Wine in the Cluster - June 24, 2007
Isaiah 65: 1-9“I’m booooored!” Maybe you’ve heard this phrase coming from the lips of children by the third week of June. Sometimes the exchange goes like this:
“I’m booored!”
“Go outside and play”
“It’s too hot!”
“Play a board game—get it—you’re bored!
“You’re not very funny, you know.”
“Read a book. Don’t you have a summer reading list?”
“I don’t want to read. I have to read in school. I need a break from reading.”
“Clean your room, then.”
That one comment usually brings a look of horror bordering on disgust, as the child in question tries very hard to figure out if the adult in the conversation was ever actually a child. I mean, to suggest that a person would willingly clean one’s room while on summer vacation is nearly unthinkable. Isn’t it?
Summer vacation is for lazing around, escaping from the normal trauma of having to go to school, see your friends, put up with teachers, do your homework, do your chores after school…etc. Nobody wants to do any work on summer vacation do they?
I have to admit—in the interest of full disclosure—that although the above conversation happened probably dozens of times over the years that I was actively raising children, I haven’t had it recently. But I never forgot how frustrating it can be.
I have friends who are either just beginning their families or are parenting young children not quite school age. I try to be a supportive friend and not tell them too much about what they are about to face, because really, who needs more anxiety? So I haven’t told them very much about the third week of June, when the harsh reality sets in and everybody figures out that there is some adjusting to do in this transition from school year to summer break.
It seems that parenting is nothing more than a series of transitions. After that first big transition—from a family that is comprised of a couple to a family that includes one or more children—the transitions get a little easier. Babies start sleeping a little more on a human schedule, then they start to coo and laugh, then they can sit up, then they crawl. I remember the delight with which I watched each of my children reach those important childhood milestones. I’ve heard it joked that God makes babies cute so we don’t kill them when they are teenagers.
Do you ever wonder what God sees when God looks at us?
The book of Isaiah tells the story of God’s love affair with the ones whom God has chosen, and follows a plot through the exile in Babylon and to the post-exilic time. Like any good love affair, there are good times and there are bad times. Today’s reading is near the end of that plot. Life has not been easy for those who returned from Babylonian exile. Whole generations were born in exile, and didn’t know any other kind of life. So much had changed for those who returned, who remembered how it used to be. But it just wasn’t the way it had been before, and never really would again.
And the people forgot, as people tend to do, how to be thankful for the return home, how to establish new routines, how to make life into a new normal on a daily basis. The children of God acted out. Kids sometimes just don’t know how good they have it, do they?
Sometimes in modern-day families a child leaves home for awhile—not really exiled, usually, just part of the normal transition from child to young adult—only to return home again. This happens so often in fact, that there is a name for this phenomenon. It is called the Boomerang Generation, and right now it includes people in the 18-30 age group. (Really, there is a whole Wickipedia entry on this!)
There is a whole lot of adjusting that happens when a young adult moves back for the first time after being on their own. Out there in the world, a young person develops a whole new set of habits and routines. But when they come home, the habits and routines might not fit in with what they had been used to before—or what the parents expect from them.
It’s the third week of June all over again, as the parents make this suggestion and that suggestion for how one might fill one’s time, make oneself useful, learn from one’s prior actions, resolve to make a fresh start--only to be rebuffed, again and again. It’s enough to make a parent want to tear their own hair out, or to at least cause a well-intentioned mother to ask herself, “How did we get to this point?”
Ah, yes. I remember. It began long before the twenty-year-old was born. It is the story that is older than time, the story so ancient that in order to put some sort of “handles” on it we have placed a beginning point in a garden. It began when the Creator looked at chaos—watery formless void—and saw a universe—heaven on earth. It continues when people who had been living as God’s chosen were sent into exile where they had to learn a new way of living and serving and worshipping, away from their beloved temple, in the relative wilderness of urban Babylonia. And when they returned, as children often do, to find that life had somehow continued in their absence, and that this return to what they thought they knew would just be one long adjustment after another, God looked upon them and said, “Thus says the LORD: As the wine is found in the cluster, and they say, "Do not destroy it, for there is a blessing in it," so I will do for my servants' sake, and not destroy them all.”
There is wine to be found in the cluster. (This from a God who counts chickens before they are hatched.) Sometimes it is as Paul says; we see through a mirror dimly. We simply cannot imagine all the potential that exists, either within ourselves or within others. But God sees, and God knows. Wine starts as grapes. Spiritual giants start as new converts. Churches start wherever two or three are gathered in God’s name.
I saw an amazing story unfold this week. There was a man named Paul Potts, from Cardiff in Wales, who entered a talent contest. At the beginning of the clip, you think you know what to expect—after all, we’ve seen these contests before. A lumpy, pale, middle aged man with bad teeth and no training? This is going to end badly. I braced myself for the sarcastic comments of the judges after a humiliating performance that was sure to come.
Then the lumpy, pale middle aged man with bad teeth and no training opened his mouth and began to sing. And three bars in to the song the crowd began to gasp. The camera panned the crowd and people were wiping tears from their eyes—soon the crowd was on its feet, cheering. Nobody expected such beauty from such an unlikely source.
This story—and its subsequent happy ending, since Paul won the contest—got me to thinking. What potential do we overlook in ourselves and each other? If as parents we continue to see the potential in our children, even the ones who boomerang, we must have learned that somewhere. Deep within ourselves there must be some part of us that recognizes that there is more to each of us than we can see at the moment—that ‘wine in the cluster’ potential that God sees in us.
What would our life together as a community of faith be like if we saw each one of us as source of greatness yet unfulfilled? What if our mistakes and missteps were seen instead as opportunities to further ripen towards becoming what God has intended for us? What if our triumphs and successes were celebrated as communal harvest?
I’ll bet it would be like heaven on earth.
Thanks be to God.
