From the Pulpit:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?
 

The official date of the solstice is June 21. That’s when the sun is farthest north and the day is longest in our hemisphere, but the kids are out of school, tomatoes and peaches are already ripe and sweet, and in Austin it’s pretty much in the high 90’s every day, so official or not, summer is here.

I ended last week’s sermon with a Mary Oliver poem, and so I’m beginning this one with another. It is called The Summer’s Day.

Who made the world? 
Who made the swan, and the black bear? 
Who made the grasshopper? 
This grasshopper, I mean- 
the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- 
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. 
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

I remember summer days like that, sitting in the damp grass, wearing short shorts so that the blades itched on my skin and peering into the face of the grasshopper I’d caught, then opening my hand and watching him spring away. I remember picking a fist full of the tiniest wild strawberries in the vacant lot down the street and eating them right then and there, their juice warm and red and sticky in my palm. When I think of summer, I think of lazy days, boredom even, which I actually think is good for children. I remember riding home from the pool on the open tailgate of my mother’s station wagon, my swimsuit still wet, and my mom racing to get us home before the afternoon thunderstorm broke loose. I remember nights rolling down grassy hills with my friends as our parents drank gin and tonics and puffed on their menthol cigarettes, and then going to bed, with a mayonnaise jar full of fireflies on my nightstand, trusting that my mom would release them as soon as I was asleep.

One of the things I cherish most about those summer memories was the indulgence of reading to my heart’s content. All my favorite books from my childhood belong to their context of summer reading – The Wind in the Willows, Misty of Chincoteague, The Five Little Peppers and How they Grew, The Secret Garden , and later, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina.

All of this is to say something that I know you already know about me, and that is that I devoutly believe in the power of story to transform us. A frivolous waste of time? I think not. We come together here in church every Sunday to be informed and transformed by the story that is at the heart of our very identity. Sometimes our scripture readings  are more recognizable as story than others. Sometimes the message they offer us is more clear than at other times. But whether we understand them or not, the sheer incarnational narrative works on our unconscious, invites us to become more of who God means us to be.

We have two exceptionally rich stories today, one from the Hebrew scriptures, the other from the Christian canon, and coincidentally or not, they echo each other very closely. Elijah, the wild and wooly prophet of the northern kingdom is up against the most evil of all kings, Ahab, whose wife, Jezebel, is perfectly clear in her intention to kill Elijah. God’s command makes exactly no sense to Elijah: Go to Zarapheth, which belongs to Sidon. Wait a second. God is sending him to Jezebel’s home town. And there to turn to a widow who has absolutely nothing to feed him and take care of him. We’ve seen prophets run in the opposite direction from where God tells them to go, but Elijah obeys God, finds the widow, who is resigned to starving to death, and asks her to make him a cake of her last meal and oil, and suddenly there is enough food for everyone.

Elijah’s decision and the widow’s decision meet to form the crucible of the miracle, the observable revelation of the goodness of God. The desperate prophet and the enemy pauper’s decisions make room for their mutual salvation, but wait…as they say in TV infomercials…there is more! The story gets even stranger. The widow’s son, who is her only hope for support, just up and dies. What kind of God is this, who saves them from starvation only to strike the boy dead? Elijah calls out to his God, stretches his body over the child’s corpse, and raises him from the dead and returns him to his mother.

The story of Jesus and the widow of Nain is strikingly similar. But this time the young man is so dead that he is being carried to the cemetery when Jesus comes upon the procession. We’re told that Jesus is filled with compassion for the widow, and in that instant makes the decision to return the son, alive and well, to the mother, whose very life is saved. The power of death is stopped in its tracks, and the will of God is for life, and life abundant.

They are wonderful stories, both of them, but we expect to do more with the stories we hear in church than just to accept the happily ever after and go back to our lives unscathed. We are meant to take these stories into our selves as physically as we take the bread and the wine. We are meant to let them weave themselves into our consciousness and to let them propel us back out into the world, changed and empowered  to fulfill all those promises we make every time we reaffirm our baptismal covenant. We are to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers. We are to persevere in resisting evil,  and whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord, We are to proclaim by word and example  the Good News of God in Christ. We are to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves, and we are to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. These stories, retold in generation after generation, embed themselves in our consciousness and our muscles and empower us to be God’s agents of life  in the world, where death so often seems to have the upper hand.

But a pie in the sky theology will only let us down when we need solace most. Every single one of us has been witness to death in one way or another. People we love have died, and there was no prophet to raise them. If we’re hoping that these stories will empower us to literally raise the dead, well, people have been trying to do that for ages, and all too often have been told that their failure to overpower death is a lack of faith on their part. No, we have tasted grief, and it hurts, even when we believe in Jesus’ promise of eternal life.

I’m going to take a little detour here and tell you another story. Have you heard of the Blue Sweater? When she was in grade school, Jacqueline Novogratz had a favorite sweater. It was blue and had African animals and Mount Kilamanjaro on the front of it. She wore it just about every day, but when a girl is eleven or twelve or so her body begins to change, and the mean kids at her school started to tease Jacqueline about the curves of her new body and the mountains on the sweater. Crushed, she ran home and she and her mom packed up her beloved sweater and took it with other old clothes to the Good Will.

She grew up, went to college, got a great job, and then felt a call to help the people of Rwanda . One day when she was there after the genocide, she saw a young boy in a blue sweater. There were African animals on it and a picture of Mount Kilamanjaro , so she stopped him and asked if she could look at the tag, and there, behind his neck, she saw her name in indelible ink,  clear as the day her mother had written it. Oh, my gosh. What do you do with a story like that? She decided that there could be no clearer or more unequivocal statement that every tiny decision has the power to change lives. She formed the Acumen Foundation, which offers loans to poverty stricken people in third world nations so that they can regain their dignity and earn a living.

When my kids were about nine or ten years old they discovered the Choose Your Own Adventure books. The reader would get so far, and then the story would tell them to make a choice. If you pick up the sword, go to page 37. If you pick up the cookie, go to page 43. And so the story could end in the throne room or the dungeon, the hero could marry the fair princess or be given the power to become invisible. The child’s choice determined the outcome of the story. Elijah made a choice in the moment, the choice to obey God. The widow made a choice, the choice to feed Elijah even if it meant death for herself and her son. Jesus made a choice, not to stand back politely and let the procession pass by, and these choices made all the difference, just as our choices make all the difference.

We all send blue sweaters out into the world, and almost never will we see the person who ends up with them. We invest our money and our selves in mission, and almost never will we see the difference we make, but that is no reason to stop. No. The stories of our Holy Scripture tell us again and again that we are co-creators with God, not of the church, but of the kingdom. These stories feed us when we are starving, and they empower us to feed others.

As Mary Oliver writes:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

Amen.