From the Pulpit:

The Rev. Margaret Waters

I started planning this sermon about a month ago, but I have to confess that it did not go as planned, and the most interesting thing is that I learned a lot about our gospel lesson by the very fact that I had to move to Plan B.

On our back patio we have a lemon tree. It was a gift from someone who used to work with John Bennet, so it just sort of showed up one day and he told us how to plant it in a big pot and where to place it and how to care for it. That was three years ago. Lemon tree. Lemons. That’s what we thought. Well, that first year it grew a whole lot of green leaves.

The second year it made a couple of blossoms, maybe four or so, and they turned into little baby lemons but they never got any bigger than a lemon seed before they fell off. This year, though, it was covered with flowers and they smelled so good, and then the flowers fell off and those teensy little lemon embryos appeared, but I didn’t have a lot of hope. We had two years of history with this lemon tree, but those little lemons got bigger and bigger – we don’t know what kind of lemons they are – until they got huge and started to turn yellow. And I looked at that tree and it was my sermon. All of a sudden the idea of giving first fruits was more than an idea. I’ve never grown fruit before. I’ve never had tangible first fruits to give, but here it was. Twenty four lemons ripening  so I figured I’d round up my tithe and bring three big juicy yellow lemons today and show you what it feels like to very literally give the first fruits. I’m going to do that, but the thing is I have to wait until they are really ripe. I talked to them every night this week, but they’re just not there yet. And in case you’re wondering how three lemons returned to God can be of any use to this parish? Well, I figured I’d make them into lemon bars for coffee hour. I’ll let you know when it happens.

So how did this morning’s gospel reading sit with you? Jesus is talking about wars and rumors of wars, plagues, famines, earthquakes. It sounds a lot like the news we hear on CNN today. The world hasn’t changed in two thousand years. This chapter of Mark’s gospel is known as the little apocalypse and I’d be irresponsible not to call our attention to it since all you have to do is surf the net  or turn on a Christian TV station to find somebody, usually accompanied by maps and charts and waving a floppy Bible in the air as his face gets red explaining to you exactly how and when the world is going to end. This has been going on literally for thousands of years and it’s not going to end any time soon, but when we start talking eschatology – that’s the theological word for the end times – we need to slow down and breathe and listen to what Jesus is really saying. In the first place we need to pay attention to who he’s talking to, and it’s not everybody. He is not proclaiming this to the world but rather only to the disciples who are country bumpkins wide-eyed and impressed with the size and grandeur of what they are seeing in Jerusalem. The temple Herod rebuilt was nothing if not impressive, its walls covered with gold that blinded you in the middle eastern sunshine. You could easily lose your bearings standing there. Then, later in the day, up on the Mount of Olives, as they were looking across the valley at the temple Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him what he meant when he said the temple was going to fall, and that’s when he tells them that all the upheaval in the world is a sign that the kingdom is coming. These are the birth pangs, he says. He’s talking about something Mark’s audience knows first hand as they live in the midst of the Jewish Roman war just at the time of the destruction of the Temple. They are feeling the earth shake beneath their feet as they hear words that are meant not to frighten but to reassure them. They are hearing Jesus teach about salvation.

Salvation is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the church. In our world it gets  understood pretty much as figuring out who has lived a good enough life that they’ll get to go to heaven when they die. I hope we can get past that narrow understanding if we haven’t already, because salvation is something much bigger than that. It’s not about what’s going to happen to us when we die nearly as much as it is about how we are going to live. I’m not talking about chalking up our good works, though you know I hope we’re leaving lots of good works in our wake, but it is about how alive we are while we are  alive. It’s about being aware and awake to the precious gift we have been given, not only the gift of being alive but of being alive knowing that God is blessing us, knowing that we can trust God and rest in God and live in the certain truth that God’s own holiness is what we are made of. It is the flip side of living in fear, anxiety, distrust, scarcity.

There is pain in the world. It is real. Last week the unthinkable happened when an army major gunned down over thirty people. The flu has taken the lives of otherwise healthy children. War rages on in the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan. Freak storms flood coastal towns. Jesus doesn’t promise his disciples or Mark’s audience or us that life will be without agony. He knows that the wheels are in motion and that he’ll die an excruciating death by the end of the week, but he is giving them the good news that this pain and upheaval is not the final word and that they must not let it crush them. Within a week they will have witnessed the resurrection. They will have experienced unimaginable agony and be confronted with unimaginable joy, the embodiment of the truth that death is not the last word.

This is a tough lesson to read today, and to top it all off, our lessons for Advent, which begins in two weeks will provide us with more doses of apocalyptic. It’s all about the already but not yet. It’s a paradox. We live in this world but we live as citizens of the bigger world. Jesus is telling them and telling us not to be so consumed with fear because of what we see that we miss the opportunity to live the gospel in the here and now, the gospel of mercy, justice, and gratitude.

Ann will be preaching next week as it will be her last Sunday at St. Alban’s, and also we’ll be gathering in the pledges  which will determine the scope of our ministries for 2010. I try to preach stewardship all year long, but it’s my last chance today to say something before most of you all sign that pledge card. I want to remind you that it is not a financial transaction but rather an act of faith. It is not like paying a bill for services rendered. Rather it is an opportunity to grow closer to God by trusting God to fulfill God’s promise to provide. That’s why I’m so disappointed that my lemons aren’t ripe yet, but when I thought about that fact, it occurred to me that stewardship is all about ripeness. Salvation itself is a process, not something that happens and then is over. It is something that we grow into as we learn to live in ever closer relationship to God, and we do that, as our icon is teaching us, by growing in the likeness of Christ. By trusting God as Jesus trusted God. By living in profound gratitude and sharing freely the blessings we have been given so that the world may be healed and may understand God’s love. And loving, may find peace among all people.

My lemons will be ripe one day soon. I’ll let you see them before I make the lemon bars. I’m really excited about giving the first fruits, not the last ones I have left over after using what I need, and that’s the way John Bennet and I make our pledge too. I wish I could get across to you how good it feels, but you have to feel that for yourself. And the cool thing is that when I make the lemon bars and we eat them they will become sacrament as they will nourish us to go out into the world, to mentor little children in Menchaca, to teach an inmate to read, to take a meal to a homebound person or help a homeless woman find a warm jacket. When we sit with a friend with cancer, teach a Sunday school class, wash dishes after coffee hour, wrap an arm around a grieving person. The process doesn’t end there. There are seeds in those lemons, and I’m going to save them and plant them and see if they will sprout. And next spring my tree will blossom again and I’ll spend the summer fertilizing and watering, and I hope the little lemon plants will begin to grow, even though it will be years before they bear fruit. And I’ll give thanks for the someone who will never know me or you but who planted a tiny seed many years ago so that I may have those very first lemons this year to offer to God and to you.

Amen.

02/13/2010