Moses, the Servant of the Lord, Died

                                                                Proper 25A 2014

                         Deut 34:1-12; Psalm 90;1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46

Father Adam Trambley

Oct 26, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

From this morning’s lesson from Deuteronomy: Then Moses, the servant of the LORD, died there in the land of Moab, at the LORD’s command.

The Book of Common Prayer actually instructs Episcopal priests to talk about the practical aspects of dying and end of life planning at least once a year, and this reading about Moses’ death is, I think, an excellent model for how we temporally prepare for our own deaths, as well as deal with the deaths of those we love.

The first point to make is, of course, that Moses died.  Moses, the man who got the Ten Commandments, whom God used to perform powerful works in Egypt and in the desert, and who saw God face-to-face, this man Moses died.  Scripture tries to explain why in different ways – that Moses did something that displeased God, that the Israelites sinned so much that their leader was indirectly punished, or, as it says here rather straightforwardly, at the LORD’s command.  We should hesitate to assign specific reasons or causes to any particular death, as if we were some metaphysical coroner.  On the grandest human scale, death comes as a result of collective human sin, but any particular death is taken most straightforwardly as just something coming at God’s command.  We do best dealing with death as something that happened, not something we can figure out or claim to understand.

When Moses died, he saw the Promised Land, but he could not enter it.  All of us die in the midst of our work, or at least we do if we have imagined the scope of our work appropriately.  No one has ever spent all the time they want to with their grandchildren, or ensured the success of their business for the next hundred years, or eliminated hunger, or saved the environment, or completed the perfect work of art, or evangelized the Shenango Valley, or even finally cut the grass so that it doesn’t get out of control again in two weeks.  If we have an imagination and vision, we can see where our godly passions are taking us, but we won’t finally get there.  And that’s OK.  Moses didn’t get there either, although he spent forty years struggling for it.  As the Talmud, a book of Jewish teachings states, “We are not required to complete our work, but we are not at liberty to quit.”

Then Deuteronomy tells us that Moses was buried, but no one knows where he is buried, and that the people mourned for him until the mourning period was ended.  Here scripture is talking to us about letting go appropriately of those who have died.  God didn’t want anyone to know where Moses was buried because they would have kept coming back and building shrines, and some folks would have stayed to form the Moses Memorial Society and make a living selling tchotchkes to tourists.  That is not what God wanted.  Nor was it what Moses would have wanted.   Moses wanted people to follow God’s commands and live their lives in the Promised Land, and they couldn’t do that if they kept looking backwards.  Certainly Moses is still remembered and honored three thousand years later.  But he is honored by remembering what God did for him and living into the blessings God provided through him.  We move forward in the direction God pointed through Moses instead of being tied to where he physically stopped.

This moving on could happen because people actually stopped and mourned.  They sat with the hole in their lives where Moses had been.  They stared into it.  They watered it with their tears as their laments and their songs and their stories and their anger bounced around in that void.  Then, when the mourning period was over, they had made friends with that emptiness.  They still didn’t like it.  The loss may still have often been painful.  But they were ready to move on and allow the hole in their lives to exist until God filled parts of it in new ways.

Too often today, we stay stuck after a death because we don’t actually mourn.  We don’t make space and time at a death to become comfortable with the new empty space in our lives.  Instead we keep running back to the proverbial grave.  Rather than allowing ourselves to move into the Promised Land our loved ones were striving for, we refuse to go forward and live our lives without them.

I wish I were making this up.

The line between appropriate remembrance and being tied to the past is always difficult to navigate, but a few things have become common that seem unhelpful.  One trend is tattooing the names of deceased loved ones on our bodies.  The Old Testament actually forbids this.  Our bodies are meant for God’s future work, not as a plaque for the deceased.  These tattoos are almost always done out of love, but they can still interfere with the spiritual work of moving forward.  Another increasing trend is for people to keep the ashes of someone who has been cremated with them in their house, or even in jewelry they wear, or, perhaps most grotesquely, in stuffed animals with special compartments for the cremains.  We are meant to bury or inter the bodies or ashes of the deceased with honor.  Holding onto remains in places not consecrated for that purpose both keeps us from the work we have to do in the future and dishonors the remains of the deceased.

Of course, Moses has done his part in helping the people move on by preparing them.  Once the mourning period is over, the people are ready to follow Joshua, son of Nun.  The people are ready to follow Joshua for two reasons.  First, Moses has made his wishes clear that Joshua is to take his place by publicly laying his hands on Joshua.  Second, Moses has prepared Joshua for the job. 

Now we may not go around laying hands on people or pouring oil on their heads as we are preparing to die, but we have ways in our culture of making our wishes clear for how our legacy is to be carried on.  We may not have leadership of a people to pass on, but we may have money or property or the care of minor children or health care decisions when we are no longer able to make them or any number of other responsibilities and blessings to bestow.  Making our wishes on all of these matters clear before we die is essential if we want to help those after us move on cleanly.  Now this can be difficult.  Who knows how many people were in the back of the crowd when Moses laid his hand on Joshua, muttering, “I should have been the next guy not this stupid Joshua dude.”  Our duty is to make sure everyone is clear about what we want, and then to write it down in the appropriate legal documents.  We should write documents like wills and health care durable powers of attorney and living wills and whatever else the lawyers recommend.  If we don’t, we may place an unconscionable burden on our heirs.  But once we have written them, we also need to share them, so that there are no surprises or fights after the fact.  Let someone make peace with the fact that they aren’t getting the house before mom dies, so they don’t have to deal with both issues at the same time.  Make sure that no one in the family is surprised at a conference table with the doctor and other family members during a health care crisis.  We need to lay our proverbial hands on the people we want to make the decisions when we won’t be able to, and we need to tell them what decisions we want made, and hopefully those decisions are what we feel the Lord is calling us to do, just like the commands Moses gave to Joshua. 

I want to take a small detour here and just remind folks that it is entirely appropriate to include the church in any estate planning or will you might be doing.   Allen Hall would not have been built, and our operating budget would not be sustainable except for the generosity of people who have left a portion of their estates, large or small, to St. John’s.  Some people leave whatever they can, some people choose to leave 10 percent of their estate as a final tithe, and some people decide to endow their pledge in perpetuity, multiplying their pledge by twenty so that every year the church can use five percent of their bequest to have support in perpetuity.  If you have any questions about how to include St. John’s in your wills, including how to make gifts of stock or real estate, please let me know and I can answer those questions.  This concludes the word from this morning’s sponsor.

The last point I want to make about Moses and Joshua is that Moses prepared Joshua to carry on his work.  Moses gave Joshua important jobs, like scouting out the land of Canaan.  He took him along on important trips, like up the mountain when he received the Ten Commandments.  Granted, Joshua could only go part of the way up, but it still was leadership training.  Moses spent time with Joshua and ensured he was ready. 

We do our own training in different ways, but if we do it right, we are ready to pass on our mission and purpose.  Maybe we let our children host holiday dinners that we used to do so that they are ready for the next generation of family gatherings.  Maybe we mentor someone professionally so our trade is passed on.  Maybe we share the gospel with someone or invite someone to church or to a ministry so that the work we think is important continues.  Maybe we just make sure that those who will make decisions once we are gone are prepared to make the right decisions.  Also worth noting here is that Moses passed on his leadership to someone who wasn’t his own child.  Some things we might anoint a family member to do, but some things, especially our work outside our families, may go to those outside the family, and that is OK.

You may remember that the last speech Martin Luther King, Jr., gave before he died talked about this passage from Deuteronomy.  Dr. King said he has seen the Promised Land, and that he wasn’t going to get there but that others would.  He laid out his vision, he prepared others to do the work once he was gone, and we all now live in a society that is much more color-blind than when Brother Martin was alive.    

Moses, the servant of the LORD, died.  Someday, unless Jesus comes back real soon, we will all die, too.  Our deaths will come before we’ve gotten to our own promised land, but if we prepare properly, our deaths can help those who come after us get where they need to go.  They can leave us and move closer to the Promised Land in this life, while we leave them for a time and enter the Promised Land of eternal life. 

Believe and Prepare

Proper 24A 2014

Exodus 33; Psalm 99; 1Thessalonians 1:1-10; Matthew 22:15-22

Father Adam Trambley

October 19, 2014

St.John’s Sharon

Believe and Prepare.

In the Exodus reading this morning, Moses is on the Mountain talking to the Lord.  Things have been rocky lately.  The Israelites got out of Egypt across the Red Sea.  They’ve seen God act in awesome ways.  Then they’ve grumbled about any number of details, and God come through with manna and quails and water.  Then Moses went up the mountain to get the commandments from God, and while he was up there the people broke pretty much all of them in a golden calf orgy.  After a bit of tough love to clean things up below, Moses has gone back up the mountain to talk with God. 

Moses is laying the people’s future back on God.  If Moses had any thoughts about how far he and the people were going to get on their own, Aaron’s bovine bacchanalia blew them out the window.  Moses says to God, “Look, if we are your people, if we have found favor with you, than you have to show yourself.”  The Almighty answers, “Don’t worry, I’ll go with you.”  Then Moses really presses God.  “OK,” he says, “but if you don’t with us, we aren’t going anywhere.  If you want us to be your people, to have something special to proclaim to the world, then you have to be with us all the time.  You can’t let us go on our own.  You can’t abandon us.  You can’t leave us to our own devises.  Come with us.”  Then scripture says, “The LORD said to Moses, ‘I will do the very thing that you have asked.’”

Moses was asking God for what God clearly wanted to do anyway.  We know that God planned to be with his people.  We know because God said it.  But Moses pushes him for it.  Moses lays his passion, his heart, his soul before the Lord and begs him for it.  Moses plays his role in interceding on behalf of the people to pull an even more forceful and committed answer from God.  The image is almost one of God preparing to walk down the street and Moses coming to him, grabbing his hand and pulling him forward at a sprint.  And as Moses pulls, God runs even faster and ends up lifting him on his shoulders and carrying him where he wants to go at a pace beyond anything Moses asked or imagined.  God nudged him a bit in the right direction, and then God responded to Moses passionate prayers with his own passionate power and love.

This passage isn’t the only time when God and Moses have this type of interactions.  We see it at the burning bush when Moses’ requests prompt God to reveal his divine name.  This sequence is also a model for us in our own prayers and work.  As we pour ourselves out in prayer, we aren’t so much trying to change God’s mind or convince him of something he doesn’t want.  Instead, our prayers and our first slow efforts are really the essential ingredients to get us moving so that God can move us along at his speed to the places where we both want to go.  God is going to get us there.  We just need to get ourselves prepared to cooperate.

Believe and Prepare.

Moses is, I think, our example this morning as we prepare to kick-off our Believe and Prepare Capital Campaign.  As many of you know, our kick-off dinner is tonight at 4:00pm, and you are all invited.  Even if you haven’t RSVPed yet, please know you are welcome.  As the invitation noted, tonight isn’t going to be a push for contributions.  Instead, we are going to spend some time going through the building, which some people may not have done before or very recently.  Then we are going to have a good dinner with an opportunity to spend some time together.  After dinner, we have a short movie and some other details about what we want to accomplish.  We should be done by 6:00, although I’m sure the coffee pot will be on for those who want to linger longer over a second or third dessert.   

I want especially to invite people who are newer to the parish, or even just visiting, to join us.  This dinner would be a good opportunity to find out more about our parish and our facilities, our hopes and dreams, and just generally how we roll.  Obviously, if you haven’t been here as long, you may not yet have the kind of commitment and investment, or have had time to develop the relationships, that would lead you to support a capital campaign.  That’s OK.  I’m glad you’re here to worship with us this morning, and feel free to engage any of our ministries and efforts as God leads you.  Over the next month and a half you will probably hear more about the capital campaign, about our annual stewardship efforts, about money, and about how it all relates to the life of faith.  We talk about this not because we are obsessed with money, but because Jesus talked about money, and how we relate to money matters as we grow in our faith.  But know also that we are not looking for anything in particular from you, even when you are on our mailing list and receive our appeals.  We are grateful you are with us, and hope you continue to find a way to develop your relationship with God alongside of us. So feel free to come tonight and have dinner without any pressure.

Now we could have chosen any number of names for this campaign, and we passed on such descriptive options as “Keep the Water Out of Our Walls” or “Give Your 401(k) to Jesus.”  As the campaign committee met and thought about names, we started to talk about why we would want to give.  Nick Baron spoke pretty powerfully about how he believed that God had a future for St. John’s with important mission and ministry and how we were called to prepare for that future.  Out of that inspiration, Believe and Prepare was born. 

At that meeting, Nick nailed the spiritual motivation for what we are trying to do in our Believe and Prepare Campaign.  First we believe that God has a future for us.  This belief is no small thing at a time when the valley has been shrinking, churches are closing, and the world is changing in ways that do not seem helpful to Christian congregations.  Despair would be easy.  We know there are fewer people showing up on Sunday morning than were here five or ten or twenty years ago.  But we also aren’t done yet.  A whole batch of little ones has started showing up.  We have new people joining us from a wide variety of backgrounds.  Hundreds of people are here over the course of the week for ECS and the Saturday lunches and AA meetings and guitar lessons and Cana’s Corner and Bible studies and any number of other activities, many of which weren’t happening a few years ago.  None of these good things that are happening are the basis of our belief, however.  They are just indications that confirm our belief that God has a future for us.  Our belief is in God and what God is going to do, and, that by the grace of God and our own obedience, we may get to be instruments of God’s work. 

The second part of our campaign is Prepare.  If we believe that God has future for us, than we dare not sit on our hands and do nothing like the guy with one talent who buried it in the ground and twiddled his thumbs hoping it all worked out OK.  Our call is to make ourselves and our congregation ready for the work God is going to do with us.  Much of that work is spiritual, and I’ll talk about prayer and our prayer vigil in a moment.  Some of that work is relational as we reach out to new people.  Some of that work is programmatic, as we develop the ministries to help others experience God’s love and learn about his good news.  But some of the work is the financial and structural stewardship of the facilities we have been given to use and maintain for future generations.  If we believe that God has a future for us, then we want to prepare a church sanctuary and classrooms and kitchens and dining rooms and bathrooms and offices that have walls that don’t leak and have adequate heating and air conditioning and good lighting and safe parking spaces and all the other things that help people feel welcome and able to focus on the work they are called to do.  The facilities we have are actually in better shape than probably any church I have ever worked in.  But we have a lot of space and we need to maintain it lest problems arise and the cost of fixing them skyrockets.  We also want to prepare all of our buildings to be well used, and not just some parts of our buildings.  I believe God has enough work to do in the valley that we’ll need all of our facilities, and maybe someday additional spaces, to undertake it. 

The abbreviated version of what we are preparing falls into four categories.  The first is basic exterior maintenance.  We need to repoint the stone, fix the louvers on the tower over the narthex to keep the birds out, repair the brick that is allowing water to seep into the corner of the lounge, replace the Plexiglas over the stained glass windows and fix the windows in the offices.  Our second area is some minor improvements like sealing the parking lot, fixing three ranks of organ pipes, and air conditioning the upstairs dining room.  Third, we want to air condition the church, because in this day and age people don’t go anywhere that isn’t air conditioned in the summer and having air conditioning is an essential part of welcoming and evangelism.  Then, fourth, we want to begin to prepare the basement for new ministries that could be started there in three to five years.  We don’t know what they will be yet, but we believe God has something in mind like maybe a pre-school or elder day care, and we want to prepare for it.   

Anyone who want to participate will have a variety of ways to do so, ranging from immediate gifts to pledges paid over five years.  Some gifts will be larger and some smaller, but all will be important.  $10,000 will fix the organ pipes, and $10 will buy a needed can of paint.  Those who can join us tonight will hear more details then, and information will come in the mail in the coming weeks for those who can’t.

Believe and Prepare

Remember Moses’ conversation with God in Exodus.  How God had a plan, and Moses had to ask enthusiastically so that Moses and God could work together to get where God wanted them to go.  We are in the same place with this capital campaign.  We believe that God is leading us in a certain direction, both to raise the funds we need to prepare the building for the work he wants done and then to do the actual ministry as it comes.  But we aren’t quite ready yet.  We, like Moses, need to passionately beg God to show up and do the work he wants done.  We need to plead with God to open his hand for the financial resources we need to keep the building up.  We need to implore God for all the right open doors, the almost coincidental connections, and the seemingly serendipitous opportunities to make our campaign successful and the work that comes after it fruitful.

Our parish is undertaking this prayer work in at least two ways.  First, we are in the midst of a twenty-four hour prayer vigil.  People have been praying in the chapel since 4:00 pm yesterday, are praying right now, and will continue until our dinner starts at 4:00 pm today.  If you have time this afternoon, please join us or spend some time praying wherever you are.  Second, we are praying our campaign prayer in place of our offertory sentence during our worship service, and we are encouraging everyone in the parish to pray it daily.  Feel free to rip the prayer out of your bulletin and post on your refrigerator, keep it by your nightstand, use it as a bookmark in your Bible or the John Grishom novel you are reading, or in whatever other way is helpful.  But please join us in passionately praying that God would be with us and use us to do the work he wants to accomplish.

There is an old story about a church that has a capital need.  The pastor gets into the pulpit and says, “I have some good news and some bad news.  The good is that God has given us all the money we need.  The bad news is that it is still in your wallets.”  Now I don’t know if this story would be true in our case or not.  I have no idea what is in anyone’s wallets or bank accounts.  But I know that God owns all the money in the universe.  And I know that this parish has been able to do ministry in the past because of contributions that nobody expected.  And I know that if we are pouring our hearts out in prayer to accomplish God’s work in God’s way, we can expect God to give us the resources we need to accomplish what we have to do.  As we beg God to show up for his work with us and as we begin to run down his path, he is going to pick us up and carry us where we need to go, quite possibly in ways we never expected.  We’ll be blessed with what we need.  If we do our part, we know that God is more than ready for his part.

Believe and Prepare. 

In closing, I’d ask you again for the following.  Most importantly, please pray for this campaign, for our parish and our ministry.  Second, come to dinner tonight with us if you can, and if you can’t, look for other information about the campaign as it comes out.   Then finally, believe in the future that God has in store for our parish, and in whatever ways that God leads you, help us prepare for it.

Parable of the Vineyard

                                                                Proper 22-A 2014

                              Exodus 20; Psalm 19;Philippians 3:4-14; Matthew 21:33-46

Father Adam Trambley

Oct 4, 2014 St.John’s Sharon

Paul writes in Philippians, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.”  Whatever’s done is done, and for Paul some of what was done was amazingly good and some was horrifically bad.  But none of that matters to him because he is going somewhere.  Paul is not staying where he is, but is pressing on to where God is calling him.  He knows that eventually God’s calling is heavenly, but he also knows that before heaven comes he has some work on earth.  Straining forward he presses on knowing that sometimes God’s call can require patience, endurance, determination and even suffering.  But like any hard work, Paul is willing to put in that effort with his whole being to get the heavenly prize, the reward, the fruit of his labor.  Paul encourages us to do the same.

In the Gospel this morning, Jesus is talking to some folks who are not so interested in straining forward toward their heavenly call.  He is talking to the Chief Priests and Pharisees, the religious and political leaders who had a vested interest in looking back to keep things pretty much the way they had been.  This parable is occurring during what we think of as Holy Week, after Jesus has come into Jerusalem and turned over the money-changers tables in the temple, but before Judas betrays him.  So we have some serious religious smack-talk going down here.  I love the line at the end of the parable: When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.  They wanted to arrest him.  So we know they heard what Jesus was saying.

What Jesus was saying was that they weren’t the stewards of their people they were supposed to be.  In the parable, God is the vineyard owner.  He set everything up for a beautiful vineyard, which represents God’s people.  Then he turned the vineyard over to tenants, who were supposed to raise fruit for him. The tenants were the religious and political leaders of God’s people who God put in authority over them. The tenants raised a lot of fruit—remember that God set everything up perfectly-- but when God asked for it, they wouldn’t give it to him.  They beat and killed his slaves who came to collect.  Then the vineyard owner sent his Son, whom they also killed, hoping to keep the vineyard for themselves.  Of course, the son in the parable is Jesus, God’s Son, and the leadership is going to kill him, just like they do in the story.  After the chief priests and Pharisees hear the story, Jesus asks how they think it will end.  They say that the owner will punish those tenants and give the vineyard to better tenants.  Jesus agrees, quoting Psalm 118 to drive his point home.

Now Jesus’ point to those he was contesting with at the time was clear.  God put you in charge of his people and you didn’t listen to his Son, even killing him.  So God is going to invite into his Kingdom all sorts of new tenants who will bear fruit and give it back to God. 

We are part of this second wave of tenants who have been given the kingdom of God to produce the fruits of the kingdom.  We are the people who God has invited in to do his work according to his purpose.  We are the people who recognize his Son and, at least in theory, are happy to turn over the fruits of our labors to him. 

But we still have the responsibility to produce fruit, and the actual production of fruit has been a problem for us as Christians in this part of the Kingdom.  Here I’m talking more broadly than just St. John’s.  I’m also speaking also about the churches in our valley, in much of the Episcopal Church, and in almost all branches of Christendom in the United States.  We haven’t really made sure that the fruit of God’s harvest is brought in.  A retelling of the parable for us might go something like this.

 

A corn farmer had a farm that he leased out to tenants.  He put his Son in charge of tenant relations.  The tenants liked the Son, and they really liked the farmer’s land.  For years they produced bumper crops, and they shipped all the appropriate documentation, notarized and in triplicate, off to the farmer’s Son via Federal Express.  But their harvests were so large, they realized they didn’t have to plant all the fields to have as much produce as they needed.  So they planted less and less.  Eventually, the farm didn’t produce as much, but the tenants were happy, and they figured they could always plant more for the farmer if he needed it.  Harvests got smaller, but the tenants still took the same share.  Then one day the farmer’s Son came back for an inspection and found most of his fields overgrown with weeds while the tenants were in the barn gorging themselves on the seed corn.
What do you think will happen to these tenants?

 

As I look back, I think a lot of good Christian folks have together made a bunch of decisions that led us to a place that isn’t so pretty.  We had everything we needed for bumper harvests – people, leadership, resources, prestige, money, volunteers, buildings.  Then somewhere along the line, we stopped planting and just lived off our harvests.  We had plenty coming in so we stopped planting new fields, cultivating new ground, or even making sure that we kept the best ears to use for seed next time around.  People that wanted to plant in new areas were sent away on their own, and were either unsuccessful or ended up with new crops that don’t look like very much like ours.  We look around today and we see most of our area, and increasing our country, unchurched.  Younger people in our communities have never been in a church, have no idea who people like Moses, Noah or even Jesus are, and have no idea why they would go into a church building.  For many people Christianity is irrelevant, except as a nebulous justification used questionably in certain political debates.  We have huge church buildings all over the place, most of which stand empty most of the time, and quite frankly are mostly empty even on Sunday morning. If we added up their deferred maintenance costs, we can see that way too many Christian churches have eaten into the seed corn, and won’t survive another long winter.  If Jesus showed up, we’d all be happy to see him and want to go spend eternity with him, which in his goodness and mercy he may very graciously allow.  But we shouldn’t be lulled into believing that the current state of affairs in this part of his Kingdom would have been his first choice. 

So where does that leave us today, assuming that Jesus is either waiting a bit to come back, or could be convinced to keep us on staff if he stops by for a visit?  Well, it leaves us pretty much where we started, with a commission to go do the work, bear good fruit, and bring it back to Jesus.  We also have to start with where we are right here at St. John’s, which is not a bad place to be.  Our congregation still has what we need to go out and plant new fields that could bring in a great harvest.  We don’t have the surplus we may have at one time, be we have enough, maybe just enough, but we have enough.  Thanks be God, this congregation has taken our task seriously.  At times we have slacked off a bit, but at other times we have really shared God’s love with the Shenengo Valley.  On more than one occasion, we have decided to plant new fields, whether that meant bringing in people who needed to learn to swim, expanding our doors to those beyond our traditional British heritage, or opening up our parish to people of every age, class or situation that needed a church.  We’ve reached out in love to meet people’s basic needs and opened our buildings and our hearts to the greater community.  Sometimes those actions have produced great harvests, and sometimes small ones, but we’ve never entirely stopped looking for empty fields and finding new places to plant.   So today, when fallow fields lie empty all around us, we have an incredible opportunity to produce fruit for the kingdom.

What does this look like practically?  Here are a few ideas.

First, marshal every moment of monotony in your day and pray for the work.  Jesus instructed us to pray for laborer’s to be sent into the harvest, and we at St. John’s have suggested that people pray for our work here by praying for laborers to be sent into the harvest, for open doors for our ministries, for fruit to be borne by them, and for the financial resources we need to do the work. 

Second, put what we have to good use.  The SeeingThrough New Eyes process we did a few years ago had a slogan, “Be who you are; see what you have; do what matters.”  As a parish we are finding more and more ways to open up our facilities to those from new fields, whether they are ECS clients, community lunch guests, Cana’s Corner participants, AA members, guitar students or those needing inexpensive clothes at the rummage sale.  But we still have as a parish, and as individuals, many resources that could be redirected toward building relationships with people who might not know Jesus or whose lives are not bearing fruit for the Kingdom.  Maybe we have a car that could give someone a ride.  Maybe we have time to call people regularly who are trying to change their lives around and offer support.  Each of us can see what we have and do something that matters with it. 

Third, we all can keep our eyes out for new fields, and think about ways we can plant there.  Maybe we invite people to church or to a program at St. John’s.  Maybe we just invite them to lunch on occasion get to know them.  Maybe we make sure they have what they need for their new baby, or after the death of a family member, or once they’ve started empty nesting and are figuring out how to structure the next phase of their life and give it meaning  And maybe we ask folks from church to help with that.  Now if we are all doing this, we may not have as much time to fill all the church jobs we’ve always had done, but that is one consequence of planting the seed instead of grinding it into meal and making Doritios™ out of it.  Some things may look a bit out of control at times, but part of faith is trusting God to bring forth fruit where we’ve planted our seeds.  The more seeds we’ve planted, the more important the harvest is to us, and the more faith we need to have.  And usually the more prayers we decide to say.  But we’re not called merely to preserve what we have.  We are called to plant and tend and harvest and bring in much good fruit.

The harvest is plentiful, and we have the glorious privilege of being laborers in God’s vineyard.  So forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, let us press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.