From the Pulpit:


The Rev. Margaret Waters

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

I probably don’t need to tell you that it is good to be home and good to be back here with you today. No matter where I travel, and I do love to go on vacation, the best day of any trip is when the car pulls into our own driveway and I felt the same way when I drove up this hill yesterday afternoon, just to touch things and get ready for this morning. Whenever John Bennet and I go on vacation we do our best to go to church on Sunday, and so on this trip we visited two churches. The first Sunday we went to the one closest to the house we were renting. There were about forty people there, and it was very proper. The priest went very much by the book, gave one of the very dullest sermons I have ever heard – the best thing about it was that it was extremely short – generally zipped through the liturgy and we were out of there in forty-five minutes. Other than shaking our hands at the peace nobody spoke to us or welcomed us or asked us who we were or how we happened to be worshiping with them. As we walked to the car, we remembered what Jesus said about shaking the dust from your sandals and started scoping out the church in the next little town. That was St. Peter’s just outside of Bigfork. It was another little church, but what a difference! There was just about no narthex, so everybody was in the church itself waiting for church to begin, and it was holy bedlam. You’d have thought that these people hadn’t seen each other since last summer. Every new arrival was greeted with loud welcomes and it was wild with joy. The rector was walking a new acolyte through her paces and when one of the altar candles wouldn’t  light, she went to an altar guild member who got a new candle from the sacristy and replaced it right then and there. We didn’t even begin to begin until ten minutes late when suddenly the uproar began to silence and the rector started to speak from the front of the church. She welcomed everybody and then began to walk around the congregation and asked all the visitors to introduce themselves. Now this is something I do not generally do here because I don’t want our guests to feel self-conscious, but in that little tiny church it worked. We felt truly welcomed and valued, and then the service moved on, and it was high energy all the way. I don’t think the rector would mind at all if I told you she was kind of goofy, but it was a good kind of goofy, and I promise you if we ever get back to Bigfork, Montana, we will be worshiping at St. Peter’s.  So, I heard two sermons in church while we were gone, one dry as the dust we shook off our feet, the other warm and kind of goofy and a little free-form, but as we covered almost six thousand miles in JB’s car, I became aware of the fact that there is a whole lot of preaching going on out there in the world, that there is a sermon at every turn of the road, and a wide variety of gospels being preached, not all of them preaching the gospel I subscribe to even though they may well be preaching in Jesus’ name.

One that stopped me in my tracks was on a kid’s T-shirt. I’m sure he is a nice kid, maybe 13 or 14 years old, and we were in a crowd of people who had pulled off the road outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming to watch three moose eating in a pond. His T-shirt had the kind of lettering you see on Metallica T-shirts, but the letters were dripping with blood and spelled out “So faithful it hurts.” I really thought about that a lot as we traveled and I was thinking about what I wanted to preach today, and I wanted to say no to that T-shirt. I don’t think that’s what Jesus wanted us to take from all he came to give us, that the measure of our faithfulness is the degree of our pain. Jesus came not to bring us pain but to lead us into joy. I know that Ann preached on the bread of life discourse last week and we’ll have it to talk about next week as well. Jesus was saying something utterly radical, something actually quite disturbing to his audience, but at the very heart of it he is saying I have come to feed you. I have come to nurture and nourish you. I know you are hungry for something you cannot even begin to name, but I have come to satisfy your deepest hunger if only you will accept what I have to give. It’s not all that easy because in order to accept it we have to give up any notion that we have done anything to deserve it. I feel certain that the young man in the T-shirt is a devout Christian but the slogan on his shirt came across as superior to me, as holier than thou and as punitive rather than loving and embracing.  It hinted more at his membership in a demanding and exclusive club than at an invitation to come as you are and see what delight is awaiting you.

Six thousand miles of highway is a lot, and the better part of three weeks riding shotgun gave me lots of time to see the sermons that are out there. There is a movement in Montana to put the Ten Commandments on billboards just about everywhere you turn. Some have all ten, others just one, highlighted, with pretty scary commentary about what God will do if you aren’t paying attention. The Commandments were a loving gift from God to the children of Israel as they struggled to live as God’s chosen people while they wandered in the wilderness. We all wander in the wilderness and the commandments are a blessing as they help us live in loving relationship with God and with the more often  than not complicated human beings with whom we share our journeys. But I have to tell you that these billboards felt to me more like a two by four to the side of the head than a gift and a blessing. Each of them had a warning at the bottom, some scary words to remind you what would happen if you broke them. They were like somebody poking you in the chest and reminding you that you are a lowly worm and bound to mess up. They were reminders not of the love of God but of the wrath of God, and they pretty much fell into the category of the kind of preaching that tries to scare you into faithfulness. On the one hand, I don’t think it works in the long run, and on the other hand, I don’t believe for a minute that that was what Jesus preached. Not the Jesus who said, Come all you who are tired. Not the Jesus who healed and forgave and fed and blessed.

There was another roadside sermon in Montana, though a quieter one, but one that spoke even more loudly to me. And there were no words involved. Along the side of the road, wherever there had been a traffic fatality, there was a white cross about this big. Some of them had people’s names on them and some had been decorated by the family in remembrance of their loved one, and sometimes there were two crosses together, in one case there were nine, and John Bennet and I gasped at the pain of nine people killed in one accident. But the message I got from this practice is that nobody is forgotten. Nobody. Every one of those deaths was a tragedy, a loss to the world of a valued human being, and it was alarming to me how many there were. You’d barely travel a couple of hundred yards before seeing another one. I’m afraid they would be just as plentiful in Texas as they are in Montana but we are allowed to forget. The American Legion has been putting them up for 50 years now, and the message I got from them is the reminder that life is precious, that every life is precious, and that it is pure gift.  They are a reminder to slow down and to love life. We listened to a lot of music, too, as we drove, and on Friday afternoon as we got closer to home we listened to one of our favorite albums by Aaron Neville. He has the voice of an angel, but he has lived a complicated life. By the time he was eighteen years old he was already a heroin addict and was serving time in prison for automobile theft. But Jesus found him in prison and Jesus did not beat him up for breaking the law, Jesus did not come with punishment for breaking holy commandments or civil codes. No, Jesus came offering him bread. He said, Aaron, come to me, let me feed you, let me nourish and nurture you. Let me remind you that you are my beloved child, and that your life is precious to me no matter how you have strayed. Jesus came to Aaron Neville and said, take, eat, just as we will come to this beautiful table in just a moment and open our hands to receive the bread that is the love of Christ himself. And I don’t know anybody who sings the love of Jesus quite like Aaron Neville, in his falsetto voice. You can hear the love born of having been healed as he sings, and when we sing together we can feel it, too. Not a one of us is going to have our faithfulness measured and found acceptable because we have worked hard enough at it. Not a one of us is going to receive God’s love by passing a test or checking off our achievements or good deeds. No, all Jesus asks is that we open ourselves to receiving it, that we come forward once again today and hold out our hands and open our lips to receive the bread and that nourished by that sweet gift we go into the world and preach that good news with our lives. You my dear ones, are the preachers this world is counting on.

Amen.