“ Abundance”

7 January 2007

Scripture Reading:   Isaiah 60:1-6,17b-22 - Matthew 2:1-12

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

We are in the season of Epiphany.  That is the season when the church celebrates the wonder of God with us as Jesus the Christ.  From the moment Jesus stepped on the earth things broke forth, broke out, and overflowed.  Jesus performed miracles to show us what God is like.  Jesus showed that God is an abundant host who showers good things upon us over and over again.  Matthew Fox calls God’s great massive abundance “Cosmic Hospitality.” 

In the gospel of John the first miracle that Jesus performs is turning water into wine while he was at a wedding celebration in Cana.  It was a three day blow out affair.  At the end of the third day, the host is out of wine.  At which point Jesus’ mother, who knows her son is extraordinary, decides to put his abilities to good use.  So, his first miracle is not world peace, it is not curing cancer, it is not a battle with Satan.  Rather his first miracle is turning water into wine so the party doesn’t have to end.  We are told that, at the word of Jesus, the jars of water are filled up to the brim and when the water is tasted it had turned into wine.  Not just any wine, but the best wine.  Not just a little wine, but a ridiculous amount of it, 180 gallons of the best wine.  “Welcome to my party!”  says the cosmic host.   

God is an extravaganza affair.  The Christian message is clear.  Where there is shortage, scarcity and lack, God will make overflowing abundance.  This is a remarkable epiphany.  God’s hospitality is so abundant it is almost slapstick comedy if it wasn’t so wonderfully generous at the same time. 

This abundance of God shows up time and time again with Jesus in the gospels.  It is kind of like Louis Armstrong playing jazz wherever he goes.  Big belts of the trumpet, low loud voice, large knowing smile as if we are in on only the overture and someday will hear the rest of the band play the whole concert. 

Let me give you some more examples of this abundance.  Once Jesus was preaching from a boat on the sea of Galilee.  Jesus decided a sermon illustration would be good.  So when he finished speaking he told Peter to take the boat to deep water and let down his nets.  Peter had been fishing all night.  They had caught nothing.  He was sick of fishing.  But, Peter did it anyway and behold their nets came up loaded with fish.  Large holes in the net ripped open the many fish were so heavy.  Fish were spewing out everywhere - fountains of fish.  The boats were swamped with fish and began sinking.   Cosmic hospitality goes fishing.

Another time Jesus was trying to get away for a while.  But, people followed him and brought many sick people to be cured.  So feeling badly for them Jesus gave up trying to be alone, and cured the sick.  Then when it was evening his disciples thought they people should go get something to eat in the nearby villages.  But Jesus said no he could do it.  With nothing but five loaves and two fishes, he blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the five thousand and behold, they all were filled as if they had eaten a whole Thanksgiving meal with turkey trimmings and pumkin pie.  Cosmic hospitality invites you to dinner.

Jesus was at a dinner party at the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  Mary had about a pint of nard.  Nard is a fragrant oil derived from the root of the nard plant which grows in the mountains of northern India.  It was a rich rose red and very sweetly scented.  It was a pint of pure nard so it was not diluted with anything.  It was worth about a years wages of a common laborers, say in today’s dollars, about 20 to 30 thousand dollars.  This perfume is outrageously expensive owing to is being imported all the way from northern India.  It may have been a family heirloom that she was lavishing on Jesus.  She pours it on Jesus’s feet, instead of his head, and wipes it with her hair.   When Judas protested and said that the money should be saved and given to the poor, Jesus said, that we will always have the poor but we would not always have him.  Right before his triumphal entry and his death, Jesus allowed God’s comic hospitality to be poured out upon himself through the actions of Mary.   

Then there is the resurrection itself.  The huge many ton stoned rolled away from the tombs entrance.   There were abundant appearances… in the upper room, to disciples on the road, at the beach on the sea of Galilee (where by the way he tells them how to catch more fish), then to hundreds, and lastly the resurrected Jesus knocks Paul off his horse and asks why is he persecuting him.  Death is swallowed up in victory.  A butterfly breaks forth from the cocoon.   God’s creative energy never ends and is never stopped, even by death. 

We are guests to God’s extravaganza.  God’s word goes forth loaded with creative potential and wherever it lands God’s good intentions will happen.  And, it is all for free.  Isaiah proclaims, “…you that have no money, come, buy and eat!  Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price….For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.  (Is. 55)”

Annie Dillard catches the same drift that Isaiah is describing:  She writes:  The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation.  After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor.  The whole show has been on fire from the word go!”

God goes over the top in cosmic hospitality.  What does that mean for us as Christians?  It means we are to live life in amazement.    People were amazed when Jesus turned the water into wine.  But, we are not to stop there.  We should be amazed at all of life.  My kids love Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.”    Here are a few amazing facts for you:  Did you know that in June 2006 sand artists created a sand castle on Myrtle Beach S.C. taller than a three story building.  Did you know that a person is shorter in the evening than in the morning due to gravity.  Did you know that the bottom dwelling Red Lipped Batfish looks like an algae covered rock – except for its bright red lips.   Amazing right?  But, why are those facts any more amazing than what we come across every day.  When my kids were two years old the wrapping paper was as wonderful as the present.  The boxes had as much play potential as the trucks that came in them.   Playing with the door opening and closing was as fascinating as any toy.   

Another word for this amazement is gratitude.  We should be delighted in the ordinary, surprised and awed by our own existence and the existence of all else.  We should have a childlike sense of wonder.  We must vow not to succumb to the monotony and boredom that saps so many lives of joy and purpose.  In his best known book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton wrote that “the test of all happiness is gratitude.  Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets.  Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he puts in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?  We thank people for birthday presents…Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?” 

If there was only one prayer you could say your whole life, that prayer should be “Thank you.”  There is no fuller or deeper response to God’s cosmic hospitality than that.  Do not wait until you actually feel grateful.  We must begin saying thank you even on days that are hard, full of suffering, and disappointing.  For it is in the very act of finding things to thank God for, that the amazing will appear in places we were hitherto unaware like water into wine.   For instance, you can practice saying Thank you as you are driving along in the car.  Even if it as first sounds ridiculous, thank you for the red leather seat, thank you for the off ramp, thank you for the rain clouds, thank you for the rain, thank you for the air, thank you for the music on the radio.  The act of gratitude begins to make gratitude.  Like a the old comedian Charlie Chaplin gratitude can be laughed at as ridiculous but it will deliver its compassion anyway.    

I guarantee when I end this sermon you are going to be feeling better than when you came in here this morning.  That is because I am now going to read to you a list of things people have said they were grateful for:

• The opportunity to always do better the next time, to love and be loved, and to leave an indelible mark on the world, no matter what I choose to do.  Daniell Ackley-McPhail, 32, Richmond Hill, New York

• The sent of wild honeysuckle in the dark air as I walk among the trees.  Though I know that out there, in the world beyond my small woods, more fearsome things lurk, I stretch my arms to the moon, inhaling the safe, damp night.  Arlene Mandell, 62, Santa Rosa, CA

• The force we can generate when we unite around a single hope.  A few months ago my husband was seriously ill and wasn’t expected to live.  That week I began a prayer circle with family and friends.  By the end of the week, the doctors could only explain his healing as a medical miracle.  My husband, my best friend, put it this way:  unity is strength.  When there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.  Carol Merolla 57, Johnston, Rhode Island.

• The smell of fresh cut grass.  Julie Westbrook, 31, Los Angeles, CA

• The sound of my child’s footsteps coming downstairs for breakfast.  That sound is like music and makes my heart soar every time I hear it.  Robin Lieberman, 39, Queens, NY

• The tree frog living in my outside tub who serenades me to sleep.  Amy Carlson, 46, Leavenworth, Washington
• A younger sister who as a child was a pest.  Now she is my friend.  Helen Luecke, 62, Amarillo, Texas.
• A little orange cat with birth defects.  I saved his life, and he saved mine.  Jane Johnston, 44, Coos Bay, Oregon

It was a miracle when Jesus turned the water into wine.  Some people say that miracles are just another form of magic and so are made up things.  I don’t know how Jesus did it.  But, I suspect it goes something like this:  The universe is tuned like a guitar, when one place is touched hidden vibrations occur in many other places.  There is a coherent unity under the great diversity and there is an intricate system of hidden harmonies.  (Prayer:  A History, page 38).    When we express gratitude we are touching off a chord in the Cosmos for hospitality.  That is, behind all small amazing things is the great amazing thing, God’s word which goes forth and calls all things into being, ignites life itself and even calls beings back from death.