Will Rice - Sermon #3 - On a Wing and a...

Rev. Will Rice Grace United Methodist Church Corpus Christi, TX pastorwillrice@gmail.com

Romans 8:26-26

As we mention at the beginning of the service each week, when we agree to join Christ’s church, we agree to support it with our prayers our presence our gifts and our service. During the summer, we have selected some scriptures that talk about presence.

The Church, as a whole, while it does encourage people to live up to that pledge, it doesn’t really do a whole lot to hold people to it. We figure, at some level, that it is between you and God. But the leaders of the church can tell whether or not the members of the congregation in general are taking it seriously.

If I stand up here on Sunday morning and realize I am talking to myself, I will realize that we may have forgotten about the presence part. If during my sermon, the lights go out because we haven’t paid the light bill, I will realize that maybe not enough of us are supporting the church with our financial gifts. If suddenly I notice that we don’t have any Sunday school teachers or ushers or musicians I may realize that people are maybe not taking seriously their pledge to support the church with their spiritual gifts and therefore their service.

But how would I know if the membership of the church had forgotten all about their pledge to support the church with their prayers? I can’t tell you for sure if I would know, but I do know that it is possible to tell the difference between a church whose membership is praying and a church whose membership is not.

I think, as United Methodists, we have an interesting relationship to prayer. Within any congregation there are a number of people who have very deep, rich, disciplined prayer lives. There are also quite a few for whom prayer is mostly a mystery or something only done in church. I would say the majority of people fall somewhere in between.

We also fall on two sides of a different spectrum. On one side, there are those among us, whether or not they have an active prayer life, who clearly see prayer as a powerfully important part of the life of the church and/or individual lives as Christians. On the other side, there are some who aren’t all that sure what part prayer plays in the lives of the church or our personal spirituality. Once again there are a whole lot of fall in between.

There are also a wide variety of answers to the question of What is prayer? In fact, there is a class that I have developed called Prayer 101 and one of the first things I ask the group is What is prayer? I am always surprised by variety of answers. The first cluster of answers usually revolve around the idea of communicating to God. For instance,

“Prayer is telling God what you need. “

An answer for which there is certainly scriptural support. Philippians 4:6

Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

But quickly, and the exercise is designed for this to happen, someone will jump in and say, it is more than asking for stuff, we have to give thanks.

“Prayer is giving thanks to God.”

And there is scriptural support for that as well. 1Thessalonians 5:16-18

16 Rejoice always,17 pray without ceasing, 18 give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

Not only is there scriptural support, there is an actual word for it in Greek. The word for give thanks used there in Greek is Eucharisteo, which is the source of another word we use for our celebration of Holy Communion, eucharist. A Eucharistic prayer is a prayer of thanksgiving.

So the answers to the question what is prayer, so far, are pretty good, but they might be missing something. Some times when I teach the prayer class, we get stuck here and I have to draw a diagram on the board and say, So far all of our thoughts about prayer have been one way, as though prayer were a one way thing, from us to God.

That almost always inspires someone to add:

“Prayer is listening to God”

Psalm 46:10:

"Be still, and know that I am God

With a little more nudging, the class comes to the conclusion that it is not talking or listening, it is both. Prayer is communicating with God.

Scripture speaks to that as well, Luke 11:9:

"So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

It doesn’t just say knock. It says knock, and the door will be opened for you. If you are going to visit your best friend, you don’t knock on the door and then run away. You knock and then you wait for the door to be answered.

Alright, now that I have done a mediocre job of tackling the question of what prayer is, let me try to get at the question of how we pray. As I mentioned earlier, we all fall in different places in regards to this question. I remember teaching the prayer class once and when I got to this part, a woman said, “What do you mean? Everyone knows how to pray.” As I looked around the room, I could tell by the looks on many faces that there were quite a few who didn’t agree with that.

As a Church over the last couple of thousands of years, there have been thousands and thousands of texts written offering direction in the discipline of prayer. But, as a modern church, I think we really have fallen down on the job.

If we are lucky, when we are children, our parents will teach us some rudimentary prayer skills, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

If we are truly lucky, our parents will continue to teach us by example. They will pray with us at bedtime and mealtime and other times, modeling prayer for us. If you had that blessing, you should feel fortunate. Most are left with the simple prayers they are taught as children, or, as in my case, with nothing at all.

I will say again for any of you who haven’t heard me speak before, I did not grow up as a Christian. The only time I heard prayer was when I was visiting my grandmother or aunt, and because I wasn’t used to it, it just sounded so strange and foreign I just hoped it would be over so we could get to my aunt’s cream corn casserole.

Now picture me years later, in my late 20s, feeling the emptiness and lack of meaning in my life, desperately seeking a connection with something, feeling the gentle pull of God’s prevenient Grace upon me without really knowing what it was. Picture me, alone in my home finally being overwhelmed by the desperation of existence and the powerful pull of God, falling to my knees and saying…

What? What do you say?

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

And out of my mouth came the words, “Show me the path.” And those words became my prayer. And as I prayed that prayer, I begin to see and hear the movement of the Spirit around me, pulling me and leading me on that path, the path of the beginning of a journey that would lead me to church, to baptism, to dedicating my life to serving God, to seminary and eventually right here. “Show me the path.”

Sometimes, I think there is an advantage to the purity and naivety of someone who doesn’t know how to pray. Sometimes, when we think we know what we are doing, we get so lost in our words, that we don’t really get to pray.

And what are we undertaking when we try to pray. As theologian Paul Tillich sees it, The Apostle Paul is saying in his letter to the Romans that there is a question of whether prayer is possible at all.

This we should never forget when we pray: We do something humanly impossible. We talk to somebody who is not somebody else, but who is nearer to us than we ourselves are. We address somebody who can never become an object of our address because he is always subject, always acting, always creating. We tell something to Him who knows not only what we tell Him but also all the unconscious tendencies out of which our conscious words grow. This is the reason why prayer is humanly impossible.[1]

But remember these words of Jesus from the gospel of Matthew, chapter 19. Jesus has just told a rich young that he would have to sell everything in order to enter into life and follow Jesus. Jesus then says,

"Truly I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. ²⁴Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." ²⁵When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astounded and said, "Then who can be saved?" ²⁶But Jesus looked at them and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."

It is not our ability to pray correctly, rather our faith that it is God who is at work in prayer.

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

Prayer is something we are never going to get right, but at the same time we are never going to get wrong, because it is truly the Spirit of God that is praying for us. Now before you think that this takes all the responsibility off of us. It is not as if, we can just go about our daily lives and let the Spirit intercede for us whenever necessary. We have to make ourselves available, we have to make ourselves open, we need to make prayer part of our lives. More than that, we have to make prayer a basis of our lives, if we can expect the Spirit to truly intercede for us and put us in constant contact with the very source of our being.

Which takes me back to the beginning. When we join Christ’s church we agree to support it with our prayers our presence our gifts and our service. My challenge to us all, me included, is that we take that seriously. I want to see Grace United Methodist Church as a church with a deep life of prayer. I want to see prayer as the focal point of our worship and ministry. That is a pretty ambitious challenge. Some are already there. But some of us still don’t quite know where to start, and this sermon has raised more questions than answers.

But you know what, those who are already convinced of the importance of prayer and those who already have a disciplined prayer life can lead the rest of us. Pastor John and I are already impressed by the depth of the prayer life of this church and we are pushing to take it further. We are doing everything we can to encourage time for scripture reading and prayer during the meetings of all of the leadership groups within the church. We are doing what we can to support and encourage the spiritual development of our staff and leadership. We hope to find more chances in the future to show different ways of praying and being in God’s presence and we hope to make everyone aware that prayer is not the same for everyone. And we are doing all we can to be attentive to our own spiritual lives so that we can lead through example.

I am totally convinced that if a church is attentive first and foremost to its life of prayer, the rest will fall into place. I am convinced that our entire mission to invite, nurture and serve will come naturally with each using their God given gifts and talents in the best possible way if we turn our hearts toward God in prayer. Remember as Jesus said,

"For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible."

That is my message today, simply, pray. If you don’t know how, start with this:

God, teach me to pray.

Then listen.

Amen.

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[1] Paul Tillich, “The Paradox of Prayer”, Chapter 18 in The New Being, (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955) online at Religion Online, http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=375&C=31, accessed 22 July, 2005; internet

Will Rice - Sermon #2 - Wasting Seed

Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com


Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

As a young child, I thought a lot about space. It may be less about my peculiar brain and more about the culture of the time. If you think about it, I am of the generation that was born after we had landed on the moon. In my worldview, people could and did travel in space. I grew up with endless thoughts of space travel surrounding me. During my childhood the Americans and Russians were going into space on a regular basis. They even launched a couple of space stations. I remember staring into the sky in 1979 waiting to see if Skylab would come crashing down into my yard when it fell out of orbit. The big screen and small screen filled my imagination with Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica

As a child, I used to try to understand the limits and boundaries of the universe. Someone introduced me to the idea as a child that the universe was limitless. I asked, Where does it end? Someone answered, it doesn’t. I was an odd child, so instead of leaving it at that and going to play, I sat alone for seemingly endless hours trying to wrap my brain around the fact that something never ends. I still don’t get it.

How could something not end? Limitless is not a concept that a 5 year old, a 12 year old, a thirty-three year old, can understand. Unlimited for us, really means, more than we need or more than we want. But even unlimited has limits.

I realized at some point this past year that I am sort of funny about food. Although I love food and I love to eat almost any kind of food, I am sometimes unlikely to accept food offered to me. This is especially true at any sort of group gathering when there is a certain amount of food to be shared by many. If you were to invite me to your house for dinner, no problem. But, if I were to stop by the fellowship hall one day, and you and your Bible study group were just sitting down to eat, and you asked me to join you, I would likely decline, unless it was very obvious that you had more than you needed. I realized this year why that is. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I think there will not be enough food for everybody. I am fighting the internal perception that if I have some, there might not be enough for you. I lack a sense of abundance where it comes to food.

I realized this year that this comes from my childhood. Don’t get me wrong, in my house growing up, we always had enough to eat, but we rarely had extra. For example, on the occasion we would splurge for pizza, my family, six of us, would get one pizza. So, the idea of eating four or five slices was not an option, there wouldn’t be enough.

It is amazing how the ways we view things like space and food can begin to shape our view of the world and our view of God.

Today we are looking at the parable of the sower. This is one of the richest parables in scripture. Unfortunately, much of its richness is lost due to the fact that we tend to pull it out of its context and read it all by itself. The word God speaks to us in this parable is shaped and amplified by what comes before it.

I don’t have time to read you all of chapter 12, but let me hit the highlights. First, Jesus’ disciples were accused of breaking the law of God after plucking heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath. Never mind they were hungry, the law comes first and the law said no work on the Sabbath and plucking grain is work. Second, Jesus angered the religious elite by healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Forget compassion, the law says no work on the Sabbath. Third, Jesus healed a man who was said to have a demon within him that had caused him to be blind and mute. Jesus cured him and then was accused of being in cahoots with evil forces from which they say he received his power.

You see, it is in the context of this tension with the religious authorities that Jesus, on the same day, tells this parable of the sower.

‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. ⁴And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. ⁵Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. ⁶But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. ⁷Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. ⁸Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. ⁹Let anyone with ears listen!’

I used to work on a farm in the summer when I lived back in Eden, New York. I worked for Mr. Henry and he can tell you, I make a lousy farmer. To my defense, I can tell you, Mr. Henry wasn’t the greatest boss. He came from the great management tradition of motivating and correcting employee behavior by yelling. If you have an employee that seems to have trouble understanding the yelling method, yell louder.

I liked the grunt work on the farm, picking and bagging corn, cutting cabbage, moving irrigation pipe. I hated the more precision jobs like driving the harvesting machines and especially seeding and planting. I hated them because I was pretty likely to mess up and Mr. Henry was certain to yell at me.

Whenever I hear this parable, I can’t help but think of Mr. Henry, very precise, very frugal, very easily angered. I think of him coming out to the field to see that I had dumped some very expensive seed on the path, on the rocky ground, in the thorns and a few seeds on the well prepared, plowed, fertile soil. Mr. Henry, when especially angry would turn red and then lose his capacity to form sentences and sometimes even words. It would sound something like, “wha? uh? eh?”

Now I have to admit that farming methods were not as precise around 0 a.d. as they are now, but the point is still the same, the sower is throwing seed around like he is never going to run out. The sower is wasting seed.

We talk a lot about wasting things. We need to not let our sprinkler water the sidewalk lest we waste water. We need to be organized lest we waste time. We need to watch our spending lest we waste money. We need to think about what we buy at the grocery store so we don’t end up wasting food.

If you think about is, the whole idea of wasting something implies that there is a limited amount of that thing, a scarcity.

Think about this. If there were an unlimited amount of something, could you waste it? Maybe you could, but would it matter? Think about how our attitudes about things change when we reconsider the amount of something we have. At one point in time, we thought we had basically unlimited amounts of fossil fuels to make gasoline. Back then cars just got bigger and bigger until, at one point, in the seventies there was a little thing known as the gas crises. We suddenly realized there was a limit to this stuff. Cars started getting smaller. At some point in the last few years, we began getting a bit overconfident in the amount of fossil fuels we had and cars starting getting bigger again. But some, still see the limitations of fossil fuels and have been buying gas/electric hybrid cars.

Back when I was a kid, living on a large freshwater lake, people spoke much less about wasting water. Here I, Texas, where there are more and more people and less and less water, people talk about it all the time, though I have never heard of wasting salt water.

Thinking about wasting something implies a scarcity of it. We should worry about wasting our natural resources. They are abundant, but not abundant enough to waste. We should think about wasting money. Even if we are rich there is a limit, and that which we waste cannot be used for better purposes.

But there are some things that never run out. There are some things that although we are able to make poor decisions about, we technically can’t waste because there will always be more.

To get at what I am talking about, let’s look back at the parable.

¹⁸‘Hear then the parable of the sower. ¹⁹When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path.

I sort of like the way Mark’s gospel puts this. It is a little bit more clear about what the sower is sowing. In Mark 4:14 it reads:

¹⁴The sower sows the word.

It is important to note that the sower doesn’t sow the words (plural) but the word (singular). A very subtle difference, but I think important. You see, this passage is often preached, and I have preached it this way myself as though it says words (plural). That subtle difference can somewhat limit the scope of the message here. It can be seen as simply a message about hearing. I might be the sower and I stand up here and sow the words of God. In this picture, you all become the soil. Some of you may not hear the words at all, some of you may hear them and react but quickly fall away, some of you may hear the words, but they may get lost in the things of the world and some of you may hear the words and take them in and engage them and produce much fruit.

Now this is a good message, and I think definitely part of the message Jesus is trying to deliver here, but it is about more than words, it is about the word. As Matthew says:

¹⁹When anyone hears the word of the kingdom

That is what the sower is sowing, the word of the kingdom. We are not just talking about words, we are talking about the word. And what is the word? John 1:1 reads:

¹In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God.

In the words of the author of John’s Gospel, the word is God and the word came to us in Jesus. You see, if you follow this thinking, the whole parable becomes not about simply the words of God, but the word of God, the breaking of things of God into this world.

You see then the seed becomes God, not just words, but the knowledge of God, it becomes that outpouring of God, that boundless love that we can only describe in our limited speech as grace.

And the sower is throwing grace around like he is never going to run out.

You see it is important to think about what kind of soil we are, how open we are to the love and word of God, but it is more important to realize no matter how bad of soil we are, God will keep throwing seed on us.

And if we are good soil and we know someone else that is bad soil, God is pouring just as much seed on them as on us. And that is perfectly alright, because God is never going to run out.

I can say that and say that and say that and most people have so much trouble getting it because there is just nothing else we can comprehend that is limitless. It is easy to say that God’s grace is limitless, but our way of living out of that often reflects a scarcity. Our actions betray our words as we live our lives with an understanding of God’s love that is more like my understanding of food than my understanding of the universe.

This really affects how we live, how we see God and how we see each other. If our lives betray our words and, and at some level, we perceive a scarcity, we will look at this parable just like Mr. Henry would have. Why is the sower throwing perfectly good seed onto the path, the rocky ground and into the weeds. Why is God wasting seed?

We may even try to start helping God by creating rules that we think will limit who God loves. Think about what was going on in chapter 12. Jesus was trying to share the love and compassion of God and the religious elite were saying, “No! Stop! You are breaking the rules we use to conserve the love of God.”

We, like the religious elite of this story, might start spending our energies on figuring out who is worthy and deserving of God’s love. We might come up with divisions and labels and categories to help God better understand where God should spread seed. Because if everybody gets it, God might not have enough for those who deserve it. And if we do by chance understand the unmerited nature of Grace, we might at least say God might not have enough for those who would use it properly.

But if we were to truly grasp the completely unlimited nature of the love of God, we could truly allow God to be extravagant, and then and only then, could we be extravagantly loving. If we could be completely confident that God would always have enough love for us, we would finally be free to love extravagantly.[1]

If we assume a scarcity of God’s affection, we will limit who we can be. If we see the extravagance of God’s love and grace, we will live generously.

I am reading now from The Message paraphrase of Matthew, chapter 10, verse 6. Jesus is sending his disciples out into the world for a while and he says:

⁶Go to the lost, confused people right here in the neighborhood. ⁷Tell them that the kingdom is here. ⁸Bring health to the sick. Raise the dead. Touch the untouchables. Kick out the demons. You have been treated generously, so live generously.

God is giving us an unlimited supply of love, compassion, and mercy. Even if God chooses to lavish this upon people who don’t hear, don’t respond, don’t live out of it, don’t even care, God will still have plenty for you.

We shouldn’t be worried about who God loves, but rather we should be scattering seeds of God’s love everywhere, knowing that the one thing we will never run out of is the love of God.

What blows my mind more than the endless nature of the universe is the common scientific wisdom that the endless universe is expanding.

The only thing more amazing than that is the fact that so is God’s unconditional love we call grace. God lavishes that love on every creature, those that are like the path, those that are like the rocky ground, those overgrown with thorns, and those who are the fertile soil. If we are going to truly respond to that kind of love, we must keep at the top of our thoughts, the extravagantly loving, endlessly abundant seed spreading God.

Amen.

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[1] Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, If God is Love, Rediscovering Grace in an Ungracious World, (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004)34