The first time I ever set eyes on
Petaluma I was farming down in Marin County.
Part of my work was to make a trip every month or two up to Harmony Farm
Supply, outside Sebastopol, where I’d buy fertilizers and irrigation parts and
tools. And on one of these trips I was
nearing Novato when the traffic report on the radio said that a tanker truck
had tipped over on 101 just south of Petaluma, and the freeway was closed in
both directions. Any sensible person
would have turned around and gone home, but instead, I headed west, out into
the country, to try my luck on the back roads.
I didn’t have a map, just a good sense of direction, and somehow, by a
long and roundabout way, I found myself at the junction of Gravenstein Highway
and Stony Point Road, a place that I recognized.
In the process I got a nice tour of
the countryside to the south and west of here, and my first glimpse of downtown
Petaluma. It was a time in my life, my
mid-twenties, when I was thinking a lot about my future, and the uncertain
prospects for society-at-large. And I
thought the best thing I could do, for myself and for the world, was to be a
farmer. I liked to dream about finding
a place somewhere to settle down with some friends and family, and get back to
the land. And I remember thinking on
that particular day that I was glad to know about Petaluma, that this was a
place I’d like to come back to sometime, that it might even be the right place
to stake my claim.
So here I am, only somewhere along
the line I went off on a different kind of journey, so I’m not a farmer living
and working on my agrarian commune out on Chileno Valley Road. I’m an
Episcopal priest, living in a tract house in a subdivision near Casa Grande High School. It’s funny how nothing happens
the way we expect, even when our dreams partly come true. And how, when we get to where we thought we
are going, we find it’s not the place we thought we’d find.
These experiences, the expectation
that turns up the unexpected, and the journey to a destination you don’t really know,
appear in the scripture readings this morning as images of the life of
faith. Jesus tells his disciples to be
always on the alert, always ready for action, because the thing you’re waiting
for is going to come when you least expect it.
And the author of the letter to the Hebrews holds up the example of
Abraham, who wandered off in search of a land he’d never seen, following a
promise to a place he’d never really call his own.
Both of these examples are about receiving
a gift from God. It is a gift that is
gratuitous, that depends solely on God’s will to give, but it also depends on
human faith; it is our willingness to receive the gift that makes all the
difference. It is the gift that makes
faith possible, and it is the faith that makes the gift real. For Abraham the gift is the promise of a
homeland, and of descendants “as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of
sand on the seashore,” but its his faith that sets his feet on the road.
The faith that Jesus commends to
his disciples is also founded on God’s gift—“Do not be afraid, little flock,”
he says, “for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” But this kingdom is not a place on the earth,
it’s not a homeland you can journey to. It’s
a kingdom that comes upon us, that catches us by surprise. Jesus’ teaching career begins with his appearance,
as if from nowhere, announcing that “the Kingdom of God has come near.” His parables point to the unexpected signs of
the kingdom in everyday happenings and ordinary things. And today we hear the surprising news that
this kingdom is given to us, and that having it, we have nothing to fear. God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom is
the promise of a treasure more worthwhile than the things we thought were
valuable, an invisible treasure nothing on earth can take away.
These words rang true for the
disciples of Jesus because he said them.
And that was perhaps the most surprising thing of all. All their lives they had heard about the
power and the goodness of God. All their
lives they had heard about the Spirit of God that anointed the prophets,
putting words of truth in their mouths and power to heal in their hands. All their lives they had heard how God had
promised a homeland to his people, a place where they could dwell in safety and
plenty, where he himself would be their shepherd and their righteous king.
And they may have believed in the
old stories; they may have hoped and prayed fervently for such things to be
revealed in their own day. But they probably
didn’t expect that they actually would.
They didn’t expect that they would have first-hand experience of the
presence of God and the power of the Spirit.
They didn’t expect to be called irresistibly away from their homes and
their former occupations to be sent wandering through the towns and the
villages on a mission to heal and forgive.
They didn’t expect to find that when they did, they did not go hungry,
but their needs were all supplied. The
disciples of Jesus didn’t expect to see lives transformed, the broken fragments
of society made whole, or to see and to know, in a land seething with violence
and oppression, the peace and justice of the Kingdom of God. And they certainly didn’t expect that all
this could flow from one person, a person like them, a carpenter from Nazareth
in Galilee.
When I had my dream of a little
place in the country, it was, at the most basic level, a dream of peace. It was a dream of building a private little
homeland, where I could be safe.
Surrounded by people I know and trust, and supplying my own needs, I could
live in minimal dependence on the world of stock market bubbles and nuclear
meltdowns, Mexican drug gangs and government surveillance. But instead I ended up here, with all of you,
squarely planted in the middle of that world. I ended up giving my life, not to building myself
a separate little homeland of safety and peace, but to our shared project of showing
the turbulent world the kingdom that God is building there.
My job here may look at times like
it’s about building up our institution, so it’s stable and secure. But my real work is to take risks, to encourage
us all to take the risks, of receiving the gift of God that is Jesus
Christ. It’s a gift that we receive on
behalf of the whole world, and that is a risky proposition, because it’s a gift
the world isn’t sure it wants to have.
We’re not so sure we want it ourselves, when hear things like, “sell your
possessions, and give alms.” This is not the charter for our Rummage Sale,
but words that put us at risk, the risk of admitting that all we can really
count on is our relationships, and no one is a stranger in the kingdom.
The world remains deeply ambivalent
about such words, unsure whether Jesus is the master of the house or a thief
come to break in and steal the things we prize.
That is why it is mostly content to leave him where it saw him last,
hanging on the cross. But we persist in praying
for the kingdom that is still to come.
We insist on acting as if Jesus has a future. And that means staying awake, of being alert
and on the lookout for the unexpected. It
means remaining hopeful, not just of finding our own private homeland of safety
and peace, but of meeting a person, the truly human being. He may come at midnight, or just before dawn,
like the master of the house returning from a wedding feast, or like a thief
coming to break in, but either way, the point is to be ready, because we won’t
want to miss him when he comes.
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