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Rez is a community where Jesus welcomes, shapes, and sends disciples for the good of our neighborhood. No matter where you are in life, this is a place for you.
Life Together In The Goodness Of God
I don't know if I have a great opening for the sermon because it involves a board meeting, but I think it could work. So just bear with me. I recently gave a report to the Quinn Foundation in our diocese, which has been an enormously instrumental foundation to support us, to encourage us, to provide us the kind of like booing, you know, and encouragement that we need for this church to thrive, especially after everything we've been through in a recovery period. The Quinn Foundation has been a gift from heaven. They have been wonderful, godly people. And I was at this report, you guys that have been proud of me. I had charts and I had graphs. I mean, my deck, my slide deck was, I like that stuff. It was clean. And if anybody in the office, they know, they've seen it because they're like, yeah, he just shows us for no reason. All this stuff that he likes all the time. There's something really satisfying about pitching and having a slide deck that I can point at, like an upward trending line and go, that's us. It's like really satisfying to me. I love that. But the part of the report that actually mattered wasn't the charts or the trend lines or the pictures. The part of the presentation that mattered most were the stories. And I could see it. I mean, I like the charts. But when I started telling stories, everybody lit up. Something's going on. This is something different. I told stories about what this congregation, what you did during a really hard season when things were not quite right. Stories about you giving sacrificially, stories about the way that you serve one another. I talked about how engaged our volunteer base in this church is like, I still think it could be greater, but it is like far greater than most churches by far. We are super, super engaged in volunteering and giving the way that you all love your neighbors. I told stories the way that when Max was baptized, came out of the water screaming, screaming hallelujah. And everybody was like, what was that? That was awesome. Well, let's do that. I told them story after story. And that's that was the stuff. That was the real stuff. The charts can show you that the church is flourishing. And we are. How encouraging. What the charts cannot show you is why. Only stories do that. Only those stories did that. Those acts of love that are easy to overlook and maybe even forgotten sometimes, they don't have a column in a spreadsheet. Right. We can't measure them so easily, but they are the most sacred signs that God is up to something. Those stories. I struggle with quiet signs like that. I don't know if you can relate to this. I struggle with quiet signs, things that are easy to look past. I want to see God at work in spectacular, like neon signs sort of ways. Lord, give me a sign. And then like the Lord descends. I like that stuff. I've asked for that kind of stuff in the past. And those smaller things, those smaller acts of love, those are easier to sort of overlook and think or write off and think, well, that's I don't know if that was really a divine thing, if that was a gift from God. Well, in our readings, we heard from Jeremiah that he's speaking to an exiled people. A people who know what it felt like to want things to get better. A people who know what it's like to cry out to God and say, are you there? Hello? The prophet, Hananiah, was exactly that sign for these people. Hananiah stood in the temple. He spoke with authority and he said what everyone desperately needed it to hear. Your exile is almost over. Don't worry. Two years. Hang in there. We're almost there. God is moving. And I can imagine the people would have exhaled like, oh, good, because this is rough. That part of the story was just before the reading that Jamie read to us. So we didn't get that part. So I'm catching you up on some context here. But standing among them and among the people of God was another prophet, Jeremiah, who's not known for great news. And honestly, most prophets aren't. And his response is one of the most honest moments in all of scripture. And I really admire it, actually. To paraphrase what Jeremiah said in response to Hananiah's good news prophecy, Jeremiah said, Amen. May the Lord do so. I hope that happens. I really do. I want that to be true just as much as the rest of us. He didn't bring comfortable predictions, the rest of his response. What he ended up doing is naming the hard truth, the hard thing being said and letting time prove him right. And when the truth came, it was never spectacular. It was actually really humble. It was very small. It was very honest. But it was a costly thing. And Jesus now jumped with me centuries later to Jesus teaching his disciples. And he's showing the twelve what it looks like. The same pattern, the same pattern. But then he ends the whole discourse on mission here. He says, whoever welcomes you, welcomes me. And whoever welcomes me, welcomes the one who sent me, whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones. Truly, I tell you, none of those will lose their reward. What Jesus is describing isn't a spectacular sign of God at work. What Jesus is describing is a very boring, humble, meager sign of God at work. And he's teaching us how to recognize those things. He's teaching us how to be those things. That's the invitation. If you can follow that like chain of grace, right? The little one to disciple, to Jesus, to the Father. This is this channel, this means, we say as Episcopans, this means of grace. Almost a sacrament, actually. There is a sacramental quality to it. The people were wanting desperately Hananiah to be right. And I wonder if sometimes we, in our desire for things to be made right, would sort of take the good news that someone has to offer uncritically and neglect the harder, humble act of love. They wanted for God to swoop in, button things up, make everything right. They wanted God to act. And that's not bad. It's okay. But the hard truth was that their own efforts were actually involved in the ways that God was acting. What they did, God was in, even in those small acts. And Jeremiah announces all of this to them. Not big flashy God intervention, but there's something else going on at work in your lives. What we have is a God who chooses for whatever reason. I don't know why God does the thing God does sometimes, but whatever reason, we have a God who chooses to work grace into the world through the most unspectacular acts of love, at least according to the world. We have a God who chooses to work grace into the world through people like us. We have a God who, instead of choosing to be an emperor or a king, chose to be a humble carpenter, son of a virgin, of a poor family out in the backwoods, a very humble entry into the world. We have a God who chooses to work grace in humble ways. Even the most important meal of your life, the most sacred meal of your life, comes to you in very, very humble form. Do you notice? This is the character of God. This is the way God works. And that means of grace, whatever it is, that channel can be traced from something as simple as a cold glass of water to a child all the way up to the creator of the universe. I, thinking about where we've seen this in our community, I think about our teenagers who this weekend spent time over at El Buen putting their hands in the dirt and cultivating a garden for their neighbors who knew what it is to be afraid and displaced. Gardening? Yeah, Sean, gardening is like that cold cup of water. I think about the people in this congregation who quietly, without announcement, honestly, oftentimes even without an invitation, care for their neighbors. I'm specifically thinking of someone I found out as caring for their elderly neighbor who's not even a part of the church, brings food, checks in, shows up. What a humble act of love. And maybe most directly connected to even this text in Scripture, those who serve in our nursery, in our kids' chapel. This is not some obligatory thing. Well, we've got to get somebody in there. Are you safeguarded? Well, I'm not. You know, like that whole, like, right? Dragging people into the nursery. It is a sacrament of God's love to these little ones. And honestly, I think if we understood how in this humble act of sitting with babies so that parents can be here and not have a baby crawling all over them, you know, during the service, or teaching our children, if we understood the power of that sacramental act, how God is at work in that, we would never have to ask for volunteers. We would have a waiting list. You know what I'm saying? So it's not a program. This is a sacramental cup of cold water to little ones. A living answer to the question people carry out there. Where is God in all this trouble? Those acts are the answer. So if we struggle, and I certainly do, I've been there, to believe that God is actually at work in these ordinary acts. Can we sit with this? Is God really at work in these ordinary acts? It seems so un-fantastic. We don't get goose bumps sometimes. We don't feel the Spirit, you know, like, in more spectacular ways. But do we believe that God is actually involved in these ordinary acts of love? One of the reasons, one of the biggest mentors and heroes in my life is Gustavo Gutiérrez. You guys have heard of his name a million times for me. I'm sorry. I'm a broken record with a few of my homies, okay? I love them. I have a picture of Gustavo Gutiérrez in my office for exactly this question, for this reason. Gustavo spent his life arguing that God's love is not absent from the suffering of the poor. It's actually the most clear there. Not because suffering is good, but because God has always moved toward the least and the last and the weak. The cup of cold water is not a small gesture that somehow counts because Jesus mentioned it in Scripture. No, it is a template, a type, a revelation that the presence of God is most visibly precise where it is most needed. Not to fix everything or make the poor rich, but to be loved, to be present to your neighbor in most humble forms in the most needed times. That is precisely when we see the presence of God. Some of you are holding a cup of cold water in your hands metaphorically, right? Or coffee, I don't know. Some of you have this cup of cold water in your hands that God has given you and that God hasn't given everyone, but has given you this cup of cold water. I think the question this morning we have to be really serious in asking is, am I going to give that cup of cold water for whom God gave it to me to give? Am I going to give that cold water? Am I going to, let me translate, am I going to participate with what God's doing in the world? Am I going to, in a living and tangible way, answer someone's question, where is God in all of this trouble? Steps into you with a cup of cold water in this humble form. And friends, some of you are really thirsty. Some of you need that cup of cold water. Some of you need to like actually humble yourself and get that help and that care from others. Because I know some of you are so good at giving, but have a heck of a time receiving, right? Sometimes you need to receive that cup of cold water. Some of you are angry at God for not doing something or being more visible or intervening or doing something spectacular or being more decisive. And that is also a place to stand. You can be angry with God. That is okay. The prophet stood there too. But here's what I want to say to you. What you are doing and what is being done for you in this congregation and this neighborhood is not separate from God's presence and action in the world. It is part of it, actually. Where is God? You'll find God in those humble acts of love. Hannah and I wanted God to show up in a dramatic reversal of things. Jeremiah knew better. The kingdom of God does not arrive in those sort of flashy ways. It comes through the long unspectacular faithfulness of people who plant gardens, who cultivate soil in exile, who bring water to the thirsty, who keep showing up even when the work is hard and when the trouble seems endless. Right? You are those people. We are those people. This is that community, that sacrament of God's humble acts of love to our neighbors. And we are connected to that same chain with the disciples all the way up to the Father whose love is pouring out and we are those vessels. So friends, keep pouring those glasses of cold water. Keep planting, keep volunteering, keep giving, keep praying, keep loving your neighbor. Find those ways of participating with what God's actually doing in the world and you will find, I promise, you will find in yourself meaning and purpose and beauty and energy, a whole, as Jesus says, a whole life abundant. We will find. That's the promise. God's grace is not a paycheck. It's not wages. It's always a gift. So I'm not twisting your arm to be a gift to somebody. But if you find yourself going like, but I don't want to be a gift to somebody right now. I need to be given a gift. Then hold out for that. And friends, let's rally around our people. Right? Let's take care of one another. But God's grace is always a gift to us. God's never twisting our arms to be part of that gift. It's always freely given. And it's given not because it's the right thing to do, but it is given because of the one we follow, the one who gave his life for us, the one who poured out his life. He was he was no victim. He was no like sort of poor messenger that got sort of on the wrong side of history. And oh, well, you know, sorry, Jesus. No, this is he said, my life cannot be taken from me. Remember that? But he gave it freely for your sake. So as we follow him, we will find ourselves in that same posture, that same pattern. Right? To pour out our lives for those, for others. And we find ourselves in doing so a disciple, truly a disciple of Jesus Christ, our Lord. This morning, let me leave you with that question. We're going to have a moment of silence. Consider what are those ways that God has been inviting you into pouring out a cup of cold water or maybe receiving one? And what could you do today? What could you do next to step into that stream of grace? Amen. Let's take a moment of silence.