sermons - stmatthewsvt

24 Pentecost November 8, 2009
1 Samuel 1:14-20
The Song of Hannah
Mark 13:1-8

Early one evening, just as it was beginning to get dark, I took my binoculars and walked down the valley where we spent our summers, to see if I could spot the deer that had been eating the beans. I went to the bank that overlooked the rapids - those raging rapids made that stretch of the Delaware River a serious hazard for all canoeists. Across the river I could see a girl standing on a rock. I looked at her through my binoculars, and she was a miserable sight. She appeared to be about 16 or 17 - a cute thing with a thick blond braid hanging down her back. All she had on was a very brief bikini, and she was swatting at bugs and rubbing her arms as she danced up and down to keep warm. On the boulder beside her was a canoe paddle - but there was no sign of a life vest or canoe. It happened all summer long - people would capsize on some submerged rock (usually without their life jackets on), and all their gear, their six-packs of beer, their clothes, and their canoe would go careening off down the river around the bend. I couldn't hear if the girl was yelling because the rapids made too much noise. So there we stood with a gulf between us - and it got darker, and chillier as a brisk wind began to blow up the river, and she kept swatting bugs, and rubbing her arms, and looking up the river in the dwindling hope that some late canoeist might show up and help her.

Let her stand there for a bit. Let her be a symbol of each one of us as we stand watching the sun go down on our past year together. Individually and corporately we have had darkness settle over us, we have been plagued by clouds of pesky problems, and we have shivered in chill winds. Each one of us, at times, is the girl on the rock - lonesome, scared, chilled, and anxiously watching the dark approach, and seeing no one to help.

Sometimes it has seemed as if a gulf, a roaring river with rapids, really does divide us from each other. We have trouble communicating with even those who are nearest and dearest to us. We say one thing and something entirely different is heard. It isn’t just that we are hard of hearing. David had difficulty with his hearing aids and often all it took was his missing one word for him to then miss the entire meaning of a sentence, with sometimes annoying results, and often comic ones. But I, with good hearing, have difficulty with attention (were I a kid in school today my folk would be told that I have “A.D.D.” - attention deficit disorder) and often all it takes is my missing one word for me to miss the entire meaning of what David would be telling me, more often with annoying results than comic ones. We could argue for a long time over the stupidest misunderstandings.

And the girl on the rock got colder and colder and kept looking up the river for help.

Sometimes it seems that a river, with rocks and rapids, flows between us in St. Matthew's Church. Did I sign up to do the coffee hour? I though YOU did. Didn’t you store the paper candle thingies for the Christmas candles? Nobody told ME that there was to be a change in the time of the service. Why are we doing things this way instead of the way we used to - I wasn't consulted about the new way we're running things.
Sometimes it seems that a river, with rocks and rapids, flows between our church and the community. You may not remember how we got righteously indignant when someone smashed our stained glass window. And, OH! -the gaps, the rapids, that separate us from the hungry, the jobless, the homeless. The river that runs between the haves and the have needs, in our churches, our towns, our country, and the world. We can't even say that we don't see them - every day on the TV we are shown the girl on the rock. She is cold as she lies on the steam vent in New York; she is hungry as she stands in line at a soup kitchen; she is bruised, hurt, scared, raped and we reach a point where if she shows up one more time on TV, graphically portrayed in her misery, we turn away because we feel so helpless to reach her.

Anyway, it is easier on our consciences if we can put the blame on her. The stupid girl didn't wear her life vest, she didn't pay attention to even the visible rocks in the river; she never tied her blue jeans (that had her wallet in the hip pocket) to the struts of the canoe. Stupid girl! She just asked for trouble - why does she just stand there waiting for ME to fish her out of the mess she should have avoided? If she, if "they", all of them, tried harder: they could find a job, they'd rather have handouts - they’re lazy - they’re . . . you know.

Because, you see, that girl on the rock is me. She is you. She is each one of us who at times has needs, gets cold, gets scared, and who looks for someone to come and help.

Does it stretch our imaginations too far to think of that very young girl on the rock as maybe named Mary - a perplexed and scared girl being told by an angel that she is going to be pregnant when she isn't even married yet? In her heart she must have felt that the future looked cold and increasingly dark - as indeed her future was. At one point there was "darkness over all the earth", as the son of that pregnancy, that son soon to be born to glad cries of "Hosanna!" died on the cross as she watched.

Today, the last Sunday in Pentecost, we have heard a reading from the Gospel of Mark. The one thing that is clear from Mark’s Gospel, where he writes such doom and gloom, is that troubles are real and that Jerusalem will be destroyed as well as future dreams. If you think we are past destroying entire cities – complete to nursing babies, old folk, young men and women – think Hiroshima, think Nagasaki.

The real girl on the rock? What happened to her? Well it got darker, and the wind blew chillier, and she learned what many of us learn - that when everything gets really dark in our lives there comes a light. When it got dark enough she suddenly whirled around and looked behind her, and saw the light - the lights of a car that showed her that there was a road only a few thousand feet away. And she was saved because of those lights.

And us? When everything gets dark in our lives, how are we saved? By the light - that light that shone in the darkness and that the darkness has never overcome. This is the last of Pentecost and we have been standing on the rock, cold and scared, and looking all these weeks for someone to come who will help us, who will save us, and now we know that "The true light that enlightens every man and woman is coming into the world..." Come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly for we are cold and hungry and scared and need to be saved.

January 24, 2010 - Third Sunday After The Epiphany

St. Matthew’s Church

Neh. 8:2-10

Psalm 113

1 Corinthians 12:12-27

LUKE 4:14-21

I used to lie in my hammock at our cottage beside the upper reaches of the Delaware River and watch the canoes capsize on a particular rock in the rapids. Over the years the number of canoes doubled and then tripled as the canoe rental people made the most of the public’s growing interest in the great outdoors and the desire to have a real “wilderness” experience. The last few years that we were at our cabin the numbers had grown into the thousands - it sometimes seemed on a sunny Sunday as if the Delaware River was Route 108 in Stowe when the slopes have new powder snow!

And I’d lie in my hammock watching most of them capsize on that rock and ask myself: “THIS is a wilderness experience?? These hundreds and hundreds of wet, beer drinking, people think they are in the wilderness?

And I’d have to admit that, yes, they not only thought so - but they were

See that canoe there? The red one, with the young couple headed for the big boulder? They can’t figure how to avoid the boulder, but neither can they see the two hundred canoes that just went down the rapids a few moments ago. Nor can they see the hundreds of canoes that are behind them and that will be hitting that same boulder right up until it gets dark. Right now they are alone on a very intimidating river, with foam all around them, and a boulder the size of their sofa right in front of them.

Jesus is sitting in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth. He has just read from the Torah, and he has told his friends and family that “TODAY “ the words he has read have come true. Not tomorrow - (no “pie in the sky by and by”) but today. Not yesterday, not back in Nehemiah’s time, but today. A “today” is a miracle, you know. We can’t do an earthly thing to change whatever has happened in the past, for good or ill. We cannot even guess at, much less control whatever may happen in the future. We are like that young couple in the canoe who cannot see the hundreds of other canoists who are behind them, or before them, and think they are alone.

As you know, I like Frederick Buechner’s writings and I’d like to read you what he wrote about the word “today”:

“It is a moment of light surrounded on all sides by darkness and

oblivion. In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own

history, there has never been another just like it and there will never

be another just like it again. It is the point to which all your yesterdays

have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which

all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were

aware of how precious it is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you

are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.

“This is the day which the Lord hath made” says the 118th Psalm. “Let us

rejoice and be glad in it.” Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The

point is to see it for what it is because it will be gone before you know it.

If you waste it, it is your life that you are wasting. If you look the other

way, it may be the moment you’ve been waiting for always that you’re missing.

All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not

yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.”

So writes Buechner, and the words can made you tremble. Today. We might never have been here, we realize, as we remember the skid that almost ended in a crash, , the diagnosis that sounded so final, that casually made decision made so long ago that changed the course of our life. Today is a miracle. This stretch of the river. That boulder the size of our dining room table in the foaming rapids ahead of us. What lies ahead around the next bend in the river of our lives we cannot see, and those boulders upon which we capsized, where we almost drowned, they are safely behind us. But today we have been promised good news, release from whatever hold us captive, sight instead of blindness, and liberty from all that oppresses us. Today. These words have been fulfilled in our hearing - Jesus said so.

Of course, we can cling to the memories of what lies behind us; we can keep our eyes shut and the ears of our minds closed to any good news; and we can moan about the heaviness of all that weighs us down and oppresses us. Or we can dream and hope for and talk about and wait for the quiet water that lies ahead, for the tranquil, boulder-free stretches that may be around the next bend. You know - the ‘pie in the sky by and by” stuff. We can also get angry at Jesus for holding out his dreams to us, raising our hopes for what might be, and telling us that these dreams are for everybody who would accept them - we can get so angry that we’d like to throw him off a cliff, the way his home town folk tried to do.

The miracle gift of our “today” is real, you know. We are here, alive, and able to choose to be glad in it. Today. Right now. Thanks be to God.

Rev. Virginia Thomas