It’s that time of year again. State fair is in the air. And opening day this past Friday had me thinking of my grandpa, who loved both the fair and the opportunities for friendly competition it offered. After my grandmother died, Grandpa more or less taught himself to cook, which he hadn’t really done before (explaining his odd repertoire of sandwiches, like peanut butter, bacon, and onion), but the next thing you know he takes to baking cookies, which he becomes pretty good at, and sometimes he’d enter them in the fair. Sometimes he won! He loved the challenge of it all. Grandpa told me that one year, even, there was this one-time competition for puns. You could enter up to a dozen. Grandpa loved puns, but couldn’t quite come up with a full dozen. So he settled on ten of his favorites. Proudly sent them in. All but certain the blue ribbon was his, that one of his gems would claim the prize and finish first. But. Well.
No pun in ten did.
(That one was his favorite.)
In honor of October, the state fair, and Grandpa…well. It’s not quite a pun, but there’s a single word doing double work in our scriptures today, pointing in the direction of two true things at once. One word on which everything depends. And the word it turns out that everything turns on is turn. The Lord, speaking up through the prophet Jeremiah, saying, “…get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live.” So the first turn we see is a turning we’re called to do. Do me a favor and just - a little bit - show me a turn in your shoulders. That’s it. A turning. Turn then and live, says the Lord.
And the picture is of a word, turn, spoken to a people in exile. Born into exile, even. By the time of Jeremiah, God’s people have been in forced displacement from home for so long there are generations now who have never known it. And they’re listless. Understandably kind of hopeless. Convinced of their own insignificance to make a difference in their world. They assume the generations before them sinned so badly, messed things up so foully, that their forbearers so profoundly broke life and relationship with God, that, well, why even try? And so they put limits on their imagination for what is possible. We’re told the people give up believing, - watch this now - that God will give them a meaningful turn at being God’s people together on this earth. They’ve even made up a proverb to express their assessment of the situation: The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. It’s another way of saying, “I didn’t make this mess, but I’m afraid I will never get out from under it.” It’s another way of saying, “God has buried us before we were even born.” And maybe you’ve known that feeling in your life. And maybe, in your life, you’ve never known that feeling. And if you’ve never known that feeling there are certain teenagers I can point you to. Some, sure, just grumpy, moody. Others, though, thoughtfully and existentially distraught at the condition of, for example, humanity’s heart and care for creation, problematic since at least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I can show you plenty of young people discouraged by, if not despondent for, this country’s generational inability to honestly confront and be present to the legacy of America’s original sin, namely slavery. With all of its persistent patterns in our own day. I didn’t ask for these challenges, you can imagine a younger generation lamenting. That’s Israel’s gist at the time of Jeremiah.
But then God shows up and says something surprising. I don’t like your proverb, God says. The goofy one about grapes that’s hard to understand. It’s not as catchy as you think. It’s complacent. It’s complicit. “Do you really think,” God asks them, “that I’m punishing you for what they did? Do you think this moment is still about them? Come on now. That’s not how it works. How is that fair? No sin of theirs will keep me from being present to you. Don’t for a second think they finished your script. But look alive! Show up. Turn. Be as fully present to me as I already am to you. I see you. Lo, I am with you. Child, I love you. You will have your turn at being my people on this earth. You show up where the world would give up and I will make you a part of my promise and the repairing of all things.”
Anathea Portier Young explains God’s good news through Jeremiah this way, “The life of this present generation is God’s, and what God brings in the present is for them and about them. They can stop looking back and start looking around. This is their moment with God.” This is their moment with God. They get a turn. And the invitation of this unexpected good news is to turn toward the good news and live.
I got to thinking about this turning, and it occurs to me you and I have our own practice at turning toward the good news to live in this place. We turn away from things that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God, toward the new life of Jesus, in our baptism. After that, each week in this space, the gospel book goes out to the center, and what do you do, but turn? And some people turn left. Others turn right. You might think you’re centering yourself on Christ, but you’d be wrong. When you turn you are centering us on Christ, because - as we turn - Christ takes our many tiny turnings and makes one Christ-centered people out of us. Makes us one body. A new thing. A thing that wasn’t before Christ became our center. A church. You and I discover that being made friends of God, God would make us holy friends of each other. As we turn, we discover that we, too, are being given a turn at being God’s people on this earth, made bearers of the fruit of the Spirit, a community of sharers in the self-emptying love of Jesus.
I don’t have to tell you the cosmic improbability, statistically, of being born. The short of it is, you’re pretty special. I don’t think it takes much convincing that this life is a gift. How much more so the peculiar and particular combination of lives God has gather and made into the people of God called St. James Church and School at Audelia and McCree in 2023. Take a minute. Look around. Church. School. School that for fifty-five years has been an extension of the heart of this church. All of you, look around. Take a gander. Church, you are a gift. The life we share is a kind of miracle. This moment, just now, is God’s answer to the prayers of saints before us. And friends that’s so much more than a preacher’s hyperbole.
Long-time parishioner Pat Hind, of both past and present seasons of our common life, tells the story of some of those prayers, as lifted by her husband John, decades ago, in an especially challenging season: John thought the church needed to be in prayer daily, she says. He started dropping by every morning around 5:30, before heading to work, to pray in the sanctuary. He prayed for himself and his family. But one morning it occurred to him, “this church needs to be prayed for every day!” Each morning he prayed, “God, fill this church with people who love You and would come to love You!” He did this for a year. Today, she says, the church’s congregation tops 400 members and has become a beacon of love and hope for the neighborhood. Our (prayers and) perseverance led to a wonderful example of “what the Lord…has brought about!” What the Lord has brought about - that’s you! That’s me. That’s us!
Church, school. Long-timers. New-comers. Like me. Each of us, all of us. Lifting hearts, offering gifts. Opening lives. Encountered by Christ. Time and again made a part of his body. Shown something new. Made sharers of his self-emptying. Made one. Made able to be a healing, a balm, for the soul of the world around us. Called to turn and discover that God has given us God’s self and all that we need, given us God’s fullest attention in this generation, you and I made alive to the truth that we have been given a precious gift, the gift of a turn at being God’s people on this earth together.
This year’s stewardship theme is Growing in Faith Together. If you’re like me you’re glad for help to see that that spells GIFT. And gift is like turn, a word pointing us toward two truth things at once today: gifts of our resources are what we ask each other in this season to prayerfully consider making to our common life. Gifts of ministry, presence, and planned financial contributions. It’s a season of acknowledging that we experience the belonging we’ve been given most fully as we share what we have with one another. That’s why a special goal of this year’s stewardship season is pledged participation from every household. Because no gift of the body is insignificant. Because every member is a part of the larger gift to which our theme would point us: the gift of life together as God’s people, which we have seen and known, and which, by ourselves, is beyond the grasp of any one of us.
But, somewhere along the line, while we were living our ordinary lives, somewhere snuck into our endless, numbered, days, God has shown up and said something surprising. “I see you. Lo, I am with you. Child, I love you. My children, I love you. You will have your turn at being my people on this earth. Turn toward that life and live. You show up where the world would give up and I will make you a part of my promise, all things made new by the mercies of Jesus.”
Amen.
