Blueberry Pie!

Off the Bush

Last year, my sister gave me three blueberry bushes for my birthday. I planted, watered, fertilized and covered with bird netting.  The bushes bloomed and the fruit formed, and as soon the berries were almost ready to pick, the squirrels reached in through the netting and ate them!  I got a total of four blueberries.  I don't mind sharing, but I felt I should have at least gotten an equal amount.

This year, my friend built a an arched canopy to hold the netting and I anchored it at the bottom.  In this little tent, the berries have ripened. Yesterday, I stood in the yard and ate a handful for breakfast. And tonight, I picked a cup before the rain started and made a little galette for my supper.

Sweet!

On the Plate

The Desert Shall Rejoice!

I have spent a few days in Phoenix, Arizona.  I was there to officiate at the baptisms of my newest relatives (baby first cousins twice removed).  Phoenix is a desert valley surrounded by mountains, in a landscape dotted with imported palm trees and native saguaro cactus.  It was hot – 110 degrees – and very, very dry.  I left Connecticut in the midst of cool temperatures, torrential rains, and widespread flooding.  The contrast could not have been greater.

To offer the blessing over the water in baptism in a dry place is to know how precious the gift of water really is. It is easy to take it for granted when it is so plentiful.  I think it is the same way with the love of our family – easy to take it for granted because it is so overflowing.  This week, though, we did not need a drought of love to know what a rare and precious bond we have.  We were together with memories and celebration and babies and catching up and laughing and crying and eating cake and talking. 

It was blessing, pure blessing, like sweet rain in the desert, poured out on all of us.  Little Lindsey hugged her mama and added her sweet tears to the celebration; all-grown-up-almost-seven-year-old Ian poured the water and then later on swam like a fish in the pool; and baby Brennie sat up and showered his wobbly smiles on all of us.  And it was a gift of God, as precious as a spring of water in a dry place.   

Buying a car

Today I bought a car.  And it took more time, more paperwork, more checking, and more signatures than if I had bought a gun.....

Holy Saturday

This has been my “day of preparation.”  I have written my part of our Easter reflections.  I have washed my white robe and hung it carefully to avoid wrinkles.  I have made the asparagus tarts for brunch tomorrow after church.  I have washed the gold cloth for the Table. I have washed and dried the new communion set that we will use tomorrow for the first time.  I have cut pussy willow branches from my yard and put them in a vase with yellow tulips.  I have put out my fancy Easter eggs in the willow basket trimmed with dried moss.  Everything is ready.  And I am waiting with an anticipation that is at once anxious and joyful for tomorrow.  

Fourth Sunday of Lent

The Presbyterian Brother

This story from the gospel of Luke is one of the best known of Jesus’ parables.  We call it the parable of the prodigal son.  The younger brother demands his inheritance, leaves home, wastes everything, falls on unbelievably hard times, and then returns, hoping to beg his father for a position as a servant.  The father is so glad to see him that he brings out the best clothes for him to put on, which he will need because the father is throwing a great party to celebrate.  The lost is found, the son is back home, and all’s well that ends well, right?  Not exactly.

We kind of forget the second half of the parable, which isn’t about the prodigal son at all.  Remember that the story begins like this:  “There was a man who had two sons.”  The story is as much as about the elder son as the younger one – the elder son, presbuteros in Greek, the same word that gives us Presbyterian.

The Presbyterian brother, like any good first-born, has a deep sense of duty and responsibility.  He follows the rules, and he works hard.  And what happens?  That ne’er-do-well kid brother of his, that son of his father, gets the big party, the gourmet meal, with the live band and the open bar.  And the elder brother doesn’t even get so much as take-out burgers to eat with his buddies.  Where is the justice in all this?

Let’s look more closely at the story to see what it tells us about this first-born son.  Right at the beginning (verse 12), the younger son demands his inheritance from his father. In the culture of this time and place, it was an unthinkable request, a deep insult, a violation of all the rules of family and faith.  After all, you don’t inherit the family business while your father is still running it. In effect, he is asking his father to drop dead, at least from the perspective of the law.  The boy demands his share and, amazingly, the father complies. 

But it isn’t just the younger brother who gets his inheritance.  The father divides up the whole estate. The older son gets his portion, too.  The father gives it all away.  Everything he has is given to these two boys to do with as they will.  The one throws it away.  And the other clutches it so tightly that he cannot see the value of what he has.  Reading between the lines, he is obsessed with getting and having.  He leads a joy-less life. 

And the sound of the party going on, as he is dragging himself in from the fields, is just more than he can stand, especially when he finds out that it is a celebration of his brother’s homecoming.  The nerve of the old man, doing something like this!

One writer, Robert Farrar Capon, describes the scene for us (The Parables of Grace, p 142; NRSV substituted for KJV in original):

The Elder Brother. Mr. Respectability… The man with volumes and volumes of the records he has kept on himself and everyone else.  And as he comes near the house, he hears music and dancing.  ….  He gasps:  Music! Dancing! Levity! Expense! And on a working day, yet!

He calls one of the slaves to ask what is going on. He is not happy:  Why this frivolity?  What about the shipments that our customers wanted yesterday?  Who’s minding the store? 

And the slave tells him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” 

He rants:  The fatted calf!  Doesn’t that old fool know I’ve been saving that for next week’s sales promotion when we show our new line of turnips?  How am I supposed to run a business when he blows the entertainment budget on that loser of a son? 

And he is so angry that he refuses to go in.  Finally, therefore, he makes a proclamation:  I will not dignify this waste with my presence.   Someone has to exercise a little responsibility around here! 

And then, for this ungrateful, jealous, bitter boy, the father leaves his guests and goes out to him and pleads with him to come to the celebration.  But he won’t. “Listen!” he says – and you can hear the hostility and disrespect in his tone – “Listen!  For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never even given me a young goat so I might celebrate with my friends.” 

And do you hear how he misses the whole point.  He isn’t working for his father at all.  The whole estate that is left belongs to him!  He is not a slave to his father; he is a slave to himself. 

He has cut himself off from his family.  He refuses to claim kinship with his brother, referring to him as that “son of yours.”  But his father won’t let him get away with any of this.  He says to him:  “Child, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.”

And there the parable ends, without a real ending.  It just stops, leaving us standing in the yard with the father and the elder son, not knowing what will happen next. Will the elder son do as the younger one did, and return to his father’s embrace?  Will he acknowledge that nothing he can do will make him worthy of the father’s love?  Will he celebrate with all the other unworthy guests?  Will he be willing to eat with the sinners?  Will he put on his party clothes and go in, or will he stand in the yard by himself, clutching the rags of his respectability and trying to warm his own cold heart?

I think we can guess how Jesus wanted the story to end.  The clue is in the first and second verses of chapter 15:  “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him.  And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” 

This fellow, this Jesus, welcomes sinners.  And as one scholar notes, in this parable there are two kinds of sinners, two kinds of sin (Kenneth E. Bailey. Finding the Lost: Cultural Keys to Luke 15, pp 190-91):

“One is the sin of the law-breaker – the prodigal – and the other is the sin of the law-keeper – the elder brother.  Each sin centers on a broken relationship.  One breaks that relationship while failing to fulfill the expectations of the family and society.  The second breaks his relationship while fulfilling those same expectations.”

And where are we in this story, my Presbyterian brothers and sisters?  Where are we?  We are the ones who try so hard to do things right, to follow the rules, to be good.  And there is nothing wrong with that.  But it will not earn us God’s love. There is nothing we can do to make God love us or to make God stop loving us.  That is the scandal of grace. 

As Frederick Buechner defines it (Wishful Thinking, p 38): 

Grace is something you can never get but can only be given.  There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth. …

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace.  There’s nothing you have to do.  There’s nothing you have to do.  There’s nothing you have to do.

In her poem The Wild Geese, Mary Oliver writes this: 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

We were created in love; we were created for love.  And the wide expanse of God’s love in Christ is big enough to take in the whole world – saints and sinners, wastrels and misers, prodigals and Presbyterians.

We don’t have to be perfect.  We don’t have to be good.  We only have to love as we were made to love.  And that means loving God with heart, mind, soul and body, and loving our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, as we love ourselves.  And when we love that way, we are where we belong, next to God’s heart, and there is cause for celebration. 

So listen for the sound of music and dancing.  God is throwing a party, and we are all invited, we are all welcomed, every single one of us.  God wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks be to God!

  

Sermon preached for

First Presbyterian Church

Hartford, CT

March 10, 2013

by Martha C. Highsmith 

God has a sense of humor!

Creation is amazing!

The Westminster Dog Show

Those who know me these days would say I am a cat person, and that is true.  I’ve been blessed by feline companions for many, many years.  Cats seem able to cope with the demands of my schedule, and certainly Mr. Manny is always glad to see me when I return from a day or a week away.

But I grew up with dogs and love them, too.  I carry dog “cookies” in my car so I am prepared when I visit my friends and their pooches.  I’d have a dog now, if I didn’t have to work 10+ hour days (I can’t quite bring myself to think about doggie daycare….).

And I love watching the Westminster Dog Show. I love hearing the descriptions of the dogs, in the announcer’s sonorous voice.  I love seeing the handlers run around trying to keep up with the dogs. 

Most of all, I love seeing the amazing, almost-unbelievable variety of the dogs.  They are all the same creatures; they are all dogs.  But some are huge, like the Irish wolfhound, and some are teeny, weighing only four or five pounds.  They have short hair and look almost bald, or they have long silky coats that ruffle against the floor.  They are white and black and red and brown and almost blue.  They have careers as hunters or herders; they are good with children or suited for search and rescue.  They trot and strut and waddle and run.  They pose and sometimes they even bark. 

To watch the dog show is to see only one example of the great and beautiful diversity of God’s good creation.  I am in awe of it; and it makes me look at those of my species in the same way – as examples of the amazing diversity of holy handiwork! 

Christmas Eve

Missing Jesus?

Luke 2: 1-20

Right before Thanksgiving, a town about 20 miles from where I live, was getting ready to put up its annual Christmas Village display.  For 65 years, the town has been doing this. Christmas Village has lots of lights and Santa with reindeer.  It also has a life-sized manger scene. 

But when the workers began unpacking the manger scene, they discovered that the baby Jesus was missing.  At first they thought he had simply been misplaced, so they searched all the town storage areas but without success.  No baby Jesus.  He had apparently been stolen.

The stolen Baby made the news throughout Connecticut, and people came forward to offer replacement baby Jesuses or give money to buy a new one.  One woman had a porcelain figure that was about 18 inches long and just the right fit.  Baby Jesus was restored to the manger, and all was well.

I’ve been thinking about this missing Jesus ever since I heard the story.  It seems to me that the baby goes missing a lot these days.  We have more Christmas than we ever had, but somehow the baby seems to have gotten lost. 

The malls start with holiday decorations and sales right after Halloween.  Thanksgiving is no longer just for family gatherings and grateful feasting; it has turned into an occasion for shopping.  We are more and more consumed with Christmas and less and less attentive to the one at the center of it.  We have lost the baby Jesus. 

But we are not the only generation for whom this is true.  Back at the beginning, back in Bethlehem, a whole lot of those people missed the baby, too. 

Think about how God announced the coming of Christ into the world.  It was to a bunch of poor shepherds – unwashed, uneducated, unimportant.  They were the ones who heard the angel, they were the ones who went to see.  They were the ones charged with telling the news. 

But they had no power, no influence, no social standing.  Who would listen to them?  Why were they the ones entrusted with the news, the glad tidings of great joy?  Well, maybe the angels had announced God’s gift to a lot of folks that night.  Maybe the angels came to the priests and the professors, the rulers and rich.  Maybe the angels tried to get the attention of the mayor and the minister in that little town, or the shopkeeper or the doctor. 

But a lot of folks are busy, and it seems that the more important the people are, the busier they are, with lots to do, lots to worry about.  Maybe all the important people missed the message from the angels because they had too much on their minds, because they were too busy.  They certainly missed the baby Jesus. 

And the innkeeper, with the full house.  You can hardly blame him, can you?  What could he do?  There was just no room for even one more, let alone a man and a woman in labor.  But he might not have completely missed Jesus.  Maybe he was the one who directed that young couple to the stable.  The story is silent on the details but maybe he came back that night to see the baby.  Then again, maybe he just turned them away and let them fend for themselves.  Missing Jesus is an easy thing to do.

And there is another part of the story that we’ll read in a few weeks, the part about the wise men.  They came from far away, determined not to miss this baby. But they went to the wrong place.  They were looking for Jesus in a palace, among the kings and princes.  As the old song says:  They were looking for Love in all the wrong places.  They went to King Herod but there was no baby to be found there.  They almost missed him.  It was only when the angels directed them to an out-of-the-way place that they found the child and worshipped him and returned on their way home having found just what they were looking for.

So it is not just in our times when people are at risk of missing Jesus.  And just like the people in the little Connecticut town where Jesus went missing, we have a calling when that happens.  Those people offered their own Jesus to the town.  Have you ever thought about how you might do that? 

Deitrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who was imprisoned in a concentration camp in World War II and eventually killed there.  In some of the writings he left behind, he has this to say:

“A Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him.  He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself. . . ..  The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s heart is sure.” (Life Together)

When you cannot find the Christ in your life, when Jesus has gone missing, then you need others around you who can share the Jesus they know.  And in a world where so many have no Christ at all, then you may be the only way they ever experience the presence of Jesus.   Be ready to offer Christ where it seems Christ has been lost.

I’ve seen a lot of people doing that in these past ten days.  In the face of unspeakable horror in another Connecticut town, friends and strangers have come together to mourn, to offer comfort, to be strong for those who are destroyed by grief and loss. 

It will never be possible to understand how so many little children and the grown-ups protecting them could be killed.  But God understands the heartbreak, God the Father who also lost a child, an only son, to violence.  And God in Christ is with us in all the dark and terrible places, coming through a touch and a tear, prayers and vigils, and a renewed commitment to peace.  God is not missing, Christ is not missing, because so many people have offered the Christ within them to those in need.

You know, they eventually found the figure of the baby Jesus that had been stolen.  Apparently, two teenagers did it as a prank.  The baby Jesus was broken in pieces and scattered in a wooded area.  

And in some way, that also seems like part of the Christmas story.  This baby who is born to us this night will grow up and live and teach and heal and love.  And he, too, will be seized, stolen from us, and broken. 

But that is not end of the story.  When we come to this Table, we tell the rest of it.  We hear his words: “This is my body, broken for you.”  And we know that this broken body is scattered in the world, through us. 

No matter how dark and difficult our world seems, there is good news of great joy for all people: “Unto us is born a savior who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  Christ is not missing, the baby Jesus has not been lost.  Fear not:  he is here in our midst, Emmanuel, God with us. 

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace and good will among all people. 

May it be so.

© Martha C. Highsmith