That we might become wells of living water . . .

      I am certain my sermon this week was based a bit upon things happening in the wider world.  In our communion, there was a great deal of discussion about how Anglicans relate to God as the Gafcon folks became GAC.  Some of their criticisms about TEC were fair, as Presiding Bishop Michael shared during his visit to Tennessee during the end of his tenure.  Other parts, though, embraced Reformed theology far more than our spiritual ancestors thought wise.

     In the wider Church, there has been great discussion about the effort of some in the war with Iran to cause Jesus to return, as if human beings can force God to do anything.  And then there’s the whole discussion about whose “Christian” theocracy should determine the Christian principles that should guide our government’s dealing with economic, social, and other aspects of life.

     And I had to laugh a bit at God as I was getting ready on this, my least favorite day of the year when we give up an hour of sleep to “spring forward.”  There is a local evangelical pastor who does a bunch of 30 second spots.  This morning, he ran one that, if I heard it correctly, asserted that if we evangelize in the wrong way, we are condemned to hell just like the non-believers.  I chuckled because I knew the pericope we were reading from John’s Gospel today and how Jesus’ method would have apparently earned Him condemnation in the mind of this pastor.

     One last note of encouragement, ladies, if you are engaged in conversations with those who do not know what to do with your role in our church, this is another one of those arrows in your quivers.  The story takes place after Nicodemus’ nighttime visit with Jesus.  When Nicodemus leaves, we are not sure where he stands in his relationship with Jesus.  By the end of John’s Gospel, we know Nicodemus argues that the Sanhedrin should not violate its own laws to put Jesus to death and that he provides the spices for the women to prepare Jesus’ Body for the tomb.  Contrast the end of Nicodemus’ visit with the Samaritan woman, though, and ladies should be encouraged how Jesus invites women as well as men to the work of God.

     John’s story picks up as Jesus and the Apostles and disciples are traveling through Samaria.  Whenever I bring up the animosity between the Jews and Samaritans, people always ask for more information, so I will try to anticipate many of the questions today.  Samaritans were despised by those from the Southern Kingdom because they ignored the clear instructions of God.  Remember way back when there was a Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdom?  Good.  I see lots of nods.  One of the efforts of the Northern Kings was to diminish the role of the Temple in Jerusalem.  It is hard to get your citizens to believe that you are ruling in accordance with God’s will when your citizens have to travel to the capital city of the Southern Kingdom to worship God properly.  Sounds like modern politics, huh?

     The Northern kings did a couple things to make sure their people did not think the Northern kingdom was dependent on the Southern kingdom.  The big move was the building of alternative worship sites in Bethel and Dan.  Right below that, though, was the removal of the history books, the prophetic books, the wisdom books, and everything else in what we call the OT except for the Pentateuch, the five books written by Moses.  Again, it was a kind of propaganda.  If your people do not know what the prophets are saying about Jerusalem, they will not know its import to God.

     Of course, kings may plot and plan, but so do High Priests.  If you know the history of the two kingdoms, you also know that the High Priest in Jerusalem brought an army and burned those alternative worship sites in the Northern Kingdom.  We live in the South 150 years after our own burning, so we can all easily imagine how the Samaritans felt about that.

     To complicate matters and relations, Assyria rolled through the area and conquered the Northern Kingdom.  Most of the citizens were carried off to distant lands of the empire.  We modern people like to think ancient peoples were stupid, or rather we are much smarter, but governments were pretty shrewd.  Whenever a nation was conquered, most were carried off and placed in other conquered nations as a distinct minority and other conquered peoples were imported to and settled in the newly conquered area.  The idea behind all this was to keep the possibilities of riots and revolts low.  If everyone in a city or town spoke a different language, it would be hard for them to organize and plot together.  Add an oppressive law enforcement and a few soldiers, and one had the recipe for oppressive peace.

     Even as Assyria carried most of the residents in the Northern Kingdom off, it imported others to the Northern Kingdom.  2 Kings tells us that the five nations imported into the Northern Kingdom by Assyria brought with them five gods, though sharp readers will recognize they brought the worship of seven gods with them.  More on that in a couple minutes.  The residents of the Northern Kingdom eventually began to marry the sons and daughters of those who had been imported into the territory.  We all know that Israel was forbidden to marry outside the tribes, so the residents of the Southern Kingdom used this as yet another reason to look down on their brothers and sisters who remained in the North.  That’s the quick background for today’s Gospel lesson.

     Jesus and His disciples are heading north.  Usually, good Jews would avoid Samaria and travel around it, but Jesus led His disciples through it.  When He gets to the well, He needs a rest.  Were we reading this during the season of the Incarnation, I might speak of His humanity more in this passage.  John tries to remind us that Jesus is fully human and fully divine.  He can do great works of power, but He also gets tired and rests, just like us.

     Jesus remains at the well while the disciples go looking for food.  That was a bigger challenge than we might expect because they will be as uncomfortable eating food prepared by Samaritans as Samaritans will be to sell Jews food they have made, unless it is not fit for them to eat.  A woman approaches in the noonday sun to draw water.  Much hay is made about this.  She should have been doing it at dawn and at sunset like any good Mediterranean woman, but here she is, fetching water in the heat of the day.  That fact has provoked a number of teachings and assumptions that simply are not in the text.

     Jesus asks her to give Him some water.  She is shocked that He speaks to her and voices her incredulity.  Jesus responds that had she known who He is, she would have asked for living water, and He would have given it to her.

     I do not know that I intentionally remind us of the value of living water enough to have impressed upon you Jesus’ offer here.  Living water, water that comes from bubbling springs and rivers and streams, was needed for purification.  Water was valuable in an arid region like Ancient Israel, but living water was altogether far more valuable.  The Samaritan woman at this point has no idea who Jesus is.  But He is offering her something no self-respecting Jew would ever offer to a Samaritan woman.  So she reminds this Jewish man that Jacob, himself, dug this well and left it for his family and flocks.  It is a not-so-subtle way for her to claim the same ancestry as this man sitting on the well and speaking to her.

     Undeterred, Jesus points out that whoever drinks from the well will be thirsty again, but that whoever drinks from His living water will never thirst again.  The woman, whose job it is to get water every day, is focused on the practical rather than the symbolic or spiritual.  She asks Him for that living water so that she will never be thirsty nor need to come to the well to draw water.

     Rather than explain Himself to her at this point, Jesus shifts gears in a way that would drive the pastor from the commercial this morning nuts.  Jesus tells her to go get her husband.  The woman responds that she has no husband.  Jesus acknowledges the truth of her statement and what she omitted, that she has had five husbands and the man she is with is not her husband.  Again, much hay is made over this woman and her five husbands.  We do not know why the woman has had five husbands.  Is she widowed?  Is she divorced?  If the latter, we do not know why she was divorced.  In the pericope, she clearly knows a good deal about the Samaritan and Jewish history.  One of her underlying claims is a practical one.  We are no different than You.  We come from Jacob.  More importantly, she recognizes that Jesus is a prophet.  There is no way an ordinary Jewish male would have come to know this about her–an ordinary Jewish male would have had zero interest!

     This is a word from Brian and not necessarily God.  But I wonder, given the symbolism in this encounter, that her five husbands are symbolic.  Those who know the history of Samaria well will know that the nations settled there by Assyria brought with them five gods.  As we will see, Jesus will patiently explain to her that she has limited knowledge.  She worships what she does not know, but the Jews worship what they know!  Their confusion is not only caused by the fact that they accept only the Pentateuch but that they have been introduced overtly and subtly to idolatry by the intermarrying.

     Now she gets to the practical heart of the division between the two nations.  They both worship the same God, the God of Jacob, but the Jews insist that proper worship has to happen in the Temple.  Jesus instructs her and us that the time is coming soon when the Temple and High Places will not matter.  Sometimes, we like to think of this as yet another prophetic utterance regarding the destruction of the Temple in AD70.  I suppose it could be, but I think it misses the real point of what Jesus is instructing.  Thanks to His upcoming Cross and Resurrection and Ascension, this is John after all, we rightly worship God wherever we are!  We pray that we do not proclaim Him only with our words but in our lives!  And we remind ourselves again and again that He has sent the Holy Spirit, the Living Water of this conversation, to us, that we might glorify Him in our lives.

     The woman acknowledges her need of Messiah to explain all things.  And in one of those great self-identifications of Jesus, He tells her He is the Messiah.  I know y’all get tired of me trying to convey the meaning of the Greek, but there are some newer to us who have not heard it.  The Greek ego eimi, I am, is the name used in the Greek OT, known as the Septuagint, as the Name given by God to Moses from the burning bush.  Whenever Jesus uses the ego eimi, it has the full force of that cultural understanding and significance behind it.  The Greek speaking Jews hear is as the voice from the Burning Bush.  For this Samaritan woman, whose culture only accepts the five books of Moses, the significance is unmistakable.  Jesus tells her the one speaking to her is Messiah and God!

     Yes, there is lots more to the pericope, and we will talk about it again in just three years.  The disciples return and are shocked at Jesus’ willingness to talk to the woman.  For her part, as the disciples get an agrarian image to describe evangelism, she returns to the village and invites everyone to come and meet Jesus.  The end result is that these two cultures, usually like Ancient Hatfields and McCoys from my world, intermingle for two more days.  The disciples share what they have seen and heard.  Jesus Himself instructs the Samaritans.  And, because of Jesus’ instruction, the Samaritans confess to the woman that they believe He is truly the Savior of the world.

     I felt called to focus on the Living Water and the right worship today, as I mentioned earlier.  We Christians love to fight about right worship with each other.  We are Episcopalians and Anglicans, and so we think liturgical worship is inherently better than the smoke machine and laser light shows of some evangelical worship.  I could joke and state that our worship clearly is, but would those watching online or maybe visiting understand it a joke.  Truth be told, in some contexts, it is far more serious.  Some Christians like the liturgy in a language they do not understand; others think worship is simply gathering and praying.  I could go on and on and leave us all wonder who is right.  The word for worship is used eleven times in the Gospel of John.  Nine of those uses are in this pericope we read today.  As a Lenten practice, maybe go back and read the story from today and pay attention to those nine uses.  What is God instructing us about right worship today?

     First and foremost, right worship needs the Holy Spirit.  As I mentioned above, living water was Jesus’ symbolic description of the Holy Spirit.  John makes sure that we understand that the Ascension of Jesus is as important as His Death and His Resurrection.  Jesus’ Ascension makes it possible for us to receive the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to worship God correctly and to understand when we are worshipping incorrectly the need to repent and try again.

     The challenge comes when we try to figure out right worship.  Jesus uses the image of water, in part I think, to describe the amorphous nature of water.  If water is poured into a waterskin, it takes the shape of that skin.  If it is poured into a clay vessel, it takes the shape of that vessel.  If it is poured into a bath or fountain, it takes that shape.  So it it is when the Holy Spirit is poured into us.  We pray often about God dwelling in us and us in Him, but do we really pay attention to what we are saying?  We are all made in His image.  And when His Spirit is animating us, we are representing Him well in the world around us.  What does that look like?

     For us Episcopalians, it looks in part like a Rite 1 or Rite 2 liturgy.  It can be spoken or sung; it can have music and a choir.  But that is only part of our worship.  We remind ourselves again and again, but especially during Lent, that we give up ourselves to His service.  We ask Him again and again to equip us and remain with us as He sends us out into that parched world to do the work He has given us to do.  We remind ourselves again and again that He gives the meaning to our work.  Those who served at Room in the Inn last night know they likely are not going to end homelessness in Middle Tennessee, right?  I know, most went home to sleep instead of worshipping with us this morning.  Trust me, they know.  Yet, month after month they show up.  They make beds, cook meals, collect socks and underwear and other clothing, they clean up, and they engage those men in conversation.  The point of their work is to give the men they serve a break from the cold in the world, to give them an opportunity for connection,  and to remind them they are loved by God.  Of course, with God at work in this, other blessings happen.  Sometimes our volunteers are inspired by the faith of those whom they serve.  They come away amazed and exhorted to do the work God has given them to do that much more.  The same happens with Body & Soul, with those whom we serve through Insight, those whom we serve with Discretionary funds, with most of what we do to the glory of God!  The ministries are different.  Often the people serving in the ministries are different.  And yet, God is often glorified in our work.

     In addition to the corporate ministries, though, many of us have individual calls.  We have tutors among us, we have individuals who gather groups to deal with a particular concern or addiction or injury, we have individuals who serve as shoulders to cry on, or as welcomers to all kinds of situations, we have individuals called to a robust prayer life and others who are able to fund the work knowing they are important to that particular work.  We have spiritual matriarchs and patriarchs, women and men whom we recognize  as particularly attuned to God, from whom we can seek Godly advice for our particular challenges, fears, or difficulties.  The Living Water, the Holy Spirit, looks and sounds and feels like us and all our differences because we were all created in His image and redeemed by His work on the Cross making all that possible.  The locus of worship is where we are, where our lives are proclaiming what we say with our lips!

     Of course, the best news about all of this is that we who have drunk from the Living Water that Christ has provided us are called to be springs of living water ourselves.  We are called to be those in whom the Living Water wells up for those around us who thirst!  We are not called to be isolated ponds or wadis or something mundane.  We are called to be those vessels through whom God reaches others.  Make no mistake, only Jesus redeems them; only Jesus makes it possible for that Living Water to well up in us.  But we are invited into that relationship with Him that He might use us for His glory.  Unlike the Samaritan woman in the story, we know who it is that offers the drink.  We know His desire and willingness to work through us.  And, since we are in John this morning, we know that because He has ascended to the Father He can provide us with the Holy Spirit, both as a reminder to us of His enthronement and as an enabler of accomplishing the Will of God in our lives!  And so we do the work He calls us to do, trusting He will use us to His glory and redeem our failures.

     My friends, this Living Water that gushes up in us thanks to Jesus’ work on the Cross and in our lives, is exhilarating and terrifying.  We get to be the people who introduce others to the Savior of the world.  We may not think of ourselves as good ambassadors, nor even good brothers and sisters, but that Living Water gushing up in us transforms us into the witnesses we need to be.  And reminded of His purposes, His Will, and His desire to fill us with Living Water, we are sent back out into that parched wilderness to invite others into the Life for which He created them!

In His Name and His Peace,

Brian+

Listen to Him!

      I was sorely tempted to pretend today like I had not preached on the Gospel lesson two weeks ago.  Part of my temptation was to see if anybody paid attention or if the sermon was memorable.  The other part of my temptation was to play it like anybody who mentioned it had had a prophetic dream.  I could have played real excitedly like I was CLEARLY preaching the right sermon since you had heard it in your dreams.  Visitors are uncomfortable now because I confessed I am a sinner and because y’all are laughing.

     If the reading sounds familiar, it is because it should.  We read this the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, and we read it here at Advent on Even years of Year A.  On odd years we read John 3 in Lent.  My sermon on the Transfiguration during Last Epiphany focused more on the Transfiguration, transformation, that is happening to us as we continue in our walk with Christ.  God is literally at work changing us into His likeness.

     Today, though, I was drawn a bit more to focus on the questions that we hear raised in Christian circles and that we sometimes wonder about ourselves.  Sometimes I think Christians fall into one of two camps.  One the one side, there are people who think that because they proclaim Jesus is Lord they can do anything they want.  No matter what they do or say, God has to save them and admit them to heaven.  Unsurprisingly to some of us, their focus is only on the eternal consequence of salvation.  In fact, NT Wright caught some flack from Christians for his claim that God cares about this world, too, that we are called to reflect the character of God in this world around us.  To use the language of Epiphany, God manifests His character and His being through our ministries or service.  I have a bit too much fun talking with people who are confident that God HAS to save them no matter what they do.  The Church would label what they claim is cheap grace.  And, it seems that a number of those folks have the bully pulpits of our country right now.

     The other group of Christians I would describe as those who are unsure all the time about their salvation.  They want to know with certainty that God will save them, but they think that certainty is impossible.  I am not talking about people who, as they enter their Garden of Gethsemane as they die and hear the voice of the enemy making a last effort to tempt them.  I am speaking of those people whose lives and words are full of the anxiety, who really believe God may mean His covenant with others, but not with them.  

     How do we know, then?  How do we know whether we are glorifying God in our lives and reflecting the hope and grace that is within us?  God gives us the answer for the third time since Epiphany 1.

     Just to refresh our memory, the cloud has come down, Jesus has been Transfigured, Moses and Elijah have appeared, and Peter has offered to erect a tabernacle for all three of them.  How does God respond?  Just as He did at Jesus’ baptism, God speaks “This is My Son, the Beloved; with Him I am well pleased.  Listen to Him.”  We know the stories well enough to realize there are a number of times that the Apostles and disciples of Jesus do not understand Him.  In fact, though He teaches them that He must die and be raised from the dead on the third day, they do not understand what He is saying.  Like us, the early disciples have a hard time listening to Jesus.

     There are lots of fights in our context today.  Many claim to be arguing for or doing the “Christian” thing.  The problem, if we are to listen to the Father’s voice today is that the “Christian” thing proclaimed or done is not always Christ-like.  You are all Anglicans / Episcopalians, so most of this will seem like a “duh” moment.  We need to teach the poor how to make better choices, so we need to cut the social safety net.  We need to cut taxes on the rich because they need more . . . dollars, yachts, incentive to make more money, whatever the excuse is.  We need to drive out all illegals because they are criminals.  Pick up a Tennessean or just pay attention to social media, and you will find all kinds of “Christian” wisdom and exhortations that does not sound Christ-like at all.  In fact, for those of us who are truly struggling with the question of whether God will save us or admit us into heaven, Jesus’ voice is easy to hear.  In the famous parable of the sheep and the goats, what is His teaching?  “What you have done to the least of these, you have done to Me.”  The struggle is real and has existed for as long as there has been a people of God.  The instruction sounds to easy to be true, yet how many of our friends, our neighbors, even members of our own family forget that what we cheer on being done to others means we are cheering on it being done to Christ?

     In one sense, of course, it is not surprising.  We intentionally remind ourselves year after year that we helped put Christ to death.  Our sins, our mockery, our indifference to human suffering necessitated His saving work on the Cross.  We remind ourselves intentionally on Palm Sunday and Good Friday that we are part of that crowd that mocked Him as He died.  Still, His love for each one of us caused Him to beat that shame, that pain, and that death, that we might know His love of and for each one of us and every single human being we encounter out there in the world.

     But in another sense it is incredibly disappointing that people who claim to be Christian allow themselves to be deafened to His call, to His instruction, and to His love.  This is My Son, the Beloved.  With Him, I am well pleased.  Listen to Him.

     And yet, part of our job is to help others hear His voice.  Those who serve the forgotten, the lost, the needy, the poor, the sick, and the lonely are called to be their voice.  Just as we are called to remind them of God’s love for them, just as we are called to be living examples of that transforming process God has begun in us, we are sometimes called to remind our brothers and sisters of His love of them.  We remind them of His Words and His example; we instruct them about our experience serving others in His Name.  And we pray.  We pray that their ears may be unstuck so that they, too, might hear the voice of Christ and serve Him in serving others, that all might be gathered into His saving embrace from the Cross!

In His Peace and Love,

Brian+

Seeking God and seeing the ripples . . .

      Our reading in the Gospel today is a fun place to restart after the great Ice Storm of 2026, both to nudge us along in our work in this place and this time and to remind us of events in the wider Church.  The passage is well known as The Sermon on the Mount.  Back in the late summer or early fall, I think it was, I had a number of conversations with people at the Green Hills Y over Russell Moore’s comments about the Sermon on the Mount.  For those of you who do not know the name, Russell Moore was a leader in the SBC, which is headquartered here in Music City.  I think he was the runner-up in their election to lead the SBC, but he made waves criticizing the SBC for its failure to require the President to act morally and for its unwillingness to discipline clergy who raped or sexually abuse girls and women in their churches.  You can google him at your leisure.

     Moore has mentioned on several occasions, as have other leaders in the evangelical wing of the Church, that congregants are unhappy with the content of the Sermon on the Mount.  It has stunned and surprised pastors and other leaders that preaching on the Sermon on the Mount is being rejected.  After all, the words are in red letters in their Bibles, reminding them that the sermon comes from Jesus word for word.  The biggest complaints from those in the congregations was that the sermon was too woke, that Jesus was too weak, that the guidance Jesus gives just does not work in today’s world.

     People would stop and ask me, in light of this controversy, if I ever preached on it and what I thought about it and what you all thought about it.  I, of course, reminded them we used a lectionary rather than my personal choice, so we read it once year, if not more.  More than one inquirer laughed when I said your all’s response would be something akin to “duh.”  You all are laughing, but those talking to me were uncomfortable.  Some went to churches where Moore’s criticism was renounced from the pulpit.  Some went to churches where Moore’s criticism was embraced in the pulpit but rejected in the pews or chairs.  Some wondered if Jesus’ words were too woke?  Others were just confused that a well-known passage could be rejected in a church that prides itself on sticking to the Bible.

     I mention this as a bit of a vaccine in case you mention my teaching today.  If I end up preaching what you think is a lesson worth sharing, you may get significant pushback.  But if you do from a Christian, you know that they have been struggling with this since maybe August of last year.

     For my part, I was drawn this week to the “pure in heart” of verse 9.  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.  A couple things stood out to me despite the fact we were living in the aftermath of a terrible ice storm.  The first is the understanding of the heart in Ancient times.  We are now in February and probably noticed since right after Christmas that stores were turning the page to Valentine’s Day.  The symbol of the day is the heart.  That’s because we modern westerners think the heart is the emotional seat or focus of our bodies.  Heck, the whole secular theme of Valentine’s Day is the piercing of a heart by an arrow, often Cupid’s.

     In the ANE, however, the heart was the seat of focus of the will.  Human beings had understanding in the head or brain, but the heart represented the choice that human beings made.  Sometimes we chose well; at other times, we did not choose as well.  Part of the reason that God speaks about circumcised hearts is that He is reminding those who listen to His voice that they should love what He commands or instructs.  Too often, though, we choose to ignore God’s commands that we love Him with everything we have, that we love our neighbors as ourselves, that we care for the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast, with our own selfish needs.  Good.  I see nods.  The evidence of our propensity for sin and our need for a Savior is the very fact that you and I, no matter our understanding and no matter how focused we are, always return to sin.  Augustine and his colleagues called it original sin; our Reformed brothers and sisters called it our total depravity.  Part of life, as Christians, is spent trying to attune ourselves to God so that we will choose to do or not do wisely.  That being said, we also remind ourselves that when we sin, we repent, and return to the Lord.

     When we talk about the pure in heart, we often speak in terms about those who are holy, those who are righteous, or those who have been transformed by the Holy Spirit significantly.  Think of Mother Theresa or Quintard or those in your lives who modeled Christ-like behavior seemingly with ease and, better still, were quick to catch on to their need to repent.  But, for those of us trying to attune ourselves to God through prayer and worship and study, there is another way for us to see God.  I was reminded as I talked with line workers this week.

     Starting on Tuesday, I think it was, people started showing up for food despite the roads, despite the ice, and despite the trees and poles and wires down.  I had been shoveling and salting when it started.  As the crews made their way down Forest Acres, I took a break to stroll over and see how things were going, thank them for what they were doing in those horrible temperatures and conditions, and to offer a bit of a bribe.  I told a couple of the guys that I wished the power was on to the church.  If the power was on, the heat would be on and they could warm up.  If the lights were on, they would be able to see their way around the bathrooms.  If the heat were on, it would be a great place just to rest and warm up.

     One of the guys thought it was cool so many folks were coming to check on us and the grounds.  I told them, of course, that nobody had been over to church.  For his part, he had seen 10-12 cars pull in and out.  I told him that was for the food insecure in our midst.  We had a normal talk about the desperation of those who are food insecure.  I also told him I was not unhappy they were coming.  The longer the power stayed off, the greater the chance things in the refrigerators and freezers might go bad.  We talked a bit about giving people choices, about the food and drink that God had provided in the Scriptures, and ultimately how Jesus warns us that how we treat those hungry, poor, oppressed, and imprisoned is how we treat Him.  Y’all know me, so it will not surprise you too much, but I was standing on Forest Acres on Tuesday, with poles down, wires down, trees down and the world around us encased by ice, talking about human beings being stamped with the characteristics of God that He wanted them to have before their birth.  And the one lineman was asking lots of important questions.

     When the conversation trailed off, he promised they were doing their best and would get us all up and running as fast as possible.  That was crazy meaningful work we were doing.  I headed back down to church and shoveled some more, salted everything unsalted, and served a few more people who arrived for food.

     The next day, the linemen were working again on the Forest Acres rise, so I headed over there to check in with them.  A third older guy, though, started heading at me as I was next to the neighbor across the street.  Are you the pastor of the church?  I pointed to Advent.  He nodded, so I nodded.  He asked if we really were feeding those people driving up the last couple days.  I told him I was feeding most of them.  Some people just turned around in my church, and a few people were looking for rides to hotels from the neighborhood.  But you’re the church feeding people steaks and lobster and fresh veggies, and bake bread and all kinds of crazy things?  I told him we were, though that had been over a period of 7 years.  His buddy, and he pointed at one of the two with whom I had spoken the day before, was telling him all about out our work.  That is awesome that you guys do that!  That’s the kind of thing churches need to be doing, and too few are!  Pastor, we intend to get your grid up and running tonight, tomorrow at the latest.  Y’all know it was not up and running until late Saturday afternoon, but it was not the close bathroom or the prospect of hot coffee or heated casseroles that had this guy motivating the other workers.  It was our work feeding the hungry in Christ’s Name.  He thought we honored Christ providing people with good food, giving them a choice, treating them like human beings, and testifying to them that as good as some our foodstuffs are, God has more amazing things for those who accept His invitation.  It was an exhorting conversation coming from yet another lineworker, who thanked us for taking His call on our lives seriously and doing things many churches would never do.  Had the conversation ended, I would have had a spring in my step.  It was a perfect example of us not knowing the impacts of the work we do.  He had learned about our work from one of the first lineman, and he was praising us for doing God’s work.

     But he went on.  Do you know about Tema?  I think Tema was a pastor and maybe ran a food pantry and said I did not know her.  He laughed and said, no TEMA.  It’s like FEMA but TEMA.  Ah, I knew of it, but only what I had heard or read.  Well, he went on, it’s like FEMA but the federal government gives the funds to the state government to administer.  Because Tennessee is a Christian state, we don’t automatically disqualify churches like other states do.  I asked him to go on.  Pastor, you and your church are doing things in the public good.  You are feeding the hungry around here.  If you can document it, you will probably qualify for help.  The money you spend on your tree removal will be money with which you cannot feed the hungry.  You should check it out and see.  I thanked him for the lead and headed back to the church.  Sarah had come down while we were chatting, so I realized he was watching the action behind me as we chatted.

     Later that afternoon, I asked Greg Platt about it.  Both of us thought there was no way we qualified, I think it fair to say.  Churches are almost always shut out of such things.  But he decided to do a bit of research, first by web and later by phone.  Though we won’t know until this week whether we are eligible to apply, we are not yet disqualified.  But we may get 80% of the damage repaired either through a grant or a very low interest loan.  And all that, that entire ripple, began with Adventers committing themselves to seeking God, to discerning the work to which our Lord was calling us, however many years ago!  I know.  Not everyone was sincere.  Not everyone was confidant.  But the fruit speaks for itself.  Many Adventers have been transformed by the Holy Spirit.  Some of those Adventers who did not think these instructions were real now know better.

     But the most amazing thing to me, because I know many of those thoughts and conversations, is that it has become a bit of an illustration for preaching and teaching on the beatitudes.  We have sought God, and we have seen God.  We have seen His provision.  We have been given a share in His glory.  Some of us have even come to see that those whom we serve are created in His image.  And the ripple includes some of the other beatitudes–you’ll hear about some of those in the weeks ahead.  We serve other humbly in His Name.  Hmmm.  Ours is His kingdom.  We mourn that some go hungry in our midst.  Hmmm.  We will be comforted.  We show mercy; we are promised mercy.  We are mocked for doing this unending work by some of our brothers and sisters.  Hmmm.  Those mocked and persecuted for righteousness’ sake will receive the Kingdom of heaven and be treated the way God’s people have always treated those whom He sent in His Name.

     And make no mistake, this is a corporate ministry.  All of you, even some of the less enthusiastic, have a share in this work.  Sarah and I, and then Hilary later, may have been the face of the work last week due to meteorological conditions beyond our control.  But every single Adventer, and even some people who do not consider themselves Adventers, were a part of that work.  Some of you provided funds to buy food; some of you pray for provision or encounters or other intercessions as led by God; some of you carried the food in; some of you volunteer and feed in Christ’s Name, reminding yourselves that in them we see some of Him; some of you provided funds that make sure the lights and HVACs are usually working properly.  Everyone had a hand in that work, just as everyone has a desire to want what He wants, to do what He wants done, to avoid those things He wants us not to do, and, since we are gathered in worship of Him and His saving work this cold morning, to do the work He has given us, both individually and as a congregation, to do, certain that, just as He was raised from the dead that Easter morning, we will one day share in all those blessings He promised in this sermon, and, in crazy times like last week, get a different pledge of the hope of our calling, that we might be encouraged to keep reaching for in His Name!

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian+