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Bambi Willis was the preacher. She was called late on Saturday and so came up with dialog sermon

Rembrandt – “Return of the Prodigal Son” (1669)

Sermon by Becky Fisher

As I thought about the Gospel reading this week, it seemed like two completely separate sections.  The first verses one through five, which talk of death, sin and repentance. Then you have the parable of the fig tree.

Versus 1 through 5 talks “about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”  It doesn’t mean Pilate offered their blood as sacrifice, but as the Galileans were sacrificing animals, Pilate killed them.  The Gospel also references 18 who died when the tower of Siloam fell on them. It sounds as if God had permitted all these people to be massacred for some extraordinary wickedness.   Jesus then poses the question “Do you think they were more guiltily than all of the others living in Jerusalem?” Were they sinners above all other sinners? Let’s mull this over a bit. Do we know people, going through hardships? Do we think they are more guilty than we are and therefore more deserving of their circumstance?  When I think of it on a personal level, it’s easy for me to rashly or absentmindedly say, yes! They asked for it by engaging in that behavior.  They should have known the risk.  Why would they do something that stupid?  If you’re speeding you get a speeding ticket.  Understand how easy it is for our human nature to find reason and blame with someone else’s misfortune. Christ could have been suggesting that no one is secure from death and we should consider it as a warning to ourselves.

Christ Jesus says, “no!” They were not more guilty than others living in Jerusalem. Jesus is clearly calling us out. Clearly the wise thing to do is to make an honest inquiry of ourselves.  What about our own sin? Humbling…   

When the Gospel says, “unless you repent, you too will all perish,” what if it’s not referring to an immediate physical death, as that which happened to the Galileans and the ones that died in Siloam, but a spiritual death.  Maybe a death that is slowing taking its toll and keeping us from bearing the fruits of the spirit? 

Have you ever had something weighing on your mind that actually felt heavy? A sin committed? A burden? Some continuous behavior that you knew needed to stop before it got even more out of control? I’m sure I’ve had my share. I’ll give you recent example, which may seem a bit far fetched.  Here it goes: The Rector at my church needed to take a leave of absence! I couldn’t believe it!  I’m the Senior Warden which usually means I don’t do a lot compared other Vestry positions.  I know it.  Now, I’m going to have to be more active.  That’s God talking directly to me. I’ll need stand up and speak in front of people!   It stresses me out more than I can tell you. How is this a sin?  Wow! When reflecting on it, there are quite a few possibilities.  Starting with the rules I teach my kids.  The 21 Rules Of This House, rule number 4 says “We will consider one another interests ahead of our own.” I certainly was putting myself first, so selfishness. Maybe the second Commandant, idolatry like the Israelites that were with Moses?  Disobedience?  Idleness? The 4th Commandment from Exodus chapter
20 versus 9-10 says, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God.”  

There’s a rule for this, too in the book, The 21 Rules of This House.  We tend to remember the Sabbath day portion of this Commandment.  We’re here worshipping together, right?  But, what about the six days of work?  I’m not idle or lazy. I’m certainly busy enough.  This month, I have very visibly been called out. I have been idle.  I have not cleared a space or time for God. This is something that requires discipline. Clearing the space for God is work we are called to do.  I haven’t even taken advantage of my windshield time.  If you don’t know what windshield time is let me explain. Several years ago, I was in a bible study with a farmer.  He explained that his best time in solitude with God was his windshield time. The he spent driving his farm equipment back and forth across the fields.  Well, it’s winter time.  I haven’t been on the lawn tractor mowing, but I do try to shut off the radio while I’m in the car on the quiet parts of route 17 from here to Fredericksburg and listen to God thinking about readings and discussions about the bible that I’ve experienced recently.  Now, I’m thinking about the Wednesday devotional time which has gone to the wayside for me, due to things that just seem to come up in life.  The phone rings. The kids interrupt for help with something.  Oops, did I look at my Facebook page instead? Have I been dying a slow spiritual death?  Has it prevented me from bearing fruit?  Am I the fig tree from the parable? 

Yes, I’m the fig tree. Are you the fig tree, too?  Are there things in your life that you need to repent? Repentance isn’t just being sorry and asking for forgiveness. Repentance is more than regret. It’s turning away from sin and dedicating one’s self to change. As the Epistle tells us, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” The great thing is there are patient and merciful gardeners around.  In the second half of the Gospel reading, the New Covenant, it sounds like Jesus, is the gardener.  He says, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.”  I, too, have not been left alone. I had a lot of people give me manure this week… Of course, by manure I mean that they nurtured me, fed me, offered support.  You see, God doesn’t leave us to our own resources. He helps and encourages us.  As it is said in Second Corinthians chapter 1 versus 3-4: Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 

The story of the fig tree doesn’t mention whether or not the fig tree bore fruit prior to the three years of barrenness. I hope that we have born fruit in the past.  I hope that we stay in the garden and bear fruit.

Guest preacher the Rev. Deacon Salli Hartman

First 25 seconds are “rough”

Tonight I’d like to go back to nearly the beginning, to Genesis, Chapter 4.  In this chapter, Eve brings her first son into the world, Cain.  And then she and Adam have a second son, Abel.  Cain is a tiller of the ground, and Abel tends the sheep.  Both of these sons bring offerings to God. 

God is pleased with Abel’s offering, but God has no regard for Cain’s offering.  “So Cain was very angry,” scripture tells us, “and his countenance fell.” 

And then the Lord says to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?  If you do well, will you not be accepted?  And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” 

Cain, ignoring the Lord’s words, invites Abel to go out into the field with him. There, Cain kills Abel. 

God asks Cain where Abel is and Cain gives that famous answer, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” 

But God knows what has happened, and so Cain must take the consequences of his action. 

God says that when Cain tills the ground, it will no long yield its strength. 

And Cain will be fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. 

Cain is horrified.  “But Lord, this punishment is greater than I can bear!  Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face.  I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” 

Now Cain is left with nothing, and he believes that he no longer has God’s protection.  No wonder all that anger has drained out of him and has left only fear in its wake.  Sin has won out, and now Cain is seemingly doomed. 

So here we are. 

Sin is lurking at the door, and its desire is for us. 

That one statement sums up the predicament in which we human beings find ourselves. 

For in this world, sin, in its various guises, lurks at our doors, and desires to take us far away from God, and from one another, and to consume us.  

As God tells Cain, we must master sin. 

And therein lies the problem, for we are seemingly  incapable  of mastering sin.

We need this season of Lent to remind us that sin is a major problem.   In this day and age of self satisfied righteousness, the danger of sin gets short shrift.  We are good people, our sins are small, we’ve never murdered anyone, and this season isn’t really and truly about us, but more about the hot shot sinners who have guns and bombs at their disposal.   

In her essay, “A Look Inside,” Edna Hong, A Lutheran poet, writes that “the purpose of Lent is…to create a healthy hatred for evil, a heartfelt contrition for sin, and a passionately felt need for grace…the true purpose of Lent is not to starve one’s sin, but to get rid of it.”  

Hong goes on to say that “the purpose of Lent is to arouse. 

To arouse the sense of sin. 

To arouse a sense of guilt for sin. 

To arouse the humble contrition for the guilt of sin that makes forgiveness possible. 

To arouse the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. 

To arouse or to motivate the works of love and the work for justice that one does out of gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.”  

“In other words,” she says, “a guilty suffering spirit is more open to grace than an apathetic or smug soul.  Therefore, an age without a sense of sin, in which people are not ever sorry for not being sorry for their sins, is in rather a serious predicament.  Likewise an age with a Christianity so eager to forgive that it denies the need for forgiveness.  For such an age, therefore, Lent can scarcely be too long!” 

The first challenge of Lent, then, is to realize that we are just as susceptible to sin as Cain was, to admit that to ourselves.

The second challenge of Lent is  to work to master the sin waiting to destroy us.  As Hong says, not just to starve sin, but to get rid of sin. 

We cannot get rid of sin on our own.  We need God’s help. 

When Cain says that he no longer has any protection, God has this to say. 

“Not so!  Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.”  And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.” 

Cain receives the Lord’s mark, and then, scripture tells us that Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, East of Eden.  What a sorrowful ending—Cain, a marked man, went away from the presence of the Lord. 

But we, sinners that we are, know that we do not need to go away from the presence of the Lord. 

The ashes that we will receive on our foreheads tonight are the mark of the Lord. These ashes hold the truth that we are dust, and to dust we will return.  We have no power over death. We all will die, and be separated from this life. 

And these ashes also remind us that we are, whether we want to admit it or not, people who have opened our doors to sin and let it come in and have its way. 

God would have us know the truth about ourselves, because knowing the truth about ourselves will set us free.  Jesus said in the gospel according to John that anyone who commits a sin is a slave to sin.  The slave does not have a permanent place in in the household; the son has a place there forever.  So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.”  The love of Jesus Christ for each one of us, will set us free from sin, if we are willing to receive that love.  And then we will have a place in God’s household forever. 

The ashes we receive tonight remind us that God is placing God’s mark on each one of us—the cross of love, the protection, the grace, and the love of God that brings us into life out of death, as seeds, dropped into the ground and dying to themselves, spring up into plants that bear their good fruit in due season.  Jesus died on the cross, spent three days in the earth, and God raised him into new resurrection life.  The cross that we will receive on our foreheads reminds us that we too, through the cross, will be recipients of everlasting life with God. 

Yes, we are dust, and to dust we shall return.  But we are marked as Christ’s own forever. 

So as the Apostle Paul entreats the Corinthians, I entreat you on this Ash Wednesday. 

On behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God, and do not accept the grace of God in vain. 

For it is only through God’s grace that we know that sin is lurking at the door, and that it desires us, and that we must master it, with God’s help. 

“Transfiguration” – Fra Angelico (1440-42)

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On the first Sunday of the season after the Epiphany, my daughter Catherine and I were in California.  During the time you all were at St Peter’s, hearing Ben reflect on the baptism of Jesus, Catherine and I were in church as well. 

We walked through a magnificent open air cathedral.  Its springy floor consisted of rich dark soil from which sprang green carpets of ferns, out of which towered redwood trees.  A deep silence pervaded this shadowy sanctuary. 

And then the light!  The sun shone through the mist, creating streams of light,  bringing to mind this bit of poetry from the romantic poet William Wordsworth,

“But trailing clouds of glory do we come, from God who is our home.” 

If any human being on this earth trailed clouds of glory throughout his life, that person would be Jesus himself, whose birth was announced to the shepherds by an angel, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were terrified.

Jesus was marked by God’s glory at his baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form like a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” 

Every year, on the last Sunday after the Epiphany, we hear about the transfiguration of Jesus.  God covers Jesus in glory. 

Jesus goes up a mountain to pray, and while he is praying, God’s glory covers him.  “The appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.”

Moses and Elijah appear in glory, and the disciples, weighed down by sleep, but still aware, see Jesus in glory as well.  And then a cloud of glory overshadows them all, and the disciples are terrified, just as the shepherds were terrified that night in the fields, when the angel of the Lord shown round about them.   

From the cloud that overshadows them, comes the voice again, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

According to scholar Gerhard Kittel, the word “glory” as it is used in the New Testament, “denotes ‘divine and heavenly radiance,’ the ‘loftiness and majesty’ of God and even the ‘being of God’ and God’s world.” 

When we see God’s glory with our own eyes,  awe, and even terror are appropriate reactions, for after all, we are made from dust.  We are  “the feeble and frail.”

But we can feel in those rare moments when we become aware that God’s glory surrounds us, that we are not only witnessing the loftiness and majesty of God, but that we, insignificant as we are, are being drawn into the glory  of God and being transformed by God’s divine radiance into the people God means us to be, only by God’s mercy. 

This transformation is what Paul refers to in his letter to the quarrelsome Corinthians, when he says that” all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” 

When we enter into God’s glory we are all being transformed by God into the people God means us to be. 

This transformation does not occur all at once, but instead happens in what seem like often discouraging fits and starts, one step forward, two steps back. 

Luke gives us example after example of our halting transformations, and God’s continuing mercy for us.  The day after they had witnessed the transformation,  right after the disciples have been immersed in God’s glory, they are unable to cast out a demon from the son of a desperate man.  A little later, they don’t understand Jesus when he talks about his imminent death, and they even argue over which of them is the greatest.  All less than glorious. 

So as today’s gospel ends, we find ourselves not on the mountaintop, enveloped by God’s glory, but in the valley, surrounded and overwhelmed by demands that we cannot fulfill on our own.

But the gospel also reminds us that even in the valley, we  are still with Jesus, who leads us on, expecting and encouraging our transformation into people through whom God’s radiance and glory shine.     

Paul says that “it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, so we don’t lose heart.” 

And we must not lose heart in the face of the divisions among us, in the disasters of war, and in the disregard for God that blinds us to God’s glory and holds us in thrall to all that would destroy us. 

In his poem, “Go to the Limits of your Longing,” Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke points out that God goes with us in the daunting challenges that life brings.  God speaks to us, just as the disciples heard God’s voice at Jesus’ baptism and God’s voice coming from the cloud of God’s glory that covered them on the mountain. 

God speaks to each of us as well. 

Rilke writes: 

God speaks to each of us as God makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
 
These are the words we dimly hear:
 
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
 
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
 
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
 
Give me your hand.

So listen for God, for God does speak to each of us and if we listen, we will hear.  Take God’s hand. Go willingly into the terrifying cloud of God’s glory, because it is in that cloud of glory that God will  transform our lives, so that God’s mercy can work in us and through us. 

“Joseph Reveals Himself to His Brothers” -Peter von Cornelius 1816/1817.

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How on earth are we really supposed to love our enemies? 

When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is not telling us to passively submit to abuse or to hatred, or to lie down  and to be the proverbial doormat that receives all the dirt and filth from the feet of the enemy. 

For Jesus, love is the active response to hatred.    

And Jesus spells out this active love with his three commands—“Do good, bless, and pray.”  Jesus asks us to do these things because these very things—doing good, blessing, and praying—are the very things that God does for us. 

God does good for us by loving us in our worst, most evil moments.  God returns not just our shortcomings, but our active hatred toward God and toward one another,  with love.  God blesses us even when we obviously could not possibly deserve any blessing at all from God’s hand. 

And had you ever thought that God might not only hear your prayers, but that God prays for you as well? 

God’s greatest hopeful prayer for us is Jesus himself.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.  Jesus here with us was God’s prayer for our salvation from all evil. 

Then, in his time with us on this earth, Jesus was constantly praying for us. Some of the most eloquent of his prayers are in John’s gospel, like this prayer he prayed for his disciples—“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one….I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”

And then, just as God gave us the prayer of Jesus, Jesus gave us the prayer of the Holy Spirit.   The Spirit is always interceding for us, praying in and through us, that is—God praying in us, on our behalf, when we are unable to pray for ourselves. 

Jesus bluntly says that God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked, that God is merciful, and that we should also be merciful if we are children of God and followers of Jesus.

To be merciful is to have compassion or forbearance, especially to an offender or someone subject to your power.  But wait, you say.  Someone with more than I have who is asking for what I have is the one with power over me. 

But I am here to say today that no one or anything in the world has power over us if God is our first love. 

If God is our first love, then we have the power of God’s love.

And that is the divine love that  gives us the ability and the desire to do good, to bless and to pray, especially for our enemies. 

Another important thing to note is that if God is our first love, then we can trust that God is in control despite the constant and blatant reports to the contrary.  We can give up our own desires to be in control.   

We can commit ourselves to God and put our trust in God, and God will bring everything round right in God’s own time. 

The Psalmist, knowing that God is in control, could write that we don’t need to fret over the evildoers and the ones who succeed in evil schemes.  Our job is to trust in the Lord and to do good instead of getting caught up in retribution, the tit for tat, the withholding of gracious generosity because the other isn’t deserving, or doesn’t behave in the way that we deem appropriate. 

In today’s reading from Genesis, we hear a bit of the story of Joseph, one of the great sagas of the Old Testament.  As one commentary says, the  Joseph story has been a favorite of both Jews and Christians through the centuries because the story reflects human nature in every age.  But even more importantly, this story of Joseph brings to life the idea that in and through the events of our lives, God is at work to save God’s people. 

Most of us probably know the Joseph story, but here’s a quick review.  Joseph was one of the twelve sons of Jacob.  The ten older sons, who were jealous of Joseph, had sold him into slavery years ago, and then had gone home and told their father that Joseph was dead. 

Now there’s a famine, and Jacob has sent the sons to Egypt to try to find grain to buy.  Meanwhile, Joseph has risen to great power and serves as the Pharoah’s right hand person.  Joseph oversees all the stores of grain that have been stored up to get the people through the famine. 

Joseph reveals himself to his brothers.  And they are terrified, because Joseph must certainly want to take revenge on them now for what they had done so many years ago.  But instead, Joseph shows his brothers mercy, because he can see that in the big picture, God has been working for good, even in all the bad things that have been done. 

Joseph says to his brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve life….so it was not you who sent me here, but God.”  And so Joseph provides for them. 

Maybe Jesus had this well known story in mind when he taught the disciples to love their enemies, to do good to those who hated them, to  bless those who cursed them, to  pray for those who abused them.  This is what Joseph, God’s servant did, and in doing so, preserved the people of Israel. 

You might say that Joseph, by showing forgiveness and mercy to his brothers, was no longer a man of dust, but had become a man of heaven, to use the Apostle Paul’s terminology. 

When his brothers threw his perishable body into that well and sold his perishable body into slavery, but Joseph grew out of that perishable body into a  man who has been remembered through the ages for his goodness—a man of heaven. 

And we too, who are children of the dust, can bear the image of the man of heaven, Jesus himself. 

We bear the image of people of heaven by doing as Jesus did, by loving God above all else, and then pouring that merciful and compassionate love out into the world, knowing  that God means it all for good, that God is in control, and ultimately, God’s love will overcome all. 

In his sermon at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back in 2018, Bishop Michael Curry preached about the power of love, which is of course what Jesus was doing that day when he told the disciples to love their enemies. 

Bishop Curry says that we were all “made by the power of love and our lives are meant to be lived in that love.  That is why we are here.” 

He goes on to say, “Ultimately, the source of love is God:   the source of all of our lives. There’s an old medieval poem that says:

‘Where true love is found, God’s own self is there.

The New Testament says it this way: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God, and those who love are born of God and know God. Those who do not love do not know God. Why? For God is love.”

There’s power in love. There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can.

There’s power in love to lift up and liberate when nothing else will.

There’s power in love to show us the way to live.”

Then Bishop Curry talks about the love Jesus had for us.  “Jesus didn’t die for anything he could get out of it. Jesus did not get an honorary doctorate for dying. He didn’t… he wasn’t getting anything out of it. He gave up his life, he sacrificed his life, for the good of others, for the good of the other, for the wellbeing of the world… for us.

That’s what love is. Love is not selfish and self-centered. Love can be sacrificial, and in so doing, becomes redemptive. And that way of unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love changes lives, and it can change this world.

“If you don’t believe me, just stop and imagine. Think and imagine a world where love is the way.”

Imagine our homes and families where love is the way. Imagine neighborhoods and communities where love is the way.

Imagine governments and nations where love is the way. Imagine business and commerce where this love is the way.

Imagine this tired old world where love is the way. When love is the way – unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive.

When love is the way, then no child will go to bed hungry in this world ever again.

When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing brook.

When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary.

When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more.

When love is the way, there’s plenty good room – plenty good room – for all of God’s children.

Because when love is the way, we actually treat each other, well… like we are actually family.

When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all, and we are brothers and sisters, children of God.

My brothers and sisters, that’s a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family.” 

Michael Curry’s words sum up the great vision that Jesus has when he said to those who are listening, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who abuse you.   Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” 

Jesus calls us, as his followers, to be part of  God’s reign already taking shape here on earth, right here in the midst of our enemies.  So this week, let’s ask God to make us people of mercy, whose name breathes love.      

In last Sunday’s gospel, Jesus proclaimed the Good News to the crowd at the Sea of Galilee.  After experiencing for themselves God’s extravagant grace in the form of fish, Peter, James and John followed Jesus because they trusted him. 

These three fishermen and the crowd around them who had come to hear Jesus proclaim the Good News that day had seen that God’s reign coming into reality on the earth was not just some distant, someday promise.  Instead, whenever Jesus was with them, the  Good News was immediate and tangible.  The Good News could be felt in the healing touch of Jesus.  The Good News could be held and shared. 

In today’s gospel,  another vast crowd from everywhere has gathered around Jesus.  The people in this crowd, like that earlier crowd by the Sea of Galilee, are also hoping and trusting that Jesus will bring God’s reign into reality. 

The confused and disheartened people in this crowd have come all this way trusting that their trip will not have been in vain and  that they will hear good news.  Those who are sick trust that Jesus will heal them of their diseases.   Those with unclean spirits trust that Jesus will cast those spirits out.    

They all trust that Jesus will put God’s power to work for each one of them, which Jesus does, because Luke reports that Jesus healed all of them. 

Now, Jesus speaks specifically to the disciples. 

He wants the disciples to understand why he has spent so much time and energy on this crowd, most of whom are poor, hungry and beat up by their very difficult lives.  He wants the disciples to know why these people are blessed. 

They are blessed because they trust that God will use God’s power, love and mercy  to care for them and to make their lives come round right. 

Jesus knows that these are the people who have been exploited financially, the ones who haven’t been able to overcome financial challenges.  These people are the ones who are hungry, and the ones who just can’t help feeling sad and depressed most of the time. 

But when these down and out people decide to trust in Jesus, they are blessed beyond imagining. 

They have turned to Jesus  because they believe that Jesus will bring the healing to them that they haven’t found anywhere else.    They trust the good news that God’s power, through Jesus,  will take their upside down  world and turn it right side up again.   They will no longer be poor, they will no longer be hungry, and they will no longer be in a constant state of sadness and frustration.  Even now, they are blessed, because they trust that the good news that Jesus is proclaiming is actually  true.   

Jesus also tells the disciples that those who have been outspoken about the Good News being the truth, and  getting ridiculed in the process, will be the ones whom God will honor as prophets, and that their reward in God’s reign, though not immediate, will be forthcoming.

Jesus says that these people in the crowd who have turned to him to receive God’s healing power are the ones who already have the kingdom of God.  They will be filled, and they will laugh, rejoice, and leap for joy.

These are the people who are blessed. 

As the psalmist puts it, by staying focused on Jesus and his goodness,  these people will be like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither.

Then Jesus explains to the disciples that when the world is once more right side up by God’s standards,  those who seem to be the most successful now will be the ones who  find themselves full of woes.

The people who have felt no need for God, and have trusted only in themselves, the ones who have cruelly  amassed their wealth at the expense of the poor, and have ridiculed the poor in the process, will find that their “reward” of material wealth and worldly success will be fleeting, and that their memories of those times will be their only comfort.  Instead of being filled, they will be hungry.  Instead of laughing, they will weep.  And they will discover that all the support that they thought they enjoyed from the crowds around them was empty as a dried up creek bed, and as fleeting as a shadow. 

Maybe Jesus, a prophet himself, was thinking of the prophet Jeremiah, who shared God’s woe list with  the people so long ago. 

The Prophet Jeremiah said, “Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals, whose hearts turn away from the Lord.”  Instead of trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, the people who have  turned their backs on  God  will be like shrubs in the desert who will die in a drought, because they have turned away from the source of life itself, the Lord of creation. 

The disciples listening to these teachings of Jesus had turned away from their former lives and were following Jesus.  Maybe some of them felt like, “Yep, I am that tree planted by streams of water.”  Maybe that group of disciples looked askance at the ones who had made it onto the woe list of Jesus.  But others of them must have squirmed a bit, itchy with the dryness of a shrub in the desert, second guessing themselves, hoping that the shallow roots of their trust in this man they had chosen to follow would reach down deeper to the living water that they still hadn’t really tapped. 

Perhaps all of them realized that, as I like to say, the blessings and woes weren’t either/or categories, but that we followers of Jesus are a both/and group. 

As Christians, we are always trying to turn more and more completely toward Jesus.  As we promise in our baptismal vows, we renounce all sinful desires that draw us from the love of God, we turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as our Savior and we try our best to put our whole trust in his grace and love and to follow and obey him as our Lord.  We are blessed when we turn to Jesus. 

But because we are flawed human beings and our trust in God sometimes becomes tattered, we can get off track and quit trusting at all, or we can begin to trust in something or someone besides God.  Then we find that we feel cursed, because we have trusted only in ourselves, re-establishing our trust in him. 

That’s why we promise in the Baptismal Covenant that we will persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into those inevitable sins that we will surely commit, we will repent and return to the Lord. 

The people in that crowd that day, full of woes of their own making and the woes that had been laid on them,  had trusted Jesus enough to take the first step and come to him for help and for healing.  The disciples trusted Jesus enough to just pick up and to follow him. 

They trusted Jesus because they could hear with their own ears that Jesus was proclaiming the Good News of God’s reign of love.  And they could see for themselves that the power of God was real, because through Jesus, God was healing them all. 

They were starting to realize that Jesus himself, the one talking with them, the one touching them, the one loving them, the one leading them was the Good News itself. 

No wonder they wanted to trust in him with all their hearts.

We disciples want to trust in Jesus with all our hearts as well, even though our trust can wax and wane through the years and be challenged in the circumstances of our lives. But we know that when we trust in God, that trust keeps us close to God, the source of all goodness and our healing love.     

Still, we have trouble trusting because we are both/and, a mixed bag of blessings from God and curses of our own creation.  We need God’s strength simply to trust, and we need God’s help to live into that trust. 

Today’s collect provides a helpful summary of what we’ve talked about today.  So let us pray. 

“O God, the strength of all who put their trust in you:  Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for ever an ever.  Amen.”    

I found my time in seminary to be quite challenging on many levels.  After the years I have spent in my own home, living  in a dorm had its moments. I missed my family.  I didn’t have time to keep up with my old friends.  Making new friends for an introvert takes some work, and I was doing that work, but along with the academic load, I often felt overwhelmed and incapable of succeeding.   But I had finally made it to  seminary, so I certainly did not want to appear overwhelmed and unable to live up to the challenge now that I was there. One September afternoon, feeling bereft and overwhelmed, I indulged in a little self pity and procrastinated a few minutes before beginning the next in a list of never ending assignments. 

I wandered down the deserted hallway and  into the dorm’s common room.  The late afternoon sunlight slanted through the windows and shone on the bookshelves.  Drawn by the light, I went over and stood gazing at the hodge podge collection of books.  

This book caught my eye, My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers, an old copy of a classic spiritual devotional that I had heard of but had never read.  So I pulled it off the shelf and opened it. 

First, I read the fly leaf.  And then, for some reason instead of just jumping into the devotion for that day to see if I could find any inspiration, I turned past the first blank page to the title page.  Someone had written an inscription on this page. 

“To Tom with prayer.  Best wishes in this new venture!  In His Love, Virginia Henderson, September 1, 1968.”

I could not believe my eyes.  I had no idea who Tom was, but I would have recognized that handwriting anywhere, and she had signed her name too, so there was no mistaking the fact that one of the precious friends of our family in Goldsboro when I was growing up, Virginia Henderson, had held this book in her hands, written the inscription in it and then given it as an encouraging gift to someone named Tom way back when I was only in the 8^th grade.  How like her!  Virginia Henderson was one of the most encouraging supportive people I have ever known, an unfailingly present friend to our family.  Her love language was gift giving.  When she came to visit with my parents, she always brought my brother, sister and me some little treasure.

Now, here I was in the late afternoon with the sun slanting through the windows of the common room, no longer alone at all.  Across the decades, I could feel the presence, warmth and love of this old friend.  She was now addressing her encouraging words to me. 

I could feel her prayers for me, her best wishes for me, her love for me.

I tell you this story because it is one of the many tangible and totally unexpected examples of God’s grace that I’ve received throughout my lifetime.  I’ve done nothing to earn these gifts.   They’ve just shown up as divine surprises, as this unexpected and seemingly impossible  gift from an old friend did.  

In its entry on Grace in Christianity, Wikipedia defines grace as “the help given to us by God because God desires us to have it, not because of anything we have done to earn it.  It is understood by Christians to be a spontaneous gift from God to people, “generous, free, totally unexpected and undeserved, that takes the form of divine favor, love, clemency, and a share in the divine life of God.”

Grace shows off God’s eternal generosity, love and care for us.  And God’s gifts of grace come to us in the ordinary commonplace things in our lives, like books for me, and fish for Simon Peter.

Simon Peter must have been tired and discouraged on the day that Jesus was down at the lake shore sharing the word of God.  Peter and his crew had been up all night fishing, had caught nothing, and so now they had given up and were on shore cleaning their nets.  Peter and Jesus were already friends, so I’m sure that even though he must have been worn out, Peter was willing to let Jesus use his boat as a floating pulpit.  When Jesus asked, he and Jesus got in the boat, and Peter put out the boat a little way from shore, and sat there listening to Jesus talk—pretty restful, probably, the boat gently rocking on the gentle waves lapping the shore.  Maybe Peter even dozed off! 

When Jesus finishes speaking,  Peter must be relieved, for now he can go home and sleep for a bit before going out to fish again. 

So when Jesus says to him, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch,” Peter pushes back.  “Been there, done that, no luck, Jesus! But, OK, if you really want me to, I’ll try again.”   

The result—an act of God’s grace—more fish than Peter could imagine for one catch!  Enough to fill two boats nearly to sinking!

And Peter, to his credit, recognizes that those fish flopping in his boat, scales shining in the sun, are gifts of grace from God—spontaneous, generous, free, totally unexpected and undeserved. 

Because Peter recognized those fish as gifts of grace, Peter was blown away and full of humility.  He knew that he had done nothing to deserve such a gift.  In fact, he had been grumbling about even trying, just as I had been grumbling to myself that afternoon about the hardships of seminary when I received my gift of grace. 

Peter doesn’t say thank you, assuming that maybe Jesus is just paying Peter back for letting Jesus use his boat, giving Peter what he had earned.  Instead, Peter throws himself at Jesus’ feet and says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  Peter sees himself for who he really is, an ordinary, flawed human being like the rest of us.  And Peter also sees who God is, right there in front of his eyes, the God of creation, the Lord of all, the one who has loved Peter and has just up and given him a gift of grace. 

So let’s leave Peter there at the feet of Jesus for a minute and join up with the Apostle Paul, who is in Ephesus, a papyrus sheet in front of him, mulling over what he wants to say to the Christians in Corinth who are having some disagreements with one another and want Paul to weigh in. 

In the passage that he is writing, the one we’ve just heard, Paul reminds the Corinthians of the good news—the fact that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus are God’s unbelievable and incomprehensible gift of grace given for you Corinthians.  Paul says that the Corinthians know this gift is true because Peter, the disciples, a large crowd, James, and all the apostles–  saw Jesus alive and resurrected and in their midst.

Paul was not in the group of people that saw Jesus after his resurrection.  In fact, Paul was out persecuting and hunting down these very people, surely sending some of them to their deaths.  Paul was the very last person on earth that you’d think would ever meet Jesus. 

But there it is!  God’s act of grace!  Paul writes that last of all, Jesus appeared to him, in a blinding light brighter than the sun,  even though Paul was unfit to be called an apostle because he persecuted God’s church, and was totally unworthy of ever seeing Jesus. 

Then Paul says,

“By the grace of God, I am what I am…and all I have done has been the grace of God that is with me.”  Even Paul, with his gigantic ego, realized that the gift of God’s grace was nothing he had deserved or earned—but instead, God’s love poured out on Paul—the one who had been actively trying to kill off that very love.

The stories of Peter and Paul are stories of God’s amazing grace.

But the most important thing about their stories is what these two did in response to God’s grace. 

Jesus told Peter not to be afraid, that Peter was going to become a fisher of people.  When Jesus left the Sea of Galilee that day to continue his proclamation of the good news, Peter (and James and John) left everything and followed Jesus—their response to God’s grace—they put out  into the unknown deep with Jesus and let down their nets in a whole new way.   

When Jesus gave Paul the opportunity to follow, Paul too, decided to let Jesus transform him, not having a clue about how things would work out.  Paul also put out into the deep, and turned out to be history’s greatest evangelist.  Paul tells the Corinthians that God’s grace toward him has not been in vain. As Paul writes,   “I, Paul, have worked harder than any of them (there’s that ego) BUT it was not I, but the grace of God working in me.” 

We, too, are constantly receiving God’s gifts of grace in our lives. Sometimes we recognize these gifts as grace, sometimes we don’t.  But when we see ourselves for who we are in the light of God’s love, then we recognize that what we have received from God is all grace. 

As I was finishing this sermon, I opened My Utmost for His Highest again, wondering if I’d find any graceful words of wisdom for all of us today. 

The title of today’s meditation is this. “Are you ready to be offered?”

To offer ourselves to God is our response to God’s grace at work in our lives.

And as Chambers writes at the end of today’s meditation, “Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove to be all you ever dreamed God would be.” 

And I’ll add that when we offer ourselves to God in response to God’s grace and follow Jesus, we will be more than we ever knew we could be, through God’s grace working in us.  

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An older person wrote Psalm 71.  This person has lived long enough to have faced the difficulties that life brings. 

This person knows that evil is a reality that just won’t go away, and how easily we can succumb to the evil that permeates our world and often seems to be beyond our control.  How easily this person could become hopeless.   

And yet this person has not given in to the fear of evil, or to the despair that evil brings with it.  And the psalmist certainly has not given up hope. 

Instead, this person hopes in the Lord. 

“For you have been my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.  I have been sustained by you ever since I was born; from my mother’s womb you have been my strength.” 

We followers of Jesus are people of hope.  Hope is a major component of our spiritual DNA, which is made up of faith, hope, and love.    Paul tells the Corinthians in his eloquent chapter on love that “faith, hope, and love, abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Paul says that love is the greatest of these three, but… like the Trinity itself, which functions as an  intertwined eternal dance of love between God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit; so faith, hope and love are also intertwined, and none can exist without the other two. 

Faith, hope, and love, these three. 

So let’s take a quick look at faith and love before we focus on hope. 

We Christians have faith, a strong belief and trust in God.  We cannot see God, but God has given us infinite ways of knowing that God is an eternal, loving reality, the great creative intelligence that brought everything into being and that sustains creation. 

We Christians believe that the best way to know God is through Jesus.  Jesus, God’s Son, had  faith and trust in God.  The faith Jesus had in God, his Father, empowered and sustained him through an incredible life of ministry, a horrid death, and then resurrection.  Jesus teaches us and shows us how to believe and trust in God, to be people of faith. 

Christian love, so beautifully defined by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, is love that grows out of our faith in God.  Our faith in God eventually brings to the realization that God IS love. 

As the first letter of John, Chapter 4, verse 16 says, “God is love, and  those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Paul says that love never ends.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

In this great trinity of faith, hope and love, we find that love hopes all things. 

So now let’s spend some time on hope, the confident hope that the Psalmist has in God, and the hope we have as Christians. 

The  Merriman-Webster dictionary defines the hope as a “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment.”  Hope is a strong and confident expectation.  I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again, when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, we are praying with hope, that strong and confident expectation that God’s kingdom WILL be fulfilled on this earth, despite all the evidence to the contrary.  In fact, this hope that God’s reign will come on this earth is our ultimate hope, for when God’s reign is fulfilled, peace and love will overcome the persistent evil that is still loose in the world. 

Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous living naturalist, is a hopeful person, despite the damaging changes to the earth that she has seen take place over her lifetime.   She is most well known for her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees in Africa.  Goodall wrote about hope in her spiritual autobiography, Reason for Hope:  A Spiritual Journey, and more recently in The Book of Hope:  A Survival Guide for Trying Times, co authored by Douglas Abrams and Gail Hudson.   

In The Book of Hope, Jane points out, just like the psalmist does, that evil is a reality in this world. 

Jane says that “hope does not deny all the difficulty and all the  danger that exists, but hope is not stopped by them.”

We act because we hope, despite danger.    We act because we have faith that our hope will be fulfilled, with God’s help.   Hope is living and active! 

That’s why hope is not only a noun, but a verb! The dictionary definition of the verb form of hope is “To cherish a desire with anticipation.”  Anticipation leads to action. 

If we cherish the desire for God’s reign of love to be on this earth, and anticipate the coming of God’s reign, then we will get busy and do our parts to overcome the evil that still runs rampant around us—to make space for God’s love and peace to be on earth as it is in heaven.   

As Jane Goodall says, “There is a lot of darkness, but our actions create the light……we see the light and also work to create more of it.” 

Jane goes on to say, “It is important to take action and realize that we can make a difference, and this will encourage others to take action, and then we realize we are not alone and our cumulative actions truly make an even greater difference.  That is how we spread the light.  And this, of course, makes us all ever more hopeful.”  

That is, active hope begets more hope, and helps others to hope as well. 

I didn’t know until I started reading The Book of Hope that there is such a thing as hope science.  Hope science has four components 

— realistic goals to pursue,

— realistic pathways to achieve these goals,

— the confidence that we can achieve these goals,

— and the support to help us overcome adversity along the way. 

Put Paul’s passage about love into the context of hope science.

For Paul, to love one another as God has loved us is a realistic goal. 

And the way to achieve this goal of loving one another as God has loved us is to model our lives on that of Jesus, to do what he asks us to do, to treat one another with dignity as we would want to be treated, to look out for one another.  No matter what our gifts and talents are, for if they are offered without love, they are nothing.

As Christians we have the confidence that we can achieve this goal of loving one another as God has loved us.  We have this confidence because we know that God will show us the way, that God will forgive us when we mess up, and that God will never desert us.  Our knowledge about who God is and how God loves us gives us confidence that we too can love. 

Even though, as Paul points out, we cannot see the whole picture, we have the confidence that someday we will see God face to face, and the story of our imperfect efforts at love on this earth will be fulfilled and completed, and we will at last know fully.  What a promise that is! 

The last thing that hope science says about realizing our hopes is that we have the support to help us overcome adversity along the way.  Jesus made it clear in his own life here, as he supported those around him and helped them to overcome adversity, that one of the most hopeful things we can do is to support one another. 

Hope, faith and love are in St Peter’s DNA.   We support one another and work together to achieve the goals that will bring God’s reign of love to fuller life in this world.  We help one another bring light into the darkness.  We work together to eradicate evil and to replace that evil with love.   

My hope is that as this season after Epiphany continues to unfold, we may remember that we are faithful people of hope, and that we will continue to act with confidence in hope, so that God, who is love,  can be known throughout the world. 

And we’ll give the Apostle Paul the last word on hope as he brings us the benediction, from his Letter to the Romans.    

“Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”

“Christ Preaching at a Synagogue in Nazareth” – 14th century fresco

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As you know, the Sacred Ground group at St Peter’s has been meeting for quite a while now.  After going through the Sacred Ground curriculum, in which many of you participated, and reading several helpful books, we have gotten to the point of taking specific action to promote racial healing and reconciliation in our area.

The first thing we’ve done has been to start the Sacred Ground scholarship.  This is a brand new scholarship and we are feeling our way along as we work toward helping a minority student or two from this county be able to go beyond high school and get to Germanna Community College. 

The high school has given us the names of two girls.  And so last Thursday night, we spent our meeting time talking about how we’d go about letting them know more about St Peter’s, and how we’d get to know who they are and what they hope to do after high school. 

Elizabeth Heimbach, who has a way with words, said,

“We want to know who the person is, where she is going, and how we can help her get there.”

Now if we asked these same questions of Jesus, what would we find out? 

Who exactly IS Jesus?  How would Jesus himself answer that question? 

Thanks to Luke we already know who Jesus is and what motivates him. 

Luke tells us earlier in the gospel that John the Baptist has baptized Jesus in the River Jordan, and Luke reports that at his baptism, the Holy Spirit descends on Jesus “bodily, like a dove.”  And a voice comes from heaven.  “You are my Son, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.” 

And then Jesus, full of the Spirit, is led by the Spirit into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil for forty days.  We’ll hear more about those forty days when we get to the season of Lent at the beginning of March.   

After his time in the wilderness, Jesus, filled with the power of the spirit, returns to Galilee where he teaches in the synagogues and is praised by everyone. 

And now, after Jesus has read the writings of the Prophet Isaiah in the synagogue, beginning with the words “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,”  he claims these words for himself. 

“THIS is who I am!” he says when after finishing the reading, he tells the people who are watching and listening intently that “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus is full of God’s spirit. 

So if we were talking about Jesus about who he is, we’d know the number one most important thing that he already knows about himself.  He and God have a special relationship through the power of the Spirit.  And if we had heard about his baptism, which we may have, because news travels fast when people have something amazing to share, we’d also know that a voice from heaven has said to Jesus, “You are my Son, the Beloved, in you I am well pleased.”

So the first part of our three part question has been answered.  We know who Jesus is, we know how Jesus sees himself and we know that he has confidence in God and in himself.   He doesn’t just have the Spirit, he CLAIMS it! 

Based on our scholarship questions, the second question we would ask Jesus  is “Where are you going?”  By reading from the Prophet Isaiah that day, Jesus answers this question as well. 

Jesus is going to proclaim the Good News about what God is up to in the world. 

And Jesus is not only going to proclaim what God is up to, but he is going to do that work himself. 

What Jesus is proclaiming and will be doing has the potential to turn the world order upside down.

Jesus is proclaiming good news to the poor.

Proclaiming  release to the captives.

Proclaiming the recovery of sight to the blind.

Proclaiming that the oppressed will go free. 

Proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, that is, proclaiming that the kingdom of God is here and now. 

Jesus is proclaiming this good news and will be bringing the good news about God’s hopes for the world into reality during his ministry.   Through the power of the Spirit, Jesus is going to be spending time with the poor and feeding  the hungry, seeking  the sheep without a shepherd, lifting up the ones who are looked down on and despised by the establishment.  Through the power of the Spirit, Jesus will be healing the sick. 

Jesus gives us a specific outline about what he will be doing, where he will be going, and who he will be serving—the poor, the captives the blind, and the oppressed.  This is God’s work, and Jesus intends to do it.   

That leaves only one question from us.  How can we help you get there?  As if Jesus needs any help!  What an audacious question! 

But Jesus does ask us to help, and what an honor that is, that Jesus would think any of us worthy of being part of his mission.  However, from the beginning, Jesus gathered people around him to help him carry out his work.

So obviously, the first thing we can do to help is to believe in him, and to commit ourselves to following him.    

We will learn more about the specifics about what we need to do to help as we follow Jesus through our lives, learning from him and practicing being like him. Jesus is our teacher. 

This work of being like Jesus and doing the work Jesus sends  us  out to do  is the work of a lifetime, never done, but always getting deeper, more challenging, more joyful and more and more Spirit filled as we continue to follow and obey. 

“How can I help you, Jesus?” is the question that each of us must ask for ourselves, but it is also the question that all of us must ask together, as this Church, St Peter’s. 

For as the Apostle Paul has said, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one  body-Jews or Greeks, slaves or free-and we were all made to drink of one Spirit…we are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” 

The reports that you received yesterday for the congregational meeting today provide some of the answers to how we went about helping Jesus be visible in this world by doing God’s work last year together as the body of Christ. I hope you had a chance to read the reports.  They are available on the website for you to read any time. 

Who are you, Jesus?  Where are you going, Jesus? 

Jesus, how do we help you get there? 

That third question is always our big question! 

As we begin a new year together, let’s keep that question before us, for Jesus, the Beloved Son of God, Anointed by God, and full of the Spirit, will keep answering that question for us.

We can count on the fact that Jesus will  by show us the way and help us along as we continue to follow him.