Thirsty

Preached March 27, 2011 at St. Michael and All Angels, Portland OR

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
Psalm 95

Dear God,
Give us the courage to ask you for the water that springs from the rock of our salvation, your beloved and our hope, Jesus.
Amen



One of my most cherished possessions is a picture I found one day at the goodwill bins under broken vacuum cleaners and shattered Christmas decorations. It cost $1.14, weighing somewhat less than a pound. It is a small framed picture of a shih-tzu, in a garden of yellow flowers with a bow on his head. The caption reads: ALWAYS BE READY TO MEET JESUS.

If someday I am a person with all of her belongings in a shopping cart, this will be one of them.

I have spent more time than I should be willing to admit in public meditating on this image.

In the south the phase “being ready to meet Jesus” suggests impending death, such signs are posted at dangerous curves in the road, or alongside steep drop-offs. So sometimes, I imagine that this picture means that nothing is safe in this world and that even small dogs with bows in their hair could be the end of us. Am I ready to die and meet Jesus?

Other times I think the picture means that God comes to us in so many surprising ways that I should never stop seeking the face of the Holy in everyone I meet. Even silky-coated cat-sized dogs can be glimpses of God. We just never know when we are going to meet Jesus.

The woman going to the well in the noonday sun didn’t know any of these clichés. She was just going to get some water.

Every day she comes to this well. Every day she fills her water jug and goes home, and every day she wakes up thirsty, and goes to bed thirsty. The longings in her heart are so deep a thirst that she barely notices anymore.

She is terrified of being alone, and yet at least five of the men she has loved have left her. She has tried to quench her thirst in the arms of love or at least companionship.
Doesn’t she know that the dry places in her heart can’t be watered that way?

Do we know that?

Are we not the same as the woman at the well?

Some of us seek to quench our thirst with the waters of information, knowing things others do not know. I have a friend who compulsively watches the news, she is terrified of not knowing what is going on in the world, as if the knowing will keep her safe.

Some of us seek to quench our thirst with the waters of respect. If we can just do everything right, then people will admire us and that dry painful scratch at the back of our dusty throats will be soothed.

Some try to extinguish the dehydration of the soul with literal drink, others in pills or food.

Some seek the waters of pleasure to anesthetize the thirst that keeps us awake at night.

But we are all thirsty.



Thousands of years before a nameless woman goes to the well in the hot noonday sun, the people of Israel were on their way to the promised land from the not-at-all loaded place named the “desert of sin.” Moses had led the people to a place to camp that had no water.
The people were thirsty, their children were thirsty, their animals were thirsty. The people were scared and wondered what would become of them. They begged Moses for water. so Moses, feeling completely overwhelmed by his responsibility turned and complained to God. What should I do? he asked. They want water. I am so tired Lord, how do I give them water?

Then with a smile God said- “follow me, and bring that trusty staff of yours.”

So, God led Moses to a rock and striking it as God told him to do, cool refreshing water streamed out.
Water to satisfy the thirst of parched, scared people.



Thousands of years go by, and one day Jesus is traveling with his friends, and he is tired and he is thirsty. So he stops by a well to rest as the noon sun beats down while they go shopping for food. He is sitting there, when this thirsty woman comes by. Jesus says to her “The water that I will give will become in you a spring of water gushing up to eternal life, you are known by the God who loves you. I see who you are and I love you."

We are a thirsty people. We are a parched and scared people.

Here is the promise: If we drink from the well of being seen and known by the God who loves us, if we sip that living water, we will loose our thirst for the wells of this world. If we can truly taste what love feels like slipping down our dry throats, the wells we have been haunting our whole lives will seem stale, and bitter.

Jesus says “if you knew who I was you could not come so close to me without asking for this.”

So here we are, this close to Jesus.
Are we going to ask him?

Or are we satisfied with the old stagnant water we have been drinking all these years? The waters of money and position, or power and pride, the waters of comfort and complacency.

Or would we like a tall cool glass of love and transparency.

Are we willing to be known?
really known?
are we willing to be loved like that?

Are we willing to reach out to the rock of our salvation and beat on it with the staff of faith and drink the refreshing water of being known? Of being loved?

Can we say “give it to me so I will never have to come back to this well of shame again"


But all our longings will not be quenched by a drink of this living water, it will awaken new longings. We will thirst more and more deeply from that moment on, for justice and truth and love.

A drink of this water will ruin us for all other wells. We will never again be satisfied by half truths, and easy answers. We will not be content with being admired and not known, with being informed and not transformed, with being in positions of power and not compassion.

Once we taste living water we will thirst for it for the rest of our lives.

As Jesus turned the water at the wedding into wine, he turns the living water of himself into the common cup of our life together. The living water of the gospel becomes the rich wine of common life.

Would you drink if you were invited?

you are invited.

If you want to know who this Jesus is, if you are ready to meet Jesus, the tired and thirsty rabbi with eyes like love,

then this is the cup of salvation.

come take a sip-

Dust

Preached at Saint David of Wales March 9, 2011

Joel 2:1-2,12-17
Psalm 103
2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Remember--

You are dust and to dust you shall return.

That is the good news we all came to church today to hear.

With last nights pancakes sitting still heavy in our guts, we came here today to remember that we are dust.

Here we are at Ash Wednesday at the brink of Lent with our toes on the long dusty road to the Cross. We are being invited to walk with Jesus all the way to Jerusalem, and that is hard, because Jerusalem is death, but we are here as a community because we believe the awesome truth that on the other side of that death is a whole new kind of life.

but the only way to get to that life is to go to the foot of the cross, where we will show the world what we are really made of-

Dust

On this Lenten walk with Jesus to Jerusalem we have the chance to come closer to God, to, to try and wrap our minds around the crucifixion and the resurrection. Lent is not an invitation to self improvement, but to intimacy with our creator, the one who loved us into being, who breathed life into the dust of this world and made it holy and awake, living and breathing.

without the breath of God we are only dust.

We are people of dust building houses of dust, working for dust, accumulating dust, eating dust, drinking dust, and pretending its all real.

This life is like a giant monopoly game and no matter how much we accumulate, at the end its all going back in the box and we will be left with nothing but the treasure of love.

Lent is the time to be reconciled to God, if there is anything keeping us from a full and deep relationship with God this is the time to put those things aside. Stop playing the game for six weeks and fall more in love with God who makes all of this dust worth loving.

We are here to receive a public and visible mark on our foreheads and hear the Gospel message :Don’t make a performance of being good, don’t practice our piety before others.

So what do we do about these ashes on our foreheads?

If you are proud that you came here today, if you think anyone is going to be impressed, go wash your forehead as soon as the service is over. Don’t worry it still counts. Consider yourself reminded and move on. If you want to make sure that people know you have fulfilled your religious duty- go wash your face.

On the other hand if you are kind of embarrassed by the thought of going out in the world with a weird dirt smudge on your face, leave it. A little humility will do you good. Its okay, not being clean won’t kill you. Your friends might ask and this is a great chance to tell the truth.

“I am part of a completely mad little community of people who once a year smear ashes on their foreheads and remember that nothing here that we are working for will last and that all our human efforts are in the big picture, dust.”

In the collect we ask for the remission of sins, we aren’t fully cured but we can be in remission.
These ashes take us back to the truth that we are not and never will be perfectly sinless, that there are marks and smudges on us that we ignore all the time.

Its okay to say we are sorry. to the world, to our family, to God.

For too many people repentance is insulting.

Don’t in any way indicate that I’m not perfect, because this edifice of dust that I have constructed is so fragile, that being ok is all that is holding me together.


If we Rest in the love of God and we can realize that nothing we can do can pull us out of God’s love, and like stepping out into the bright sun after years inside we may see things in ourselves that need tending. It doesn’t make us awful people, just people who need to wash our faces.

We need to wash our hearts, clean off our intentions, and give our courage a good scrubbing.

So this one day we can go out with faces to match our insides. We can go out in the world looking like the imperfect people we are, with dirt on our faces.

don't worry

Epiphany 8A 2011
preached February 27, 2011 at Saint David of Wales

Isaiah 49:8-16a
1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Matthew 6:24-34
Psalm 131

Dear God,
Give us the courage to fear nothing but the loss of you, so that no clouds of worry hide the light of your Love.
Amen

Jesus says: Don’t serve two masters then he starts talking about worry.
At first, it seems like Jesus is changing the subject. Does Jesus want us to be total slackers who never do anything? If we didn’t worry about what we were going to eat and what we were going to wear, we would end up naked and hungry in no time.
Doesn’t Jesus know how complicated our lives are?
How can we not worry?
However we are a fractured people suffering from spiritual ADD and we cannot keep our minds off our worries long enough to experience the goodness of the God who has written us on the palms of his hands.

The word that is translated this morning as worry for us means division, He is saying: don’t be divided.

Jesus hasn’t changed the subject at all. Worrying IS serving two masters. Worry keeps you continually focused on ourselves, on our “own” family and our own future.
We need to learn how not to let ourselves be divided between the things of this world and the work of God who has written us on the palms of her hands.

Jesus has been telling us over and over in the Sermon on the Mount this epiphany about the kingdom of God we should place our undivided attention on.

We cannot be joyful and anxious at the same time, we cannot serve God and the money, to try is to be divided, to try is to worry.
If we seek first the kingdom of God there will be no room in our hearts for worry.
God calls us to unity, wholeness and singleness of heart.

Now Jesus accepted hospitality in the homes of plenty of folks who did whatever the 1st century equivalent was of paying all their bills on time.

This is not a call to stop doing today’s works, but to trust that God sends the money that we earn. So we do not think we alone are responsible for our good fortune? If we have health and education and skill, where did they come from?, if we had a good childhood and a family where did that come from?, if today we have friends and a partner, children or pets, did we make those? (Well maybe the kids but you know what I mean.)We are quick to take credit for the good in our lives and blame God for any misfortune, the God who tells us: I will never forget you. I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands. while the psalmists’ soul is still like a child upon her mother’s breast, resting in the peace of God.

What could be important enough or compelling enough to pull us away from a God who writes us on the palms of her hands.
Here are Jesus’ priorities-
Loving enemies going the second mile, turning the other cheek, not calling anyone a fool, not objectifying women, and continually remembering how incredibly blessed the poor and broken and weak are to God.

Don’t worry about what we will eat, worry about the children with out enough are going to eat, don’t worry about what we will wear. Worry about our neighbor who has no coat. This is kingdom living. Today has enough problems for itself. We can take care of ourselves and take care of our neighbors today. But if we are hoarding food for tomorrow while our neighbor’s child starves, we have abandoned God, and serve only worry.

Worry says: Not like those people Lord please. Keep me from being like those people, but Jesus knows we are those people. That’s what we are worried about, keep me from falling into misfortune.
God says: you are inscribed on the palms of my hands.

We are being invited out of a life of self-sufficiency.

What if you lost everything tomorrow?
All of it gone.
Can you imagine a place where that does not panic you?
That is the place Jesus is inviting us to.
What if you woke up tomorrow with everything you have worked so hard for taken away.
Would you feel that you had lost everything, or could you say, “all that I had was a gift from God. Now I will see what else God provides.”?
When we worry about our possessions and our appearance we claim them for ourselves and we give ourselves the credit for God’s graciousness.

Everything we see is a gift, everything we are able to do is a gift, everything we have is a gift, and when we start hoarding the gifts we have been given and paying more attention to them than to the giver, we are divided.
Nothing we have is ours, Jesus says.
I think he means what he says.
Don’t worry

This is exactly what we are being invited into and I would rather we told the truth about it and said no sorry, I cant do that, than try to pretend that is not what Jesus is saying.

We are being called to trust deeply and too much. We are called to be dependent on God for everything. The only easy part is we already are, we just need to try and catch up our beliefs with the reality of a God who writes us on the palms of her hands.

This is not a promise that nothing bad will ever happen to us.

Sometimes the birds of the air do starve to death, the grass is thrown into the fire but still they sing and swoop and bloom.

Faithful people go hungry while we store up for tomorrow enough to solve today’s trouble.

So, concern yourself with what your neighbor can wear today if he is naked
And concern yourself with what your neighbor can eat today if she is hungry

We can act, we can pray, we can sing, we can work, we can cook, we can bless, we just can’t worry.

We can love all those around us friend and enemy alike with a deep singleness of heart. We can be fully present to God’s work in the world, watch the birds and the lilies, and do whatever work God sends our way.
This will take all our time if we do it well.

Then tomorrow we can wake up and do it again,
wherever we live,
whatever we eat,
whatever we wear-
seeking first the kingdom of the one who has inscribed us on his hands.