospital we support in Limbe: “The Hospital of the Good Samaritan.” Several years ago we, as a church, gave a significant gift toward the purchase a new generator that would help supply the hospital with a reliable source of electricity so they wouldn’t have to rely only on the unreliable local power “grid”—if it could even be called that. It was a huge boost to the hospital’s care they offer to their neighbors in need.

THREE: Heifer ... a gift that keeps on giving (as opposed to guilt ... Keillor)

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

Christ has no body now but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

compassion on this world.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

At this time I invite us to begin to draw near to the table that is laden with rich hints of God’s goodness and grace: bread and the juice of grapes. The bread and the cup symbolize the world’s physical hunger and its satisfaction. We may not be able to “live by bread alone”, but without bread, we cannot live at all. The bread and the cup symbolize the sustenance and nutrition all beings need to live. And they also symbolize the deeper sustenance and nutrition without which we also have no real being: the sustenance of our souls, our hearts, our dreams, our spirits, our purpose, our living, our humanity. God is also concerned with these things and all things—with the “allness” of all people—and God promises to feed all who come together in love to this love feast with that which satisfies and fulfills our bodies and minds, hearts and spirits.

So let us come and join together with the children of God’s heart the world over in partaking of this food, this meal, this grace.

 Christ invites us all to this Holy Feast.

  As we gather this morning,

            we remember our sisters and brothers

            from above and below the equator,

            from the North and from Down Under,

            from every time zone around the globe.

  As today's sunlight inches across land and sea

  Christians gather to celebrate their place

in God's family.

  All are invited and all are welcome.

  Come, for the meal is ready!

God is my rock, by Greg

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

A part of me is up in eastern Washington state today ... later today members of the church I grew up in, along with most of the members of my own family, will be gathering to celebrate the life of a man who was the father of my best friend during my teen years.

Skip Arnold was a Rhode Island native who drifted West like so many others. He and his wife Shirley set up shop in the valleys east of Spokane, joined a church, started a family, made a life. It was midway through that story, in the early 70’s, that my family moved to Spokane Valley, joined the American Baptist church there, and met the Arnold family. It wasn’t long before Skip Jr., or “Skippy” as we always knew him, was one of my closest friends. I cannot even fathom the number of days and hours we spent together at his home or mine.

Big Skip, as Skip Sr. was always known, was a short, heavy barrel of a man, with a big heart, but a clear mind and a quick tongue. You really wanted to stay on Big Skip’s good side if you, as a squirrely young teenager, didn’t want a swift quick on the backside. He was a good and loving man, but he knew right from wrong and he wasn’t a bit shy to let you know what side of that equation he thought you were on. After my own father, I believe it would be fair to say that Big Skip was the most influential man of my teenage years.

Big Skip married a good hearted Rhode Island girl named Shirley and she became like a mother to me. She was as loving, sweet and kind as Skip was brusque. Until just a couple of years ago, we would always receive a long, kindly, hand-written Christmas card from Shirley telling how they were and asking how we were. It was that dreaded lung disease, pulmonary fibrosis, that robbed Big Skip of Shirley two years ago and not long after that, Big Skip suffered a stroke that made him a virtual prisoner in his own body ... and only last week was he finally granted an eternal parole from that dreaded confinement.

I’ve been mingling thoughts, this week, of Big Skip and the Psalmist’s deep, deep words of faith ... and I find myself wondering if anyone ever thought to read Psalm 62 to Skip as he lay in his bed ... wondering ... wondering what lay ahead ... wondering what his life meant ... wondering what his soul stood on in that “time between times”. Did anyone read these words to Skip and if they did, could he identify with the psalmist and did he find comfort and hope in these words from the psalmist’s heart?

For God alone my soul waits in silence,

for my hope is from God.

God alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

On God rests my deliverance and my honor;

my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.

Skip was never a man of “flowery” faith ... he was a bull of a man who worked with his hands and his sweat and the strength of his broad back. As with so many families, Shirley was the more spiritually effusive of the two. Skip’s faith was sunk deeper, you might say ... buried deep in the bedrock of his person. It might help to know that Skip was a “driller and blaster” ... it was his vocation to operate mighty pneumatic drills that bored into solid rock where charges of dynamite could be planted so that a way could be made for roads. There probably aren’t many men alive, except for Skippy who is also a driller and blaster, who’ve worked their way into more acreage of solid rock than Big Skip. If ever there was a metaphor for the solid, grounding reality of the heart of the universe, a metaphor for God’s own being, it was “rock” and I think it was in that “rock” that Skip found his footing and his grounding. And I have to think that in these last few years when his earthly soul had little else in which to find joy or meaning, that the God who was in his soul’s bedrock never let him down, was a firm and reliable place to live and, finally, to die.

On God rests my deliverance and my honor;

my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.

The potential deep comfort of these words to someone at the end of their rope seems obvious. When there is nothing left to hold on to, we can at least hold on to God ... and in that time between times we are graced to discover that God is enough. (HWS)

If you are here this morning, it is because you have thus far been spared the horror and indignity of being bedridden and incapable of self-care. To one degree or another, we who are present today continue to enjoy a good measure of independence and health—all in all, life is still good.

But we live in uncertain times in an uncertain world. And who among us will bet the family farm on that “uncertainty” changing in any foreseeable future? As long as this planet’s population keeps growing, and as long as this planet’s resources remain finite, and as long as this planet’s wealthier and more powerful inhabitants refuse to invest their best energies and thinking and resources in creating a world where children are no longer born into hunger and fear ... as long as these things remain true, uncertainty will be our truest certainty. That’s the world I was born into ... that’s the world I live in now.

That is not to say that I have or we have given up on the world and given up our hope for the world. Not by a long, long shot. Not while I have breath and, I hope, not while you have breath. But it is to say that we perceive the world and our lives within it with few delusions, which is, I think, the healthiest and most honest way to live within the world ... if not the craziest. But we also live within the world as followers of Jesus, another clear-eyed soul who loved the world he lived in. And if we wish not to be crushed by the concerns of the world while working hopefully on behalf of the needs of the world ... well ... we’d better be grounded in some pretty solid stuff. We’d better know where to stand and on whom to stand.

God alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

So ... what are you standing on?

What are you grounded in?

What gives you strength?

What gives you hope?

Where do you stand when storms come and storms blow?

What is saving you now?

What does it mean to bore down into the rock? What does it mean to be “anchored” in that which is undeniably deep and firm and trustworthy?

Last week we spoke of the din and distractions of the holiday season and so much of life that makes it hard to “hear” the still small voice that can whisper our true name and speak peace to our souls. It is a parallel thought to say that that same holiday season that also symbolizes materialism at its worst ... the avalanche of stuff that buries us ... preoccupies us ... impoverishes us ... and whets our appetites for even MORE stuff. It seems to me that the shallower the human soul and spirit gets, the greater the need for stuff to make up for the lack of depth and meaning that stuff just can’t provide. There is a hunger and anxiety that seems palpable in our world and in people who surround us that is easily exploited for a profit.

I was with my pastor friend, Katie Choy-Wong recently, and she told of her recent sabbatical travels to China, to the village from her family came to this country several generations ago. She said that the region where her family came from use to be all farms, nothing but farmland ... and now, she says, it is only factories as far as the eye can see ... factories that churn out the junk that you and I are so desperate to have. I know that when I get home, I’m going to hear a wail of woe and despair from my lifemate.

At their worst, our human lives become littered on the surface with such a depth of debris and detritus and distractions that there’s little hope of finding anything solid underneath on which to stand. All this, you understand, from someone whose desktop, at its worse, can look like the county landfill.

When the earth shakes us ... when changing life circumstances shake us ... when crumbling economies shake us ... when failure of family or friends shake us ... when our health or lack thereof shakes us ... where do you stand? Can you find the rock of your salvation? Have you got a firm place to put your feet ... and your faith?

And if a thick layer of “stuff” can keep us from finding firm footing, from finding the rock of our salvation ... what does anxiety and fear about the future do for our rock-finding?

I am of the age when AARP starts stuffing your mailbox with their repulsive membership cards and come-ons for their magazine. Come on, I say, I still think of myself as a somewhat older, but still young, young adult. Retirement and all that that entails is still off on some impossibly far off horizon ... isn’t it? Isn’t it???

Well OK ... so it isn’t. A recent evening found us sitting with Dana Murphy at a teacher’s retirement seminar ... at Ruth’s Chris steak house of all places—but it was a lovely dinner ... and hosted by an insurance company who wants to help you buy ... assurance ... freedom from anxiety and fear, right? ...

One of the most remarkable changes in our culture is the emergence of the whole world and culture of retirement. And it is, at its root, grounded in the specters of anxiety and uncertainty and fear. For those who will soon plunge headlong into retirement ... how much is enough? How long will I live? Have I saved enough? Will I have healthcare? Will I be a burden to my children? Will I be alone?

There’s really something here terrifically at odds with what used to be conventional thinking about facing the future. Now we face the future with faith ... aaaaand a WHOLE LOT MORE ... Our whole culture is obsessed with “securing the future” ... selling our souls, nearly, to make sure we are comfortably and predictably ushered into our infirm years and, finally, into the grave. No shocks ... no surprises ... nothing but safety and security. I’m having trouble putting my finger on this, but there seems to be something almost nihilistic about this. It’s like slowly increasing the level of barbiturate until we gently fade from the scene. I think we should acknowledge that there is a whole massive industry whose sole purpose, nearly, is to terrify us with haunting visions of impoverished golden years where you are kept alive with food stamps and the E.R. room of the county hospital. “Dear friend,” the retirement counselor says to you with a heavy hand on your sagging shoulder, “no price is too high to avoid such a specter.”

But ... but ... my hope is from God.

God alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress;

I absolutely know that our stuff cannot give us life or save us ... and I doubt the ability of even the best “securities” portfolio to give us the security and peace that our souls most crave in uncertain times ... a security and peace that cannot be shaken by a shaky world economy.

So ... what are you standing on?

What are you grounded in?

What gives you strength?

What gives you hope?

Where do you stand when storms come and storms blow?

What is saving you now?

What does it mean to bore down into the rock? What does it mean to be “anchored” in that which is undeniably deep and firm and trustworthy?

Skippy—my friend Skip Jr.—said on the phone last night about his mom—who died two years ago—that she’d spent her whole life getting ready for the place he now imagines her in. That’s not an articulation or understanding of what’s beyond this life that all of us here would use or share—though some would ... but in this life while she lived it, that simple, sturdy, resilient faith of Shirley’s never failed her, never let her down, always upheld her even as her health failed and the end of her life on this earth drew near. And I trust and pray the same was true for Big Skip, may he rest in God’s good peace. Simple faith ... and .... simple trust.

For God alone my soul waits in silence,

for my hope is from God.

God alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

On God rests my deliverance and my honor;

my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.

Perhaps it should be said that this sense of grounding ourselves in God’s bedrock is not for everyone ... perhaps not even everyone here—whether it is that we doubt the nature of the rock, or doubt ourselves to be able drill into it—our strength or our ability or our “faith”. Or perhaps such an understanding of God smacks of a simple-minded piety that you have spent the bulk of your adult life evolving beyond ... or fleeing. Maybe we’ve just become too sophisticated and urbane to do anything more than wistfully wish we still had our drills and the faithful courage to use them.

Perhaps we should turn the image around ... perhaps we are the nearly impenetrable rock and God is the gently dripping water that slowly bores God’s way into us ... if we will allow it ... if we will not shield ourselves from God. When I am hiking in the high sierra, one of the phenomena at which I most marvel is where water has run across the high mountainous granite slabs for eons ... carving straight and curving channels, sculpting circular bowls of all sizes, shaping and reshaping the solid bulk of the mountain. Time and persistence make the granite, to the patient water, like clay. And so it is for the one who will simply wait upon God ... for God to do with us and for us what God will do ...

For God alone my soul waits in silence,

for my hope is from God.

God alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

On God rests my deliverance and my honor;

my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.

People of Shell Ridge, wait upon God ... trust in God ... be rooted and grounded in God even as God seeks to be rooted and grounded in you.

Amen.

Listening, by Greg

I have been enjoying introducing Alex to some of Puccini’s great Arias ... including “O Mio Babbino Caro” from one of his less well known operas. It is such an extraordinary thing to close your eyes and allow the passion of this almost painfully beautiful piece of music to cascade down upon your ears and your soul. I know very little about Puccini, but listening to his music almost feels like you’re looking through a window into his soul.

Alex is glad that we’re now listening to Puccini or Bach or anything besides the nearly non-stop onslaught of Christmas music that I’ve subjected my household to for the past couple of months.

We have just come out of a season that is notable for, among other things, its sound ... the nearly non-stop din of seasonal music and bells ringing and general “hubbub”. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about this month ... the month of January ... is the quiet ... the cessation of sound ... the chance to still oneself and to ... simply listen. To this day, our New Year’s day worship of two weeks ago remains a gift for the calm and quiet worship we enjoyed together. During the closing guided meditation, we were told repeatedly to “smile and breathe” ... a simple, but effective spiritual practice.

This past Monday and Tuesday I joined a group of my colleagues for a brief time of retreat ... the theme of the retreat was “Sabbath Keeping” and one of the important “duties”, if you will, of Sabbath Keeping is, simply, listening ... ceasing to speak and slowing your activities and opening up your mind and your heart and your soul to ... whatever is there to be heard. Several times during our retreat we simply sat in silence ... our eyes closed, our bodies relaxed, our minds relaxed, as well, and open ... open to whatever gifts might come to us when we cease activity and speaking for a time.

Our friend Trevor, who preached last Sunday, came out from snowy Vermont to join us at our Sabbath Keeping retreat, because he knows, as I know, that our ministry and our personal spirituality is deepest and most effective when we take time to pause and grow still and listen. After the retreat, Trevor took leave of us for a couple of days and drove to the coast. Wednesday, he told us, he made a “day of silence”, that is ... where he did not speak. He even carried a note with him that explained to people he might encounter that he was observing a day of silence. One young woman at a store said to Trevor, who was speaking again by the time he returned to our home, “I’d love to ask you about your day of silence ... but ... I guess that wouldn’t really work, would it.”

One of the potential hazards of being a human being is that we forget that communication is a two-way process ... we too often get the “speaking” part down, but forget that “listening” is the critical other half of the equation of communication. For as many years as I’ve performed marriages, I’ve always reminded soon-to-be-married couples of the sage advice of the wise old Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, who said “We have two ears and one mouth, so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

Some of us were born as “chatty Kathy’s” and stilling our voices, for a time, does not come easily to us. But whether we are naturally chatty or not, learning to cease speaking and to listen remains a challenge for most of us. No less of a challenge is to turn off the noise and distractions to which we modern creatures seem almost addicted. It would be interesting to observe our neighbors in a number of places ... on the bus, on the street, in their homes ... and see how many have a compulsive need for sound or information ... see how many must have the television running, the ipod playing, the social network buzzing, the smart phone or the home computer chugging out its information. It might be our neighbors ... it might be us. Too often it is only when we lie down in exhaustion to sleep that we let go of these things and allow silence to envelope us.

Silence and stillness can help open what we might call “the ears of our souls” ... that is, while we are in a posture of receptiveness and listening, it is listening at a deeper level that we are seeking ... to deepen our listening opens us to hearing, finally, the gentle voice of God ... the heart of another person ... the world and its “hopes and fears” ... and even the voice of our own hearts.

To “listen” to the voice of another isn’t simply to hear their words, but it is to seek to understand their heart and their purposes and their concerns. Listening is an act of “knowing” ... it is a communion of souls where the “other” becomes more deeply known to you.

Young Samuel, that we’ve heard about this morning in our scripture reading, models for us that simple receptivity to the voice of God. He keeps hearing his name called and once old Eli sets him straight about who’s doing the calling, Samuel demonstrates for us how to find communion with God: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” It is Samuel’s openness and willingness to wait for the voice of God and to listen to the heart of God that helps him play a critically important role in the life of the nation of Israel as a judge and a prophet. It is Samuel’s discernment of God’s heart that allows him to help Israel in the selection of its rulers ... first Saul ... and then David.

Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.

Voices of Healing, by Greg.

We sometimes will speak about “scars” that we have within ourselves ... that is, lingering evidence of wounds we have sustained in our living and loving.

I have some scars within ... some knotted and twisted “places” that you cannot actually see, but I can “feel” at times. I also have a pretty fair collection of scars on the outside ... I have scars that were inflicted upon me by doctors who needed to get inside my body and fix things.Other scars were accidentally self-inflicted ... you know the fascination boys have with sharp, dangerous things ... and fire ... and stuff that goes “bang!”. It’s a pure wonder that I’m alive and have nearly all my “parts”. But the thing about all of my scars that amazes me and is worth noting is that they are all evidence of healing. The scar is the symbol and the sign that my body has amazing powers of recovery and regeneration. And so it is with you ... and so it is with our earth and all of creation.

Broken things can become whole ... wounded things can heal ... empty things can be filled ... sadness can become joy ... uselessness can become new purpose ... loneliness can become belonging.

We live in a world where hurt and brokenness is all around us. Some of the hurt and brokenness is very personal ... very close. I ache to think of some of the sadness I know that has touched each one of us here. Who has not known loss ... disappointment ... emptiness ... failure? This week we received the annual Christmas photo and letter from my late best friend’s family. The photo of this dear, dear family shows three members, now, instead of four. Jan wept to see the photo. I did my weeping while writing these words.

We cannot escape the wounds and brokenness that come by virtue of being alive ... or by loving and caring for others ... or by the accidents that can sometimes befall us ... or by the occasional cruelties of others ... or sometimes by the enormous cruelties that are the part of unjust and oppressive systems.

And yet, remarkably ... and we might even say “miraculously”, our inner and outer wounds and brokenness are most often graced by healing ... remarkable healing ... by the knitting together of broken bones and broken hearts ... the return of stability to our inner systems and balance to our ruptured emotions. We can know healing ... and restoration ... and renewal. And God’s grace and gentle love is a part of every healing ... every restoration ... every renewal.

We live in a universe where healing and renewal are a part of the natural process. And yet, we might say in this setting of faith, that at the very heart of this universe, we understand that the Spirit of our loving God conspires and works tirelessly to bring healing and wholeness to every heart and hearth and nation to where it is needed.

Healing is a mysterious blend of God’s divine Spirit and the natural powers of creation and our own modest efforts. And it is not always a “cure” that results from our efforts and nature’s influence and God’s “healing.” Sometimes the healing is an inner one that cannot yet stem the tide of illness or difficulty that has beset us. And in this life and this world where we know we are mortal, sometimes that is just the way it is. And yet in the wider circle of God’s love and care, and surrounded by loving community, let us be encouraged to find peace in that ... and great joy while we live and with each living breath we draw.

We have been standing at the threshold of the stable ... the edge of the manger for several weeks now ... like expectants parents waiting for the contractions to begin. But this “birth” that gets hinted at in Isaiah is more like a re-birth ... the conditions out of which this re-birth is occurring is not what we hope for ourselves or this world ... brokenheartedness ... captivity ... impoverishment. These are symptoms of things that have gone wrong ... symptoms of a body or a world in need of repair ... a new start ... a new life ... healing and restoral.

For all of the difficulty that the “occupy” movement has had to find traction and a focused message, it is, at the heart, a cry that speaks of things that have gone wrong, a system in need of deep healing and change. It would also be fair to say that it’s not just the U.S. that needs an “occupy” movement, but the world as a whole.

Isaiah stands among people who have reoccupied the land of their ancestors, but can see no hope, no healing, no future ... all they can see are ruined buildings and ruined lives in need of restoration. They are a brokenhearted people in need of a fresh start and to these people Isaiah speaks God’s healing word: “The creator of this universe, whose breath shaped this earth and spoke life into existence, will heal and restore you. And this is “good news” for all people, all earth. The birth of Jesus is, for us, a grand fulfillment of Isaiah’s hopeful and healing words. God’s decisively entering into our lives and our world “from within” ... love encased in human flesh, the Spirit clothed in our human condition, and from within God’s healing and restoration comes, not in a great show of power, but on the wings of every breath and with every newborn baby’s cry. And this is the word and message of “Christmas” that is beneath every cry of “Merry Christmas” ... this is the word and message beneath and within our seasonal celebration. It is a word and message of hope and healing and new futures.

And we are at the same time, people who need to hear this the “good news” of this healing word ... and people who need to pronounce the “good news” of this healing word. And so, while yet standing at the threshold, with seasonal bustle and twinkling lights and merry songs all around, we come into a time of prayer for healing ... healing of ourselves ... of nations ... of this earth.

We open ourselves to this time of hearing and speaking the healing heart of God by singing together: “Come and fill our hearts ...”. Let us sing together as we come together in prayer:

Come and fill our hearts with your peace.
You alone, O God are holy.
Come and fill our hearts with your peace.
Al-le-lu-u-u-u-ia!

Voices of Comfort, by Greg

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen.

Sing: Comfort Ye, comfort ye my people.

As I drove to Berkeley on Thursday for a meeting, a hillside on the north side of Highway 24 in Lafayette caught the corner of my eye ... it was nearly completely white, as though snow was slowly drifting down and blanketing the ground. I turned my head and looked and it was, of course, not snow, but the slow, growing accumulation of small white memorials, mostly crosses, each marking the end of a life ... the end of a unique and brilliant and lovable and capable human being. Each memorial marker represents a whole universe of pain and loss for friends and family members of each service person who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. And for each white memorial marker, somewhere between 10 and 20 civilians have also died in those locations in this latest reminder of the awfulness of war and the utter futility of violent means to achieve peaceful ends.

Sing: Comfort Ye, comfort ye my people.

Another day and another drive. I was driving to work this past Tuesday morning in a dense fog. It was the literal fog we had before the brisk winds cleared the fog and darned near everything else in its path.

I had just read an email telling about the death, on Thanksgiving Day, of Sarah Hammond, the 34 year old daughter of our dear friends from the Baptist Peace Fellowship, Steve and Mary Hammond. Steve and Mary are co-pastors of Peace Community Church in Oberlin, Ohio. At our first peace camp in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1999, we had met the Hammonds, including Sarah who was the oldest of their three daughters. You may remember that it was Steve Hammond’s words that helped catalyze Jan’s thinking about becoming a vegetarian.

Sarah had just earned her PhD in religion last year and was already a beloved professor at William and Mary College in Virginia. She was a deeply intelligent and compassionate and sensitive woman. And ... she had also battled inner demons of depression and despair all of her adult life. Steve and Mary wrote a few brief words to their friends and supportive community about their loss and their daughter’s struggle.

I had just read those words and was pondering them as I sat at the stop light in the fog waiting to turn on to La Casa Via ... and in one of those odd, ironic moments, the music I was listening to was a piano medley that combined “I’ll be home for Christmas” and the “Going Home” portion of Anton Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony. It was a moment of tender irony. “I’ll be home ... and ... I’m going home.”

These are Mary and Steve’s words:

From Mary -- Our beloved first born child, Sarah, passed away on Thanksgiving Day at the age of 34 after an utterly valiant decades long struggle with mental illness. Sarah, may you find the peace and rest with God that you could not find here on this earth. The God we trust holds you tight.

From Steve -- That call from the police in [Virginia] today was one that we always feared would come. Sarah was such an amazing person. So giving. So thoughtful. So brilliant. She just couldn't believe how amazing she was, and grew tired of this long battle with the darkness.

I really believe that darkness Sarah knew everyday has been finally shattered by the light. And I am glad to trust her in the hands of the one who said "I am the resurrection and the life."

Mary and I are so very grateful for all who accompanied Sarah on her journey. We got this far by faith, farther than, at times, we ever imagined she could make it. But her weary journey has come to its end. We often sing "Come and fill our hearts with your peace," at the Taize service. And it has always been my prayer for Sarah. Now that peace has come.

Sing: Comfort Ye, comfort ye my people.

This past Monday—my day off and the only day of the week I actually get to read the paper, I opened up the morning paper and out fell two sections that, to my surprise, had no news on them to speak of—at least as we think of news. They were the “public announcements” section of the Contra Costa Times. They used to be the back part of another section, like the Business section, but apparently there are now so many “public announcements” to be made that it takes not one, but TWO WHOLE SECTIONS of newsprint to contain this fine, but wicked print. Two whole sections of “legal postings”—and they were, with only a few exceptions, announcements of what people ... families were about to lose ... about to be forced to return to the lending institutions from whom money had been borrowed … two whole SECTIONS of foreclosures … two whole SECTIONS of misery … two whole SECTIONS of families’ lives being turned upside down ... two whole SECTIONS of moving trucks being packed, children being told that they must leave their neighborhoods and friends and classmates, two whole SECTIONS of credit ratings destroyed and futures being frazzled and threatened. Two whole sections of dislocation and misery and frustration and fear.

Sing: Comfort Ye, comfort ye my people.

Our sermon text this morning also speaks of dislocation and misery and frustration and fear. Isaiah’s words are written out of a time of exile ... a time when a good portion of the nation of Israel had been forcibly relocated to Babylon ... and with that forcible relocation, they had left behind EVERYTHING they knew and loved, EVERYTHING that gave their lives meaning ... they had left behind their homes and their Temple and, it seemed, their God and their very future. It was period of unspeakable bleakness and pain.

The people and their priests had no way to understand or interpret their exile except as a desolating punishment ... and as God’s “washing of the divine hands” of the once “chosen people” that God had, generations earlier, led out of bondage and into the promised land. But now that was a painfully distant and mocking memory.

It was only after a great deal of time had passed that a new prophet, speaking in the tradition of the great prophet Isaiah, found his voice, took heart, and began to utter words of comfort and hope, words of mercy and healing.

Sing: Comfort Ye, comfort ye my people.

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.
A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Isaiah sees with eyes of faith that dislocation and misery and frustration and fear are not the final word. On the horizon of faith, which is beyond the horizon of sight, Isaiah sees God’s return and the restoration of God’s people to their land, their homes, their Temple and their place near God’s own heart. What Isaiah sees is not to be hidden or held close, but proclaimed from high places:

Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” God will feed God’s flock like a shepherd; God will gather the lambs in God’s arms, and carry them in God’s bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

Isaiah’s word to Israel in exile is a also a word for us and for our world. You who have known the pain of loss and deep grief, you who have known dislocation and misery and frustration and fear ... know that these are not the final word, know that these are not the journey’s bitter end. On a horizon that is yet beyond our sight, a faint, but strengthening glow can be seen ... and it is a glow that portends healing and hope, mercy and forgiveness, reconciliation and return. It is a strengthening glow that speaks of the deep and abiding peace of God for all who have been in literal and figurative exile. It is a strengthening glow that hints at the love that is at the heart of all things, all creation ... love that will find new birth in our lives and on this good earth.

May we ALL be graced and blessed with the eyes of faith that can see beyond our human knowing. May we ALL see together the hints of God’s promise to be birthed once more into this world and into these lives: our lives and our world.

Amen.