The first big crisis in a relationship is not the day one partner finally gets tired of picking up the other’s socks. It’s not the first time partners fight over the right way to balance the checkbook, or even the right way to hang the toilet paper. The big crisis breaks the first time they cook Thanksgiving dinner at their own house.

“That isn’t stuffing!” she says, “Stuffing has apples and raisins.” Her mother made it with apples and raisins. “It is too stuffing!” he replies. “Stuffing has sausage and nuts.” His mother’s stuffing had sausage and nuts. Persuaded by the memory of a taste, each is certain of the truth about stuffing, and each is compelled to reproduce the pattern of perfection learned long ago.

The stuffing crisis is a hard one because it’s not really about stuffing. It’s about truth, ultimate harmony, right order. The memory enclosed within taste buds is the flavor of home. To have stuffing now the way it was then is to persuade our tongues and tummies that we are the same now as we were then, that things are good now like they were then.

Nostalgia has a way of distorting memories. Things are more complicated than wafting aromas suggest. It’s not for nothing that at this time of year TV sitcoms make us laugh and Hallmark specials make us cry at the anxious, ungainly spectacle of families regrouped around turkeys. At Thanksgiving, some folks don’t, won’t, or cannot go home.

For many, the nostalgia of the holidays isn’t about what was, but what ought to have been, if only. If our mouths water with nostalgia, they water also with desire—for firmer ground, for knowing and being known, for a love that circumstances can’t alter.

Dwell for a while on the thick sweet smell of nuts and sage, raisins and apples, and you will sense the source of such longings, the truth about our life: we were fashioned for a joy so fragrant we can taste it. We were made with hungering hearts. We were created for a feast laid on richly like a dream, tantalizing and aromatic, at the center of our souls.

We were made by God for God and for the amiable company of God’s people, for fellowship as pungent as precious ointment squandered by a woman on the weary feet of Jesus. We were made to sit down at a table where the feast is God.

“O, taste and see!” the ancient psalmist sings, “Taste! You’ll see how good God is.”

We are a people with a taste for God. Our history is one vast story of feeding on mercy and steadfastness, our life a drama of sustenance. Even in the harshest famines and the longest droughts, our memory floods with aromas that make our mouths water with desire for beauty and justice, that make our bellies rumble with hope for what might last—faithfulness, deliverance, vindication, breath and life, children and children’s children, righteousness, and peace.

We remember that from age to age our Shepherd’s wine runs generous and free, our cup brims full, and the board is spread with kindness. We remember that in every place our Host makes room for all kindred souls and every stranger, every widow, orphan, lost or straying sheep, each enemy, and every child.

Because we remember, we find no comfort in consuming bitter food, like the narrow do, who live only in the past. Neither are we gratified by food too rich, like the fearful do, who live just for today. We find no joy snacking on junk and skipping meals, like the headlong and ambitious do, who live only for tomorrow.

In us is a different craving, the memory of a subtle, varied flavor, tantalizingly familiar and completely new. Rolled on the tongue, lingering on the palate, filling the cavities of stomach and soul—once sampled, nothing else is good. We want no other recipe. “O God,” we cry with our ancestors, “you are our portion and our cup. For you we thirst like deserts parched, lifeless, and without water.”

“Well, then, come,” the Spirit replies, “Eat my bread and drink my wine. Come to the feast I prepared for you.”

On Thanksgiving Day we assemble around tables to say, “We are not our own. All that we have and do, all we are, comes from and belongs to our Creator and Sustainer.” We assemble to give thanks for God’s all-providing.

But when we give thanks, we aren’t settling accounts or dryly honoring a benefactor. We are God’s own; when we give thanks, our taste buds tingle, our mouths salivate, our insides rumble, our olfactory memory drives us deep.That memory makes us more than thankfully awed at what God does and all God gives; it makes us awed at who God is. Our thanks is for all our blessings, but first and most of all for having gifted palates, lives imbued with a taste for God, a predilection for the generous wares of endless love.

By the power of that love and for its sake, and for the sake of a world sated with violence and contempt, for the feeding of a world that hungers for God, we assemble so that we ourselves might become what we have tasted—bread of righteousness, seasoning of justice, water of mercy, wine of truth and sweet peace for the weary of war. We must, then, eat, and eat our fill.

Taste, see. Discover how delicious, how very, very good God is. Today, we say this grace for all this grace: “God is our feast: Thanks be to God!”

Revelation 14:1-3, 14;  Matthew 25: 30-41

“Oh when the saints go marching in…” It’s a great old song that gives voice to an even older Christian hope, that when the kingdom comes, we ourselves will be among the holy ones streaming through its pearly gates, dancing down its golden streets, cavorting in its heavenly fields, and sampling its thousand sacred sweets—speaking figuratively, of course. (Except for the sweets. The sweets had better be real!)

“Oh when the saints go marching in…” We sing it with  happy gusto, completely oblivious to the little bombshell tucked away in the third line of all the verses. Did you notice it? “Oh Lord,” the third line says, “I want to be in that number…“

Oh! There’s a number. When the roll is called up yonder, a number of saints will go marching in.

Now, when I sing, “I want to be in that number,” I really mean it. And despite recent reports of declining belief in heaven among liberal Protestants, I’m willing to bet that you want to be in that number too. But ‘number’ might mean that not all of us will be marching to Zion. ‘Number’ could imply a limit. Think ‘bouncer at the door with an official guest list,’ or ‘guy with a clicker standing under the maximum occupancy sign posted on the Pearly Gates.’

What if that’s the case? What if we’re not on that list? What if we dawdle and arrive to find heaven already at full capacity? What if we’re turned away? A cartoon shows a befuddled man standing before a desk in the clouds. St. Peter is behind the desk scowling at him, his quill pen hovering over the Ledger of Life. The man says to Peter, “Nobody told me I needed to bring my receipts.” What if we forget to bring our receipts?

“Lord, I want to be in that number…” How many are we talking about here? Just how big is ‘that number’? And will we be in it?

In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of Christians operated on the gloomy assumption that they were not going to be in that number. The church gave them lots of spiritual means for slogging their way through this earthly “vale of tears” towards the heavenly realm, but in the medieval way of believing, arriving was never a slam-dunk, no matter how often or well you made use of all those sacraments, indulgences, and intercessors.

It was widely believed that monks and nuns had a better chance at getting through heaven’s gates than the hoi-polloi did.  A monastic life removed you from all sorts of temptations—the relentless allure of the world, the flesh and the devil. In theory, anyway! But every day of their lives, ordinary Christians had to engage in tainted things like commerce, politics, and sex. And that meant they were always sinning. Thus, it was mostly those famous miracle-working, life-and-limb-losing, inimitably virtuous, perfectly perfect, officially-certified, canonized saints who got to be in that number. How many? Not many.

The idea that not everyone gets to be in that number did not pass away with the Middle Ages. Many Christians still expect the number to be limited. One newer American religious movement even teaches precisely what that number is going to be. It’s derived  from the Book of Revelation—one hundred forty-four thousand. One hundred forty-four thousand men and women “sealed for God,” which is to say, ‘marked as God’s own.’

(By the way, practically everybody in the Book of Revelation is marked in some way—whether you belong to God or Satan is something you can see.  Satan’s people are marked with the number 666. That was my telephone exchange when I lived in Somerville, MA. Some fundamentalist Christians in my neighborhood complained about it to the phone company, and so they offered everybody new numbers. I kept my old one. I loved it that people had to dial 666 to reach a minister. But I digress…)

These folks believe that when the trumpet sounds on the Last Day, one hundred forty-four thousand special believers from their community of faith will be ushered right into heaven, and there they will reign forever with God. Others in their movement will reside for all eternity on a new, paradise-like earth. So, according to a recent census of this group, if the world were to end today, the new earth’s population would be five million five hundred sixty thousand saints, minus one hundred forty-four thousand special saints in heaven. If you’re not a member of this group, you won’t be in either of those numbers. But you won’t suffer eternally in hell, either. There’s no hell in their theology. You’ll be annihilated, quickly and completely.

If you’re tempted to think those beliefs are funny or bizarre, beware. The wagging finger points right back at our own Congregationalist history. A lot of our Puritan forbears believed in double prelapsarian predestination. Now, most of us don’t know prelapsarian predestination from a potted plant, so let me sum it up this way—long before Adam and Eve even suspected that there might be such a thing as forbidden fruit, God chose who would be saved and who would not. Because God is gracious, however, God’s election is not stingy. God has chosen to save an “innumerable multitude” of saints. Yet no matter how many people God elects and saves, it’s still a number. Not everybody is going to be in it, they guessed. Some people are going to be counted in a number that’s headed south, where it’s a lot warmer.

Did you notice the “I” in our song? “Oh Lord, I want to be in that number.” Throughout Christian history, ‘I’ have always wanted to be in that number, but ‘I’ have rarely wanted you to be in that number alongside me. Fred Phelps didn’t expect to see any gay people when he got there (imagine his surprise!). Most fundamentalist and some evangelical Christians preach that unless you explicitly accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you won’t be joining that number either. And it wasn’t all that long ago that nearly all Protestants believed Catholics wouldn’t go to heaven, nearly all Catholics believed Protestants wouldn’t go to heaven, and nearly all Christians believed that non-Christians wouldn’t go to heaven. (If everybody’s right, then nobody’s in heaven! And with all our violent squabbling over heavenly turf, I’m sure there are moments when God would prefer it that way.)

These days, thankfully, we’re a bit more inclusive. Well, a lot more inclusive! Catholics have done away with Limbo so that unbaptized people can now enter paradise instead of languishing forever in an in-between state, deprived eternally of the presence of God. Most Christian churches don’t consign suicides to hell anymore, in some cases owing to a deeper grasp of the complexities of depression as a form of mental illness. And in liberal Christian circles over the last generation or two, we’ve been steadily backing away from the traditional Christian conviction that there’s only one way to salvation, through the grace of Jesus Christ.

Indeed, in the UCC we break out in hives if someone even hints at excluding anybody from the procession of the heaven-bound. We expect God to elect absolutely everyone, no matter who they are, or where they are on the journey of faith. We don’t think you have to be a Christian to go marching in, let alone a particular flavor of Christian.

We also aren’t fond of the idea that Christian saints are exceptionally heroic and holy—the few, the fine, the famous, and the dead. With St. Paul, we say that to be a Christian saint, it’s enough to be baptized and to desire to live a new life in Christ—whether you’re living or dead, ordinary or extraordinary, you qualify. You’re a saint the minute the cat drags you in over the church’s threshold!  Especially if you sign up for a committee. Nothing canonizes you faster in our tradition than filling a vacancy on the Board of Christian Education.

These days, it seems that we mainline Protestants can’t think of anybody who’s not going to be in that number. Of course, it’s easy for us to say that. It’s easy for us to say anything we want about a total mystery we know nothing about. All the same, and speaking just for me, I’d rather be lax and rule everybody in, not strict and rule a bunch of people out. It seems to me that although lowering the bar as much as we do these days might have some moral downsides, it’s a far less violent way to go than its opposite.

Because ruling people in or out of heaven is not some quaint, innocuous theological game. It isn’t merely theoretical. It has consequences. If somebody thinks you’re unworthy of the next life, they probably think you’re unworthy of this one too. History is littered with the battered bodies of everybody’s excluded infidels and heathens. How we think about ‘that number’ really matters. And so it also matters what Jesus says about it. Let’s listen to him.

In the famous gospel passage about the sheep and the goats that we read today, you’ll notice that Jesus doesn’t say how many people will inherit the kingdom. What he does tell us is how to get there. And for that, the only number that counts is the number one. Listen! “Whenever you did it to one of these least, a member of my family, you did it to me.” One, fed. One, clothed. One, comforted—one is the number that counts.

I honestly don’t know if there’s a predetermined cap on how many of us will one day go marching in, but I do know that we have good warrant for setting the bar so low. Our brother Jesus was there before us, doing exactly the same thing. If you go by what he says in this passage, anybody can be in that number, because anybody can make one visit, cook one meal, throw one warm jacket over a pair of shoulders hunched-up against the cold.

I don’t know for sure if there’s a cap on that number, but I do know that Jesus isn’t trying to make it too tricky or too onerous for us to be in it. You don’t need special knowledge or heroic virtue. You don’t need to be a martyr or a monk. You don’t need to accumulate one hundred forty-four thousand good deeds or say one hundred forty-four thousand prayers to St. Jude the patron saint of lost causes. It’s one stranger welcomed, one wound healed, one thirst satisfied.

You don’t even have to do it for God! Maybe you don’t even have to know God! The sheep, after all, had no idea that they’d been lending a hand to Jesus. “Lord, when did we see you hungry, or thirsty, or naked, or homeless, or in prison, or sick?”   We know when. “When you did it to one…”

As I said, I don’t know if there’s a cap on that number, but if there is, in the course of our Christian lives, you and I have not been kept in the dark about the basis on which it will be decided. It’s no secret. It has to do with whether we hand ourselves over to each other in kindness, or whether we bring our hands down on the weak and unprotected. It has to do with whether we get our hands dirty with works of mercy, or wash them of responsibility for our neighbor. It has to do with whether we have our hands full of compassion, or remain an empty-handed people.

But even more, it has to do with the mercy of God, the one we know in Jesus, who opens the divine hand to us all and bestows largess beyond all telling, requiring so little of us in return for so much.

Praised be God by all God’s precious saints and by every creature under heaven, now and in the endless age to come.

“Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”

I ran into an old friend the other day. She’s a Baptist’s Baptist who hails from deep in the Bible Belt. Soul freedom personified, and a fierce free-churcher, she is not someone you’d expect to inhabit the same zip code as a Book of Common Prayer. But there it was… she had it in her hand.

I must have raised an eyebrow, because she immediately launched into an explanatory rant about how loopy worship services at her home church had become.

‘We never know what we’re going to get,’ she said. ‘Every week it’s amateur hour!’ A few Sundays before, it seems that instead of the sermon there was a fully-costumed skit announcing the Strawberry Fair. And just last week there was special music to honor the King…of Pop.  And every Sunday, she endures the vague churchy blather (her words, not mine!) of a pastor who can never quite pull off a single, simple, clear declarative sentence—subject, verb, object. ‘And,’ she said, ‘when that man prays, bless his heart’—if you’re from the South, that’s a phrase that makes it okay to say something bad about somebody—‘when he prays, bless his heart, you’d think it was the weather report on the morning news!’

“Dear God, we thank you for the blue sky and bright sun on this perfect spring day with temperatures hovering around 70 dry, breezy degrees. And for this high pressure area that’s going to ensure pleasant weather well into the week…“

So… she’s started going to an Episcopal church. Hence that BCP. She attends Morning Prayer, Eucharist, Evening Prayer—whatever’s on offer. With the ‘Piskies she gets a fixed liturgy, time-tested language, no guesswork. She can relax. “And,” she said, “it makes me cry.”

Now, I got the part about a fixed liturgy being a relief. But I wasn’t expecting her say, “It makes me cry.” And to mean ‘that’s a good thing.’ She’s not exactly sentimental.

So I echoed her, in my best imitation of a therapist, “It makes you cry….”

“Yes. Well, no,” she said. “not everything makes me cry. It’s mostly evening prayer that makes me cry. “

“Evening prayer…”  I repeated.

“Yes. Well, no, not evening prayer as such.  One of the prayers in evening prayer, the collect, this one. It makes me cry.” And she opened the prayer book to read it to me. But I already knew which one it was going to be. Maybe you do too.

“Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way; kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love.  Amen.”

For years this prayer has been a devotional staple of mine for when I lay me down to sleep.  It makes me cry too… In part, I think, because my heart is easily smitten by a really great metaphor: Almost evening. Nightfall. The day passing away.

You know where this is going.

If you were to place this prayer on the lips of my 91-year-old father some Monday night, he wouldn’t be thinking, ‘Monday. Monday is almost over.’ He’d be thinking about how it’s all gone so fast. He’d make a stunning calculus of years behind and years ahead and wonder how it happened. He would say to himself, deep in that place in the soul where from time to time you dare to test out the truth, ‘It won’t be long. It’s almost evening. The day is far spent. Death is near.’

And, of course, he’s not the only one.

I occasionally spend time looking at photographs of myself as a child. Not so much because I’m vain, but because it’s bracing. It’s like the old monastic practice of keeping a skull in your cave. ‘Memento mori,’ says the wiry, sun-draped child sprawled like Huck Finn on a flat rock in the swift brook that empties into Stirrup Iron Pond on her grandfather’s farm.  She is so far away. She is impossible. I’m only 65, not 91, and yet I can’t reach her. I can’t really say in truth that I remember being her. She is a day drawing to a close. She is like an evening gone. She makes me cry.

Do you know what I mean?

Once upon a time, we had our whole lives ahead of us, and we imagined them a certain way as we hatched hopes and made plans for them. We cast ourselves as protagonists of beautiful unfolding stories: We’d have a loving, lasting marriage. We’d build a good career in a meaningful profession and stash enough money away for a comfortable retirement. And we would be fine people, people who do good and not harm. We’d eradicate world hunger by the time we were forty.

And then we wake up to find that we are forty and there is still world hunger, and that good intentions notwithstanding, we were more than occasionally mean or dishonest or selfish. Whatever we did or left undone, we managed to contribute our fair share of sin and stupidity to the vast reservoir of human pain and regret.

And then we wake up one day to find that we are fifty and our tattered marriage is no better now than it was when we were forty; or maybe we find that we don’t even have a marriage any more.

And then we turn around and we’re sixty, and we are have doubts about the meaning of our life’s work, and the money we thought we’d have is not as much as the money we actually have, and what we do have may not last until we die. And we are going to die. It wakes us up in the wee hours.

And I haven’t even mentioned what could happen at 70…

The day is far spent.  It is almost evening.

In the course of my teaching and preaching, I come across a lot of people who are really “into” spirituality. They also seem to know what it is, which I find fascinating, because I’ve been studying it for a good part of my life and I’m not sure I have any solid sense of it yet. But I have come to at least one conclusion about spirituality, not so much from study as from what happens in those wee hours when one is awakened by the sadness of things slipping away. I’ve learned it from the pathos that wells up and constricts your throat when you turn the soft black page of an old album and come face to face with a child who (they swear) is you, but you can’t exactly place her. I’ve learned it from the way tears come unbidden when at vespers we finally say out loud what we know is true, ‘It is almost night.’

I think if spirituality is about anything, it has ultimately to do with the immense grief that punctures the human heart, grief that stems from the knowledge that this one life is all we have, and that it is way too short, no matter when it ends, and that even if it is full of suffering, it is still too wonderful and precious to have to abandon, just like that, to the night that is fast approaching.

This grief is the subtext of every delight, the undertow of regret we feel even in the midst of ecstasy or quiet gratitude for the beauty and pleasure of this life, the smoldering rage we reflexively stoke up when we ponder the intractability of our fate, the fact that nothing can stay.

Spirituality must be about the kind of grief and fear that, left to its own devices, is capable of recasting our souls as one life-long, fatalistic shrug of the shoulders, rendering us indifferent to all kinds of intimate and global horror; or worse, making us cruel, able to take out our despair on the innocent.

If spirituality is about anything, I think it must have to do with this stunning human disappointment, the fact that we who love to live all die, that death is the one sure thing that is coming to us all.

The job of a devotional life, if I can put it that way, is to take us as we are—caught up in immense disappointment, traveling on a rough road to more of the same–and by grace, day by day, year after year, discipline us to know and embrace our heart’s anguish as the finite echo of another, infinite and encompassing reality: the fact that, although our deaths are sure, we were not made for death, but for a persevering love that cannot lose or leave us. When all is ended, love remains

The job of a spiritual practice is not to make us perfect people, holy people, or even better people, but simply to deposit us daily, routinely, in the way of this sustaining love; to accustom us to the familiar cadences of its voice, which we may not at first be able to place exactly, but which rings so true that it blazes; and to support these frail hearts as love makes mysterious, yet shining sense for us out of the grand story of the trustworthy ways of God; and shining, yet mysterious sense for us of our own stories in God.

And then, when we look up and register that it is almost evening, that the day is indeed ending and night is falling fast, we will know that our anxious prayer has already been answered, the prayer that goes, ‘Lord Jesus, stay with us.’ Our anxious prayer not to die, not to die forever, has already been answered and is never unanswered, no matter the strange disguise in which this answer may appear. Answered and never unanswered by the companionable One whose hands still bear the mark of nails and from whose open side we have all received grace after grace.

And after we have gone in with him and he has come in with us, after we have sat to eat with him, and after we have known him again and again together, there will be only one thing to do with the life he imparts: To get up and return to that rough and hopeless road to find some other pair, some other trudging hearts despondent over death, and say to them, “Love is living still!”

Matthew 14:22-33 After Jesus has fed thousands of hungry people with five loaves and two fish, he sends the people home. It’s late, but he wants to pray, so he tells the disciples to take the boat back across the lake. He’ll meet them later. Now, if someone says, “You go ahead in the boat, I’ll meet you later,” you think, okay, he’s going to go on foot around the lake, or maybe take another boat across. You don’t think he’ll walk to you on water. So when the disciples see someone walking on the water, when they all stand up in the boat and lean way out to get a good look, they’re not thinking, “Oh, that’s Jesus.” They’re thinking, ”Oh, Jesus, that’s a ghost.” And so you can also imagine how relieved they are when that familiar voice calls out and says something they’ve heard before: “Don’t be afraid. It’s me.” I imagine they are so relieved they sit right back down in the boat. They sit right back down and they grin at each other with those goofy grins you can’t help grinning when things that should have turned out really really bad turn out really really good. Jesus said he’d meet them. They assumed he meant on dry land. But it’s out here, in the wind and waves, in the wee hours, just when they’re most exhausted and aren’t making any headway at all. “Don’t be afraid. It’s me,” he says. And at that, everybody sits down and waits for him to get there and climb in. Everybody, that is, but Peter. We know what he does. He challenges Jesus, and Jesus challenges him back. We know that he sinks, and that he cries out, “Lord, save me!” We know that Jesus grabs him in the nick of time, and that Jesus asks him,  “Why did you doubt?” Now, when we hear that bit about doubting, we think Jesus is scolding Peter for noticing the waves and the wind. And it’s true. He notices, he wavers, he sinks. But it’s doubt that gets him onto the water in the first place. His doubt begins before he even leaves the boat. All the other disciples take Jesus as his word. It’s him. There’s nothing to fear. That’s why they sit back down. They believe it’s him. He’s coming. That’s all they need to know. But Peter says, “If it is you…” If you are who you say you are. You’ll have to prove it to me. Do a trick, a miracle, something cool and spectacular.  Like, tell me to walk to you on the water. Where have we heard this before? “If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread, or better yet, jump off the temple pinnacle and see if the angels will catch you.” That’s Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness. “If you are the Son of God, let’s see you come down off that cross and save yourself.” That’s the mockers tempting Jesus as he was dying. “If it’s really you, show me the nail marks your hands.” That’s Thomas tempting Jesus after the resurrection. The minute Peter says, “If it’s you, command that I walk to you on water,” he joins the company of the tempters, and that’s not good. Jesus calls him “little faith” not so much because he gets scared and starts to sink, but because he didn’t sit down when the others did, he couldn’t wait like they waited, he wouldn’t stay in the boat. Now, I know we often hear this story differently. We make fun of Peter for sinking, but we admire his courage and impetuosity. We think it took guts and faith to get out of the boat. We like people who strike out on their own and take risks. If you’re going to do something bold for God, you can’t just sit there. You have to do something. Faith climbs over the side, faith walks out to Jesus. Yes, you’ll have doubts. Yes sometimes you’ll go under. That’s okay. Jesus will give you a hand. So get out of the boat. Just do it. That’s the way we often read this story. Like a Nike ad. But the early Christians who handed this story down to us saw it differently. For them, the best thing you can do is trust Jesus’ promise that he is either already always with us or that he is always on his way to us. Trust that it’s him when he says so. Trust him enough not to tempt him, not to try to be him, not to walk on water, but to leave that to him and stay in the boat. Why in the boat? Because he’s getting in it, and you want to be with him. And because that’s where your sisters and brothers are, and you want to be with them too. Because life is treacherous and hard and it’s easy to get picked off by its cares if you go it alone. Because evil is real and you’re easy prey if you think you can confront it alone or depend on your own virtue to avoid it. Because human sin and woundedness require compassion and healing and forgiveness, but we are unlikely to grant ourselves such gifts, such is the depth of our confusion and shame. Because we do not save ourselves and we cannot be saved alone. If there is any safety to be had in this life, it does not come through self-sufficiency, but by discovering the companionship of God, and by sailing through thick and thin with other companion disciples. If we find healing in this life, it won’t be because we went it alone, but because by God’s grace we found good company, and by that same grace we bound ourselves to Christ and to others in affection and accountability. If there is hope for us, it lies in telling each other stories and singing each other songs, and eating from each others’ hands, and showing each other our dreams and visions, and reminding each other where we’d be if there were no boat, no companions, and no fearless Christ with us, but only rising water, only howling wind. If we live to see the dawn it will be because through every adversity we have sailed together.

Today our story tells us to take Jesus at his word. To wait for him to arrive. To watch how he comes to us no matter how high the waves. He’s on his way, here even now, with us till the end of the age. Our story says, don’t be afraid, just sit tight, glad of the good company that gives meaning and hope to life’s sailing. Be a steadfast companion. Stay in the boat.

****

Credit: Deacon Matthew Garrett of http://www.holy-icons.com for the icon image of the Mystical Church, above.
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Micah 4:1-4; John 15:1-8; Revelation 21-22

Seven years ago, the Israeli Defense Ministry began investigating the theft of Palestinian olive trees. Black market trade in the trees was growing as Israeli government contractors confiscated and cleared Palestinian land in order to build an 80-mile-long barrier to stop suicide bombers from infiltrating into Israel. It appears that the government contractors were uprooting the trees and selling them to wealthy Israelis and to local town councils for their gardens and parks.

Olive trees are extremely hardy. They can weather great shocks — uprooting, transplanting, sometimes even frost, fire and, of course, flood.  When the waters of the Great Flood receded, the Book of Genesis says, it was from a hardy, surviving olive tree that the dove from the ark plucked a silver branch to carry back to Noah as a sign that the land was dry and salvation was near. Some gnarled old olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemene are said to date from the time of Jesus, although that is certainly not true. But there are olive trees there that are among the oldest in the world. And that may be why the olive branch is a symbol of peace — olive trees grow and mature very slowly, they abide, they endure, they outlast just about everything. And they are beautiful.

News of the illegal sale of Palestinian olive trees leaked out after a contractor offered two reporters 100 large trees for $250 each. The reporters also found one ancient tree on sale at a plant nursery for nearly $5,000. An official of the military command was implicated in that transaction. The Defense Ministry, which is in charge of building the security fence, stated that the Ministry pays contractors only to uproot and replant the trees; no one has permission to sell them. The contracts require that the trees be replanted in areas their owners suggest, away from the security zone; however, an Israeli human rights organization reported that these relocations were not taking place.

For the people who buy them, the trees have ornamental value. They have a different value for the people who owned them. They are the lifeblood of Palestinian agriculture, almost the only crop growing on the stony hills of the West Bank that does not need irrigation. The olives are precious. Many Palestinians are unemployed after all the years of violence; their staple diet is bread and olive oil.

According to some estimates, the wall will eventually take the land of 11,000 Palestinian farmers. One farmer complained that 44 of his 50 acres had been confiscated, and he had lost 2,700 fruit and olive trees. His village lost 7 wells, 15,000 olive trees and 50,000 citrus other fruit trees. The Palestinian Agriculture Ministry says that in the two years of fence-building to protect the settlers, over 200,000 olive trees have been destroyed.[1]

The contractors, the soldiers, the settlers, the corrupt officials — none of them, it seems, has read the Book of Deuteronomy. “Seek peace and pursue it,” the Torah teaches.  But even if you should fail, “Even if you are at war with a city . . . you shall not destroy its trees” (20: 19-20).

To sit unafraid under your own tree, to rest peacefully under your own vine — in this single striking image, the prophet Micah crystallizes God’s great vision of healing and wholeness for the creation. All the peoples of earth stream to God’s mountain where God presides. God judges them with divine insight. God instructs them with divine wisdom. Thus they stop learning war.

They dedicate themselves instead to the hot, hard and artful work of the blacksmith, pounding swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. And then, when fear is gone, when nothing can harm them, when they too do no harm to anything on God’s holy mountain, they all sit beneath their own trees — their figs, their olives, their lemons — and rest under their vines. The fellowship, the well-being, the harmony, the presence of God is their shade. This, Micah implies, is God’s great shalom!

Do you sense what God’s shalom is like? It seems that many of us do, if polls are to be trusted. A poll I read a few weeks ago reported that of the huge number of Christians in this country who claim to be regular “churchgoers,” nearly 80% say we feel closest to God, most whole and most at peace with ourselves, our neighbors and the universe when we are out in nature, not in church.

And it doesn’t have to be Yosemite or Big Sur to awaken in us this intuition — memory? foretaste? — of God’s shalom.  An old Italian guy who lived a few blocks away from us in Somerville had a backyard that couldn’t have been more than 12′ x 14′, but he grew everything imaginable in there, including fruit trees. One was a weird-looking fig under which he abided amiably on Sunday morning and smoked cigarettes as the bells of St. Anne’s church summoned the rest of the neighborhood, including his wife, to mass.

Sometimes when you walked by his corner, only the wispy smoke told you he was there, sitting squarely on his old cane chair, because in the shade his face was the color of fig tree bark. He blended in. At times he seemed to be a plant himself, an old, thick, person-shaped vine with male pattern baldness. The bells would ring all morning — there were three masses — but still he abided, the garden his sanctuary, the fig tree heaven’s tent, and the lazy smoke his incense, rising to God.

You probably have your own version of shalom, maybe a special place that restores you. Your probably have glimpsed the truth and loveliness of creation’s web in some small way and have, as a result, your own story of what it’s like to stream towards God’s holy mountain. My father’s story might be about a hammock in the back yard, stretched between an aluminum pole he painted green and a maple tree that lightening struck years ago and split down the middle. Unable to bear the loss, he bolted it back together. Somehow, it survived, and he lazes about in its shade now and talks to the birds, mistaking himself for St Francis.

Mine is a cherry orchard in the Sabine Hills, north of Rome, a place I once lived and to which I’ll probably never return. On a long sloping hillside, the trees are pruned back to essentials in the early Spring, and all their skinny trunks are painted Smurf Blue. The cold mist that swirls and lifts as the sun comes up and the light changes makes them seem to move, to march in your direction — a squadron of aliens come in peace; a heavenly host.

But perhaps for you it isn’t so much a place or an experience by which God’s great shalom engulfs you. Maybe it’s simply an abiding awareness that this harmonious and satisfying presence is what is finally true about the world — as it was in the beginning in Eden, it is now and ever shall be, world without  end. Perhaps you are one of those people who carries around in your body a kind of solidarity with original solidarity, you are blessed with original blessing. Or perhaps you possess the mirror capacity to feel keenly the absence of wholeness, to feel grief well up in you over its betrayal by human self-centeredness and sin.

Last year a friend of mine was watching a news report about punishment meted out to the family of a young Palestinian who had been arrested for the shooting an off-duty Israeli policeman. She was silent as the camera showed the boy’s father turned away, his hands tearing at the hair on his head. She was silent as she watched the bulldozer smash through the walls of the family’s small house. She sat still when it rolled over the debris into the back garden and tore up an olive tree by its ancient roots. When the report ended, there was a commercial. It was about super-sizing your burger and fries. She burst into tears.

Maybe like my friend you are a witness to shalom by your sensitivity or your suffering — you have tears that testify to the reality of consolation, hunger that testifies to the reality of bread, anger that testifies to the reality of acceptance, wounds that testify to the reality of healing.

In the gospel of John, Jesus calls himself the vine and his disciples branches that will bear fruit, if they abide in the vine. The church has often read this metaphor of vine and branches as a reference to holy communion, and especially to the communion cup filled with the fruit of the vine. From ancient times, the cup has stood for the lifeblood of Jesus, blood that circulates vigorously, like the nourishing sap of a vine, through the many branches, making the lives of Teacher and disciples one deep life, lived together, fruitful and strong.

But this is not just a human in-group solidarity thing. When Jesus uses that metaphor to describe the source of a disciple’s fruitfulness — abiding like branches in a vine — we are imaginatively confronted not only with our solidarity with him and other humans, but also with the whole world of nature. To belong to God and to the one who took our flesh is to belong to the earth.

Every Christian ritual of inclusion and incorporation, of universality, affirmation and acceptance, requires us to touch the things of earth, or better said, to let the things of earth touch us. In baptism, we use water (in ancient times it would also have meant the use of oil and salt and beeswax). In our rituals of healing and forgiveness, we often use anointing oil. In the Eucharist, we bless the earth’s precious wheat and the wondrous grape. We light beeswax candles and set out bouquets – the flame and flower remind us that we are not alone, not apart from, not on some other plane, but are ourselves creatures, woven into and dependent upon nature’s wondrous web, inserted deep in the plan of God for the restoration of all things — shalom.

These natural elements remind us that we are not the only stewards on earth. The earth cares for us as much as we care for the earth.  It continually offers irreplaceable gifts to our bodies, minds and spirits, mediating God’s peace to us, in small and still imperfect measures, to be sure; but without these gifts, we might never see, taste, smell, hear and touch our God.

In the Book of Revelation, that wild series of visions that brings the Christian Bible to a close, the seer tells us that at the end of time when God’s shalom comes, it will be like a jeweled city with massive walls and gates and towers, with golden streets and many-roomed mansions. It will descend from heaven to earth and be our home. A city? Ah, read on! At the heart of the beautiful city there will be a tree — perhaps an olive? — nourished by a river gushing from the very heart of God.

That tree will produce diversity and healing. Like a kind of divine fruit-of the-month club, it will yield fruit of twelve different kinds. Not one kind for all, but many kinds for many people, something palatable for every taste. The leaves of the tree will be medicinal. They will heal the human heart, but they are meant mostly for “the healing of the nations,” for the good of the whole earth and all its peoples, believers and unbelievers alike, together. Under the canopy of that tree, all creatures may sit without being afraid. It is a tree everyone owns. Nothing and no one is fenced in or out; no one and nothing is cursed, untouchable, or unclean once touched by its shade.

It is hard to speak joyfully about such a tree today, to imagine its promised fruit, its healing leaves; for as we speak there are still guns in human gardens, we bulldoze the thousand-year olive, the wound of earth’s despoiling is opened again and again. If we sing of Easter joy, if we sing of new life, if we believe in the coming holy city with its sacred tree descending from above, if we have felt it, glimpsed it in places and moments of wholeness and peace — in the forest, in the yard out back, in sanctuary of this church, in the sleep of night, in the grief of loss and struggle, in the care we extend to one another; if we hail it at all, it is always with throats choked with tears.

We are called by the God who made us to be witness to God’s shalom without a shred of the kind of evidence the world loves to demand. But this is, of course, why faith, hope and love are required of us. It is also the very definition of our Christian calling to testify – to be so absurd, so brazen, so besotted as to announce to all (weeping, angry, suffering and lamenting all the while) that life is good, that God is even now content with us, that even now we walk in the beauty of the fig and the olive, safe on the dry land of peace; and that all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.

Christ Call His Disciples, Raj Solomon

Matthew 4:12-23

Is there anything better than the feeling you get at the start of something new, when a great idea strikes you, an ambitious project finally gets off the ground, a long-anticipated journey begins, or a promising relationship comes along? That sky-high, semi-nervous, tingly feeling that everything is possible—ain’t it grand?

It is, but when this kind of euphoria overtakes you, it can also scare you. So you try to shield yourself from disappointment with a reality-check. You sit yourself down and tell yourself it won’t last, something will eventually go wrong. But it’s useless. No matter how often you remind yourself, “What goes up must come down,” you still secretly think, you secretly believe, that this adventure will be the first one in human history not go the way of all flesh. This love affair will not crash and burn. This is the fever of infatuation. It can be awfully hard on the nerves, but it’s one of the greatest feelings in the world!

So here we have four young fishermen, two sets of brothers—Andrew, James, John and Simon—who leave their nets to follow Jesus. And I’m betting that they are feeling that feeling as they get up and go. From here on out, anything goes, the sky’s the limit, the world is their oyster.

If we had a Wayback Machine, you and I could crash their 1^st century party, throw a 21^st century wet blanket over them, and reveal the sober ending of the script. “Boys,” we could warn them, “the ‘fishing for people’ thing that Jesus mentioned? It comes with a price. Did you know that Jesus came here to Capernaum because the baptizer got thrown in jail? No? Didn’t think so. Shades of things to come, fellas—days when you won’t feel what you’re feeling now, when you’ll grumble about him, second-guess him, and think seriously about peeling off from this now-merry little band and going home. Days when his charm wears off and his foolishness embarrasses you and his recklessness endangers you.

And there’ll be an awful day when you realize that you’re going down with him, and you’ll claim you don’t know him, that you’ve never had anything to do with him at all.”

We could tell them, but it wouldn’t matter to our four giddy fishermen right now. Not now, at the start of something big and grand and new. They would listen to us, sort of, then they would say, “Oh, sure. We know. He’s not guaranteeing a walk in the park. Got it. You want us to sign a release or something?” But they would not really register the caveat. They would brush by us with big goofy grins on their faces and hurry to catch up with Jesus.

Unconcerned about tomorrow, they’re feeling only the glory of today. We feel the exhilaration of their going, and we can’t help ourselves—we put aside what we know and cheer them on. We root for them even though the folly of their innocence is plain to us. We sense the risk, the daring, the unbridled hope in this great old story of call and response. We marvel at their beginners’ eagerness to throw themselves into the unknown, their precious idealistic willingness to follow a dream.

It’s all very energetic, isn’t it?  So energetic, upbeat, extroverted, enthusiastic, vigorous, and grand that it tires me out me just to talk about it.

Maybe it’s because I’m in my seventies that I think of this story as a young person’s story, a story for people with their whole lives ahead of them, for young adults searching for a way of life that is distinctive and worthwhile and who may still have that glorious, much-needed capacity to ignore the shadows ahead and throw caution to the wind.

Now, I know that’s wrong. This story isn’t just for young people. It’s also for people like me who are a little long in the tooth and crinkly around the edges. We are also capable of responding enthusiastically to the call of God. Not with youthful enthusiasm, perhaps, but with mature enthusiasm, with a deep and knowing eagerness.

We may not leap to our feet when Jesus calls, but we would if we could, and what our stiffer limbs balk at, our hearts can still embrace with nimbleness. We are age-appropriate disciples, offering ourselves to the adventure any way we can. We older generations have been following Jesus since we were young people. Now that we are not so young, we can—and do—persist in choosing him. This long habit of discipleship has made all the difference to us. When Jesus calls, we still find some way to go.

And he is still calling. He does not come preaching the way of our God just once. He calls us to the Christian journey all the time. Life is always changing, and the spirit is always inviting us deeper. Each new circumstance contains a new call. His invitation is never a one-off deal, never take it or leave it, once and for all. Jesus comes down to the lakeshore every day. So I know very well that the gospel’s invitation is to everyone, and in every moment. Whether we are young or old or in between, this energetic story of a new way of life is and can be anybody’s story, at any stage of life.

Nevertheless, as I was reflecting on this text anew, I felt it again—that sense that it is a young person’s story. And I felt an urge to say something about it directly to you who are a lot younger than I am. I want to tell you something that you may not hear elsewhere. I think it would be a shame not to share it with you precisely because you are unlikely to hear it elsewhere. I want to offer you the gift the church must never be reluctant to offer. I want to extend an invitation.

If you are looking for meaning in your life, or just needing to get a life, one that you can be proud of, you could do no better than to follow Jesus, to come and see where he is living and listen to what he is saying and participate in what he is doing; to take no heed for the morrow, as scripture says, and step into the adventure, no matter how many rumors you hear that things won’t always be rosy.

You will have to get past the Sunday school cardboard cutout Jesus, the unbelievable and even a little yucky holy perfect Jesus, the nasty judgmental Jesus, the “accept him into your heart as your personal savior” Jesus, or whatever Jesus it is that makes you hesitate. You will have to get past that Jesus in order to meet the Jesus who is incredibly new and very much alive, the one who will face you day in and day out (as a colleague of mine puts it) with a challenge to love like you have never loved before, and with a chance to be loved as you will never be loved by anyone else.

Thankfully it is not a Herculean task to find this real, living person. All you need to do is put yourself in his way, and he will come to meet you. Putting yourself in his way means shaping your days according to his earthy priorities. It means letting the practices that characterized his ministry give definition to your own life and your own activity in the world. It means mingling with people who know him and have shaped their lives in his pattern.

To get a life that is really worth something, you could do no better than to learn from him to be broadly and deeply hospitable as he was. To forgive, and to honor your body, the bodies of others, and the body of the broken world. To learn to say yes and mean yes, to say no and mean no, and in that way to get ready for the inevitable time when you will need to say a very costly yes to the good that conquers death, or a very costly no to the evil that deals in it. To participate in shaping new communities, beloved ones, especially the church, but also others, including households of every kind, communities in which people are accepted and valued because they are God’s creatures, not because they are rich or beautiful or productive or smart or compatible. To be a healer, pouring balm on every kind of woundedness, unrelenting compassion on unrelenting pain. To speak freely to others in your own words about what faith means to you, commending a life of faith to them with grateful joy, so that a world in shadows might brighten under the light of your testimony. To celebrate all life’s delights and to lament all its sorrows, singing your lives in the company of other singers, in the rhythms of worship and sacrament and silence, as well as in the solitary depths of your private communion with God. And some day to die well, in the love of family, friends and church, in certain hope of life that is resurrected and love that is indestructible and a God who is faithful and can never lose you.

If you are looking for a direction, for a teacher, a language, a tradition, a community, and a practice that will not merely enhance your life as you are living it now, will not merely help you cope, but will actually change you in ways that you cannot imagine now, I tell you from my heart, from 72 years of living in his company, that you could do no better than to apprentice yourself to Jesus in a community of apprentices, a community of disciples who will help you along the way, as you will surely help them.

I want to tell you now, from the experience of 72 years of living in his company, what many other faithful church-people of a certain age could also tell you—in words different from mine, and for that variety all the more compelling—that you could do no better than to become Christ’s friend, and in that friendship to discover as we have gratefully learned over many years that you can lean on him in trouble and grief, turn to him in exaltation and joy, learn from him all the time, entrust your life to him, be shaped by his words of challenge, and be loved by him with a passion so strong and enduring you will hardly know what to do with the lovely self he sees in you. You could do no better than to experience the joy of being freed in his name to love one another in the church, where I pray he will always be our center and our height, our depth and our whole, and to share that strong, healing and justice-making love with the hurting world.

I want to reassure you that knowing and following Jesus in such a company will not narrow your mind or make you judgmental or turn you into a mush-brained fool. It will not make you any stranger than your heart already longs to be, because God has given you a heart that is never going to be satisfied until it fixes on something true and selfless, and everything true and selfless will make you an alien in a world in which power, money, brute force and unvarnished self-interest are the norms of acceptance and success.

Following Jesus will not make you better than anyone else, so please don’t try to befriend him if you just want a leg-up on God’s favor and blessing, or if you just want to lord it over someone else. No, it will not make you better than anyone else, but it will make you happier than you ever thought you could be. To know and follow him will reveal your true heart to your own heart, in him you will come to know who you really are.

No matter how old or young you are, no matter whether you are newly arrived at the doorstep of faith or have been denizens of the household of God for longer than you care to say, I want to remind you, in the lovely words of another preacher, that “there was a time when we could not look at the face of God and live, but now we can look at the face of God in Jesus and live as we have never lived before.”

That is the invitation.

If you–if we– accept it, if we become (again and again) Jesus’ disciples, it won’t be a walk in the park. You know that. Nothing important ever is. So what? It’s Jesus calling. And if we all go to him, it will not be a solitary risk. We will be part of a company. We will always have each other, the church, so that in times of beauty and plenty, we will have each other’s grateful joy; and in times of challenge and pain, we will have each other’s courage; and in times of trouble, we will not hold back; and if we do fail, if we wander off, when we return we will always find acceptance, forgiveness, healing, and hope.

Can’t you feel it? Even a little? That feeling you get when something big is starting, when the world cracks open and the light comes through and the heart leaps up and a voice inside you says, “This is the real thing. Say yes. Say yes now”? The feeling you get when it dawns on you that everything can be new, that you can live an adventure, that you can be different, and that you can make a difference, and that the universe is on tiptoe just waiting to see what you will do…?

The Miraculous Catch, Eric de Saussure