Another Challenge

A stone in the exterior wall of the church in Barga Italy. What does the inscription mean?

Speak for Your Servant is Listening

1 Samuel 3:1-10 Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD under Eli. The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was. Then the LORD called, "Samuel! Samuel!" and he said, "Here I am!" and ran to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call; lie down again." So he went and lay down. The LORD called again, "Samuel!" Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call, my son; lie down again." Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. The LORD called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." Then Eli perceived that the LORD was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."

What is happening in our story today is truly a strange event. Samuel has been raised by his mother, Hannah, a deeply devout woman of God. She has nurtured him and prepared him to be a faithful servant of God. When Samuel was the proper age, she went to the house of the Lord in Shiloh and gave her only son to the priest Eli to be raised by him. And over the years Samuel has been a faithful servant, ministering to the Lord under Eli. So when God calls Samuel three times, and three times Samuel thinks mistakenly that it is Eli the priest calling him it seems to be remarkable that he would not know it was God. Now the Scripture tells us that the word of the Lord was rare in those days, ! but come on! It’s God after all! Wouldn’t you know if God was calling you? Wouldn’t you recognize God’s voice? And after all Samuel had been prepared for this calling, he had been not only a regular attendee at the house of the Lord, but a servant as well! Certainly we would respond to God’s call! I mean if God thundered down, right here and right now, Church! Church! We would stop what we were doing, and say “Speak, Lord for your servant is listening.” Wouldn’t we?

This is the question that I think this story asks us to reflect on today. And to help us process it, I would like to talk about the wind.

I am an avid sailor. I grew up sailing off the New England coast since I was ten years old. And early on I discovered sailboat racing. Sailing gave me the opportunity to not only to be out on the water, enjoying God’s beautiful creativity in the waves, and the silence of the wind, but I could also be with friends and also beat the heck out of my competition.

But winning did not come easy for me in sailing. You see in sailboat racing you have to do something called read the wind. Now maybe for some of you navy pilots or golfers you can see and read the wind. But for me, the wind is this invisible force, that I only really sense is present, when it messes my hair or I have to walk against it or when a cool breeze gives me relief. In other words, I can only experience the wind when it is blowing hard. But I don’t see it!

And this is problematic in sailing. Because you have to know where the wind is to get anywhere! If you don’t know where the wind is, then you tend to end up all over the course. The boat becomes subject to what appears to be random shifts in the wind and also to strong currents that lead you where you do not want to go. There has been many a race where I threw my hands up in despair exclaiming,
“I have no idea what to do!”

Over the years I tried to learn to read the wind. At first I emulated top sailors trying to learn their secrets. I read their books; I crewed for them, but to no avail. I still could not see the wind, let alone read it. Then one day, when there was barely a hint of breeze on the water. I saw it. Coming across the lake, I saw a dark shadow on the water, and as it approached, I could see that the wind was pointed in a different direction than the wind that barely filled our sails. And as I waited with anticipation, I could count the seconds as it approached us. When it hit us, the sails flapped for a moment and then filled, our boat gently tilted and we took off. “Puff” I exclaimed, as we, the only boat in the wind, took off and passed our competitors.

After that, I began to look for the wind. “Over there!” I would cry, and off we would go, headed for the darker water. As time went on, I could also see the wind when the weather was stormy. You see in storms, the wind is very unpredictable and is rarely constant. And you can see all of its vagaries as it breezes over the water. So in sailing, you learn to look for the dangerous winds that can not only fill your sails but knock the boat over.

But try as I might, I could not figure out how to see the wind, on a steady air day. Where there were no large puffs of wind to signal a change in direction.

This all changed when I watched the America’s Cup several years ago. For those of you who don’t know, the America’s Cup is an international competition between the best sailboat racers in the world that is held once every four years or so. It’s never covered on the big network channels, because frankly watching sailboat racing is akin to watching paint dry for most: Even more boring than golf or bowling and the rules more incomprehensible than hockey or cricket.

But there I was, in 1995, watching a New Zealand team compete against the American, Dennis Conner. On board the Kiwi boat was an awesome tactician named Brad Butterworth who was acclaimed for his ability to read the wind. So when I first started to watch the coverage I expected to find Brad sitting alone at an upward key advantage spot, reverently reading the wind, and making the strategic calls downward to the skipper and crew. But that is not what I saw; instead, he stood by the skipper and several other people and engaged in a conversation with them, during the whole race! It seemed that Brad’s giftedness for reading the wind had more to do with his ability to process what he saw with others rather than just giving out prophetic directions.

And after watching Brad, I began to try this. I began to talk with my skipper about the wind. I admitted to him that I could not read it on my own. He admitted that he struggled with this too, and together we began to enter into a dialogue about the wind throughout each leg of the race. And low and behold, we began to see the wind! We began to understand what direction we needed to point our boat. We began to understand how to adjust our sails.

I think that God’s calling in our lives is like the wind. We expect it to be like a giant puff moving across the water, that we can anticipate and measure. So we prepare ourselves. We like Samuel, go to church every Sunday and faithfully serve in various positions in the church. And Sunday after Sunday, we look for a puff. We look for God to fill our souls and move us boldly forward. We expect a mountain top experience like Moses and we look for signs like a burning bush. Or we anticipate God’s blinding grace to bring us to our knees as it did Paul on the road to Damascus.

And more often than not, we think that this will be a deeply private and personal moment that we will know and understand all by ourselves. But while God’s call on Moses and Paul did come in isolation, they both had others to help them understand and discern God’s calling. Moses had Aaron and Paul had Ananais.

And like the wind, I believe that God does act in this way sometimes. God’s calling can be like a blast of wind that literally knocks us over. And it is a marvelous thing to see this happen to someone. They truly are on fire and filled with a passion that is contagious.

But for some of us, perhaps many of us, God seems to work more like the wind on a steady air day. God is like a warm gentle breeze that is more like a whisper than a bold hurricane like noise. Remember Elijah’s call in 1 Kings? He went up to the mountain to hear the Lord, but the Lord was not in the loud wind, nor in the earthquake, but in the sheer silence. The wind on a steady air day, you cannot see, you cannot hear, and yet it presses you forward.


We come to church and worship, we serve, we pray, we stay in the word. In this we are very much like the young Samuel, tending the house of the Lord in Shiloh, very much like the young Samuel prepared by his mother to be a faithful servant to the priest Eli and very much like the young Samuel worshipping God as he has been taught. Our preparation and faithful servant hood allows us to steer the waters, even when they are shallow even when as we are told by the narrator in 1 Samuel, that the word of the Lord is rare. And so with our faithful preparation we are content to rest in the shallow waters, convinced that God is helping us to keep course. Yet as Samuel’s story reveals it is very easy, to get off course and to miss God’s call on our lives.

The problem is even with God helping us keep course, we can still become victim to the shifting winds and currents of our lives. You see, when we aren’t experiencing God’s call in our lives, we can mistake other calls not of God and follow them until we are fatally off course. Our modern world is a deep and swift current that at surface level seems calm and harmless, but at its core is powerful enough to sweep us right off the race course where we become in danger of being sucked under or shipwrecked.

And maybe some of you today are sitting out in the pews wandering what God is doing in your life or wandering when God is going to call you. Maybe you have just started coming or maybe you have been coming for years, but if you had to be brutally honest you would have to admit that either you have never heard God’s call or somewhere along the way you stopped hearing God’s call. You are adrift, some more comfortably than others.

But God realizes our dilemma; he knows how hard it is to read the wind, to hear his call. So he gives us each other where we can share his word, where we can pray for each other, where we can discern that call with each other. For Samuel that was Eli, for the church today, we have small groups and Bible studies, and programs like Alpha. I am not sure why, but Alpha is so often promoted as something people new to faith should attend. Now don’t get me wrong, Alpha is an excellent way, if you are a seeker, to learn about God the Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit and to begin to be in fellowship with others with questions and with people deeply rooted in faith.

But Alpha is also a wonderful ministry for those of you, who are drifting, who are still in the boat, but sense that you have lost the ability to read the wind. Because in Alpha it is not about someone with all the answers imparting them from on high to you, but a group experience, where you come together and learn to read the wind together. Over the years, I occasionally have returned to Alpha when I feel that I have stopped hearing God’s call in my life. I have also turned to faithful friends who have mentored me, prayed with me and helped me once again learn to set my boat on course and to faithfully hear and follow God’s call.

Maybe the reason Alpha stays a seeker course is that we, who claim our identities as Christians, are so ashamed to admit when we get off course and to be honest about it. That somehow we fear that we will be judged as not being Christian enough or being weak and falling victim to the deep currents of the world.

To address this concern, I have a story to share with you. There was a man, who was born over 300 years ago who was raised in a faithful Christian household. His mother nurtured him and his brothers and sisters with a firm and spirited Christian education. His father was a pastor and taught his children the value of tradition and loyalty to the church. For this young man, all his young life he dreamed of serving God. So in his early thirties, he and his brother set out to a newly discovered and developed foreign land to work with the indigenous population. Despite all of the two men’s hard work, the ministry failed and the two brothers returned home, dejected and dispirited. Still they continued to faithfully attend church and serve the Lord, even though they both had lost a sense of God’s calling in their lives.

The young man and his brother continued to drift for almost a year. Fortunately, a friend had invited them to attend a series of prayer meetings. At these prayer meetings the young man spoke of his struggles and wrestled honestly with his faith. And then one May evening, as the gentle winds blew outside, the young man’s heart was strangely warmed and he exclaimed to all present, “I believe!”

That man went on to be the founder of Methodism. He was no other than John Wesley.

People, we have to get honest with one another. We have to share with each other what is going on in our lives. If we do not, we are just isolated ships, drifting on a sea that will eventually shipwreck us and leave us drowning in the dangerous currents of life.

We need each other. God’s gentle winds are blowing on all of us gathered here today but we can’t read that wind, can’t respond to it, unless we join together in honest conversation and prayer. Like Samuel we need Eli’s to help us discern God’s call and to be able to finally respond to God, “Speak for your servant is listening.” And if you cannot hear God, or don’t recognize that God is calling you, if you are a drift, or if you have gotten off course, you are not in the boat alone. For we gathered here today will not make the journey without you. We have been called to this ship we call the church, as brothers and sisters in Christ and we cannot set sail without you. Come join us for the most wonderful voyage of our lives!

Samaritan Woman at the Well

We all are aware of the natural disasters occurring almost half a globe away in Myanmar and China. Myanmar has been devastated not only by a cyclone and major flooding, but also by a ruling junta who will not allow aid workers into the country. So many of thousands will die needlessly, simply because of the circumstances of their birth.

In China, officials have confirmed deaths in the 20,000s and expect many more. The other day I heard a reporter on NPR relate what he saw in a remote mountainous village. What stuck out to me in his report is that he said the town had a well, but the people were dying of thirst because they dared not drink from the well, because they feared that death had contaminated the water.

So close to the living source of water, hundreds if not thousands of people will die. Many within feet or yards of a well.

The Gospel of John has a story involving a well - a well that has a different life outcome than the well in China.

John 4:5-29 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." The woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" Jesus said to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." The woman answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming" (who is called Christ). "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." Jesus said to her, "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, "What do you want?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?" Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?"

Jesus comes to the well thirsty. The theme of thirst is central to John’s Gospel.

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), "I am thirsty." John 19:28

One of the final words that Jesus cries out on the cross is that he is thirsty. Thirsty for water? No. Thirsty for us.

Mother Theresa wrote this about God speaking to us:

I thirst for you. Yes, that is the only way to even begin to describe My love for you: I THIRST FOR YOU. I thirst to love you and to be loved by you - that is how precious you are to Me. I THIRST FOR YOU. Come to Me, and I will fill your heart and heal your wounds. I will make you a new creation, and give you peace, even in all your trials. I THIRST FOR YOU. You must never doubt My mercy, My acceptance of you, My desire to forgive, My longing to bless you and live My life in you. I THIRST FOR YOU. If you feel unimportant in the eyes of the world, that matters not at all. For Me, there is no one any more important in the entire world than you. I THIRST FOR YOU. Open to me, come to Me, thirst for Me, give Me your life - and I will prove to you how important you are to My Heart.

I know you, through and through. I know everything about you, the very hairs I have numbered, nothing in your life is unimportant to me. I have followed you through the years, and I have always loved you even in your wanderings. I know every one of your problems. I know your needs and worries, and yes I know all your sins, but I tell you again I love you. Not for what you have or haven’t done, I love you for you. For the beauty and dignity my father gave you by creating you in his image.

Dignity that you have often forgotten. Beauty that you have tarnished by sin. But I love you as you are, and I have shed my blood to win you back. If only you ask me with faith, my grace will touch all that needs changing in your life. I will give you the strength to free you from sin and all its destructive power., I thirst for you. That is the only way to describe my love for you. I thirst to love and to be loved by you.

No matter how far you may wander, no matter how often you forget Me, no matter how many crosses you may bear in this life; there is one thing I want you to always remember, one thing that will never change: I THIRST FOR YOU -just as you are. You don't need to change to believe in My love, for it will be your belief in My love that will change you. You forget Me, and yet I am seeking you every moment of the day - standing at the door of your heart, and knocking. Do you find this hard to believe? Then look at the cross, look at My Heart that was pierced for you. Have you not understood My cross? Then listen again to the words I spoke there - for they tell you clearly why I endured all this for you: I THIRST...).Yes, I thirst for you- as the rest of the psalm-verse I was praying says of MeI looked for love, and I found none... All your life I have been looking for your love - I have never stopped seeking to love you and be loved by you. You have tried many other things in your search for happiness; why not try opening your heart to Me, right now, more than you ever have before.

Whenever you do open the door of your heart, whenever you come close enough, you will hear Me say to you again and again, not in mere human words but in spirit: No matter what you have done, I love you for your own sake. Come to Me with your misery and your sins, with your troubles and needs, and with all your longing to be loved. I stand at the door of your heart and knock ... Open to-Me, for I THIRST FOR YOU.

We hear these words, but do we know in our heart of hearts that God in Christ knows us completely AND, not despite, AND loves us completely. How much do we hide from God? How much do we try to conceal in shame or hurt, in embarrassment or in vanity? How many of us try to earn that love from God? How much do we try to be good or productive, or loving or nice so that we can be loved by God? But do we have it backwards?

John often speaks of this thirst of Christ as a groom wooing his bride. Already in John before we get to our story for the day, Christ has attended a wedding feast at Cana where he turns water into wine. And John the Baptist has described his role as the friend of the bridegroom.

And listen to John’s words, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom.” John 3:29. We already belong to Christ. We are already betrothed to Christ, and he has come to earth to woo us, and to claim us as his bride.

The setting for John’s story of the Samaritan woman picks up this theme of betrothal, wooing and marriage. Stories of the beginning of the families of Isaac, Jacob and Moses all begin at wells. Resting at wells equates in the Old Testament as a place for God’s chosen to be nourished, and refreshed. It is the starting point of the next chapter in their lives, which always involve being connected to a woman and her family, through a courtship process.

At Jacob’s well, deep in the heart of Samaria, it is not a patriarch, like Isaac, Jacob or Moses, but a lone woman who comes to the well for water in the heat of the afternoon sun. How will God woo her? How will God begin her new journey?

Well, it starts strangely, for it is Jesus who asks a drink from her. It would almost be like you or I asking a homeless person for a bite of their burger that they have just taken out of the dumpster at McDonalds. Why would we possibly want anything from a homeless person? What could they possibly offer us, that wouldn’t contaminate or kill us?

But Jesus, who already knows the Samaritan woman, thirsts to come into relationship with her. He already loves her. Jesus begins the courtship process by asking her for a drink of water. Jesus, who knows that she is living with a man outside of marriage, could have condemned her, could have named her a sinner, could have demanded that she repent and ask forgiveness before he would have anything to do with her, but he does not. Instead he humbly tells her that he is thirsty.

The woman resists, after all she knows how others have judged her, how others have ignored her, how others have condemned her. She has most possibly experienced the rejection of courtiers and husbands before, after all she has had five husbands. Did she bury them all? She couldn’t have divorced them, only men could divorce womaen.

She wonders how Jesus could ask her for water. Doesn’t he realize that by receiving water from her that he could become contaminated? That by sharing water with her, they would be in a relationship that would be deadly?

Jesus responds to her by offering her living water. Jesus bends forward in conversation with her, resisting her attempts to distance herself with artificial boundaries set up by human beings.

Jesus does so in a riddle, just as he has answered Nicodemus the Pharisee in an encounter that has happened just before Jesus comes to Samaria. The riddle engages the woman, just as it did Nicodemus. It draws both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman into a relationship with Jesus, it causes them to pause and examine all that they know and all that they value and hold dear and to begin to receive Jesus into their lives.

Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that she has already been given a gift by God of living water and that all she has to do is ask for it. Jesus is telling her that he already knows her and loves her. That she is already his, if only she would ask Him into her life.

But the woman resists. Commentators since the reformation argue that this demonstrates the willful and bold nature of her sinfulness. They say she is taunting Jesus out of her wickedness and immorality, that at this point she is unaware that she is a desperate sinner. Her sick and injured soul speaks rashly to Jesus, they say, because she does not feel guilty for living with a man outside of marriage, therefore Jesus has to point this out so that she can feel guilty and thus thirst for the water of life. But the problem with this approach is that Jesus never calls her a sinner, never asks her to repent.

The early church saw the woman’s response differently. They see her as confused woman who is willing to try to understand what Jesus is offering her. She is trying to understand Jesus’ riddle through the religious structure of her time. First and foremost she is concerned that her water would contaminate Jesus, that it would bring Him shame and condemnation.

For years I knew there was a God. I would look at nature and see all His glorious work and I would be in awe of such a creator God. And then I would look at myself. I grew up in a household with a lot of verbal abuse. I can’t repeat the name my mother called me and my siblings. I thought I was contaminated, polluted, little more than pond scum. For years, I wondered, how could such a creator God ever love me, someone so worthless? How could God ever want me to draw near? Wouldn’t I just contaminate all that was good?

If I ever was going to get near to God, I thought that I had to make myself clean. I had to become better, I had to scrub hard to get the slime off of me. But the more I tried to be better, the worse I seemed to become. It became a vicious cycle; one I think that the Samaritan woman knew well. We both did not need condemnation; we had enough of that to go around. What we needed was love and truth. We needed someone to know us and to thirst for us. No wonder the Samaritan woman was wary about responding to Jesus’ offer of water, I was wary too.

Then the Samaritan woman takes Jesus’ offer of living waters literally, as something that springs forth from an earthly well that she must draw from. Here the woman might be testing Jesus, but not out of unconfessed guilt, but out of woundedness. Too many had come before offering promised potions of love, that too often were just shallow pits of mud. What the woman needs is a deep eternal well of love to sustain all who she is.

For many, when we don’t feel love, when we don’t experience the thirst of God for us, we go in search for it in the shallow offerings of earthly love. We seek meaning in imaginary relationships based on sex, or we take drugs, or we acquire things or claim status. Anything to fill the emptiness. But what happens is we end up drowning in the random meaninglessness of life from the rising waters of our amoral sensual constructs.

Jesus knows this about me. He also knows this about the Samaritan woman, so he helps her to understand that the living waters are not from earthly wells that condemn us to death, which only lead us to more thirst. The living waters he offers are ones that quench our thirst because they will be an eternal spring of water that lead to life. They are living waters that allow us to worship in spirit and in truth.

And there is no part of her, no place of shame that she can hide from Jesus. Jesus knows her and he loves her. He knows what is true. His love for her is so deep, that nothing about her or her circumstances can change his thirst and love for her. And because of this, his waters can bring truth to the woman who came to the well and experienced God’s thirst for her.

And this promise is for us as well. We too can draw near to the well and receive God’s thirst for us. We can experience his love and truth for us. Truth that is life giving. Truth that allows us to see ourselves for who we are, to see ourselves as God sees us, as his beloved bride, whom God desires to woo, and wed.

I will never forget when I came to Christ almost nine years ago. I walk my dogs every morning, and during that time, I walked with Christ and each day he told me about my life and who I was. Deep personal truths stripped of the falsehoods I or the world had constructed. He told me who I was, and where I had been. He revealed how much he had always been by my side thirsting for me, wooing me, knowing me and loving me. Continuously offering life to me.

The Samaritan woman has only known husbands who leave her for dead, Jesus is offering her a different marriage proposal, one that will leave her with the promise of life eternal, because Jesus will eternally thirst for her.

And boldly the woman asks for this water, and with this request she receives the water.

Now the conversation goes deeper. The wedding is soon to take place, vows exchanged. The woman says her vows, “I know that the Messiah (called Christ) is coming. “ John 4:25

And Jesus responds, with his vow “I am”.

We are fond of saying traditionally in weddings, I do, but Jesus responds with “I am.” His words echo his Father’s love for the people of Israel: God said to Moses, “I AM” WHO I AM" He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.'"Exodus 3:14

The greatest words of love ever heard by anyone is not I love you, but “I AM”. For it is God’s declaration of love for his people. A love that is an action word that will bring deliverance and salvation first extended to God’s people, the Israelites, and now offered to all in Jesus.

The wedding is finished. Jesus has declared his love for his bride. He chose to make his declaration of love, not to the Pharisees, not to the disciples, not to John the Baptist, not Nicodemus, but to the Samaritan woman. A woman who was open to the thirst of God in Christ for her.

The time of celebration has begun. The woman, liberated, gets up and leaves her water jar behind. She is no longer in need of water that leaves her thirsty, she has been wedded to the living waters and she will thirst no more, for her groom will thirst for her eternally. She has become the vessel unto which she can receive the living waters of Christ. And because of she has become this vessel she in turn can worship in spirit and in truth. A miracle has happened and out of it comes the Samaritan woman’s worhsip that God eternally thirsts and desires, for it is in her worship that she gives all to God through Christ. For ours is a jealous God who seeks nothing less than all of us in union with him.

What if we stopped trying to convince people that they are thirsty? What if instead, we turned our attention to God’s thirst, for us and for others? What if we carried that message to the world? What would it look like?

What would it mean to put down our vessels that we use to quench our thirsts, and take time to enter into God’s thirst for us? What if we allowed ourselves to become vessels that quench God’s thirst?

What if we knew, not just with our minds, but with our hearts, that there is nothing about us or our circumstances that could ever bring contamination or death to Christ’s deep well of living water?

Maybe it would look like this.

One summer, I worked as an interim pastor in a small rural church in the Midwest. During that time I met Dan, a fifty-two year old man scheduled to have a quadruple bypass heart surgery. His parents, Pearl and Ed, were parishioners, whom I had visited regularly. In Pearl and Ed’s small cluttered but clean parlor I had shared refreshments and heard stories of their family. Back in the early 1930’s James was a fieldworker. He first saw Pearl on the back of a covered wagon as her family moved all they had into town. They soon married, but life was hard, and they barely eaked out a living in the harsh climate of the dusty plains. When the depression hit, they lost everything and had to start over. Pearl and Ed had five children, two who died as infants. Ed and his two brothers dropped out of school so they could work the fields next to their parents. Eventually the family prospered and owned thousands of acres of land, and several businesses.

One of the things that the small framed but wiry Ed would almost proudly tell me was that when he would need to discipline his boys, both who grew to be strong giants compared to their father, he would stand on a footstool and pummel them. And Ed was proud, not necessarily of the violence per se, but that he had raised his boys to know the difference between right and wrong. All of his boys lived in their own homes on the land that Ed owned, but I never saw them or their families at church.

Pearl called me one day and asked that I visit her son Dan in the hospital before his surgery. She was worried about Dan and the state of his soul, she said. At the hospital, I encountered an overweight but strong man, sitting alone in his hospital gown, vulnerable in the darkness of his single bed hospital room. I told him who I was and that his mother asked me to visit him; he was not glad to see me. I am sure that he thought at some point I would either try to convert him or pray for his lost soul. He must have decided that the best way to get rid of me would be to tell me scandalous things about him. “I have two wives,” he began. He then recounted portions of his life story, one of much pain and sorrow. He described how at one point his business failed, which led to bankruptcy and the end his first marriage. Dan wanted to divorce, but his parents would not let him because it was against their faith. Dan had to leave the family church, one that had shaped his faith since a child. He set up the first wife in a new house, and then after ten years met another woman and common law married her. For over fifteen years, he had taken care of both of them and his children.

When Dan realized he had not scared me off, we told some funny stories that made us laugh. As I was preparing to leave, Dan shared with me how he was worried about his surgery and if he did not make it what would happen to his wives. I asked him if he wanted me to sit with his wives the next day during the surgery and he nodded. He tried to speak again, his head downcast; I could tell that he was worried about what would happen to him. He had had a faith that abandoned him when he was down, would it be there for him now? I told him that he was a child of God and that God loved him very much. He looked up, a tear forming, and nodded. I asked if I could say a prayer for him and he said yes. The next day I sat with Dan’s wives. They were anxious but not distraught. I did not say much and they seemed to be a comfort to each other. When the news came, that Dan made it through the surgery; they both broke down in tears. I left them as they went to visit him in post-op.

The truth that needed to be spoken that day to Dan, was that he was much loved by God. That God still thirsted for him over all these years and that God could still draw close to Dan and his family. God knew Dan so intimately that He named him as His child. It was in that naming, in that claiming of God’s thirst for Jim that healing occurred.

Dan did not return to our church, but over the next couple of years, reconciliation between Dan and his father did occur. When his father died just last year, Dan and his wives attended the funeral.

In the beginning, God made creation and saw that it was good. There was no hunger, there was abundance for all.

John tells us that in the end God will prepare a final heavenly banquet, a wedding feast where the living waters will turn to wine, and all will come to the table and thirst will be no more.

Until then we live in the in between times where we can catch glimpses of God’s love for us and hope that one day, we may hunger and thirst no more.

Revelation 21:1-6 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away." And the one who was seated on the throne said, "See, I am making all things new." Also he said, "Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true." Then he said to me, "It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

Maundy Thursday

On Easter we will gather together in praise and worship to God our Father who lovingly sent his only son so that we may have life. We will celebrate with Halleluhahs that death no longer imprisons us but that we have been given eternal life. And we will also rejoice that our life here on earth has been radically changed. We have moved out of darkness into light and we have been given the gift of abundant life in God, even in our lifetime. But what does this abundant life look like? How do we dare to dream and to see it as God would have us see it? How do we live it out? How do we know with assurance that we are living as Christ’s followers and not just his admirers?

This is why I think Holy Week and especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are so important. If we skip too quickly from Jesus’ triumphant march into Jerusalem straight to Easter we might remain as bystanders to the miracle that Christ shapes in our lives and in the life of our community.

We may remain content to stand at the side of the road shouting Hosanna as Christ passes us by on his way to the cross. We may be too faint hearted to journey with Him to the cross. We may not hear his final seven words, words full of promise for us, and we might not be able to claim and live the commandment he gives us in our scripture passage today, to love others limitlessly, as Christ himself has loved us.

We gather on Maundy Thursday to prepare ourselves for Easter, to ready ourselves for the abundant life that Christ gives to us and with which we will celebrate on Easter.

We spend time with Jesus and we listen to his words and we reflect on his example, all so that when Easter comes we will be ready to be not just admires but followers. Ready not only to claim the promises on that Easter day, but every day onward, even when we are confronted, challenged, discouraged or tired.

We pause on Maundy Thursday so that we may know with full confidence what that abundant life looks like. “Every believer knows that Christ went the way of the cross for our sakes. But it is not enough just to know this. Each of us must find the cross and take it up.”

In Scriptures Jesus describes the abundant life we receive at Easter.

John 13:1-17 NRS Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him. And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, "Lord, are you going to wash my feet?" Jesus answered, "You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand." Peter said to him, "You will never wash my feet." Jesus answered, "Unless I wash you, you have no share with me." Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head!" Jesus said to him, "One who has bathed does not need to wash, except for the feet, but is entirely clean. And you are clean, though not all of you." For he knew who was to betray him; for this reason he said, "Not all of you are clean." After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord-- and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Very truly, I tell you, servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them. If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.

John 13:31b-35 Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

The word Maundy is derived from the ancient French and it means a new commandment. And in our scripture reading today we receive this new commandment that shapes our abundant life in Christ that we celebrate on Easter morning. This new commandment is none other than love one another, just as Jesus has loved us. And the example of Jesus’ footwashing gives form to that love. For when Jesus’ washes the feet of his disciples he defies worldly assumptions of love rooted in false notions of power.

After all our Lord and Savior is the one that we glorify with Hosanna’s as he entered Jerusalem on a donkey. This teacher, this master, is one that bows down and washes the feet of his disciples, and in doing so demonstrates that love is both a giving and a receiving, an action of humbling self-emptying that invites others to empty so that they too may receive and share God’s greatest gift of all…love. It is this love that will empower us to follow Jesus to the cross and to be present at the empty tomb on Sunday. All so that we may receive God’s cleansing love for us and share it with others.

The cleansing act of footwashing, humanizes Peter and the disciples. Peter and the disciples may have bathed that day, but they were covered in sin. They needed to be made holy, to be cleansed of their sins, so that they could know the love of God in Christ for them.

Jesus in washing their feet emptied himself so that the disciples could be made clean, so that they could receive God’s love for them. But it was not just a gift given to be hoarded by the disciples. For the ultimate meaning of being made human, of being cleansed and transformed into holiness, is that God’s love restores and reconciles us with the other. To be fully human is to love others as God in Christ loves us. It is to be connected with each other in a way that both simultaneously empties of sin and fills us with God’s love that humanizes the other.

Think of all the ways that we dehumanize each other, both in word and action. We use sharp words, we lie, we ignore, we judge, we condemn, we strip people of power, we beat them, imprison them, we kill them. We treat others as disposable. We make them into something not someone that can be easily discarded. We treat them as animals rather than as humans created in the image of God. In all of these actions we are washing our hands of others, just as Pilate washed his hands of Jesus.

Pilate, motivated not by love but by fear, dehumanizes Jesus. In John 19 we read that Pilate: has Jesus flogged, places a crown of thorns on his head, dresses Jesus in a purple robe to mock him as the king of Jews, allows Jesus to be struck in the face, ridicules him to the mob and then ultimately hands him over to the mob for crucifixion. All are ways Pilate, washes his hands of Jesus.

Joel Marcus writes, “It is precisely this sort of dehumanization that Jesus experienced on the cross – for our benefit. He was flushed away in the ancient Roman sewage disposal system….” Jesus truly becomes as Psalm 22 prophesies “a worm, not human” Paul in Galatians tells us that Christ became a curse for us. In 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “God made him, who did not know sin, to become sin, in order that we might become the righteousness of God in him. “Paul does not say that Christ became a cursed person but that he became a curse; he does not say that God turned him into a sinful human being, but that he turned him into sin. Christ becomes a thing for us – a bad thing.

When we feel, therefore, that the negative opinion of other people, or their indifference, or our own failings have robbed us of our most precious possession, our image of ourselves as worthwhile human beings, we are not undergoing an experience that is alien to Christ. And it is precisely in this ability to identify ourselves with Jesus, or rather in his self- identification with our dehumanized state, that our humanity is returned to us.
Christ becomes sin, so that we become the righteousness of God in him; Jesus through his cleansing both in his life and in his death gives us the ability to be fully human.

Pilate’s washing of his hands of Jesus is in sharp contrast to Jesus’ actions at the last supper when he washes the feet of his disciples. Jesus does not wash his hands of the disciples. Rather he washes them so that they may receive His love and His promise for their lives, so that they may go out and share Jesus’ life giving promise with others. And in doing so, Jesus sets in motion the life giving redemption of the world, one soul at a time. You see when Jesus humanizes us, he gives us a wholeness that is not just an individual wholeness, but a wholeness that is experienced as connectedness with others. This is the nature of his love for us, it is meant to restore and reconcile us with others, that is how we experience love.

There is a small town in France, called Le Chambon that I believe demonstrated Jesus’ footwashing during World War II. The villagers, mostly Christian farmers living in the mountain town, were isolated from the dehumanizing reign of Nazi Germany. They were not aware of the extent that Hitler and his men went to dehumanize whole groups of people, by placing them in ghettoes, by herding them on trains to extermination camps, by stripping them bare and ordering them to dig their own graves and then shooting them or gassing them. All these actions meant to strip people of their humanity and make them into things. Pilate and his dehumanizing ways were alive and well in the Nazi regime.

The villagers of Le Chambon were aware however, that they had been ordered by the occupying government not to take in Jews, under penalty of death. When Jews began to show up in their town and on their doorsteps, the Christians of Le Chambon decided to ignore their government’s orders and they took the Jews in at great possible risk to their own safety as well as the safety of their families.

When interviewed many years later why they did it, many shrugged and said that it made sense to do it. That they did not see themselves as heroic, that they did not feel any sentimental love for the Jewish strangers that came to their door. They just did it because it was the right thing to do. Many testified though, to a wonderful thing that happened. As they sheltered the Jewish refugees, as they welcomed them into their lives and their homes and their community, relationships formed and bonds of friendship were made that still live on in the ancestors of the villagers. And the blessing received was that many during that time and even to this day encountered and still encounter the risen Christ through the relationships formed. The actions of the villagers of Le Chambon, rooted in Christ’s self-emptying love, transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, into friends and neighbors.

No where is this more evident than when we come together as a community to share communion. Long ago, after Jesus self-emptied himself and cleansed the disciples, he was betrayed by one of them, Judas, who set in motion the dehumanization of Jesus. As Christians we come to the table repenting of our actions and words and beliefs that have dehumanized others, and we seek the wholeness that comes from the transforming power of the Holy Spirit to make us one with God and one with each other.

The meal we share is life changing. It is restorative. It is a place where we encounter Christ risen through our relationships with each other.

As Methodists we share our table with the other, with the stranger, with anyone who genuinely seeks this cleansing in Christ that brings wholeness and oneness with others, and who repents of that which dehumanizes the other.

No where is Christ’s example made plainer, than when we approach the table, with outstretched hands: our hands symbolizing our willingness to be cleansed, to be emptied of all that is not Christ like, and our eagerness to receive all the promises of our Lord and Savior. But often another thing happens when we receive communion. For one moment in time, the person sharing the bread and the cup, and the person receiving it, exchange a glance.

And in that naked moment, when eyes meet, we know the dehumanized Christ on the cross, humanizes us all as a community into the loving purposes of God. At that moment, our humanity becomes cleansed of all that is sinful, all that is death, all that is evil, as we are washed in the body and blood of Christ and transformed anew into someone that is more than just a one, more than stranger encountering stranger. When we give and receive the bread and the cup we are now one of many joined in love.

It is at that moment that we know God’s love for us and we know that we are changed in God’s cleansing blood.

It is at that moment that we know that we truly are Easter people, prepared to live Christ’s new commandment and share the loving promises of God in Christ with others.

We are prepared to empty ourselves and to follow Christ all the way to the cross on Friday, through the darkness of Saturday, onward into the dawning light of Sunday, where we will encounter the empty tomb and will know the joy and peace that our Lord and Savior has risen, and that we now have been given his cross to take up and share with a dehumanized world in need of God’s reconciling love.

Too Much Not to Share

Justo Gonzalez in his book Manana states: “Spirituality is first of all living in the gospel-making faith the foundation for life. And it is also living out the gospel-making faith the foundation of actions and structure…The early church is spiritual not because it spends all its time in prayer and meditation but because it is a church seeking to live out of the future that the Spirit makes present…It is future oriented. It is life lived out of an expectation, out of hope and a goal. And that goal is the coming Reign of God. To have the Spirit is to have a foot up on the stirrup of the eschatological future and to live now as those who expect a new reality, the coming of the Reign of God.”

The Methodists I have met on two visits to Cuba amazed me by their depth of spirituality, where their actions reflected that they are living in the future Kingdom of God. Their actions do not make sense in the present day of Castro’s Cuba nor do they make sense in the current day reality of the United States. However, they do make sense in the context that with Christ the Kingdom of God has come. Even though this Kingdom has not come in full glory, we are now participants with Christ in the building of God’s kingdom through the Holy Spirit.

In Cuba, I met a young missionary named Edward. Edward bicycles 37 kilometers twice a week to a village in order to share the gospel. Edward shared his testimony with us. He had been an angry teenager, who felt he had no future in Castro’s Cuba, so he turned to alcohol and women for comfort. This made sense to Edward in the reality of present day Cuba, where people struggle for a limited piece of the future. Then, Christ touched his heart and he was born again into a new being. This new being was able to shed the old and begin to live in the reality of not Castro’s Cuba but the reality of God’s kingdom. His bicycling 37 kilometers did not make him spiritual, instead his living in the reality of God’s kingdom where this effort makes sense is the key to Edward’s spirituality. Edward’s actions are consistent with his beliefs. Another missionary, a woman, was a nurse. Although not a highly paid position in Cuba, it is still a good career. However, this nurse gave up her career to become a missionary. She now lives in a small house in a
very poor neighborhood. She uses her house for a church. Her actions only make sense when they are viewed as part of the building of God’s future kingdom in the present.

Gonzalez writes, “So long as we proclaim the Reign but make little effort to speak even a few words of ‘Reignese’ our witness will hardly be credible. If, by the power of the Holy
Spirit, we are a pilgrim people looking forward to the coming Reign of God, we had better begin practicing the love of that Reign – we had better begin organizing our lives according to the new order that we know is coming and that we proclaim.”
The Cuban Methodists are spiritual because they have organized their lives according to the new order. What may be considered a great sacrifice in our reality takes on new meaning in the Kingdom. Luke in Acts 4:31-35 states: “After this prayer, the building where they were meeting shook, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. And they preached God’s message with boldness. All the believers were of one heart and mind, and they felt that what they owned was not their own; they shared everything they had. And the apostles gave powerful witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God’s great favor was upon them all. There was no poverty among them, because people who owned land and houses sold them and brought the money to the apostles for those in need.”

But why would those who received the Holy Spirit, sell everything? Does this make sense in our reality? Not in present day Cuba or the United States, but it does in the reality of the Kingdom of God. The Cuban Methodists never bragged about their work to us. They honestly and forthrightly told us of their work. To them, what they were doing made sense. They shared all they had with others, as if they had more than an abundance of goods. In many of the villages that we visited, converts opened their homes so that the gospel could be shared in their village. These homes were often very small, but the little space they had they shared with others. Where I saw too little to share, they saw too much not to share.

There was nothing sacrificial aboutworking or sharing. Their actions reflected that the future has arrived in the present, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Jurgen Moltmann writes in The Source of Life, “There is enough for everyone! That is the incredible message of the story. We are not being told some historical tale about the golden age of the first Christians long ago. This is the disclosure of real, possible ways of living for us today. We can have this experience ourselves. The experience of the community of the Holy Spirit.”

Spirituality has nothing to do with how much we pray or fast or worship. Spirituality has everything to do with the Spirit, who empowers us to live out a life that is consistent with the message that with Christ, God’s future kingdom has come to the present. The faith of the Cuban Methodists is spiritual but it is also orthopathic in nature. We are all familiar with orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right practice). In fact in the United States we probably excel at these. However, Wesley also talked about orthopathy (right feelings/experience) as part of our faith response.

Theodore Runyon, in his book, The New Creation, comments on Wesley’s theology, “Creation is to be restored and perfected. God is the God who declares, ‘Behold I make all things new.’ The transformation of human lives is the foretaste of that which is to come. He is already renewing the face of the earth. Our justification, regeneration and sanctification link us therefore to this divine work of cosmic transformation…In orthopathic faith our experience is incorporated into the unfolding history of salvation and we are given a goal and direction that includes both personal renewal and a participation in the first fruits of the kingdom.”

With the goal and direction that comes from their orthopathic faith, Cuban Methodists claim the power of their new lives in Christ. “So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God’s very own children, adopted into his family-calling him ‘Father, dear Father.’ For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God’s children.” ( Romans 8:15-16).

There is a boldness in the Cuban Methodist preaching, in their singing, in their praying and in their witnessing. When Omar witnessed to a non-believer in the village of San Pablo and asked him if he wanted to accept Christ in his life, there was boldness. When we prayed for healing for a mentally ill man in the Amigo Ven a Cristo house church there was no timidity. When Ernesto, Danilo or Victor preached with conviction and power, it was not a pastoral power, but a power that comes from God. All of us in Cuba were claiming our authority in God, through the Holy Spirit. What we experienced was not only the potential but the reality of the new creation. The Cubans are not going to settle for heaven when they die, they are claiming it for themselves now and in the present.

Orthopathic faith, however, must also incorporate orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Runyon building on Wesley comments, “Orthopathic faith is thus the kind of faith relationship that is open to reason and willing to be corrected and reshaped in its self-understanding by normative experience and the counsel of the community of faith.”

The Cuban Methodist church has had to struggle with this issue as it reshaped itself during the Castro years. Many Cubans either have grown up with no religious background or in the Santeria faith. If just left to experience their new faith in Christ, Cuban Christianity might have strayed into a synchretic form of religion. However, the Cuban Methodist church has been able to answer this challenge by structuring the church and its practices after the primitive church and John Wesley’s subsequent model.

Amazing Grace - Empowerment or Cultural Artifact?

Wintley Phipp’s video at first glance is emotionally charged and dramatic. However, his performance which includes a discussion of Negro spirituals and John Newton’s Amazing Grace demonstrates the de-politicization of a marginal cultural practice. Modern social scientists and folklorists “borrow” a political marginal practice from the original producer, and classify and tame it into an authentic sensibility that crosses cultural spheres. The cultural practice becomes a cultural artifact that can be marketed to the dominant culture. The taming begins with the assumption that the noise made by slaves was “spiritual” (and by this I mean Christian spiritual not indigenous spiritual) rather than political or social or a mixture of any of the three. This erases any meaning that the producers themselves had ascribed to the music. It also erases the cultural practices that might have shaped the meaning, for example slave owners forcing their slaves to sing an upbeat tune while working. While the religious and abolitionist causes spiritualizing black noise helps to politically challenge society’s then existing mores on the issue of whether slaves have souls, the move is one that brings the dialogue into the modern sphere. The consequence is that the modern propensity for scientific classification makes the political challenge vulnerable to social scientific classification and its propensity to ascribe what is the acceptable aesthetic. This classification and aestheticism robs cultural practices of their political efficacy and reifies them into cultural artifacts. The negro spiritual, no longer occupies the margins where it once had political power, but has been centralized into an ideal westernized black expression that can be produced separate from the realities of the black community itself. This move robs the black community of politically determining what it means to have a black soul in a modern westernized context because any cultural production is measured against the culturally acceptable artifact, which is now produced under the watchful eyes of the dominant white culture. Phipps demonstrates the taming or confining of the political meaning of the cultural practice of black noise when he points out that all Negro spirituals could be played on the black keys. Phipps wants to ascribe a hidden significance to this. Perhaps as abolitionists began to assemble Negro spirituals for their own grievances, it was important to take the noises they heard and order them to the black keys as symbolic. Given that slaves did not have access to piano, by ordering the noise to the black keys of the piano, a whole range of black noise was ignored. Phipps by humming the noises to the tune of Amazing Grace ignores the production of the Negro Spiritual into a formal and westernized musical construct. In doing so, it is aesthetically pleasing as well as understandable to his predominately white crowd. Here we have again the notion that the authentic black soul is one that produces a westernized aesthetic sound recognizable and acceptable to whites. The video shows the consequence. The idealized negro spiritual, robbed of its political power to challenge and speak to current racial issues, becomes a romanticized performance that leaves the audience in tears. Tears and pathos however are dangerous because now this white audience has a firm picture in their mind of the ideal black man, rooted in a sentimentalized version of a black slave, noble and deeply spiritual, quietly enduring the violence of slavery. This idealized black soul becomes for the audience the power that transformed John Newton and abolished slavery. But in reality this ideal black soul has only limited political agency, because his or her expression is kept centralized so as not to be too disruptive of the status quo. Removed from the margins, what does this ideal black man have to do with our current racial issues? How might this depiction reify the white audience’s reaction to other productions of black political agency? Amazingly the ideal black soul seems to become a border that demarcates centralized acceptability and marginalizes radicalism.

Existentialism

A man thrown into the sea can only thrash about. He may discover by his very thrashing that he supports himself. Atheistic existentialism inclines to that opinion. Or his thrashing arms may hit upon some more substantial hope outside himself. Metaphysical and theistic existentialism follows this suggestion.

Carl Michalson, What is Existentialism

Mustard Seed Kingdom

In Mark’s gospel the crucifixion of Christ comes with the crowd’s loud and frantic shouts of “Crucify him!” And Jesus’ despairing cry of "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Strangely, Mark tells us immediately following Jesus’ death that the centurion who witnesses Jesus’ death says, "Truly this man was the Son of God!" The witness of the world begun anew does not come with the triumphant fanfare of trumpets. The centurion seems humbled and with all his implied armor vulnerable. It does not come with crowds. Rather, the kingdom of God comes in the wonderment of a single centurion facing the crucified Christ. The centurion’s simple statement gives evidence that at the moment of Jesus’ death the light extinguished is not permanently gone. New life has begun. The kingdom of God is at hand. At the very point of Jesus’ death on the cross, comes life for all creation. But not exactly as we would have pictured it happening and this is the mystery. In the midst of the chaos and noise of evil, God’s creative force brings new life.

Mark’s gospel is all about this mystery of life hidden in death and revealed only slowly. It is about the hidden nature of the kingdom of God and its slow but ongoing revelation in the midst of a broken world still dominated but no longer ruled by evil.

When Jesus begins his teaching, he has already begun his ministry…In Mark, there are different reactions to Jesus’ ministry. There are crowds that continue to get bigger and bigger.

All this happens in Mark before we get the teachings of Jesus in chapter 4. His first parable is one that is probably familiar to you. It is the parable of the sower of the seeds….. It is important for us to take two themes from this parable because they will shed light on our reading for today. First, Jesus uses the seed as a metaphor for his teaching, or the “word”. The seed is Jesus’ message recounted in Chapter 1 v. 15, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel." The second point is Jesus gives three responses to the word that are adverse and only one that is a positive response. The responses are not sequential either, they occur at the same time.

What follows Jesus’ public parable are two other seed parables that he recounts to his disciples in private. Contrasted to the first seed parable, these parables only have seeds that grow. These parables demonstrate how the positive response to the word happens and what it looks like.

In the first parable, a sower plants the seed. This sower is both Jesus, the disciples and even us today. What is important in this parable is not the sower, but the seed itself and how it grows. Mark 4:26-27 Notice that the man’s only direct action is to sow the seed. After sowing the seed, he sleeps and rises only to find that seed has grown. The man does not know how the seed grows; it is a mystery to the man and to us as well.

Jesus explains this mystery in Mark 4:28 “The earth produces of itself” is a reference to God’s creative power that is a mystery to humankind. Through Mark’s use of imagery we hear the words of Isaiah in chapter 55, verses 8-11

When we share the word, we sow a seed. We are only the planters of the word. We carry no authority of our own; we hold no life giving power. When we preach the word, it is all God working creatively to accomplish the purposes of God in revealing the mystery of the kingdom of God

The second parable that Jesus recounts privately to the disciples is the Mustard seed parable...

In this parable, Jesus turns from the how the hiddenness of the kingdom of God is revealed to the contrast between the relative smallness of the preached word symbolized by the mustard seed to the greatness of the kingdom of God, which is likened to the mustard plant. The contrast is key to explaining the mystery of the kingdom of God, which comes in weakness and in power. Power and greatness is hidden in the smallness and insignificance of the mustard seed.

To the world, the word may be small and insignificant. To the world, the word in its vulnerability and weakness cannot defeat the powers of evil. To the world, God’s kingdom will only come in victory with loud fanfare. To the world, refuge will come in the shade of trees like the great cedar that lifts to the sky. Interestingly Mark avoids the imagery of the cedar tree and sticks with a mustard shrub with large branches. It is hard for us to imagine a mustard shrub being great or large. It is not so hard for us to imagine the cedar tree being great and tall, reaching to the sky. But the height of the cedar tree is problematic. If we turn to Daniel chapter 4, verses 20-24, we can listen to Daniel’s interpretation of King Neb’s dream.

We like the shade of that which is mighty and great. We like big and find our own greatness and security in the shade of that which is bigger than us. Think about it. From the tallest buildings, to the biggest SUV’s, from homes with five bathrooms, to megachurches, from double sized burgers, to people who in general are 15 pounds heavier than they used to be, from to wealth to average work weeks of 60 hours, from wide screen tvs to shopping malls the size of a town; from a Bush who sees himself as mighty cedar tree, protector of the free world to bigger bombs and four hundred mile long walls to keep us in and others out. We seem to be a culture consumed with size, and not just any size. We have adopted the Texan motto, Bigger is better. But does bigger, support life?

Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade." From smallness comes greatness but in a way that we probably do not expect. …….hiking in CA….We can see all too easily how rising to the heights of God is often mistaken for being God. Remember the Lord’s warning in Isaiah 55: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

In comparison, the mighty mustard shrub, even in its greatness and ability to sustain, remains vulnerable and lowly. The mustard shrub can only spread outward and not upward. As the mustard shrub branches spread outwards so the revelation of the kingdom of God spreads through out the land, touching and bringing refuge to most lowliest of the lows.

The mystery of the kingdom of God, therefore, is not just that Jesus chooses the mustard shrub over a cedar or redwood tree to represent it, but that even the mustard shrub begins as a small seed. Jesus, in his teaching, reveals that the mystery of the kingdom of God is that its power is revealed in its weakness. The tiny mustard seed holds the promise of the greatness of the kingdom of God. When we preach the word, the world may ignore us, may scorn us, may laugh at us, and may humor us. However, when we preach the word, God’s creative powers are bringing life out of death. God’s creative powers are vanquishing the evil represented by the tall tree that would be God and replacing it with the greatness of the mustard plant, where life flourishes in the shade of its lowly branches.

My father raised me to be “great” and as I entered into ministry I expected great things from myself, however, I had a problem. This past year has been a personal torment for me as I try to deal with my lack of “greatness”. Until a couple of days ago, this was still a big struggle for me. However, what I realize now, I never understood the meaning of “greatness”. I was wrapped up in the world’s view of “greatness” and in my busyness; I had totally missed the real meaning of “great”. I had substituted life for death, evil for good, and left no room for God’s creative power to renew me. I was not living in the kingdom of God but in a kingdom that I had partially constructed myself. Even when my mother gave me the mustard seed charm, I still did not understand. I still did not see that living in the time of post-Easter, means that the word as proclaimed by Jesus, the disciples and all the preachers over the centuries is the ongoing revelation of the kingdom of God’s greatness. My responsibility is to share this word in a world, to sow the seed. I am not responsible for the success of my preaching or any other aspect of my ministry. It is up to God to create new life from the seed sown and in so doing reveal the mystery of the kingdom of God.

“Greatness” is not created by hard work. “Greatness” is not found in the tall cedar trees that reach to the sky. To be great is to be the smallest mustard seed that God miraculously changes into the mustard shrub. To be “great” is to be the centurion, standing at the foot of the cross, saying, “"Truly this man was the Son of God!"