Father John McGinn, Rector

Saint John’s Episcopal Church

Sandwich, Massachusetts

 

February 11, 2007                                  Sixth Sunday of Epiphany

 

 

I would like to take a trip to Alaska.  I heard of its great beauty and the mountains, wildlife, but I do not want to go to Nome, Alaska.  It is on the edge of the Bering Sea, and like many villages of the Artic the ground on which the community sits is frozen tundra.  Burying the dead is a real challenge there.  Sanitation landfills are unheard of. Garbage trucks do not haul away the amount of trash we put curbside in the lower 48 states.  Instead a typical front yard shows broken washing machines, junked cars, scrapped wood, old toilets and piles of non-biodegradable refuse.

 

Tourists who visit in the summer are amazed at the debris and shake their heads.  How could anyone live like that?  What those visitors do not realize, is that for nine months out of the year Nome sits under a blanket of snow that covers the garbage.  During those months the town is a quaint winter wonderland of pure white landscape.  Your impression of Nome would depend on when you visit.  Nine months of beauty and three months when the junk underneath comes through.

 

Many people are like that.

 

See them in some situations and they impress you with their maturity and grace, see them in other less guarded situations and the junk underneath comes out.  The well dressed businessman, a pillar of his church a leader among men, but when he goes home at night abusive of his wife and neglectful of his children.  The sad eyed woman more knowledgeable than most about the bible, but given the chance she slams many of the people in her own church with criticism and badmouthing.  The talented newcomer with negative remarks about people of other skin colors and economic conditions.  The salesman who appears to be carefree, but at night when he is on the road alone in strange hotel room he is addicted to pornography. 

 

On the surface people who are glistening with possibilities, but underneath it is junk.  In a sense this is the human condition.  Mark Twain once said, “No man, deep down in the privacy of his own heart has any considerable respect for himself.”  And Martin Luther once declared, “When a man like me comes to know the plague of his own heart, he is not miserable only, he is absolute misery itself.” 

 

This is the human condition.  All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Most of us are fortunate; we are able to keep the junk under control.  Sometimes it comes to the surface. And then all hell breaks loose.

 

Many years ago when I was living in Manchester, CT, a crack appeared in the bedroom wall of our house there, and I tried to fix it.  I plastered over the crack and repainted it.   And I repainted the wall.  And it looked as good as new.  But within a week the crack was back, I replastered and repainted, but again the crack returned.   I contacted a contractor who told me what was going on.  “You don’t have a problem with the wall,” he said, “the problem is with the foundation of your house.  The foundation is shifting, and until it is fixed the cracks will always be a problem.”

 

An attractive home we had, but one with a flawed foundation.  I wonder how many of you san relate to that.  This is what the bible calls Sin.  Each of us has a point of weakness, a flaw in our foundation, junk underneath that only rarely come to the surface.  When it comes to the surface it causes us and those we love much pain.

 

It reminds me of something John Piper, in his book A Hunger for God, wrote.  “The greatest enemy of the hunger for God is not poison, but apple pie.  It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for Heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world.  It is not the X-rated video, but the prime time drivel that we drink in every night.  The most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth for when these replace the appetite for God the idolatry is scarcely recognizable and barely curable.”

 

In the Old Testament lesson that Jan just read, the prophet Jeremiah contrasts two kinds of people:  The cursed and the blessed.  Listen to how Jeremiah described the cursed.  “Thus said the Lord, cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a short in the desert and shall not see when relief comes.  They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness in an uninhabited salt bed.”

 

Now listen to how he describes the blessed.  “Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord, they shall be like a tree, planted by water sending out its roots to the stream.  It shall not fear when heat comes and its leaves shall not stay green in the year of drought it is not anxious and it does not cease to bear fruit.”

 

The difference between the cursed and the blessed is internal.  It has nothing to do with external circumstances.  You can’t judge whether a person is cursed or blessed by the kind of house or job or clothing or car a person has.  It is a mistake to judge people by their external circumstances.  “Those poor people” we might say as we pass by a dilapidated house or an old car. Be careful, the people in that house or car might have something we do not.

 

Alice Walker once wrote an essay about growing up poor and black in the South of the 1930’s and 1940’s.  If you have driven through the south you may have sent he run down shanties like the one Alice Walker grew up in.  You and I would wonder how people live in those conditions.  But that is not how Alice remembers those years. She describes the home she grew up in as beautiful.  The first thing her mother did in a new home was to plant flowers around the house, saving seeds each year.  The flowers grew with great abandon, and at the end of long days after working in other people’s houses, Mrs. Walker would sit out on her veranda surrounded by her flowers.  Neighbors would come to visit and drink in the flower fragrance on hot summer nights as they listened to the crickets and frogs.  These people worked hard and in many ways they were beaten down and beaten up, but make no mistake, theirs was not a black and white world.  Their was beauty, and they valued it.  They recognized God in the beauty and thanked him for it.  It is a different way of looking at life.  Some people look so great on the outside, but we know they are junk on the inside.  Other people don’t look nearly as good, but inside is a beautiful flower garden.

 

Being blessed and being cursed has nothing to do with external circumstances.  Being blessed and being cursed has to do with the basic orientation of your life.  Jeremiah described the cursed as trusting in mere mortals.  That is if the meaning of you life has to do with your toys and your accomplishments, then you are like a shrub in the desert.  You can buy insurance to protect your health you can try to stay on the right path and protect your reputation but if you only trust in the tools this world can provide; sooner or later you will come across an obstacle in your path that you won’t be able to move.  Inwardly you will shrivel and die.  But if you trust in God you will have deep roots that will heal the garden in the most extreme circ- umstance.  You see, all of us have junk within us.  Maybe it was from a difficult childhood situation, maybe rejection, maybe abuse; maybe we have simply grown to be selfish.  Are we blessed or cursed?  It is not about where we come from; the real question has to do with our commitment to God.

 

How do you start your day?  Do you moan about how difficult your life is, or with a prayer of thanksgiving that God has given you another day?  Listen all of us have junk on the inside but it does not have to determine or happiness or success.  What we need to do is align our direction with God’s purpose for our lives.  Let God take care of the junk, ask God to remove that junk from us and move forward determined to do God’s will.  Amen