A
Sermon Preached by
University
Congregational United
This
morning is the first Sunday of Lent.
This is the season for us to turn our attention inward. Traditionally, Lent is the time of year in
the church calendar set aside to consider the state of our own souls. Now I know this is not an easy thing to ask
liberal Christians to do. Often we are
much more eager to turn our attention outward, to see what needs to be changed
and throw ourselves into the changing.
We see the ache of the world and want to get ourselves busy with the
healing. We see the profound unfairness
of life and we put our shoulders to the wheel of justice, trying to turn it to
the way of hope.
All of these instincts, of course, are good. The hard work that these instincts call us to is good. And yet, all of the busyness, all of the “throwing ourselves into,” all of the “shoulders to the wheel” pushing that we do is not just exhausting, it is also disorienting. In a time that calls for so much action, there is also another call, and it is a call we cannot ignore. That is the call to find our center. That is the call of Lent.
When I was a child, one of my best friends was Catholic. She would approach the season of Lent with a certain kind of piety the rest of us seemed to lack. She explained to us that during Lent she would be giving something up. This was usually something she really liked, like chocolate, or sleeping in on the weekend, or television. I would look at her with envy. As a marginal Protestant I wasn’t called to anything so noble. We were just kind of waiting around for Easter.
Now that I have faith practices of my own I have a much better perspective on Lent. I have discovered the invitation of Lent that is, not an invitation to deprivation just for deprivation’s sake, nor a retreat for retreat’s sake, but an invitation to clarity, an invitation to renewal, and this year, for this congregation, an invitation to simplicity. So we turn this year to the Gospel of John.
The Gospel of John is, after all, a simple gospel. The vocabulary of the Gospel, in fact, is so basic that it is the gospel of preference for teaching beginning New Testament Greek. The words are those one would learn as a child. Words like bread, water, light and dark, life. Words like grace and truth. The stories are simple ones too, stories of everyday life. A family throwing a party because someone is getting married, a teacher of the law looking for more answers, a woman by a well, a lame beggar by a pool rumored to have healing powers. A hungry crowd. A man whose eyes have never seen the light of day. A close friend who dies too soon. And so, in the midst of its simplicity, John’s gospel takes us to the depth of human experience, and unrolls before us the breadth of human understanding, and then goes deeper and farther, inviting us to glimpse in Jesus the reality of God, walking with us in all of life, and full of grace, and full of truth.
All of that is to say that an invitation to simplicity is not an invitation to abandon complex realities. Last week I listened to Don speak about faith, and he repeated over and over that faith is complex. I couldn’t agree with him more. I once had a woman say to me she could ask me ten yes or no questions yes or no, mind you, and then, by my answers, tell me if I was a Christian. And the interesting thing to me was that the first question (I did ask her what it was) was not “Do you love God with all your heart and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself?” It was, actually, “Do you believe that the earth was created in six literal days?”
Yes, faith is complex. Yet as soon as I say that, I also say, “The journey of faith is a journey of simplicity. And it is a journey that calls for traveling light.”
As I think of “traveling light,” I recall the ways we were invited to prepare for the predicted disintegration of society as our calendars turned to the year 2000. Do you remember all those books that were published about how to survive that crisis? They promised that if those of us who were smart enough to buy that book were prepared enough, we would make it through while chaos broke out around us. The book I bought recommended purchasing items that were sure to be valuable for trading. They listed four key ones: chocolate, cigarettes, coffee, and toilet paper. If you had enough of these items, they promised, you could get whatever else you might need. I didn’t get very far with the list, but i did purchase a lot of toilet paper. I may even still have some. But you know, with all that stuff, I wasn’t traveling light. In fact, I wasn’t going anywhere.
Traveling
light means letting go of our illusion that if we are simply prepared enough,
we can control the future. It means
letting go of our sense that our worth in any way comes from what we have, or
what we do. It means resisting the false
gods of society who tell us that we can live by bread alone, or count our
success in life by the power to rule kingdoms (including little tiny ones like
our own dinner table), or even that we, through our piety, can manipulate God
over to our side. Traveling light means letting go, and letting ourselves
center, and letting ourselves center in the love of God.
Traveling light is not about simplicity only for the sake of simplicity. Author Mary Rose O’Reilley, whose book, The Barn at the End of the World you know I have to love (the subtitle is The Apprenticeship of A Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd- you’d almost think I wrote it!) tells of an intentional community she lived in a while. She notes that she and her children “had to negotiate periodic bursts if ‘simple living’ fervor . . . Someone would decide we all needed to have a day of fasting, a weekly third world meal of clear soup and bread. The first time this happened my son, coming in from a cross-country run, scarfed down his bread and helped himself to seconds from the sideboard. An elderly lady in the community rebuked him: ‘The spirit of the simple meal is to take only what’s provided, not go around looking for leftovers.’ After that, I hiked the children out for pizza and ice cream whenever the community got into one of its fits of self-abnegation. I didn’t want my children to associate religion with an empty stomach.” (p.79)
O’Reilley
then reminds us (and I would if she hadn’t) that Jesus was a guy who spent his
time at parties and picnics. He lived
life fully and warmly, and celebrated it whenever he could, and in fact that’s
one of the things that got him in trouble with the religious folks. “
All of that then brings us back to the story of this wedding feast, where the wine runs out. Perhaps this story makes more sense to anyone who has planned a wedding lately than it might have to those of us who attended the carefree, barefoot weddings of the sixties and seventies. I recently attended the wedding of a younger generation family member that cost, easily, over $10,000. Care was taken to make sure no one ran out of anything at that wedding. That massive spending on the day of the wedding seems as if there is a sense that if we just make this day big enough, and spend enough, maybe we can purchase some kind of guarantee that this marriage will last.
Yet, here at this wedding feast in John’s gospel, in spite of all the preparation, the steward finds himself with “not enough.” And here also is the first hint of the simple life to which Jesus is calling his disciples. He steps in and turns that lack into more than enough. And his disciples believe. They seem to get it, just for a moment. The life Jesus is calling them to is about something bigger than being “ready for anything.” It is about faith. Over and over in the Gospel of John, “not enough,” through faith, becomes “abundance.” The call of Jesus is simply, over and over again, to stay centered. Not to get bogged down. To keep focused on what really matters, on your call, and then to trust the rest of it to grace.
As the shepherd in the barn at the end of the world has said, “Self- abnegation, when your heart isn’t in it, leads to self righteousness, self-punishment and distain for creation. . . But when you have your eye on some prize, possessions begin to weigh heavily, junk food slows the steps. Surrender at that point is a natural process. It is what we do to attain the vision we have come to long for.”
“Simplification,” says Quaker Thomas Kelly, “comes when we center down, when life is lived with singleness of eye, from a holy center where we are wholly yielded to God.”
Or, as Jesus finally says at the end of all these stories in John’s gospel, “I came that you might have life, abundantly.”
ABOUT TODAY”S TEXT:
Background for this sermon as printed in the worship bulletin
John 2:1-11.
Matthew, Mark
and Luke begin their stories of Jesus’ ministry with his baptism, and then tell
of his temptations in the wilderness. It
is this model of forty days of fasting that the church has adapted for the
forty day season (not including Sundays) of Lent. The Gospel of John, however, does not tell of
the temptations of Jesus. John begins the story of Jesus’ ministry with the
calling of disciples, and then tells of this “first sign” (which has thus come
to be called the first miracle of Jesus) of turning water into wine at a
wedding banquet in
For John to begin his story at a wedding feast is to call to mind the image of the banquet of God to which the faithful are welcomed. What God provides there will be overflowing, and the best. By the way, Jesus address of his mother in this story (see 2:4) can read as startling to our ears, but the term “woman” was actually most likely one of tenderness (compare John 19:25-27). As we begin a journey of simplicity this Len, considering ways to travel light, we turn to the Gospel of John to be reminded that God’s provisions are abundant.