The Fragrant Gift: Memories of Loving Service and Salvation

A Shell Ridge Sermon preached by Rev. Greg Ledbetter, preached 03/25/2007
Fifth Sunday in Lent: Gifts in the Wilderness

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; John 12:1-8

Hear this additional reading from the Song of Songs, Chapter 2:

10My beloved speaks and says to me:
‘Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away;
11for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
12The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle-dove
is heard in our land.
13The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.

Close your eyes and “come away with me” for a moment … I want to appeal to one of your senses:

Where do you remember the smell of bread baking? Grandmother’s or your own mother’s kitchen? A favorite bakery? Remember the smell of tearing open a fresh-baked loaf, the fragrant rising up in your face.

How about the smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafting through the house in the early morning.

Do you know the smell of the rain on warm asphalt after a long dry spell?

Who do you remember that smoked a pipe, nasty to taste, but so wonderful to smell. Or was there a loved one who wore a memorable perfume … or cologne … a fragrance that was bracing or intoxicating.

Have you worshipped in a cathedral where the censor is swung and the rich, pungent smell of incense fills the air.

Have you knelt down and dug in the soft, warm earth and smelled the very smell of life? Or buried your nose in the first apple blossoms of spring? Or dragged your fingers through the rosemary or the lavender so those fragrances can be held close to your nose?

How about the smell of a Christmas home … the steamy rich smells coming from the kitchen … the fragrance of the Christmas tree … or remember walking into a Christmas tree lot as a child or an adult surrounded by hundreds of fragrant trees?

Have you walked along the seashore and stood facing into the wind just taking in the tanginess of the salt wind?

If you wish, you may open your eyes now. And if someone could go get me a slice of warm bread slathered in butter, and a mug of fresh Peet’s coffee—French roast--that would be wonderful.

Our sense of smell is a remarkable and wonderful thing. Our experience of life is made rich and deep and full by our ability to experience the wonders of creation with our noses.

Humans can smell, but I have to wonder what it would be like to have the olfactory capabilities of my dogs.

I often catch Sparky, our 7 year old male Jack Rusell, sitting in the open back sliding door … just sniffing the wind … his nostrils flaring and sampling whatever there is to be sampled.

Whenever I have been around another dog, when I get home my are immediately all over me, sniffing me up and down to trying to figure out what foul beast I’ve been two-timing with.

And yet as glorious as their smelling apparatus seems to be, it is equally strange. Every time Jan and I go for a walk above Borges Ranch, when we get up to where the cows graze and wander amongst the final results of that grazing, Sparky and Biscuit are out in the field … splashing on the stinky green perfume … “Yeah, baby … you know that you like it!” We have to drive with the windows down on the way home.



I am trying to remember when I last have heard a conscious reference to our olfactory senses within the context of worship. How is it that something that is so powerful a part of our everyday experience is so completely absent in our worship of God together?

Smells and odors and fragrances have incredibly deep religious roots … nearly all ancient religions, including the religion of Israel, burned incense or sacrifices in the hopes that the smell produced was pleasing to God … these “holocausts”, as they were called, symbolized the devotion of God’s subjects … God’s people … the phrase, “a pleasing odor”, occurs repeatedly throughout the Hebrew scriptures, our Old Testament. You may recall, however, that the prophet Amos lambastes the people and their faith for thinking that “pleasing odors” were what God really wanted … that they were any kind of substitute for the weightier matters of justice.

You know already that our worship in this season of Lent has gently pushed and pulled us into new ways of being present to God and God being present to us in our times of gathered worship. Our tongues have been tantalized this Lent with the flavors of Apples, honey, figs, bread and wine. And we began the season with the usual application of ashes to our hands and foreheads, but this year the ashes were infused with the oil of lavender … ashen crosses that were not only visible, but also fragrant reminders of our frailty and mortality. The lavender was also intended to remind us of the promise and possibilities that are present even in the midst of great difficulty.

Today we join Jesus who is sharing a meal in the home of his beloved friends, Lazarus and Martha and Mary. These are the disciples whom Jesus loved, and we can only imagine the extraordinary warmth of feeling that radiated around that room … the conversation … the lingering eye contact in between the words … hands clenched together and kisses exchanged. I would have to think that the love poetry of the Song of Songs aptly described the love between Jesus and his three friends from Bethany.

We who gulp our meals on the run have nearly no sense of the kind of meal that Jesus and his friends shared. These were long, lingering, drawn out affairs. A whole evening would be spent around the table … food coming and going, conversation ebbing and flowing, wine passed and poured and drunk.

I’m remembering my trip to Israel during the summer of my sabbatical … Jordan and I had flown to Tel Aviv where we picked up our trusty little Hyundai and headed into the hills of Galilee. We finally found the little village of Ibillin where one of Israel’s great peacemakers, Father Elias Chacour had founded a school that welcomed Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews. It was dusk when we pulled into the compound of the school on the side of a dusty hill. A woman pointed to where we could find Abuna, as Father Chacour is known. We climbed the stairs to the second floor of an apartment building … walked through the door into a brightly lit, but empty room. At the back of the room was a door and through the door we could hear voices. We opened the door and stepped out into a garden, olive trees and grape vines trailing overhead … and there in the middle of the garden sitting around a long table laden with food and candle and wine was Abuna and his friends. They looked up and greeted us and welcomed us to their table. I was put at the head next to Abuna while Jordan was seated next to some young teachers from the school. Our glasses and our plates were filled … and as our stomachs were filled, so also our hearts became full. The meal and the conversation lasted as long as we did. Finally, we wiped the crumbs of baklava from our lips, took the last swig of wine and took leave of a most memorable evening.

It was just that kind of evening, long, lingering, intimate, that Jesus shared with Lazarus and Martha and Mary and their friends. And at some point in the evening, as the affection between these friends swelled, Mary slipped away for a moment and returned with a gift that she had purchased for just this occasion. It was an exotic and expensive perfume. And this particular perfume was well-known, in the context of the Song of Songs, as a symbol of the intimate nature of the Bride’s love. Mary took the nard and anointed Jesus’ feet with it and wiped them with her hair. And John tells us that the house was FILLED with the fragrance of the perfume.

This is one of those scriptural occasions when our modern sensibilities simply fail to convey the depth and meaning of the actions being described. In our silk stockings and hand-stitched loafers, we have nearly lost our awareness of just how filthy human feet could become when treading through the waste and sewage of dirty and muddy streets. When guests entered a home, the host would provide water for the guests to wash their feet in … or in a wealthy home, a servant would wash the guests’ feet. It was the first act of hospitality, and possibly the most intimate.

When a loved one washed your feet or anointed your feet, it took on the meaning of an act of loving service … it was a way of expressing one’s affection at an incredibly deep level. By anointing Jesus’ feet with expensive perfume, Mary expresses her love of Jesus in the most profound way possible. It is an act of loving, devoted service by the one—a woman follower—who might be considered Jesus’ foremost disciple.

But Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet has another connotation, as well. It’s interesting to note that the Greek word for “dinner” used to describe the meal in Bethany finds its only other usage in describing Jesus’ last meal with his disciples … the last supper. It is at that supper that Jesus speaks to his disciples of his impending departure … his death. At the dinner in Bethany, Mary is not only offering to Jesus an act of loving service, she is also anointing Jesus as a preparation for his burial that is to come.

I can’t help but think of scenes from the movie several of us watched together last night. Paradise Now was the fourth and final movie in our Lenten Cinema Series … it tells the story of two young Palestinian men from the West Bank, friends from childhood, who have agreed to serve on a suicide bombing mission. The night before they are to depart, they are verbally and spiritually prepared for their mission … for what is to come. They gather in a rough-hewn hall around a table in a scene that surely was intended to evoke DaVinci’s famous painting of Jesus’ last supper. 13 Palestinian fighters seated around a table for what will be at least one of the young men’s last supper. And in what appeared to be a sacred ritual, the young men’s bodies are lovingly bathed by the ones who are preparing them for their mission. And as awful and horrific as their actions will be … you get the very strong sense of the sacred feeling and sacred intent of the actions of all who are involved in this event … this deadly mission.

This meal shared by the Palestinian fighters is only a few miles from the place where, some two thousand years earlier, Jesus shared his meal with his friends in Bethany and, later, with his disciples in Jerusalem.

I have to believe that for John, the evoking of the Bethany dinner and the way that the fragrance of the nard FILLED the room is more than just a poetic mention … a literary device. In recent years, scientists have begun to trace the connection between smell and memory. It is said that it may be that smells can evoke our very earliest memories.

One of my aroma-related earliest memories includes living in Hawaii as a child … upon our return from a mainland visit, I rmember getting off the airplane and being festooned in leis … surrounded by the intoxicating aroma of cascades of plumeria blossoms.

While at Linfield College, I worked at Lon Dee Florists … I frequently drove a delivery van full of funeral arrangements … and I remember the overwhelming smell of the stocks in the arrangements … even to this day, when I smell stocks, it is the smell of funeral homes and hushed voices and death that I recall.

Is it John’s intention—the author of the gospel—that the evocation of this room filling fragrance of nard … of this exotic and expensive perfume is to recall us to the memory of this meal among beloved friends? And to recall us to this act of hospitality and loving service that is also a tear-tinged anointing of a loved one who will soon die? John’s gospel is highly artful, and I believe that John wishes for our “spiritual noses” to tingle and twitch and come to life with rich memories of Mary’s act … and to let the memories remind us of what it means to lovingly turn and tend to Jesus our Lord.

Perhaps we find ourselves finally back at the real purpose of Lent … which is to draw us once again into a closer, more loving relationship with God … and with Jesus our Lord. If it takes a pound of pure nard to do it, John tells us that it’s a price worth paying.

And yet perhaps Lent serves an even more fundamental task than drawing us into a closer, more loving relationship with God.

All this talk of smell and memory reminds me of something I remember Rod Romney saying. You may recall that Rod pastored the Lakeshore congregation and Seattle First Baptist before retiring a few years ago. I remember Rod saying that our task in life and faith is less to “be saved” our task is to remember that we have always been saved … at the deepest levels of our individual and shared memories, we may find deep archetypal memories of the God who has always loved us and loved all, the God who has wooed us from when we were in the womb and when we were being “fearfully and wonderfully made” …

It is not a thunderclap of searing salvation that we need as much as a memory as old as mountains and as soft as the sound of our mother’s voice singing us to sleep and as silent and sure as flowers in the meadows in the spring.

And perhaps as we sink and settle down into that deep loving, saving memory we will hear whispered into the imagination of our hearts the ancient love poetry of the God who love us:

[Song of Songs, Chapter 4]

I am for you, my beloved, like an orchard of pomegranates
with all choicest fruits,
henna with nard,
14nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon,
with all trees of frankincense,
myrrh and aloes,
with all chief spices—
15a garden fountain, a well of living water,
and flowing streams from Lebanon.

Hear the voice of God who says: “I am your beloved and you are mine.”
Amen.

A Prodigal Family Portrait: Love that Welcomes

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Rev. Greg Ledbetter, preached 3/18/2007
Fourth Sunday in Lent
Gifts in the Wilderness: The Prodigal Gift

Scripture: Luke 15

Kids say the darndest things. This was the name of a TV show started by Art Linkletter and kept alive by Bill Cosby. One boy said on the show: “A Christian should only have one spouse. This is called monotony.” At Shell Ridge, we could produce our very own “Kids say the darndest things” based on the children’s message, alone.

But, alas, not all of the things that children say are memorable for their cuteness. Some are memorable for the inner pain they cause (though I’m pretty confident that the pain kids are capable of causing is far out of proportion to the knowing intent of their words). How about this “darndest thing”, a far more difficult one: “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” I’d be surprised if any parent hasn’t heard one variation or another on these words from the fruit of their loins and wombs. Yesterday in the park at the peace march three of us stood in a circle and, as I looked at us and realized the challegnes we each faced and thinking that the two in front of me may not have been introduced, I said, including myself in the mock introduction: "troubled parent meet troubled parent meet troubled parent." If the child’s “I hate you” is the equivalent of being stabbed with a blunt, plastic Playskool knife, the words can hit us like a Samurai’s sword. It can feel like our guts are all splayed out on the sidewalk.

Sometimes a child will not only say “I hate you”, but may actually be angry enough to run away. I remember my brother ran away once. He didn’t get very far. Unfortunately, he came back and I had to give back his toys. But do you remember the little nine year old boy from Dallas, I believe it was, this past winter who drove a car and got on an airplane by himself just to get away?

We can probably all understand the desire to “get away” … as I look out at you, it’s hard for me to identify anyone here who isn’t an awfully long way away from where you started … Africa … Australia … England … El Salvador … Rhode Island … Connecticut … Philly … Nebraska … Georgia “Hot-lanta” … Oregon. While there are a few “born and bred” Californians in this room, there aren’t many. Most of us here left home at some time in our lives and so far, we haven’t gone back … at least to stay.

Paul Hardwick’s Lenten photo on the bulletin cover speaks of what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey” … and the hero in this instance isn’t someone who performs superhuman feats or a courageous soldier or someone who sinks the game-winning basket. The hero is one who willingly and fearlessly embarks on a journey of body and soul … a journey that does not have a clear path or intended outcome … except that the journey is necessary to “make” the person, to help the person flesh out and test and fulfill the person’s potential.

Alex spent the last several weeks working on his family’s genealogy and I was reminded of some of my ancestors’ journeys, including the Harris branch of my family from whom I take my middle name … the Harrises who came out in the 1850’s on the Oregon trail in covered wagons to Oregon and a new life. They separated from their family of upbringing and never went back.

The hearers of Jesus’ story understood that kind of journey even if they’d never made their own because their earliest faith ancestors, Abraham and Sarah, had heard God’s call come to them in the land of their upbringing which was a whole long way from where they finally ended up.

The hero’s journey is a journey of separation and self-discovery and fulfillment of one’s potential. We could even say that clear marks of that journey are present in Jesus’ own life and journey. Leaving his home … dwelling in the wilderness … ending, finally, in Jerusalem. And all along the way, a deepening sense of who he was and his purpose in the grander scheme of things.

Well, we can only get so far into the mind of the younger son in Jesus’ story. We don’t know all the reason for his desiring to leave, but we do know the implications. By demanding his inheritance, he declares his father symbolically dead, metaphorically dead. He’s not saying, “Dad, can I borrow a few bucks so I can go sow a few wild oats?” He’s saying, Dad, I’m gonna get my share when you die anyway, so let’s cut to the chase. I’m never planning to see you alive again, so give me what’s mine and let’s be done with it.”

If you think it hurts for a sputtering four year old to say: “I hate you. I wish you were dead,” try having a full-grown adult child say that to you. We are meant to understand that it probably would have wounded the father less if the son had died or if the son had killed the father.

We’re not completely clear on the father’s rights, but in the story, he complies with the younger child’s request. By the laws of that time, the older son got two-thirds of the inheritance, so the younger so takes his third and goes as far away as he can. And again, everything in the story is said in such a way as to help us understand that if the father is “dead” in the eyes of the son, so too, the son is “dead” and utterly forgotten in the eyes of the father … and of the family … and, indeed, in the eyes of the community in which the family lives. “Do you have any children?” someone might ask. “Just one son.” “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” “No, I’m an only child.” Gone. Vanished. No trace. End of story.

The family enterprise has been hit hard by the loss of one-third of its capital, but it will survive … it will go on.



Try as they do, though, the family cannot help hearing bits and pieces of the exploits of the still very much alive younger brother. Bits of juicy gossip trickle back and are whispered around the edges of the community … the kid brother’s getting every bit of bang out of the old family buck that he can. One night he’s helping Britney shave her head … and the next night he’s denying being the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby. Oh, it was a riotous time. If it was possible to be hurt more deeply by someone who no longer existed, I’m sure the family’s pain and dismay grew ever deeper.

Whether the family knows or not, we know that the younger son blows his wad in record time and great was his fall. The party’s over and there’s nothing to show for it but an empty coin-purse and an even deeper emptiness that comes from looking back at home and relationships from across an unbridgeable divide. It was as though he’d been thrown into a prison without bars.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent the last days of his life in a prison with very real bars … and barbed wire and machine guns with hair triggers. From the place of his confinement from which he would never escape except by death, Bonhoeffer wrote: I am “restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, … powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making, faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?”

Utterly destitute in body, mind and soul, the younger son “comes to himself”, Jesus’ story says. He comes to himself. Whatever had been separated and split and torn apart within finally comes together and finds union. Maybe the first major stage of the hero’s journey is complete.

British psychologist, R. D. Laing used to say “breakdown is breakthrough” … and perhaps this was the shattering event for the younger son that allowed him his wholeness. Perhaps we can think of our own shattering moments, our own breakdowns which have paradoxically led us more deeply into our own selves, our own truth, a new wholeness. We are, after all, at our best, cracked beings that let in the light of God.

The young hero turns … he turns away from the pen of swine, his filthy grunting brothers who had been the only ones to share their food with him , their fodder … he turns away and begins the hardest journey … the journey home, but not home, exactly.

He knows what he has done … for good or ill, for right reasons or wrong … he knows the implications of his actions. He knows that even if he can map a route back to the place of his upbringing, it will not be his home to which he returns. And you sense that for the younger son, that is OK. He seems to understand that he has effected changes that he cannot undo and his has a peace about accepting his new place in the scheme of things, a place without the old comforting privilege … a place of servanthood.

Do you see any of this journey, this pilgrimage in you? In your life and movement? Has there been a time of particular awareness that you really goofed … really blew it … but also a willingness to take full responsibility for your actions … for your journey no matter what far country it led you through?

At this point of the sermon, let’s pause and recall that Jesus’ story—the story of the so-called “prodigal son” is the third of three stories told in response to this: the Pharisees and scribes were grumbling … bellyaching because Jesus seemed to prefer the company of the impure and the outcast, the whores and pushers and petty thieves to the pious and proper scribes and Pharisees. Maybe their personal feelings were hurt … maybe they liked Jesus and wanted to be liked in return, but more at stake was that, on the one hand, Jesus seemed to pass himself off as a Rabbi who claimed an unusually close relationship with God, yet, on the other hand, how could anyone who was close to God have any kind of proximity to those whom God hated … whom God ignored … whom God cursed … because of the filthy, reprobate lives these human vermin lived. “Thank you, God, that I am not like these wretched … people” was a prayer a Pharisee might be heard praying.

Who gets to speak for the mind of God? Well, Jesus makes his case. But he doesn’t argue with them in a conventional manner, but sits down and tells a story … and then another story … and, finally, another.

The first story tells of a shepherd who should have been fired, if not executed, for leaving 99 of the 100 sheep under his care to go out and search for the one wandering lamb. Not even the best shepherd brings back all of his sheep alive … which shepherd would go in search of one lost sheep while leaving the 99 others untended? On earth or in heaven, what kind of economy is this? No matter, the shepherd finds the lamb, puts it over his shoulders and calls his neighbors together to celebrate. Ludicrous.

The second story is like the first … a lost coin instead of a lamb … a woman now instead of a man … the house is swept and searched carefully until the coin is found … and rather than privately expressing her thanks, the woman calls together a block party to celebrate her good news. Bizarre.

Strange behavior that gets even stranger in the third and final story. And if these were merely stories told in no particular context, Jesus would be thought of as an eccentric … an odd duck in a pond full of odd ducks.

The stories tell of things of seemingly nominal worth that aren’t worth a lot of risk or lost sleep if they cease to exist. But Jesus is helping to cast God in a new light—God who takes all of creation seriously, not just part … God who takes all of the human family seriously, not just some … God who takes riotously outrageous JOY when the disparate parts and pieces of God’s creation come back together in a unified whole.

It’s tempting to make the father in the story “God” … it’s an easy allegorical jump … and even if we stoutly resist turning Jesus’ parables into allegory, we can yet see that the father who runs out to greet his son who was lost and is now found hints in a fleshy way at the God of all creation whom Jesus thinks the elder son Pharisees and scribes have seriously misunderstood.

Let’s listen in on some of the language that is used in the story. Throughout the first two-thirds of the story, The story refers to a “father who had two sons” … the reference is always generationally vertical … father/son … son/father … it is only when the elder son comes back from the fields to find a wedding-like celebration going on that he is told: “Your BROTHER has come …”.

We know well the furious, raging response of the elder brother … his father’s other son, who insulted his family, declared them as good as dead, squandered his inheritance in disgusting ways has now come home to spend the elder brother’s inheritance. The fatted calf is the elder brother’s fatted calf. To the father who is seeking to placate him, the older son refers to “this son of yours”. He absolutely, steadfastly refuses to acknowledge kinship, brotherhood. “This son of yours!” ‘He may be your son, but he’s not my brother!’

The father will not bed dissuaded: “My son” he calls him, “my Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found." ’

This brother of yours. Whoever is the son of the father is also your brother. Whoever is a child of God is also our sibling, our brother, our sister, a part of our common family.

This parable comes at the very center of Luke’s gospel. It is the final of three terse stories told in quick succession. It comes at a time when the very nature of God’s being and the nature God’s love is at stake. The stories, and in fact, all of Luke’s gospel, seem to being asking the question: which version, which image of God shall we take to be true: the God who nurses the elder son’s self-righteous anger, or the God who sprints into the desert to welcome his lost son. Jesus clearly stands over against all of the religious authorities of his faith and his day in declaring that God is the God of the loving welcome.

It is the elder son in us that makes us persist in naming the parable “The Prodigal Son” which is a reference to the younger son’s profligate behavior. But in fact, the “prodigality” in the story is far less in the younger son’s exploits than it is the father whose love is so deep, so boundless, so durable that against all reasonable behavior and all conventional culture and understanding declares that being in relationship trumps whatever it is anyone has done in their past.

But there is another part of our human nature … roots of bitterness that dig their way into us whenever we feel that God is too good to others and not good enough to us. Typically, we want mercy for ourselves and justice—hard justice—for others. But Jesus’ stories call for us to celebrate with God because God has been merciful not only to us, but to other as well, even to those we would not have otherwise accepted into our fellowship.

A Jewish story tells of the good fortune of a hardworking farmer. The Lord appear to this farmer and granted him three wishes, BUT with the condition that whatever the Lord did for the farmer would be given double to his neighbor. The farmer, scarcely believing his good fortune, wished for a hundred cattle. Immediately he recieved a hundred cattle, and he was overjoyed until he saw that his neighbor had two hundred. So he wished for a hundred acres of land, and again he was filled with joy until he saw that his neighbor had two hundred acres of land. Rather than celebrating God’s goodness, the farmer could not escape feeling jealous and slighted because his neighbor had received more than he. Finally, he stated his third wish: that God would strike him blind in one eye. And God wept.

If God weeps when we are priggish and cold in our welcome, if God gasps and groans from the depths of God’s being when we are misers of mercy and pinchpennies of grace … if God weeps and groans at these, let us simply try and imagine God’s joy … God’s celebration … God’s divine elation … when we come to ourselves … when we experience a complete breakdown of the old attitudes and opinions that keep us from fellowship with the rest of the human family … when we realize that it is WE, YOU and ME, and not only the despised “other” that are the lost sheep that God so diligently seeks, that we, YOU and ME, are the lost coin that God, like a great cosmic homemaker, sweeps and cleans until we emerge from the dirt and brokenness of our tidy little lives … that we, YOU and ME, are the both the younger AND the elder son, each lost so nearly irretrievably in his own way, yet never quite beyond the joyous grasp of the galloping father who runs out to welcome and embrace us and welcome us back to FULL membership in the FULL family of God. It is when we come to ourselves and know ourselves to be brother and sister to each other and to all that we finally complete our hero’s journey, that we become, at last, whole. When we finally realize that “we are one”, that we ourselves become “one” as well.

And so, I invite you at last to enter the feast … to come out of the shadows or out of that far land where you have taken yourself or where any reluctance to embrace another or even your own self has taken you. Come from that place where you are to the feast that is, even now, being prepared for you. It is a feast of the land that God has given to us and to all. It is a feast and a land brimming with all of the good gifts—the produce of the land—that God seeks to give to God’s people.

And let us proclaim that the name of the one who prepares the feast is “amazing grace” and “wondrous Love” … it is that amazing grace and wondrous love that welcomes us … and welcomes all.

And so let us one and let us all say and sing with our lives and our decisions, our love and our ministry: “Let us build a house where love may dwell, and ALL may enter in” and let us all say and sing with our lives and our decisions, our love and our ministry: “… all are welcome … all are welcome … all are welcome in this place.”
Amen.

The Abundant Enough

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Jennifer W. Davidson preached March 11, 2007
Third Sunday in Lent: Gifts in the Wilderness

Sermon Texts: Isaiah 55:1-19; Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9

We are now, already, at the half-way point of Lent, believe it or not. It has been a somewhat unusual Lenten season this year, as we have immersed ourselves not in penitence and self-denial but in the promises of God:

Through all of Lent we are keeping in mind God’s comforting words spoken by Isaiah: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” We have listened to the flowing water in our fountain, and we have allowed ourselves, perhaps, to be drawn into the wilderness time, at the least to remember the occasions when we have been in the wilderness places of life—and to remember the gifts that God provides even where all seems desolate, lonely, and lost. “A way in the wilderness; and rivers in the desert.”

On Ash Wednesday a number of us gathered around the fountain and saturated ourselves with God’s promise that “You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.” The first Sunday in Lent we lavished ourselves in apples and honey as we remembered God’s promise to the Israelites to lead them to a land flowing with milk and honey. Last week we feasted at the banquet table of communion as we renewed our confidence, along with Abraham, that we will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.

Our hunger comes in many different forms.

Elliot was about three years old when I found myself suddenly overwhelmed one morning by all that I needed to do in order to properly equip him for this world. I must have made the mistake of venturing “up the hill” from our humble, seminary housing apartment in the Mt Airy section of Philadelphia to the prestigious, wealthy enclave Chestnut Hill only a mile or so away—though light years in terms of income and class--along Germantown Ave. Occasionally Elliot and I would ride the bus up the cobblestone street and debark at the neighborhood-built, all-wooden playground. After a hearty playtime, sometimes we would walk on up to the shopping district, gazing in the windows of the boutiques, and occasionally stopping for a coffee and apple juice at Starbucks.

I must have picked up the Parents Express newspaper on our latest excursion on a beautiful spring day—and I found myself on this particular morning before work paging through the dozens of pages of advertisements for children’s day camps being offered around the Greater Philadelphia region that summer. The choices were endless, but the cumulative effect, at least on this particular Mom, was that I would hopelessly fail my son if I didn’t sign him up for one of these Summer day camps immediately.

There was the Settlement School, where he could begin his life as a musical prodigy; or maybe he needed to develop his physical prowess in this dog-eat-dog world and I ought to sign him up for Soccer or Baseball camp (or both!). Maybe he needed to get a headstart (hardly a headstart already at age three, the newspaper seemed to imply) in computers—and I should send him to the camp to teach him programming. Or, given that there was hardly a day that Elliot went without wearing a cape, maybe I should send him to Drama Camp. Weren’t acting lessons long past due for this three-year old?

The longer I sat considering these options, none of which we could afford in the first place, the more discouraged and depressed I grew. And the more Elliot’s future seemed to loom before me in grey colors of misspent potential. It was clear to me on this particular morning that his could hardly be a childhood future full of lazy summer days, reading by the open window, playing hide and seek until dark with the neighborhood kids, shaping mudpies, playing street hockey, or seeing who could make the longest skid marks in the streets with their bikes (as my childhood was)! No, it was clear to me on that morning that if I didn’t send Elliot to camp that very summer to develop and hone some important life skill—and not only that summer but every summer after that, no matter what the tuition might drain out of us—well, then I would fail him as a parent.

It was all too much, but somehow we were going to have to figure out a way to pull it off—if we wanted our kid to have a rosy future, not a grey one, some competitive chance at making it in this society.

I’d no sooner resolved myself to this thoroughly depressing acceptance of reality, when I glanced up and saw my kid, still only three years old, hungrily gazing up at me—all packed up and ready for daycare. Doug’s hand was on the door as they were hurrying off for the day. Elliot looked at me a bit confused and asked me glumly: “No breakfast today, Mom?”
I hope I never forget that day—when I got so overwhelmed by the pressure to provide the best future possible for my child that I completely forgot to take care of him in the moment he needed me. I sent my kid off to daycare that day without his breakfast. I knew his teacher kept oatmeal on the ready for the families that mismanaged their time on any given morning. He would be okay. But for me, the lesson was stark. I was so concerned with the future, I forgot to be present to the moment.

I tossed that Parents Newspaper into the recycling immediately after Elliot and Doug left. Elliot would be all right with lazy summer days, I decided, just as I had been when I was growing up. What he needed was a family that cared about him here and now. And in every here and now to come. That would be abundance enough.

This morning we have the offer of great abundance from the hands of God in Isaiah 55:8 “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” Here is a true invitation to fullness of life, and all of it gift!

Just as God’s promise of a land flowing with milk and honey came to the Israelites while they were wandering in the wilderness, after their exodus from Egypt and their liberation from slavery, so this promise recorded in Isaiah comes to God’s people just as they are preparing, once again, to embark on a long journey—this time heading back to the Promised Land after generations of being in exile. Truth is, many of the exiled Israelites weren’t too sure this was good news. They’d gotten comfortable in their new land, and many of them felt settled there. Though they were in exile, they only knew of the so-called promised land from the stories of their grandparents. Going home wasn’t really going home for them. It was going to a place they’d never seen; a place that had been ransacked and destroyed years before; a place they would need to rebuild from the ground up: from city walls to the walls of the temple, everything lay in ruins back there.

God’s promise, in this case, is only good news for those who were indeed thirsting: for those who had no money to buy what they needed to eat. But many of the Israelites at this time seemed to have enough money to waste. Abundant enough money that God is compelled to ask them, through Isaiah: “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and labor for that which does not satisfy?”

The question continues to have resonance today. At least it does for me. That morning, when I imagined Elliot’s future, all looked bleak. Because suddenly I’d gotten completely swept up in the belief that in order for Elliot to succeed in life, there were certain things we had to do, ways we would be compelled to spend our money in order to invest in our child’s future. My hunger for his success in the world obscured my ability to perceive his actual hunger in the moment for the nourishment he needed to grow that very day.

Thomas Merton called such desires social compulsions which are manifested in the continuing need for success and approval caused by the lurking fear of failure. As a result there is a steady urge, a compulsion, to prevent failure by gathering more and more things to oneself: whether more work, more money, or more friends. All of this acquisitiveness is done in an effort to bulwark ourselves; in an effort to keep ourselves from truly facing the hunger within.

Henri Nouwen points out that one of the main enemies of the spiritual life is greed. When our sense of self depends on what we can acquire, then greed flares up when our desires are frustrated. The more work, the more money, the more possessions, the more people we can pull into ourselves, then the more we are able to make a case for our success in life. Unfortunately, these are exactly that which does not nourish us and what does not satisfy.
Far from it, in fact. Because in our consumerist society we are kept in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and desire. It is to our economy’s benefit that we are always dissatisfied with what we have. The lure of new and supposedly improved draws us irresistibly to the mall on Saturday, or to i-tunes, or Amazon from the comfort of our own couch. A consumerist economy, such as the one in which we live, thrives when people spend their money on that which does not satisfy. Because if we were to realize that we had enough already, and abundantly so at that, then what would become of the Gross National Product?

This past Wednesday evening, a group of about twelve of us gathered in the sanctuary to experience contemplative prayer together. We started our time out by reflecting on the wisdom of the Desert Mothers and Fathers. These were women and men who lived in the desert of Egypt beginning in the third century. They modeled their spiritual lives after Jesus’ time in the wilderness (from which we have the temptation narrative that opened us into our Lenten journey this year) and Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist—about whom we read in the gospel of Luke this past Advent.

Not a lot survives from these Desert Mothers and Fathers, but we do have collections of their sayings which, when taken together, form what is called a Desert Spirituality.

A man named Arsenius is one of the most highly revered of the Desert Fathers. He lived from the mid-third to early fourth century, for fifty five years in solitude, in the desert of Egypt. Once a Roman educator who had considerable wealth and status, Arsenius gave all of that up in order to descend into his own sense of hunger for God’s presence in his life. When one morning he prayed, “Lord, lead me into the way of salvation,” he heard a voice saying to him in response: “Be silent.”

To descend into silence, as some of us experienced this past Wednesday, is not really the easiest or most comforting thing to do. In fact, it can be deeply unsettling. Because when we descend into silence, when we seek to clear out the constant noise, the clutter, the never-ending wordiness of our lives—we are often forced to confront precisely the things we’ve been keeping ourselves so busy to avoid! Our own sense of emptiness, our own profound hunger for God’s healing presence, our own unquenched thirst for God’s living, loving waters.
Our psalmist this morning surely had descended into that silence before: “My soul thirsts for you,” the psalmist writes: “My flesh faints for you. As in a barren and dry land where there is no water.” To know our need for God as a deep and aching thirst, to know our desire for God as a terrible, longing ache—these are not comfortable places to be. And very often, when we begin to practice a form of prayer that does not fill up the space between God and us with an endless stream of words, requests, and petitions—then we are forced to confront that terrible longing, that yawning ache for God.

Years later, when Arsenius asked a second time: “Lord, lead me to the way of salvation,” the voice that spoke to him not only said: “Be silent,” but also “Pray always.” Henri Nouwen writes that:

To pray always—this is the real purpose of the desert life. Solitude and silence can never be separated from the call to unceasing prayer. If solitude were primarily an escape from a busy job, and silence primarily an escape from a noisy [world], they could easily become very self-centered forms of asceticism. But solitude and silence are for prayer. The Desert Fathers [and Mothers] did not think of solitude as being alone, but as being alone with God. They did not think of silence as not speaking, but as listening to God. Solitude and silence are the context within which prayer is practiced.

The command that Arsenius hears is the very same invitation that God extends in our Isaiah text: “Incline your ear, and come to me, listen, so that you may live.”

This is the marvelous wonder of God’s love for us: it is in the experience of our hunger that we are fed; it is in the realization of our thirst, that we know it quenched. So much so, that the Isaiah text equates listening to God with eating well: in verse 2 God says: “Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.”

In fact, it is the same for the psalmist who writes: “My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I think of you on my bed, and meditate on you in the night watches.”

In our hunger for God, we are fed. In our listening for God, we eat well. In the silence of our prayers, our souls are satisfied with the richest of feasts.


Listen and Eat. Taste and See. Be silent. Pray always. The Desert Mothers and Fathers literally walked into the desert and remained there for year after year. Carlo Carretto, who became a desert monk in 1954 at the age of 44, acknowledges that not everyone is called to a desert life. “But if you cannot go into the desert,” he writes, “you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life. Every now and then leaving others and looking for solitude to restore, in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life.”

A final image: a fig tree that has yet to produce fruit. An impatient land owner. And a compassionate gardener. The landowner, frustrated by the fig trees aberrant behavior, demands that the tree be cut down. The landowner, like John the Baptist in Luke 3, has no patience for trees which do not bear fruit. And like John the Baptist, he urges the use of the axe, which even now lies at the roots of the tree. But the gardener, like the Compassionate Christ, has other plans: “Another year,” he pleads.

And in that year, we get the sense, this gardener will lavish that tree with more tender loving care than that fig tree has ever known before. He will nourish it, dig around it, love it, and urge it to fulfill its potential. I like to think of that year ahead as the tree’s wilderness year: the making of the desert, the abundant enough in the life that fig tree.

We don’t know the end of this fig tree’s story. But that’s because the ending is not the important part here: it is the tending, the listening, the tasting, the hunger and the thirst, it is the abundant enough of God’s lovingkindness that is the real story here.

Be silent. Pray Always. Be hungry. Eat richly. Taste and See that God is good.

The Girl Before a Mirror

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Rev. Angela Yarber (preached 2/25/2007)
First Sunday of Lent--Gifts of the Wilderness: The Gift of Life
National Eating Disorder Awareness Week

Text: Luke 4:1-13 Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness

"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Child of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Let’s be honest. The question we’re all wondering: was Jesus on the Atkins diet? “One does not live by bread alone.” Was it the insatiable need to count carbs that led Jesus into the wilderness, escaping the temptation of sandwhiches, pita pockets, tortillas, and sourdough bread bowls? Or was bathing suite season lurking just around the corner and Jesus wanted to retreat into the desert for forty days of “hot yoga,” certain that the sun, heat, and plow position, combined with utter starvation, would burn off those extra unwanted pounds?
Sacrilege! Blasphemy! Jesus didn’t struggle with such things! How dare we apply our contemporary struggles, our American and privileged concerns onto the Christ, Jesus, Messiah, Co-Sufferer. Jesus wasn’t concerned with such things…was he?

Today we enter into the season of Lent, a time when we remember Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness: 40 days of fasting, heat, temptation, and perhaps fear. At Shell Ridge we are focusing on the Gifts of the Wilderness in the days to come, a time when we recall our own days in the desert, what we learned there, what we needed there, and what provided strength there. Have you ever been in the wilderness? Do you recall spending time in the desert? And, no, I don’t necessarily mean the literal desert or wilderness, though trading stories of camping and hiking is something I love to do. I mean those metaphorical times in the wilderness, the symbolic days in the desert. What did it feel like? Were you hungry, hot, tired, tempted, and a little afraid? What was it that gave you strength during those dry days, your symbolic stream in the metaphorical waste land? We’ve all had our times in the desert, and so did Jesus. Perhaps it was a time when you lost your job, or went through a divorce, or moved far away from family and friends, or watched a loved one suffer and die. These wilderness times are hard and often painful to remember. But we’ve all had our times in the desert.

This morning I would like to share with you some of my wilderness time. Like your time in the desert, it was hard and often painful to remember. One of my heroes in homiletics, Barbara Brown Taylor, describes preaching as “spiritual exhibitionism,” where you lay it all on the line, when you are spiritually naked in front of eager and hungry hearts. And so, at the risk of “baring it all,” so to speak, will you journey with me into the wilderness? It may be hard, painful, or uncomfortable. As we journey, however, remember that we do not brave these desert roads alone: we are on this path together and have a Co-Sufferer by our sides.

Today is, not only the first Sunday in Lent, it is also the beginning of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week. Did you know that 80% of women in America struggle with a sub-clinical eating disorder? This may not be a word with which you are familiar; we hear about anorexia and bulimia and binge eating and over eating, but what’s a sub-clinical eating disorder and how on earth do the majority of Americans have it? You see, a sub-clinical eating disorder is when an individual is constantly worried about food, eating, appearance, calories, exercise—when food and appearance consume one’s thoughts. For me, this notion is best illustrated in Picasso’s painting Girl Before a Mirror. I remember looking at a picture of Picasso’s painting with a child. The child said that there are two girls in the picture. Interesting: the title is Girl, not Girls, Before a Mirror. One girl. One reflection. But her reflection does not really seem to mirror what she looks like, does it? Rather, the girl, like 80 % of American women, looks into the mirror and cannot clearly see her reflection, but a distortion of it—one that is not pretty enough or skinny enough or good enough. Perhaps the girl Picasso was painting compared herself to all the models that grace the covers of magazines, or television, or movies. Perhaps the girl before Picasso’s mirror looked at her reflection with tears in her hungry and wanting eyes and wondered, “Why can’t I look like _______?” Maybe she was struggling with Body Dysmorphic Disorder. At one point or another we’ve all been Picasso’s girl, Picasso’s person before a mirror, where our eyes could not see our reflection clearly, but instead saw one that was less than, worse than, unworthy to see beauty reflected in the mirror. Such was the case for the majority of my adolescent years.

I’d like to share a story with you, a story that stems from one of my days in the wilderness. A story of a time when I was convinced, like Jesus, that “one does not live by bread alone.” Once upon a time there was a college cheerleader named Angela. Now before you pass judgment on this chipper cheerleader, allow me to elaborate. She was not your typical cheerleader—ditsy and airhead were not a part of her vocabulary. She was actually a star student. 4.0 in the religious studies program. That’s right: religious studies. Not only was the cheerleader a good student, but she was a youth minister at a local church, leading bible studies, mission trips, and camps for teenagers. I suppose it’s safe to say that this cheerleader was an oxymoron. However, despite her paradoxical tendencies to defy stereotypes when it came to the brains or morals of the typical cheerleader, this college student found herself struggling with her reflection, much like Picasso’s girl before a mirror. She had always been a dancer, gymnast, and performer, living her life in a leotard…surrounded by mirrors…on stage for all the world to see…every flaw visible for critique. So, maintaining weight was always an issue for the college cheerleader. In fact, she’d battled anorexia for many of her middle and high school years. But now she found herself in college: studying to make straight As, serving as a minister at the “wise” age of 20, and battling to balance on the quivering hands of her bases that threw her tiny body into the air in cheerleading stunts. The smaller you are, the higher you fly. So, the I cheerleader counted calories and exercised, aware that her 5’5” frame probably did not need to weigh so little. To make matters worse, the cheerleader was a perfectionist. As a performer, her life was always on display and her new-found faith taught her to imitate Christ, to be perfect as her Heavenly Father is perfect, to deny herself, take up her cross and follow Christ. And so, she did. Perfectionism and self-loathing are recurring idioms in disorder eaters. Like the female monastics that lived hundreds of years before her, she denied herself, took up her cross and followed Christ.

In Michelle Lelwica’s stirring book, Starving for Salvation, she quotes a young anorexic’s words, “The whole life is like you are carrying a cross—something heroic, something that is very difficult and demands admiration. I felt [that] doing something that was not hard was quite inconceivable; it would be lazy and despicable.”

So, the cheerleader took up her cross and followed a path that led only to emptiness, hurt, hunger, and a countless number of emergency room visits.

On game day, the squad was required to eat a meal before the game. “You can’t cheer on an empty stomach,” coach said. So, the college cheerleader polished off 6 Saltine crackers and a glass of water. Like, Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, she stood in front her reflection, running her hands over her bony ribcage and protruding hipbones. She did not see an emaciated body staring back at her, but instead saw arms that needed toning, obliques with too much fat, and a waistline that could use some more sit-ups. She saw a hypocrite: “how can I preach to my youth that they are made in the image of God, beautiful and beloved, and struggle so much with what I see? I am not worth the space my body takes up. Furthermore, I am succumbing to patriarchal and materialistic trends that I find oppressive. Why won’t this go away? A girl who was raised in the projects was not made to deal with such a privileged problem. This is my choice, my disorder. Just make it go away,” she thought. So, as she did after every meal, the cheerleader retreated to the bathroom to hold back her hair and force her finger down her throat. When she was finished she brushed her teeth, smoothed out the pleats on her uniform, wiped the tears from her eyes, and smudged cherry-red lipstick across her mouth. As she gathered her thoughts before walking to the gym, she glanced over to her dorm room bed to see her Greek homework laying unfinished and sighed at the thought of post-game studying. She closed her notebook, and reached for her Greek New Testament. And the words of Ephesians 2:10 caught her eye: αυτου γαρ εσμεν ποιημα. “You are God’s workmanship, God’s ποιημα.” This word for “workmanship” in Greek is the word ποιημα from which we derive our English word for poem. You are God’s poem, Angela.

The college cheerleader returned to the bathroom, reopened her cherry-red lipstick and scrawled across her mirror in large letters: αυτου γαρ εσμεν ποιημα, promising herself and the God who created her that she would get help for her disorder. Strength in the wilderness. A stream in the desert of disorder.

You are God’s workmanship. One day, God wrote a beautiful, magnificent poem and titled it Katy, Greg, Eliot, Maura, Willis, Frances. As an artist creates a masterpiece, imbuing each detail with handiwork and care and intentionality, so God has created each of us. God’s fingerprints are all over you. Whether you see your reflection in the mirror and smile, or whether you look, like the Girl Before a Mirror, and see a distortion of that reflection, God looks at you and cries out, “If you could only see yourself through my eyes, you would marvel at the sight.”

So, one does not live by bread alone…but a little bread sure does help.

During this time of year, let us be mindful of those who may still find themselves in the desert. Let us remember that there are those in our world and perhaps here in this place that are struggling in the wilderness, even today. May we be a people that offer streams in dry lands. May we be a church that provides strength in the midst of heartache. If you are in a dry and hungry place, we invite you to take heart. Here is a place where you may find refuge in the wilderness. Here is a place where the living water never runs dry, no matter your situation in the desert. The road may not be easy, but it is one that we commit to taking together. And as we walk hand in hand along these desert pathways, let us remember that One has gone before us and walks beside us still, giving hope and peace and strength for the journey. During this season of Lent, let us be refreshing agents of hope in wilderness, a source of rest in the desert. During this week, may we be mindful of the concerns of struggling men and women around us, who look at their reflections, like Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, and are unable to see the beauty with which they are created.

As Tony Morrison reminds us in her novel Beloved, may we learn to love our flesh, no matter how others perceive it. As Cele proclaims in Alice Walker’s novel turned musical, “I am beautiful!” And even as pop icon Christina Aguillara sings, may we recall that “we are beautiful no matter what they say.” You are beautiful, beloved, and worthy in the wilderness and in the promised land. As the one who created us and sees us wholly tells us, “you are made in my image and that is good.”
Amen.

The Serious Work of Sacred Silliness & Holy Hilarity

A Shell Ridge Sermon by Greg Ledbetter (preached 2/18/07)
Transfiguration Sunday/Mardi Gras Sunday

Who could have possibly predicted the Sarah’s birth announcement? Who could possibly have grabbed an angel by the wing and pulled him down out of the sky and contrived for him to give such astonishing news? It all happened not of necessity, not inevitably, but gratuitously, freely, hilariously. And what was astonishing, gratuitous, hilarious was, of course, the grace of God. What could they do but laugh at the preposterousness of it, and they laughed until the tears ran down their face. The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforseeable.

--Frederick Buechner
Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale

SERMON TEXT: Genesis 18:1-15

1The LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. 2He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. 3He said, ‘My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. 4Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. 5Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.’ So they said, ‘Do as you have said.’ 6And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, ‘Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.’ 7Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. 8Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
9 They said to him, ‘Where is your wife Sarah?’ And he said, ‘There, in the tent.’ 10Then one said, ‘I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.’ And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. 11Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. 12So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’ 13The LORD said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh, and say, “Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?” 14Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.’ 15But Sarah denied, saying, ‘I did not laugh’; for she was afraid. He said, ‘Oh yes, you did laugh.’

SERMON

So, God and Jesus are playing a round of golf … no wait … if we are trinitarian, maybe it’s redundant and a bit problematic to say it that way … OK … Jesus and Moses are playing golf and … no wait … golf is a modern game and why would Jesus and Moses be playing it? OK … Moses walks into a bar … “Ouch!”

Preaching has often been described in shorthand as three points, a joke and a poem.

Now my sermons don’t always contain the requisite three points … in fact I’ve heard they’re sometimes pointless, so that means the poem and the joke better be pretty darned good. A zinger of a joke that rips the laughter from you and a poem to make you weep or make you knowingly nod at the great, wise truth of it all.

There is a line in the Koran which, I suppose, if you looked has a counterpart somewhere in the Hebrew scriptures … the line asks: "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" Annie Dillard quotes this line in her classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” and she follows it up by saying: “It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction?”

But it seems to me that a slow walk or a quick ramble through the Hebrew and Christian scriptures reveals God as, among other things, a great cosmic comedian full of divine wit and a certain wise and loving folly, and one who takes a wily delight in surprising the world and all there is within it with unearned and unanticipated grace.

Sometimes God’s jesting is against us … or actually FOR us in the long run … but it is God who evokes laughter and mirth and cheerfulness from us … who startles our settledness with possibilities and outcomes beyond our wildest imagining (Sarah’s birth announcement … the Prodigal Son) … or seeks to puncture our anxious self-absorption with a bit of satire and levity (Jonah … Job … many of Jesus’ parables [the judge and the exhausting woman]) … or seeks, simply to delight us with wonder so that we laugh in joyful spontaneity along with the creator of all things (Psalms 8 or 19 or 139 or 150).

If you put on the right set of filters, the right set of lenses when reading scripture, you will find that comedy is all around … comedy and wicked satire and absurdist contradiction and wily middle-eastern eye-twinkling humor.

One of the ongoing difficulties of reading the Bible in English as citizens of the 21st century is that it is nearly impossible for us to “get the joke” … to get all of the comic, wry, double-jointed nuances that were plain as day to the original hearers of those words in the original languages of their telling.

Mark Biddle is a professor at Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. He says that there is a great deal of humor hidden in the pages of scripture, but he says that “many are subtle and you need to tease out the Hebrew or Greek a bit," A prime example he offers is the story in Genesis 24 that traditionally recounts that Rebekah "dismounted from her camel" after seeing Isaac "meditating in the field." But, Biddle says, a strong case can be made that Rebekah "fell off her camel" when she saw Isaac "relieving himself." Mark Biddle says: "Since we are created in the image of God and we have an innate sense of humor, could that mean God has a sense of humor too?”

How do we respond when we hear things like this? Someone has said: “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Scowl and someone will ask, ‘Are you a Baptist?’”

Apparently the church over the ages has been pretty thoroughly Baptist … think of all the classic religious art you’ve ever seen (excluding the most modern depictions) … did you ever see a painting of Jesus or any of the great figures of the Bible smiling? Laughing? Leaning together and weeping because of the hilarious punch line of some wonderful story? No … there seems to have been a two thousand year long sense of “gravitas” … this great serious gravity that has pulled the long faces of the painted into scowls and dark, heavy brows full of the unshakeable burdens of living.

As early as the 11th century, the influential church leader John of Chrysostom insisted Jesus never laughed. The Second Council of Constance in 1418—I’m sure you all know it well—considered the question: “Can those who would be Christ-like laugh and still not sin?” That medieval Christian council assigned to hell any minister or monk who spoke "jocular words such as provoke laughter."

But this is at such odds with what we read and experience in scripture. Someone has said that survival in the ancient context out of which our scriptures and faith traditions have come was one where a certain wiliness and foxiness and guile were essential survival skills. And all of these things could evoke laughter and be sources of humor for people who understood what was going on.

You may remember the story of Jacob and Laban. Laban was a dessert sheik who had two daughters, Rachel and Leah. Jacob finds Rachel beguiling and asks Laban for her hand in marriage. But the story has a bit of a cruel twist—because Laban felt it was necessary to insure the survival of his elder daughter Leah who may have run out of prospects. So he deliberately plants the wrong daughter in the dark marriage tent, giving Jacob a wife he had not sought. Jacob confronts Laban who shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘here in our land, we do not give our younger daughters before our older daughters … whaaat, did I forget to mention this seven years ago? Silly me. Ah well, ‘tis a trivial thing … if you agree to work seven more years, I will also give you Rachel.

It is said that by the time of the Greek and Roman era, stories like these, in their crude desert guile, had become embarrassing to the Rabbis.

But if we remember the kind of wily character Jacob was, cheating his brother Esau out of his birthright … and if we knew what Jacob’s father’s name meant in Hebrew, none of the comic and absurd twists and turns of his life should take us completely by surprise.

Jacob’s father is, of course, Isaac and the name “Isaac” you might be interested to know means “laughter” … and indeed, Isaac is the “son of laughter”.

If you’re really up on your Old Testament characters and their stories, you’ll remember that laughter and how it came to be. There was a man named Abram and a woman named Sarai. They were happily settled in the land of their ancestors, the land of Ur, until God called them to hitch their wagon to God’s star … God made some outlandish promises (may be spoken in a bad imitation of the comedian, Jackie Mason, here) “your offspring shall be as numerous as … the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted” … and so they followed. And those offspring … hmmm … well … “numerous” is not quite how you’d describe them. Non-existent was a bit more fitting.

One day, God appears to Abram, now Abraham, in the form of three men, but certainly not three ordinary men. Abraham senses the importance of these visitors and rushes about to see that they are offered the finest hospitality that he can muster.

In Genesis 18, beginning with verse 9, “They said to him, ‘Where is your wife Sarah?’ And he said, ‘There, in the tent.’ Then one said, ‘I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.’ And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Anyone who had heard me snore while sleeping alone in my tent will know that tents block no sound whatsoever. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’ The LORD said to Abraham, ‘Why did Sarah laugh, and say, “Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?” Is anything too wonderful for the LORD? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.’ But Sarah denied, saying, ‘I did not laugh’; for she was afraid. He said, ‘Oh yes, you did laugh.’
I am always amazed at how much “real life” humanity can shine through these ancient tales that were first told thousands of years ago around a dying campfire in the deserts of the ancient middle east. “I didn’t laugh!” “Oh yes you did laugh.”

Well … God gets the last laugh, for Sarah does conceive a child, the child’s name is Isaac and Isaac’s name in Hebrew means “laughter”.

The other promise of God to Abram, that has become a sad joke—is made in the same breath as the promise of numerous offspring: “for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring for ever.” I can see God as Homer Simpson realizing that these were fateful words that should never have been spoken and upon immediately realizing the implications of such a promise, God slaps his forehead and says “Doh!” (Alex keeps telling me that I’d better never quite my day job to play Homer Simpson).

And of course, as we can so easily observe ourselves, the forces of Divine Comedy and the draining realities of tragedy are always in contention … both beyond us and within us. Every day of our existence is full of opportunities for hearty guffaws and for gales of tears. It is into that kind of world … that kind of existence that GRACE is always seeking to insinuate itself, seeking to find rootage, seeking to grow that more grace may be propagated still.

Today is Mardi Gras Sunday … and if you’ve been around a while, you’ll know that we’ve never done a Mardi Gras Sunday before … though we have celebrated Mardi Gras in our own sober Baptist way before But this is a first. And now I’ve just learned that there is an old tradition that is now experiencing a bit of a revival …

Apparently for centuries in Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant countries, the week following Easter Sunday, including "Bright Sunday" (the Sunday after Easter), was observed by the faithful as "days of joy and laughter" with parties and picnics to celebrate Jesus' resurrection. Churchgoers and priests and pastors played practical jokes on each other, drenched each other with water, told jokes, sang, and danced. Those were some crazy times. And now a number of American churches are resurrecting this old Easter custom … they’re calling it: "Holy Humor Sunday" celebrations of Jesus' resurrection on the Sunday after Easter.
The custom was rooted in the musings of early church theologians that God played a practical joke on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead. "Risus paschalis - the Easter laugh," the early theologians called it.

In 1988 the Fellowship of Merry Christians began encouraging churches and prayer groups to resurrect Bright Sunday celebrations and call it "Holy Humor Sunday," with the theme: "Jesus is the LIFE of the party."

Here’s how I sort of imagine the beginnings of Mardi Gras: having barely survived yet another brutal winter, the average citizen of the European dark ages was just beginning to enjoy the promise of spring when around came a dour priest announcing that the next forty days were to be spent in a time of sober repentance and fasting and renouncement of earthy and fleshly pleasures. It’s a wonder any priests survived Lent. Mardi Gras was the natural outgrowth of it’s placement between winter and Lent. it came into being between winter hardships and the beginning of the Lenten season of austerity and served as a means of providing a brief respite … providing relief.

The old country comedian, Jerry Clower, tells a story about his best friend, a fellow named Marcel Ledbetter, who was out “coon hunting”* one night with his friends. I am quite a bit sorry to say that hunting raccoons was probably a beloved and even sacred activity among my mountain-dwelling, moonshine-making Tennessee Ledbetter ancestors. [* I use this phrase reluctantly as the term “coon” has a had long, shameful racist associations in our nation’s history.]

Anyhow, one night they were out raccoon hunting and they thought they had treed a raccoon. They shook the vines in the tree but they couldn’t get the raccoon to come down. So Marcel, he’s not a terribly wise fellow, he decides he would climb the tree and shake the raccoon out. He gets to the top and he discovers when he got up there that it was not a raccoon … it was a bobcat. And the bobcat caused him untold harm and he started yelling down from the tree to the fellows below him on the ground, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” The fellows on the ground started yelling back up, “We can’t shoot up there, Marcel, because if we shoot, we’ll hit you!” This goes on for some time with the most awful sounds of yowling and spitting and scratching and fighting going on up in the darkness of that tree. Marcel keeps calling down for them to shoot and they keep begging off and so he finally says, “Just shoot up here amongst us. One of us has got to have relief!”

And you see, that’s just it. From time to time and perhaps much or even most of the time … we are in need of relief. ‘Laughter is the hand of God on the shoulders of a weary world.’”
It is God who evokes laughter from us … and the laughter God evokes serves a number of purposes for us:

The laughter of JUDGMENT … seeks to puncture our anxious self-absorption with a bit of satire and levity (Jonah … Job … many of Jesus’ parables)

The laughter of GRACE … who startles our settledness with possibilities and outcomes beyond our wildest imagining (Sarah & Abraham … the Prodigal Son … hidden treasures in the field)
The laughter of DELIGHT … seeks, simply to delight us with wonder so that we laugh in joyful spontaneity (Psalms 8 or 19 etc. … Paul: “rejoice in the Lord always”).

One night, over a dozen years ago, made the dubious decision to take our boys to the evening worship service at the Pacific School of Religion’s evening worship service. Alex was 3 and Jordan was not quite 8. The service ended with communion and Jordan determined he would partake of the elements and WOULD NOT BE DISUADED. In our inestimable parental “wisdom”, we determined that he would NOT partake of the elements and we WOULD NOT BE DISUADED. The joie de vivre of the evening suddenly came to a screeching halt and we ended the evening stomping out into the dark, none of us blessed by the gifts of table, and Jan, Jordan and I each silent and FURIOUS. We unlocked the car, settled into the car that immediately filled with a thick, angry silence. Into that silence, from his spot in the car seat, Alex suddenly sneezed. No one said anything. Then from the darkness, a tiny voice: “Bless me!”
And we laughed … we laughed the laughter of judgment … and the laughter of grace … and the laughter of delight. It was the sneeze and the blessing that saved our lives … and gave us the relief we needed.

This is serious work we are about … the serious work of sacred silliness and holy hilarity. We do well to laugh … to laugh often and to laugh hard. We are wisest when we laugh with others and at ourselves. We are encouraged to laugh the laughter of judgment … allowing God to puncture our self-absorbed seriousness. We are encouraged to laugh the laughter of grace … allowing the God of glad surprise to shower us with blessings and goodness and grace. And we are encouraged to laugh the laughter of delight … to allow the child within to never die, and to allow our sense of wonder at God and God’s creation and God’s goodness to remain fresh and alive. Hey, whaddya know … three points!

And as we laugh alone and as we laugh together, let it be that we know our laughter to be the hand of God on our shoulders and the shoulders of our weary world.

Amen.

A Surprising Catch

Click Here for This Morning's Texts
A Shell Ridge Sermon by Gregory H. Ledbetter

A Surprising Catch … I love that phrase and its evocativeness … in the quiet of your mind, what might it evoke?

1982 … Candlestick Park … 49ers vs. the Dallas Cowboys … NFC Championship game the 9ers are down and practically out … Joe Montana to Dwight Clark … it was the catch that turned around the long dismal fortunes of the

McMinnville … 1979 … meeting Jan while applying for a job … it was a “catch” that would change my life forever …

Alaska … 1981 … “casting” the net … pulling the “sock” out of the water, nearly tipping the boat over it was so full … we made about a fifth of our season’s income in that one day



We’ve heard another “fish story” this morning … it is a story from the early days of Jesus’ ministry when he was just calling his disciples out of the crowds that clamored around him.

The background of Luke’s story of the early ministry of Jesus goes like this: … in short order … Jesus goes into the wilderness and demonstrates his utter dependence on God alone (temptation in the wilderness) … then Jesus returns to his home community and announces his ministry and its shape … he also notes that people will always try to turn that the power that animates him to their advantage and it shakes up the community, so much so that they try to throw him off a cliff (welcome home, Jesus!) … Jesus survives this attempt on his life and takes his power and his message on the road (it’s a traveling salvation show) … he heals people and frees them from spirits that possessed them … entrapped them … and then he seeks solitude by the lake … but the crowds follow him … so Jesus borrows the fishing boat of a man whose mother-in-law Jesus had healed.

The people then, as now, were possessed by so many things … be it “demons” … evil spirits … or the spirit of the age … or even “self-possession.” It seems that Jesus’ message was to offer people an alternative … a chance to be “God-possessed” … to be enfolded in God’s care … to be snared by the love of the Creator … to be held close to the heart of the universe. In offering people a chance to be possessed by God rather than anything else, he was offering to them a wholeness and an integrity and a power that cannot come from human strength alone.

After the sermon, Jesus takes Simon fishing … with astounding results … to say that it’s a “surprising catch” is an understatement. Two boats can’t even hold all that the net has caught in one single cast. Something is brewing out on the lake and Simon isn’t sure that he wants in on it.

You see, Simon seems to “get” that such a display of power is not going to happen without something being demanded of him … like so many of God’s servants before him, he declares his utter unworthiness. Jesus tells him to fear neither the power … nor his sense of unworthiness … nor the road of ministry ahead: “Don’t be afraid … no longer will you fish for creatures of the sea, now you will fish for people.”

Fishing for people … for many years, Christians have put a strong “missional” slant on this fishing story … Many of us learned to sing: “I will make you fishers of men” … but if we push the “fish for people” analogy too far, we end up with certain difficulties … among other things, the fish are unwilling occupants of the net … they are “rounded up” … caught against their will … and we know what becomes of them at the end of the story.

Unhappy historical events like the crusades are, in part, a result of taking the story of the surprising catch a little too far. To suggest that it is God’s desire that we make the whole world Christian at all costs is a misunderstanding of the “Good News” … a misunderstanding of what it was that Jesus saw as his mission and the mission of those who followed him.

When Jesus told a story or enacted the message, such as in the story of the surprising catch … neither the story nor the enactment on the water were meant to taken to its absolute extreme …

If we wish to continue to use the story and use the metaphor of net-fishing and our being “caught” in those nets, it might better for us to say that we are “caught by God’s mercy and grace” … surrounded by God’s mercy and grace … enfolded in God’s mercy and grace. Might it be that the net of entrapment and endangerment can be transformed into a safety net of compassion?

There are many ways in which I think we get this. [MLK … single garment of destiny] Largely, we do not see the human beings us around as lost, hell-deserving sinners who need to be tied up and beaten with the gospel. We most of us look around and see a common humanity who, in so many ways are like us … who share our hopes and dreams of a world where individuals are healthy, loved and loving and societies and cultures and nations that create and protect these opportunities.

The Good News is that the Shalom of God that has been promised for every person and throughout the earth is not a “fish story” … it is not a wild exaggeration to say that in many ways this is being fulfilled in our time, in our lives, in our world. The Good News is that the energies of hope that poured out of Jesus’ mouth and ministry were then … and are now … ALIVE! They are real. Even the horrific reality of market bombings in Baghdad cannot destroy the other truth of loving, compassionate sacrificial goodness that has been loosed in the world. Jesus’ own horrific death on a cross was not enough to kill God’s love … as Bill Coffin has said, and I have repeated: “You can kill love, but you can’t keep it buried!”

So … that’s a part of our pedigree … that’s a part of the message that we have witnessed and are called in our lives and words and ministries to bear witness to. Every one of the roughly 6000 days that I have been privileged to walk and work with you, the members of this congregation have, in manifold ways, lived out the good news of Jesus to the world around us. As Jesus said:

Yet … yet sometimes we can grow weary … even with some of the surprising catches that hint at the power of God that is present, we can still grow tired … we can still despair … we can still ponder giving it all up.

Simon Peter speaks for the church, which, in the New Testament, is often symbolized by the boat … after Jesus has used Simon’s boat as a floating pulpit, he tells Simon to row out to where the water is deeper and to let down his nets for a catch. And Simon says: “Jesus … we are tired … our work has exhausted us and we don’t see the fruits of our efforts … we have toiled long and hard in the darkness of our times … and when we pull up our nets from the water, they are empty.

It’s not easy being the church. It’s not easy trying to bring salve and bandages and hope to the world’s hurt. It’s not easy to stay on the path of peace, following the footsteps of the Prince of Peace.

I think of ABCUSA … a good denomination with an influence far beyond its size in our world … the incredible work of its missionaries in all corners of this globe … sat and listened to our general secretary, Roy Medley …

I think of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America … painfully small and fragile … yet with an enormous heart full of enormous hopes for peace with justice for all the people of this world … I had lunch with one of its board members last week and we commiserated over how difficult the work of peacemaking is …

I think of Shell Ridge Community Church … a modestly sized community of faith with a uncommonly large heart. As we talk about the future and the challenges that congregations like ours face as we look ahead … it is tempting to just sit down on our “blessed assurances.”

I think of many individuals I know … common people … humble people … people with big hearts and willing spirits … I think of parents … and partners in love … and teachers and nurses and managers and accountants and laborers …



Simon is a stand-in for all of us in the church and in our real lives who are “weary and heavy laden” by it all: “Jesus … we are tired … our work has exhausted us and we don’t see the fruits of our efforts … we have toiled long and hard in the darkness of our times … and when we pull up our nets from the water, they are empty. I don’t know if I have the strength or the hope to throw my nets into the water another time. “

And what is Jesus’ response to us? To our weariness? To our despair? To our desire to turn back?

Be not afraid. Go … go out to where the water is deeper … and let down your nets.

I talked with my Dad last night … he’s just back from New Orleans … Habitat for Humanity is building 82 houses … he said, “I’d go back immediately if I could.” I said: “So there’s a couple more weeks worth of work to be done?” “A couple of WEEKS? They estimate it will take TEN YEARS.” Mentally, I staggered under that figure … just one broken spot on this earth amidst many dozens … perhaps many hundreds that need rebuilding and healing … TEN YEARS.

And we in the church … and we in communities that seek to wage peace with justice near and fear … we are huddled in our little boat and Jesus, the prince of peace speaks again to us: “Be not afraid. I AM WITH YOU. Go … go out to where the water is deeper … and let down your nets.”

Bill Coffin said of this long, tiring journey … what is asked of us is not that we be successful as much as we are asked to be faithful. BE not afraid, I am with you.

We prepare to come to the Table of the Lord. Here we will take into ourselves, not only bread and wine, but the promises of hope and love that they represent. I like to think of the bread and wine as food for the journey … nourishment for the LONG journey that is ahead. What we take into ourselves may not be enough to sustain us all the way … and so we come back to the table again and again. To be faithful in the journey, we not only need food to sustain us along the way … we need perspective.

Martyred El Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero speaks to our weariness and the long journey that is ahead and our need to engage in that journey with some perspective:



It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.

The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about.

We plant the seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well. It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

My dad said something else last night … he said that his faith in Americans … in humanity was being restored … day after day he witnessed new volunteers pouring into that broken, but building city … people who, like himself, have heard Jesus’ call to go out to where it’s deep … and to let down the net of their lives … the safety net of compassion and mercy and grace.

Paul, once a persecutor of the church and maybe not even a very nice guy, told the Christians in Corinth: … by the grace of God I am what I am, and God’s grace toward me has not been in vain. (I Corinthians 15:10a)

When you brushed your teeth … did the person looking back at you in the mirror look like someone through whom God could do something GREAT?

People of God’s loving and blessing: By the grace of God, you are what you are … and God’s grace toward you has not been in vain.

Meanwhile, I urge you to get your nets mended and ready for a surprising catch.

Amen.

God is in Our Midst

With joy, you brood, do not fear...
A Shell Ridge Sermon by Jennifer W. Davidson

Isaiah 12:2-6; Zephaniah 3:14-20; Luke 3:7-18

I’m going to start off with a strange suggestion this morning. I want to invite your mind to wander in the next little while. Don’t stay with me here. If a word or phrase or a thought arises in you, I invite you to go with it. Tune me out. I invite you to hold two questions in mind as I’m speaking:

What is the Word that I am hearing?
And what is the Word that I most need to hear?

Hear again, some fragments of the Word around which we have gathered ourselves this morning:

Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for God is my strength and my might;

The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.

Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees;

Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.

“You brood of vipers!

the people were filled with expectation,

the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more.

Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

The Lord has taken away the judgments against you

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

His winnowing fork is in his hand

Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

The Lord, your God, is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory; he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love;

At that time I will bring you home, at the time when I gather you;

let this be known in all the earth

all were questioning in their hearts

but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

“You brood of vipers!

With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.

Do not fear, O Zion; do not let your hands grow weak. The Lord, your God, is in your midst

With joy, you brood, do not fear…

If there is anything these scriptures from the lectionary tell us right off the bat it is that Advent is a difficult season to cozy up to. It falls across our skin like the camel’s-hair clothing of John the Baptizer.

It takes us to places we’d really rather not go. I mean that literally, even. Last week we read from the book of Malachi. The week before that we shared our communion meal around the words of Jeremiah. And this week, we turned to Zephaniah. Zephaniah! When was the last time you thought of turning to that book, tucked nearly invisibly into the last pages of the Hebrew Scriptures? Advent takes us places we wouldn’t normally go.

When I read the texts for this morning, they made me swoon.

These are the words I hear: With joy, you brood, do not fear, draw water from the wells of salvation.

We started Advent with the words of hope that carried us into exile—The Days are Coming, we heard! Jeremiah gave us words of hope to sustain us for the long, hard journey. We ate our communion meal together, planting these seeds of hope and salvation within ourselves.

When the people of Israel were wrenched from their homes and their temple, they didn’t only have comforting words to carry with them. Their cup was bitter, indeed! The prophets had long warned the Israelites to shape up, to do justice, to walk humbly, right? to remember the widow and the orphan, to feed the poorest among them, to be fair in all business transactions, to remember the Lord their God who brought them out of the Land of Egypt. The prophets spoke the most dreadful, sharp-edged, wounding words—often to a people who had grown content, satisfied. The people didn’t only carry words of hopefulness in to the exile, but they must have also been haunted by words of judgment.

This Sunday is like an echo to our first Sunday of Advent. Here, again, we have the words of Promise that the Israelites will be gathered again. This is the Return from Exile, the homecoming, where they will draw from the deep wells of salvation. This is the Advent Sunday of Joy!

Oh, how tempting it was to dive into the refreshing waters of Isaiah and Zephaniah. Do not fear…I will trust and will not be afraid. God is in our midst.

But John the Baptizer, baby no more, had something else to say. I stood among the crowds and heard him shout, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” And I was struck silent—as silent as John’s father Zechariah had been when he encountered God’s messenger. “When Zechariah came out of the sanctuary, the people realized he had seen a vision. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak.” Struck silent at the good news.


The first time I read from the Bible with interest was when I was about twelve years old. I had recently committed my life to Christ, and I turned to this ancient book to see what it would tell me about the one I’d encountered on my own. I read the book of Genesis because, you know, you have to start somewhere. I read the books of Acts because it’s a great action book. And I read the books of Ruth and Esther because they were the ones written by women, I figured. And I read the gospels. Which really tripped me up.

Because every time I encountered a word of judgment, whether John’s “brood of vipers” or Jesus’ “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” (Mk 9:19), I would internalize them. I would see Jesus turned to me, saying those words to me. I was faithless. I was the one Jesus couldn’t stand to be around anymore. I was the brood of vipers. I was the one who could not flee the wrath to come. I couldn’t hear the good news for the words of judgment intermingled there.

What is the Word that you hear? What is the Word that you most need to hear?

For whatever reason, sometimes the Word of judgment is the only one we can hear. And when this is the case, it makes it awfully difficult to open ourselves to knowing God’s presence in our midst.


The presence of God is a tricky thing this way. The presence of God cannot be tamed. At least not for long. The danger of taming God’s presence is no more apparent than when we celebrate Christmas every year—when we remember the infant Jesus, swaddled in cloth, with Wise Men offering their gifts to him, cattle lowing, and stars being birthed. Even Madison Avenue knows that babies and puppies sell products more than anything else. In some sense, the infant Jesus is the most unthreatening presence of God that we can imagine. Who wouldn’t approach that manger? Who wouldn’t want to hold that infant close?

In the movie Taladega Nights, the Nascar race driver Ricky Bobby, played by Will Ferrell, begins his nightly grace over their family meal by addressing “Dear Sweet, Tiny, Baby Jesus.” When his father-in-law complains and points out that Jesus isn’t a tiny baby anymore, Ricky Bobby clings fast to his tame, nonthreatening image: “That’s the Jesus I like best!” He exclaims.


But the presence of God cannot long be tamed. Because we know from the prophets’ cries in both the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, that God’s presence with the people is intimately intertwined with God’s justice. God’s desire for the well-being of the least, the lost, and the little ones among us burns as brightly as God’s Love. To put it another way: God’s Love is not an abstract concept, divorced from our daily lives. God’s Love is the same as God’s Justice.

And, God’s Justice is also not an abstract concept—precisely because God is in our midst, God is With Us. The prophet Amos, for instance, declares God’s judgment against Israel because “they sell the righteous for silver” (which means people were being sold into slavery), “and the needy for a pair of sandals,” (which means so many people were being sold into slavery that the price of a human being had been driven down to the cost of a pair of sandals). God’s anger was kindled because of “They who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way.” And finally, “they lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in pledge” (which was an inequitable practice of money-lending) “and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.” (which was an unjust worship practice.)

God’s presence with the people means that God notices the systemic negligence of the least, the lost, and the little ones among us.

This is precisely why, though they at first appear to be, our scripture texts this morning do not contradict themselves. John the Baptizer is, indeed, proclaiming the good news to the people!

John calls the people to repentance. And it’s very difficult for us to hear that word without loading onto it a bunch of our own associations. For too long, repentance has been understood to be about turning ourselves away from our “sins.” And for too long, our concept of “sin” has been strictly personal and moral—about how we conduct our individual lives and relationships. While personal misconduct can certainly be a part of our larger state of brokenness, John’s call for repentance has much broader and yet more particular implications. John’s call for repentance is a way of readying the Kingdom for the Presence of God—a God whose Love is intimately intertwined with God’s justice for the least, the lost, and the little ones.

“The Greek word repentance translates as “have a change of mind,” or “go beyond the mind you have.” Repentance depicts a change of life and heart evidenced in action as well as attitude.” [Seasons of the Spirit] John is concerned that the people’s actions must “bear fruit”—show evidence of a life lived in such a way that all people can thrive.

What should we do? asked the crowd.
What should we do? asked the soldiers.
What should we do? asked the tax collectors.

The repeated questions of the people listening to John’s call for repentance calls to mind the people’s questions to the prophet Micah in the verses leading up to the one we love to sing here at Shell Ridge from Micah 6:8. There the people begin asking in hyperbole: “What does God require of us? That we give a thousand rams? ten thousand rivers of oil? my firstborn? the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

The people’s overblown image of a vengeful and capricious God who requires more than they could possible give, reveals a people who could hear nothing other than the word of judgment. They couldn’t open themselves to the good news that was already present to them. They couldn’t hear the Word they needed to hear. Their image of God was so unreasonable that Micah breaks it down for the people: “No.” Micah says. “God has already told you all that God requires: Do justice. Love kindness. And walk humbly with your God.”

In the same way, John the Baptizer answers the people’s questions with such simplicity that we are in danger of missing it every time we read it: If someone is cold, give them your extra coat. Do not charge someone more than what they owe in order to pad your own pockets. Do not bribe people with false accusations or threaten people for money.”


The Word of judgment is not more than we can bear. The wells of salvation are deep, full of refreshing waters that do not run dry. All people are invited to draw from these wells. God’s presence is in our midst—which means we need not live in fear, but are equipped to see the needs of the world and respond in hope and wholeness. The good news is that the One who judges us removes all judgment. The One who is coming is in our midst.

It is for this reason that we can sing and we dance. For the news is indeed good. God's presence in this world, now, matters. The One who is coming is here.

Amen.