John 15:7-11

If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.

If you weren’t here last week for Ash Wednesday, you might not be sure about what we’re up to. On Wednesday nights, over the course of the next few weeks, as we make our Lenten journey to the cross, we’re going to engage some of these ancient Celtic Christian practices. So much of popular culture and popular theology and popular practice, when it comes to Lent these days, is about “giving something up,” “taking something away,” “sacrificing” something as a way to focus our attention on the season, to mimic some solidarity with the sacrifice of Christ, whatever. And that’s all well and good and as meaningful as we’re able to make it.

But I hope it can be meaningful, too, to add something to our life of faith and how we practice what we’re up to around here. So I hope these practices we’ll look at will be fun and meaningful practices and disciplines that might inspire some new insights and understandings for us; some new ways for us to bring life and faith together; some new ways to meditate, pray, focus our attention differently, learn something about ourselves and what God might be up to in us and for us and through us these days – and that might last even after Lent ends and we’re living on the other side of the tomb again.

Pastor Aaron and I will do most of the preaching, but we have a guest coming for one of the evenings, too. And we picked our topics from this book – The Soul’s Slow Ripening – which some of you have signed up to read along with us as part of it all. We picked practices that spoke to us, personally, and that we thought we might have something to learn from and share about for the good of the cause.

So it might not surprise you that I picked this ancient Celtic practice of “Learning by Heart.” You know that most Sunday’s I commit the Gospel to memory as part of my preaching. It’s something I started doing way back in the day, during my first year or two of ministry. To be honest, I first started doing it as a kind of party-trick; as a special effect for worship that I’d seen other preachers and pastors do. I thought it would be an interesting challenge and something that would add a bit of interest and drama to the way we hear and receive the Word from one Sunday to the next.

And that’s all it amounted to, in the beginning. It was a challenge for me from one week to the next and something fun and interesting for worship in general.

And, in order to get some of these Gospel readings locked into my very scattered and busy brain, I start on Monday or Tuesday, if I’m lucky. Whenever I get into my car to drive somewhere longer than my commute from home to church, I start to read and re-read – out loud to myself – whatever passage I’m trying to commit to memory. (I imagine people who see me on the road assume I’m talking to myself, or by way of Bluetooth, on the cell phone.) It’s also a really good way to fall asleep at night.

My litmus test for how well I have internalized a passage and learned it by heart is to see if I can recite it, with the radio on. If I can recite a passage out loud, uninterrupted, without losing my train of thought, while simultaneously listening to a song I’d just as soon be singing along to, I feel pretty confident that I’ve learned it “by heart” enough to share with all of you, in worship.

I’ve gotten better at it over the years. And thankfully many of the passages show up again and again every three years, thanks to the lectionary, and they get easier to recall.

But what I learned after making it happen week after week, year after year, is how much more inspired it seemed my preaching became; and how my personal engagement with and learning from Scripture seemed to grow over time. I started to hear the voices in Scripture more dramatically. I started to wonder differently about which words Jesus might have emphasized, or not. I started to reflect on the emotions behind what was said, to whom, and so on.

These Gospel stories and the words of Jesus become a part of my on-going, inner dialogue from day to day so that I have experienced, through this practice of “learning by heart,” what, I believe, the ancient Celts were up to so many generations ago.

In her book, The Soul’s Slow Ripening, the author’s husband talks about how ancient cultures, like those in ancient Israel, didn’t necessarily understand that the brain is the organ that stores memory and learning and wisdom. He says ancient Egyptians were under the impression that the brain wasn’t used for anything more than cooling the blood, so that, while the other organs of dead pharaohs were preserved with a sense of reverence, their brains were scooped out through their noses and thrown away.

All of that is to say, when we hear Jeremiah talk about “writing God’s law on the hearts of the people,” we’re to understand that the heart was believed to be the seat of – not just love and emotion – but of learning, wisdom and understanding. So that “writing God’s word” on your heart wasn’t just an invitation to emotional reverence for or worship of God’s commands, but it was just as likely a practical call to an intellectual commitment to God’s Word, and teaching and commandments for God’s people.

And there is something as practical about that invitation as there is something holy and spiritual about making it happen. There’s something practical and holy about committing God’s word to memory; searing it into your brain; learning it by heart.

A well-known trick for coaches and athletes who run or swim or otherwise compete against a clock, for instance, is to repeat a goal-time over and over in advance of a competition, in order to prepare themselves to achieve that time or to beat that goal. (You might not know that my wife, Christa, was a really good swimmer in high school and her mother would leave index cards around the house with those goal times written on them in the days before her swim meets.)

If you’ve ever loved someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease – or if you’ve ever been with Joyce Ammerman when she’s taken communion to local nursing homes – you know what it is to have frustrating, seemingly empty conversations with these poor, elderly men and women until the time comes to sing a familiar old hymn or recite the Lord’s Prayer. When you wonder if you’ve wasted your time… if they’ve heard or grasped a word you’ve said… if your praying has been in vain… they suddenly come to life and sing or pray those words right along with you. It’s holy, beautiful, surprising thing, every time.

I’ve heard stories of prisoners of war who saved their sanity, salvaged their hope, by practicing their faith in the form of whatever Bible verses and prayers they could remember during their years of torture, confinement and captivity. You never know when “learning by heart” might just save your life, I suppose.

And we heard a great example of this – if not the greatest example of this – just this past Sunday in the Gospel story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. The devil tempts Jesus over and over and over again… “Turn this stone into a loaf of bread,” “Bow down and worship me,” “Throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple.” And after each temptation Jesus counters the devil’s test with the words of Scripture that he had written on his heart. “One does not live by bread alone.” “Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” “You should not put the Lord your God to the test.”

The practice of learning by heart is as practical as it is holy. And I hope you’ll give it a go this week – and that it might become a fun, regular spiritual practice and discipline for you. On the table before you leave, are a handful of passages from Scripture to choose from. I hope you’ll draw one out before you leave and work on learning it, by heart, over the course of the next week. It will take some time and repetition, but I’m certain everyone here can do this. (I’ve started small. And there is a variety to choose from. I’m not suggesting anyone memorize the Gospel of John, for crying out loud!)

If we want our hearts and our minds and our lives to be filled with the Word and promises of God… let’s fill our hearts and our minds with the Word and promises of God. Let’s invest at least as much time and energy on God’s Word and God’s promises as we do investing our time and energy on less hope-filled, less fruitful pursuits. Let’s let God’s Word and God’s promises take up more prominence, more power more space in our hearts and in our minds than all the other destructive distractions that compete for our energy and attention too much of the time.

Let’s write the Word of God on our hearts in a new way. Let’s abide in God’s Word and let the Word of God abide in and through us so that we might be changed by the joy it brings – for us and through us – when we do.

Amen

John 2:1-11

On the third day, there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” She said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Now, standing there were six stone water jars for the rites of Jewish purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, “fill them up with water.” So they filled them up to the brim. Then he told them to draw some out and take it to the chief steward, so they took it. When the chief steward tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it had come from (though the servants who drew the water knew), he called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first and the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have saved the good wine until now.”

Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

I had a conversation a week or so ago with one of my boys about the concept of “luck.” I don’t remember the details, but I think it had something to do with a half-court buzzer beater at some basketball game that went in, earned someone three points, and won the game. “Lucky,” right? Of course “luck” may have been involved, but I assured them it also very likely involved some preparation and practice, too.

One of my favorite sayings – for which I give Oprah credit, though she may have learned it from somewhere else – is the notion that there’s really no such thing as “luck.” Instead, she suggests that “luck” is nothing more and nothing less than the moment when preparation meets opportunity. “Luck is nothing more and nothing less than the moment when preparation meets opportunity.”

It may not apply, so much, to a winning lottery ticket – or if I were the one who made a half-court buzzer beater on the basketball court. That would be nothing more than dumb luck, for sure. But it does make sense when it comes to a half-court buzzer beater by Jordan Reid, say, or Steph Curry, or any time when good fortune finds someone who’s been preparing for, practicing on, working toward such blessing, abundance, or victory – like passing the test; or getting the job; or winning the game. What looks like “luck” to outsiders a lot of the time really involves a whole lot of practice, preparation and just the right opportunity coming together.

And I wonder if the same might be true where miracles are concerned. Don’t get me wrong, miracles are miracles are miracles. I don’t mean to discount them or suck the mystery and magic and power they carry from our faith’s story. I think they are evidence of grace when they happen and by the power of God, for sure, in ways I don’t always try to explain or rationalize or justify. And there are miracles worth praying for in these days for many of us gathered here…just look at our prayer list for evidence of that.

But what if “miracles” are more like “luck” a lot of the time, too. What if what we want to call – or need to be – “miracles” in our lives also involve some preparation, some practice and some opportunity coming together at just the right moment?

I read a reflection on this passage from John’s Gospel last week, written by a pastor in Kansas, named Joanna Harader, who suggests that miracles can be hard work. She considers this miracle – of Jesus turning water into wine – from the perspective of the stewards in the story, who Jesus enlists to help him make it happen.

The short of the long is that these stewards had to fill six hefty, heavy, stone water jars, each with 20-30 gallons. Imagine the weight of those jars before they were full, let alone after they were filled to the brim with all of that water. And remember that there wasn’t a tap or a hose or a pump, and who knows how far they were from the nearest well or what kinds of buckets they had at their disposal.

(I found myself wondering about the kids and sisters who care for us in Haiti who, each morning before they do almost anything else, have to hoof it up or down the mountainside for long distances with containers as large as 5 gallon buckets and as small as an old, re-purposed Canola oil bottle to collect water for their day. Suddenly, 20-30 gallons of water – times six – seems like no small “miracle” in and of itself, and no small favor to ask of the stewards at the wedding.)

So again, the point is that, as miraculous as Jesus’ water-to-wine event was, it wasn’t all magic; it wasn’t easy; and he didn’t do it alone. There was no small amount of preparation involved, coupled with the opportunity of God’s power and God’s people being willing and able and in the right place at the right time.

And I wonder if you and I are preparing ourselves for the opportunity to see and share in, to instigate, to accomplish, even, the miracles we long for in the world these days.

If we want there to be safety and warmth and shelter for those who are without it this winter, have we done something to prepare for that – or are we just waiting for a miracle?

If we want hungry people to have something to eat, have we so much as made a sandwich, passed out a gift card, volunteered at the soup kitchen – or are we just hoping their luck will change?

If we want the politics in our country to change did we vote? Have we contacted our representatives? Are we praying, by name, for our leaders?

If we want there to be peace on earth (a miracle to be sure), what are we doing – what have we done – to let it begin with us? Or are we just waiting, praying and hoping for a miracle to do the trick?

I guess what I’m saying is, maybe you and I are called to be like the stewards at that wedding in Cana – the ones called to get things ready, if you will, and to let someone else have their miracle. Maybe it’s time we start fetching the water; readying the jars; following Jesus’ orders; creating the opportunity for God to do God’s thing.

You and I – and wow, the whole lot of us together – could just be the miracle someone’s waiting for; we could just be the lucky day someone’s been praying about.

Yes, miracles can be hard work. But look at the joy that follows. Imagine the party that flowed from the abundance Jesus created that day in Cana. Imagine the fun those servants had drawing out that new wine, re-filling those empty glasses, jump-starting that celebration, when everyone thought it had ended too soon.

And what a miracle it will be, when all God hopes and everything Jesus died for, comes to pass – thanks to the faithful work and heavy lifting of you and me; God’s church, the baptized children of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, at work – making miracles – in and for the sake of the world.

Amen

Seeking the Sacred - Learning by Heart

"Luck" and "Miracles"