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A Congregation Of The "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen |
From October 8, 2006 It's one of those moments movie directors love. A moment in which the past and the present come together to have us, the audience, understand that our protagonists are stand on a threshold. A threshold that, once crossed, changes their world forever. Of course we are more than observers to those potent moments. We have thresholds, our own occasions of the past and present binding together as we look out over what awaits us. Graduates of every stripe know this moment. Brides and grooms do, too. When contractions intensify and accelerate, expectant parents find themselves on a threshold like none other. In worship, too, those moments occur in the stepping forward for baptism or confirmation, often in entering into the covenant of membership. Today is a threshold day for Moses and the Hebrew people. For forty years they have wandered through desert and doubt, through trials and tribulations and the temptation to turn back toward Egypt. For forty years they have stepped and then stepped away, trusted and then balked, obeyed and then disobeyed, listened and then tuned out. For forty faithful years Moses has led his people, God's people, on this journey of journeys out of Pharoah's slavery into freedom land. Moses' people, God's people, are nearly there, nearly home. I imagine Moses leading his people up out of a valley and up onto a bluff. A bluff that offers a panorama of the Promised Land. See, Moses asks silently. See? Our journey has not been in vain. God's promises are real. The view is stunning; so much so that no one stirs. Even the ever restless children become motionless. Even babes in arms sense the weightiness of the moment; they neither cry nor fuss. "Remember," Moses urges. With this one word the eldest among them, the grannies and granddads, the ones who started out with youthful vigor and ended up struggling hard to keep up, find their backs straightening and their hearing sharpening. "Remember how far we have come. Remember the humbling of heart, the testing of resolve along the way. Remember the taste of manna and the feel of dust on the skin." "Remember how God saw to it that your clothes never wore out and your health always held up. Remember forever the oppression of slavery and never forget how Yahweh guided us out the poverty of that prison and into this land so rich in promise." There on the bluff, Moses and his people stand on a threshold. The Promised Land is within sight. They're almost there, almost home, almost inhabiting this land God's generosity has prepared just for them. And so that they might enter God's land of promise with intentionality, fully aware of the blessing they are inheriting, Moses prepares them. "For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you." It is God's nature to bless. To be lavish. To be extravagant. It is God's nature to provide not just what is sufficient but what is far more than enough. God's giving is over the top, outrageously generous. When God's doing the dishing out, never are the portions puny. vocabulary there is no word for adequate, enough, sufficient. The mediocre effort, the acceptable gesture? God doesn't even know what these are. God is so generous, so inclined toward extravagance that God adds luxurious flourishes for no good reason at all. For example, when explorers sailed across the Atlantic and approached the eastern seaboard of this continent even before they could see land, it welcomed them. The sweet scent of cedar trees not only greeted but disarmed them! Elsewhere along the coast, large beds of floating flowers made for magical sailing. (Original Blessing, p. 43, quoting Frederick Turner.) If God has no word in God's vocabulary for adequate, then neither do we have language sufficient to describe God's perpetual lavishness. At fourteen I stood for the first time at the edge of the Grand Canyon and with my teen-aged mind sought to fathom a God who would think nothing of spending millions of years carving into a barren landscape for no reason other than beauty. Only later, as I continued to marvel at God's glorious display, did it occur to me that God's extravagance there was even greater still. Not only had God labored so lavishly to carve that stunning canyon, God had spent millions upon millions of years before that lovingly preparing the canvas of the land, laying down layer upon layer of rock and soil so that God's multi-million year creative effort could even begin. You tell me what you call that. I call that canyon and its creation God's word for love. Another word for love, another feat of lavish giving, another expression of extravagance you and I know as Jesus. In Jesus, God's word for love took on flesh and bone, breath and beating heart. The extravagance, the abundance, the wild abandon of generosity that Moses and his folk saw, that you and I see expressed in and around us, this lavishness is also found in Jesus of Nazareth. How much Jesus took after his Father. He, too, was abundantly generous. He, too, gave far more than was required. And he, too, had a hole or two in his in his vocabulary. Jesus had no word for scarcity. Sure, he knew it was a painful part of the human experience. But Jesus knew that in God's realm, in the kingdom life which is so close at hand, scarcity is antithetical to God's vision for us. "I came that they might have life and have it abundantly," we hear Jesus proclaim in John's gospel. And yet even before Jesus says it, we see his message coming. We see it, for example, when a couple little ol' dried fish and a few humble loaves are held up in thanks, offered in confidence, and then are more than enough for a hungering crowd of 5,000. Even that bounty spilled over, you will recall, and the disciples gathered it up into basket upon brimming basket. The abundance Jesus made plain on the hillside that day, he demonstrated countless times. Never one to portion himself out, he was generous with his time and his affections and patience and his wisdom. His very mortality he was generous with, even as this meant confronting the cross and the impossible question of how God's abundant life could be proclaimed when nothing was left of Jesus at all. It is God's nature to bless with wild abandon. It is God's nature to speak in abundance and generosity and boundless possibility. God always gives more than is expected. God goes more than the extra mile. To borrow from Buzz Lightyear, when it comes to giving God goes to infinity and beyond. As we begin our journey into a season of stewardship, you and I aren't all that different from Moses and his flock, you know. We who have come this far together, we who have been on a path that leads toward a new day, a new era for this congregation, you and I are standing on a threshold that faces onto a life so abundant that any word we might choose would be too small. No, we are not journeying into the Promised Land in the same way Moses and his flock did. But like the Israelites before us, we too are stepping into, growing into God's future. A future that holds as much promise, as much plenty, as God's land did for the Israelites. We stand on a threshold, you and I. Lacking nothing, already graced with abundance, God calls out to us today every bit as clearly as God called out to Moses and his people that day of the bluff. "Come," God says. "Come grow into the future with me. Come, the fields are full and the rivers shine. Come, grow in the good land, the good land I have prepared for you." Amen. ©
Rev. Karen Winkel |
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Promises
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