June 14, 2020, Scripture Readings and Sermon

Rev. Mark Hatch

Scripture Readings

Romans 5:1-8

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person-- though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Psalm 100

 Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands; *
serve the Lord with gladness
and come before his presence with a song.
Know this: The Lord himself is God; *
he himself has made us, and we are his;
we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving;
go into his courts with praise; *
give thanks to him and call upon his Name.
For the Lord is good;
his mercy is everlasting; *
and his faithfulness endures from age to age.
The Gospel- Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)

Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. [Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for laborers deserve their food. Whatever town or village you enter, find out who in it is worthy, and stay there until you leave. As you enter the house, greet it. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.
“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I tell you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.”]

Sermon:
      The sHOELACE AND THE sEAGLASS

The Shoelace and The SeaGlass
 
            It is a lovely way to begin any story, especially in summer, and it comes a bit later in Matthew’s Gospel: “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea.” [Matt 13:1]  I myself sit beside the sea or by the water every chance I get, especially this quiet spring and summer enjoying daily time at Norway Pond, right near my home. That does not mean that I am like Jesus, but it does mean that Jesus had the right idea. Whether it was Harvey’s Lake, to which my Pennsylvania in-laws escaped from their Wilkes-Barre summers; or the great and unknowable Atlantic Ocean along which I grew up, and in which many generations of my family worked, and sailed, and served in the Navy, and thought about life and all of life’s mysteries; and into which my Grandfather eventually walked when he decided it was time to end his life, sitting by water has been a part of me and, I suspect, many of you. In all 3 of the Gospel accounts Jesus is trying both to inspire and yet to escape the crowds. Scripture tells us that: “Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing.” [Matt 13:34].  And so teaching follows upon teaching, just as respite in boats and upon the open water seems to provide antidote to his implied exhaustion and the escalating demands of his ministry. We all need to get by the sea, by the lake, by the water, real or metaphorical, for the life of faith is made richer and fuller by such times and in such places. If we are fortunate and still, quiet and yet open, visions and insights often come our way, usually in the form of the unexpected and sometimes even in the shape of the mundane.
            One year, a long time ago now, a few weeks after Easter, I ventured alone out to the coast of northern California. If there is any place in the world more beautiful in early springtime I have yet to experience it. Other than solitude and renewal my goal, if you can call it that, was to cover those remaining miles of the Pacific Coast Highway, to complete all of California's Route 1 from the Mexican border to the Oregon line, which I had yet to traverse. And thus it was that Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte counties unfurled before me, a glistening and patient ribbon of road which hugged some of the most spectacular, undeveloped and mystical coastland in all of North America. By design, travel was slow. By good fortune, the highway was empty. By every turn, an inviting pull-off or secluded rest awaited.
            Outside of Mendocino itself I stopped alongside the sea, tired, but tired in that way by which fatigue and weariness sometimes invite the Spirit into your heart without much planning or foresight. I made my way down the headland and dunes towards a secluded inlet, a friendly place where a kind and gentle river was feeding out of the precipitous Coast Redwoods into the ocean, and there I sat, on a massive piece of driftwood, simply watching the world go by. I had no agenda, save for calm and silence, a time apart from life’s exigencies and demands, a time to listen both to the Divine and to myself. With no more than half a dozen people around me it was somewhat startling that my eye would catch a glimmer of some hidden detritus, methodically being uncovered by the receding waves. But there it was, something dear and precious that I had not seen or found since my distant youth. And so I crept to the ocean’s edge and picked up not 1 but 5 small pieces of seaglass, a childhood remnant that I had not come across in more than five decades. In my grasp now lay five smoothed and opaque offerings, prized treasures which had serendipitously made their way into my hands and, as always, into my mind and my heart. 
            As I sometimes do when I travel, I pulled a piece of scrap paper from my pocket, (perhaps an old napkin from In-N-Out Burger or a room receipt from Motel 6), and began scribbling. Later that summer, as I was packing up things in my apartment in Harrisburg, I came across that scrap (which was not a napkin after all, but an old mapquest triptych), and here is what it said:
“Seaglass. Mendocino. 3/29/05.  Something broken, shattered, discarded, now made smooth by the passage of time and tide. Some might say ‘worn down’ but, for me, gentleness emerges in time, despite our resistance, by the timeless and daily flow of life. A kind of acceptance, submission, to eternal forces larger than us; we give in and we are actually made better.”
And then these last words, barely legible after a journey or two through the Laundromat at Pennsylvania Place:  
“It’s simple: God’s will for us is contentment.”
Now a napkin scrawl is surely too chaotic to be considered a journal entry, but as I read those words again this past week they did seem, if not prophetic, at least fitting. At the time of their writing, I'm not sure they made much sense. This morning, as these days and seasons turn about us and within us, they surely do, at least to me.
            The ancient wisdom of the East speaks of this same “softening” of hard things and stubborn sentiments; this being made smoother and in many ways better, by the passage of time and the elements:
“Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water,
Yet nothing can better overcome the hard and strong,
For they can neither control nor do away with it.

The soft overcomes the hard,
The yielding overcomes the strong;
Every person knows this…”

   (Tao Te Ching, ch. 78)

Well, if we are lucky or wise we may “know” this, but living it out -- living into such a yielding to the ancient and the Divine, and a softening over time, and an authentic, genuine acceptance of contentment -- that is never as simple nor as easy as it sounds. You and I know people in our own lives and in our own families for whom contentment is not only a distant dream but, in some cases, a state of being to be actively worked against. You and I know people in our lives who, literally, struggle to resist and avoid the contentment which God and the Spirit can bring, often because their very being is defined and shaped by some aura of unhappiness, irresolution or agitation. Although we may not want to admit it, simply being happy and satisfied with Spirit and life is a scary proposition and an elusive reality for many people. 
            If I have learned anything in these last 34 years since I first entered seminary it is this: yielding to the Divine, sometimes gracefully and sometimes under duress, is the key to the Kingdom. Discarded and shattered as we may sometimes feel, tossed about and buffeted as our lives occasionally are, we nevertheless must find within ourselves the essential core of our being, lay claim to that beauty and timelessness as part of creation, and then we must let that mysterious Divinity continue to shape and form and tumble and smooth and prepare it. In time, we too will discover that we have become precious jewels and wondrous gifts in the hands and lives of others and for the work of the Spirit. We shall come to know, as St. Paul confirms, that “to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” [Romans 8:6b]   We shall come to see and know, in the words of a favorite intercession from the Book of Common Prayer, that “in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength.” [1]
            That is contentment indeed, God’s will for you and for me. Return, renewal, reassurance. Softening, yielding, acceptance. Let it come to you. Do not be afraid. Drink often from that well. Sow and reap the harvest of hope. The journey is still young. Years and miles of promise and possibility yet lie before you. And may each of your beautiful, special lives be a gift to others, an offering to the world, like Christ himself in the chaos or like seaglass on a lonely beach, found once again, with great joy, by a curious and wandering traveler.       
~ Amen.
Peace, Mark 
  
[1] Book of Common Prayer, p832, #59.