Pentecost 20C -- got faith?

The point -- if there was a point of this sermon (notes below) was that the miracle done by faith is NOT the miracle of the spontaneously supernaturally uprooted mulberry tree.  The miracle is not moving the mulberry tree but moving the disciple[s].  The folks seemed to be happy with that -- and then we had a great potluck lunch.  There were little kids and even a three week old baby to cuddle...

Pentecost 20, preached at  St Swithin’s in the Swamp, October 6, 2013.

I speak with you this morning in the presence of God.  AMEN.

All summer and into the fall we have been reading in the gospel of Luke; and if we were going to put a title on what we’ve been reading, it might well be, “Things we wish Jesus hadn’t said.”  More formally, we might call them “The Hard Sayings…” – not necessarily hard in the sense tht we don’t understand what he means – sometimes hard in the sense that we are afraid we DO understand what he means, and we’re not sure we like it.  At the very least, Jesus upsets the disciples’ expectations, and our expectations as well. //a signal to pay attention//

This morning’s reading from the gospel is one of these passages.  Look with me for a few minutes at what happens.  The disciples ask to be given more faith.  What a natural, innocent, harmless, blameless request – the kind of thing one might well say in hard or challenging circumstances//lamentations//. 

But how does Jesus respond – does he say, “Why, sure, I thought you’d never ask” and comply with this Perfectly Reasonable Request?  Not a bit of it.  He is quite rude about their request, in fact.  He tells them they don’t have any faith at all (you can almost hear the “Huh”) and then he says something quite wild about a mulberry tree, and wraps up with a gratuitous scolding about something else entirely.

What on earth is going on here?  Something seems to have been wrong with the request!  1. What did they really want? 2. And why didn’t Jesus give it to them?

1.    He’s just told them about the obligation to forgive – and it’s a hard one.  So before they start in forgiving, they say, “if you give us enough faith, we’ll do it” – or, more likely, “if you don’t give us more faith, we’re not even going to try.”  “Increase our faith” turns out to mean, “give us more strength, more power ~~ make this task easier ~~ and then we’ll do it.”  “FAITH” is a kind of magic, a kind of superpower, that will keep the life of a disciple from costing us anything, including failure.

2.   And Jesus doesn’t give it to them; in fact he mocks their desire to do what they – and we – must do by supernatural means.  God does not do for us what we can do for ourselves.  That mulberry tree is there to demonstrate this.  If we want that mulberry tree flung into the sea, we can manage it without divine intervention, without extraordinary spiritual power… //lady evangelist story about new Christians wanting spiritual power – wouldn’t exercise what they already had//

3.   The word “exercise” takes us deeper into Jesus’ program here.  The disciples do need more faith (and often, so do we); and faith is a gift from God; but it is a gift like the other gifts we are given, such as a talent for music, or a capacity for athletic accomplishment.  None of these gifts comes as a wrapped-up, ribbon-tied accomplishment – every such gift is a gift of “potential” – not the finished expertise, or virtue, but something like “a kit” – some assembly is required; some exercise is required; some practice is required )Carnegie Hall story). Such gifts  never mere luxuries or mere ornaments, always given in response to need – courage, patience, only present where they are needed (in great fear, in great frustration)…  They don’t “make things easy” – they make us willing to confront what is hard.

4.   When we want to have the spiritual gift, such as faith, in its perfect form before we undertake the tasks that are set before us, we get the process backwards.  We have been given enough faith to start to be obedient in some small things – and by our obedience we find a) the limits of our faith[fulness] and b) the faithfulness of God toward us c)the increase in faith that we have desired – not in our own spiritual “easiness,” but in our capacity to be a blessing to other people, to our community, and to our world…

 

Thing One and Thing Two

In my most recent post I mentioned the Granddaughters (Thing One and Thing Two) and then thought, GOOD HEAVENS, it's time for up to date pictures.  So here they are: Annie at 19 months (nearly), and Lena at 10 months (just barely)... What's that zinger about "the lines have fallen unto me in very pleasant places?"  Yes.  And among very lovely creatures, too.

Friday Five (okay, okay...)

3dogmom has given us this prompt, for this week's Friday Five:
I’ve just returned from an extended road trip, a portion of which included travel through ancestral homelands. While I was gone our son’s first child, Hunter, was born, making me mindful of the gift that our roots can offer to us as we venture through life.  That juxtaposition inspires today’s Friday Five.
At a baby shower honoring Hunter guests filled out a card full of hopes and wishes for his life. Thinking about whatever new life may be touching yours (the birth of a child, a marriage, a new call…), choose five wishes from the following and do the same. (For instance, I wrote for Hunter, “I hope you laugh at your grandfather’s jokes.)
I hope you: learn, grow, remember, laugh, get, follow, aren’t afraid, love, respect, try to, never forget, become, experience.
Bonus: what hopes did someone in your life offer to you that have stayed with and inspired you?
Let us know in the comments if you play. You can leave a link old school if you want to be fancy, or you can simply cut and paste the URL, because that works on WordPress.

My wishes and hopes are for Thing One and Thing Two (the 2012 vintage granddaughters) -- but how do I keep it down to five? All right, here goes.

I hope you learn and go on learning as long as you live.
I hope you laugh whenever you can (and only cry when you must).
I hope you respect yourselves, and each other (and if there's any left over for Grandma that would be all right too).
I hope you never forget that you are tremendously loved, and tremendously loveable (because your RevGalBlogAunties can tell you, those are SUPERPOWERS).
I hope you aren't afraid of the world or the people in it.

There.  That's about it!
And I love you very much.

Back again...

Don't look now, but I'm blogging again.  Up at 5, blanched and peeled peaches (big BC freestone-type -- the stones may be "free" but oh boy, the peel wasn't) and put together a Dutch oven full of ingredients and made six pint jars of Peach and Raisin Chutney.  The jars all sealed.  There was a spoonful left over for me to enjoy with my lunch.  Jars are cooling on a rack in the kitchen.  Contentment.

I bought a half-case (allegedly, 10 pounds, but I think the fruit merchant was a bit generous in his measures) while I was at the downtown market in Prairie Metropolis on Saturday.  A full case was beyond me, I knew, in part because I was coming and going by bus.  As it was, I "blessed" the ones I had purchased before I finished wrastling them home.  I've eaten several "in the hand" -- and there's enough left still for at least a generous peach pie and something else, not sure what.

I'm in the "crack" between two ministerial assignments -- finished my happy summer stint with the parishioners in Intensely Orange -- Sundays only, one service, a 400 km round-trip drive through prime agricultural country as well as a small national park, so I had at least a glimpse of Bison bison athabascae  once a week -- and on the last Sunday at different points along the way I saw FIVE moose -- and at least three vast flocks of snow geese resting and fuelling up for migration among the stubble.  I'd seen snow geese before, back East on the St. Lawrence, but never on the western flyway. 

Pretty rich stubble this season too.  My summer congregation were, um, agriculturalists, and as we got on from August into September they began to smile very, very cautiously and mutter, "she...doesn't look too bad, this year..."  This unemphatic perspective translates into newspaper headlines about "Best Yields EVER"... wheat, barley, and canola...   I kept saying to myself, "There IS corn in Egypt yet..."  Must be irretrievably carnal-minded, I guess, but nothing improves a vista like the visible presence of (potential) GRUB spread over it.

So now it's time to get dug into St. Leroy's, here in town, half-time, while their Rector has parental leave.  The trick will be giving an honest half-time's worth of work AND NO MORE.  Still juggling that in my own head.  I'll see what the lay leadership thinks about priorities and necessities.

All this--and reading, and reading, and reading.  Working on understanding my OWN priorities and necessities.  I seem to have been doing that for a very very long time.

Sermon time again, with some very obtuse angles among the lections.

Isaiah here turns to a second “mode” of announcing God’s message to the people of Israel/holding up a mirror to the people of Israel (two-part process).  Here he chooses to sing them a kind of parody of a grape-harvest song.  You know the sorts of hymns we sing at Thanksgiving, “Bringing in the Sheaves” – what if we wrote a hymn about a harvest that failed?  What a shock it would be.  This is what Isaiah gives us here – the harvest God planned and planted for has failed.  He planted good stuff (very fancy grapes indeed) – he planned and planted for justice, and righteousness, “peace and plenty” – and what he has found instead are bloodshed and wailing and crying – very sour little mean grapes indeed.  So what happens now?  What will God do when his vineyard betrays him, lets him down, disappoints him? What is the plan now?

We hear that plan – and we hear it again from a different angle in the Psalm – now we hear the cry OF the spoiled vineyard, a cry for relief and repair and restoration.

I suggest to you that the two readings are like what we see with our two eyes – now we have something like 3-D view of the problem; we cry out for help for our own harm; and the harm that we have done or allowed to happen also cries out for help – for healing and repair.  We have met the enemy as Pogo said, and he is us – we are in trouble and we ARE trouble.  So mending the vineyard is not going to be a swift or simple business…messy, and painful, and a long chain of catastrophes and grief.

Now the writer of Hebrews takes a different approach (a thematic approach) to what we call “the history of salvation” – his attention is on the common element of faith/fulness in the characters of this history (far more than are mentioned here but so it is)… and therefore he focuses more on the activity of those who are in and of the vineyard, the people of Israel, those who have had faith in God.  We get a summary of the long struggle with the vineyard, but now we consider people, biographies, careers.  And the paradox of their struggle to bear good fruit, not to be obliterated by (all that preys upon the vineyard) is not resolved.  The job isn’t finished, in their lifetimes. 

Now all the way along, I think we are nudged to think, as we are reading, or hearing, “Oh this is about us.  This must mean us.”  And that can be pretty presumptuous, but there is a sense in which it is one of the right responses to Scripture.  Here in many ways we do see a predicament we recognize…we long for happy endings.  We want to see the problem solved, the answers complete, the wounds healed, the battles won, the treasure found…(maybe especially difficult in our time because we have been given lots of drill in being discontented)…and we don’t see that complete resolution (even though there are moments of great joy and great satisfaction).

And yet, says the writer of Hebrews, the promise remains, and remains trustworthy; the vineyard plan was, and remains, the good plain, the “best idea ever.” 

And the question comes back – how do we LIVE in the spoiled vineyard—we live in it in FAITH.  That means living among witnesses – all these characters who are our companions in faith – and our models of faith – and often our reasons to have faith.  In their company, we persevere.  We run our race…I think the image here is of something like a rely race, we carry forward what we have been given, without expecting tht we’re the “last leg,” that we’re going to make it all the way to the tape – what we have to do is take the good news of the kingdom of God, the promise from those who gave it to us, and pass it along; wht we’re not allowed to do is to head off cross-country, or decide to do shot-put instead, or quit.  This relay is like the labyrinth (ask the question????) – not a maze – but a confusing course where the only failure is to stop running, to stop walking, to stop trying to bring about what we will not live to see (olives)…

Our work is repairing the vineyard – but not alone, not all on our own – and therefore it is noisy, and divisive, and full of conflict.  That conflict, that setting us at odds with each other, is not the purpose of Jesus’ coming, but the inevitable result…how we respond to his coming IS judgement, not on him but on us…prayer of poor/rich in contrast.  And the conflicts that tear us are the human response to the nearness of the kingdom and the power of the promise, the vision of the kingdom…portents – blips on the radar – that are reasons to be more faithful, more courageous, more gentle, more hopeful…

Most of the time, thank you,

I may get to the Friday Five later on.  For now, taking a brief break from the battle with domestic ENTROPY and chaos-come-again.

Spurred by RAGE and weariness in wet-vacuuming something like 300 litres of rainwater out of my permeable basement this week -- recognizing that chore would at least be made much easier if it weren't so overfull of STUFF -- I have put THAT DAMN BASEMENT in a permanent position at the top of the daily to-do list.

Applying the principle of DO THE WORST FIRST...and the 90-MINUTE MAX principle...and any other of the current buzzwords that seem applicable.

In broad general terms.  I have work-space[s].  And I have storage space[s].  And storage keeps encroaching upon and taking over work-space.  Until there is nothing but storage, and I am walking sideways through it.  

So just at present I am fighting the Battle of Jars.  Not on the Plain of Jars ("megalithic archaeological landscape in Laos" thank you, Wikipersons), but in the Basement of Jars.  Although come to think of it, "megalithic archaeological landscape" is not altogether unfitting...

By "jars," of course, I mean CANNING JARS.  ("When I say religion, I mean the Christian religion..." etc.)  Or Mason jars.  Or whatever you call them in your tradition.

There are two kinds of people in this world, including in Canada, and they are those who know what a Mason jar is, and those who do not.  And between them there is a great gulf fixed, take it from me.

But there are also Usefully Huge jars which formerly contained mayo or peanut butter or pickles.  And are just too...imposingly JAR...to throw out.  And there are other commercial jars that are Efficiently Tall and Slim for storing bit of things in the fridge (speaking of megalithic archaeological landscapes).

And there are those Evil Devious jars formerly full of purchased pasta sauce, which despite their one-piece lids are, in fact, actual Mason jars complete with cute designs in the glass and volume-markers up the side.

I don't want to talk about the baby-food jars.  I just don't.

I think my problem is that when my conscience was in a particularly unset state, perhaps, somebody came and left a big fat footprint in it, in the shape of a comment about how wasteful and cavalier 20th century North Americans are with CONTAINERS.  The idea being that if we had had to gnaw that peanut butter jar, and its lid, out of the primal soapstone with our own front teeth, we wouldn't be tossing it into the landfill with a blithe tra la la, the way we do.  So I have a COMPUNCTION, nasty thing, whenever I do.

In spite of all this dithering and casuistry, I have accumulated one Big Blue Bag of glassware and lids for the recycle pickup next week.  So Tether's End will be roomier by that much volume, at least.

back at it...

Annie's breakfast face...

"Dear Grandma, please make more yogurt.  Thank you."