Jerusalem Presbyterian Church

If I could just be good enough.  So many of my problems would be solved.  If I was thin enough, or had enough self-control to put the cookies away.  If I had more money—or worked harder at my job in order to make more money—heck, what do I need to sleep for?  If I could clone myself so that I could be in three places at once and could attend to my family’s needs better.  If I was a better mother, friend, sister, daughter, partner.  If I was a stronger Christian—prayed better, and harder than anybody ever prayed, if I lived my witness for Jesus like a neon sign for everybody to see.  If I offered forgiveness faster, and more, if I turned the other cheek with more predictable regularity, if I knew just the right thing to say to those who were hurting and lonely—another situation in which that cloning superpower would come in handy—if I could just love more dearly, see more clearly, follow God more nearly.Man…I’d have this life thing licked!  If I could just be good enough.

Finitude has really been getting me down lately.   Do you ever feel like that?  I see people hurting, I see where the world is messed up, and I can’t help but think “If only I was good enough.  I could do something about that.”

I think everybody has felt like that at some point.  Don’t you?  Like we just aren’t good enough—if only.  Some friends and I call that our “Inadequacy shtick”.  We don’t sit around thinking about it all the time, but when we are scared, vulnerable, frustrated, tired or overwhelmed, well…we start up with our shtick.  Eventually we get over it, but very once in while we just need to wallow in it.

I guess it must be human nature, because even the disciples did it.  You can’t really blame them, I guess.  Following Jesus around, watching healing after healing, hearing parable after parable—those especially must have brought out the old inadequacy shtick in them.  We can hardly understand the parables now, after 2,000 years to figure them out—imagine hearing them live and in person from Christ himself! Jesus drops a couple of them—real doozies if you ask me—on the disciples in our text for today.  And the way they are in the gospel, right after one another, they hardly seem to make any sense.

All the disciples did was ask for a little more faith.  Is that so bad?  Is that really a reason for Jesus to bombard them with riddles?  “Jesus, if only we could be good enough!  Tell us what to do to be good enough!  Give us more faith!”  Jesus’ response is at the same time perplexing and comforting: you already have what you need.  Implied in what Jesus says, and hidden from our understanding by the complexities of the Greek and the vagaries of English translation is this: “If you have faith (and you do) you could do these things (and you can).”  The use of a seed as the metaphor for faith is genius.  From so small an object comes a great thing.  Jesus’ response to the demand “Make us good enough!”  is a confusing “Since you are good enough, you can do this.”

The next parable, immediately following the mustard seed is about slaves and masters, and a place at the table.  Jesus seems to approach the disciples’ inadequacy shtick from the opposite side.  If they were feeling really good about themselves and their mustard-seed sized capability to move large trees, Jesus quickly takes them down a notch or two with the riddle of the slave and master.   Slaves can’t earn a place at the table; slaves prepare the meal, even after spending all day out in the fields taking care of the crops or livestock.  It’s the difference between slave and master, you see.  One serves the other.

Make no mistake, even though Jesus asks the disciples how they would act as masters, the disciples (and we) are clearly the ones who are called to serve.  And so Jesus’ response to his friends ends up fairly balanced: “You have what you need; you are good enough.  You cannot earn more. Do what is asked of you; serve.”

It seems important on this World Communion day to talk about our place at this table.  For the first twenty-five years or so of my life, communion was a very mysterious thing—something I grew up not learning much about. The churches that I grew up in downplayed this sacrament—even though baptism was a big deal, communion was not.  I learned most of what I knew then from my grandmother, who attended a tiny Disciples of Christ  church in Indiana.  On those weekends when I was lucky to spend time with her, one of the duties she let me help with was preparing communion, which, in contrast ot my upbringing, her church celebrated every Sunday.

One Saturday afternoon when I was about ten years old we were riding in her car to her church to pick up the trays of tiny glass cups (what I jokingly call the “shot glass on the hubcap” arrangement) to take home to her house and painstakingly fill with Welch’s grape juice for the next morning’s worship service.   As we were driving home it was my job in the backseat to keep my hands on the trays, but I got distracted by something outside the car.  When grandma took the last curve home a little too fast, the trays slid across the seat,  and seemingly in slo mo before I could catch them, went crashing to the floor of the back seat upside down, and I heard that devastating crunch of broken glass on broken glass.

Grandma stopped the car.  “Are you okay?  Julie Ann are you hurt?”  I remember sitting there speechless surveying the damage.  I had never been afraid of my grandmother; I had only been afraid of disappointing her, for in her I found my kindred spirit. “I ruined it!  I ruined it!  I ruined communion.” I wailed from the back seat.  “The little glass cups are gone.”  I didn’t understand in my ten-year old reasoning exactly what the cups stood for, but I knew that they were important to my grandma, and I knew that she was important to me, and that I had failed her miserably.  And that made me miserable just thinking about it.

Grandma ascertained that I was not cut or bleeding and proceeded the half-mile home driving more carefully this time.   We got out of the car and she painstakingly made sure I got out safely, then she began to pick the broken glass out of the carpet in the back seat floor of her Plymouth Fury. She wouldn’t let me help her, although I’m sure that would have made me feel better.  When she was done, I did my best to apologize.  I told her “I’m so sorry I ruined communion.  What will you do?  Will church be mad?”

“You didn’t ruin communion.  You broke some cups.  We’ll get more.  You’ll hold them carefully this time.”  We made the drive back to church, and I held the cups closely the next time.  The lesson that day was not about gravity or centrifugal force, or even how shiny objects can distract young girls.  The lesson was that I could not earn, could not un-earn my grandmother’s love.  The lesson was that those little glass cups, even when intact and filled with Welch’s grape juice and arrange in neat little trays, did not contain the grace that earns us a spot at this table.  True communion begins in how we treat one another.

As we approach the table this morning, some of us might be thinking ”If only I was good enough to have earned the right to be here.”  Jesus replies with complex and reassuring words: “If you have faith (and you do) you can do great things (and you can).  You have what you need, you cannot earn more.  Do what is asked of you; be fed, then serve.”

Thanks be to God!