Abundance
Sermon preached at All Hallows by Alison Terrell on 22 January 2006
Third Sunday of Epiphany
Readings:
Psalm 128
John 2:1—11
The first thing that came to my mind when I read these passages was the word abundance, and this is what I want to explore this morning. The Psalm we read may sound very patriarchal to our ears but this was an agricultural society, where good harvests meant the difference between plenty and starvation, and where children provided continuation and the assurance of care in your old age. (This may become important again the way pensions are going!)
The second reading is about abundance in celebration, it’s about more than enough in the midst of celebration, in both quantity and quality. In John’s gospel the miracles are referred to as signs. This is not about Jesus doing magic tricks to draw attention to himself, or even just being kind to people because he has the ability to do so. Signs give the idea that they point to something bigger. They tell us something about God and his desire toward us. By calling them signs, John invites us to explore their meaning in more depth. So what does this tell us about God and his intention toward us?
Many of the miracles or signs in John, and the many discourses of Jesus recorded in John’s Gospel, are full of this sense of abundance. In this story they’ve already had plenty of wine, but Jesus provides loads more, and its good quality stuff. We have the story of the loaves and fishes where they all get enough to eat and there are still basket loads left over. After Jesus’ resurrection the disciples catch fish, and there are so many that they have trouble hauling their nets in. Jesus talks to the woman at the well about giving people water that will not just quench their thirst, but become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. He calls himself bread, he invites people to come to him and drink, and experience rivers of living water flowing from them. In John Ch 10 he says ‘I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly’.
So how does this relate to us? It gives us the courage to go on asking, to go on seeking, to go on knocking. It stops us settling for a bit of faith, a bit of trust, a bit of healing. One of the things I have really struggled with over the years is that God wants more for me than I want for myself. It is a bit like with the prodigal son. He comes back hoping he might just be accepted back as a servant, and even that, he thinks would be rather generous of his father, instead he finds himself given honour and a big party to welcome him home. That always makes me a bit uncomfortable, I would settle for a God who grudgingly lets you in on probation and expects you to sit in a corner and keep quiet. Yet gradually I am allowing God to be that generous, all-embracing God in my life and it is changing how I treat myself and hopefully how I treat others.
When I realised that I was going to talk about this on the day that Enid was due to be deported, I wondered how this truth about God fits with stories like Enid’s. Thankfully her deportation has been postponed, but that of course does not alter the problem. There are clearly lots of people, including Enid, not experiencing abundant life. This is part of the tension between God’s kingdom being present today, but still to come in all its fullness. It gives us the courage and strength to fight for this abundance for those who don’t have it. It also allows us to cry out to God on their behalf, and demand justice, and ask for his word to be fulfilled on their behalf. Raging to God about injustice has a time-honoured tradition which I believe God values.
This doesn’t mean that we should be reluctant to experience that abundance for ourselves; because it is out of this that we will find the courage and strength to work for this for others. Otherwise we will just burn ourselves out or become bitter and twisted. So I invite you this morning to think about the abundance of God. I have brought some food to represent this, and I invite you, during the meditation time, to come and take bread and fruit for yourself to show your desire to know God’s abundance, or if God puts it on your heart, to take some food and give it to someone else to show your desire for them to know God’s abundance.
Copyright © 2006 Alison Terrell
This page was last updated on Sunday, 27 August 2006
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