Stone Soup: A Series on Generosity in Community Week 1

This Soup Needs Our Prayers and our Presence

It is the Feast of the Epiphany, a point in our church year when we have received the Christ Child and we celebrate how God has been made flesh to walk with people. Think about that…God chose to become a person with all the stuff of personhood, in order to show us a way of being in the world.  A way of humility, of goodness, of love for God and love for our neighbor. 

God loves us that much.

Hear that again.

God loves us that much.

God loves you that much.

So much that God would join the chaos of the world to show us a way.

And a star appeared to the magi – men of great wisdom who studied the relationship between the earth and the stars and the good and the bad happenings on earth, the politics, the power, the process, and they came and knelt before the toddler Jesus.  Because they knew, they felt, the anticipated… the power of this promised messiah…

And that power, we know (because we mostly know the story) had nothing to do with political might, storming the castle, building the temple…it had everything to do with Love.  It has everything to do with love.  Love for you. Love for me.  No matter what.

God entered into the chaos of imperial Roman rule to stand with the oppressed and to say that love is greater than might, that grace was bigger than a reward system…God loves you that much.

Then, the church, intended to be in the world as the body of Christ, was brought into being by the power of the Holy Spirit in the wake of Jesus’s birth, crucifixion, death and resurrection.  The church has existed over thousands of years, keeping alive the teachings of Jesus, drawing people into the story of God, helping people to know how much they are loved, serving as the hands and feet of Christ in the world, ideally working to be a community of believers who know they are loved by God and sharing God’s love abundantly with those who may not yet know that to be true.

(Cue image of stones: prayers, presence, gifts, service, witness)

Over the course of the month of January, we’re going to explore together what it means to be a member of a church, and specifically, this church — what it means as United Methodists to commit to participate in the ministries of the church by our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness.  How do all of those things come together to be our lived and loving presence in our neighborhood, our world…

But what has this to do with Stone Soup, you ask?

The story of stone soup is a story about community, about scarcity, about resistance, and then eventually about sharing, and generosity and abundance.

When a stranger shows up in the community asking for food, folks say “no.” (It’s not lost on me that perhaps the stranger was “a wise man” of sorts… seeking for something in this little town.)

But that clever stranger sets up his cooking pot in the middle of town, intrigues the locals with his mysterious recipe for stone soup…and bit by bit, the soup becomes a tasty group effort – a tasty concoction in which everyone shares from what they have…including the strangers’s wisdom about what this soup stone might become for the community.

As a church, we are always making stone soup…from our pockets, from our talents, from our prayers, we’re putting what we have into the pot.  And when we all remember that we have something important to toss into the pot, we realize the most amazing concoction – our very own Stone Soup. This Ferndale United Methodist Church has a history of making stone soup, eh?  Talent show fundraisers to fix the boiler, collecting cast off food from restaurants far and wide to feed the hungry, offering our ample space to be refuge for the cold and the addicted, wisdom of the ages becoming a program for our youth….

Our stone soup is the product of our commitment to the church of Jesus Christ – and more specifically, our stone soup is the product of our commitment to Ferndale United Methodist Church. That is a commitment to our fellow members, it is a commitment to the vision we share — hopefully a vision crafted with input from a lot of people, and supported by programs, outreach, teaching and a budget that help us bear fruit for the Kingdom of God.

This week, our pot is bubbling away…and it needs just a little something. 

You know what would really make this Ferndale Stone Soup amazing?

Prayers and presence.

This week, our stone soup needs our prayers and our presence.

In the membership vows that we take as United Methodists, the first two things we commit to is offering our prayers and our presence.

Now..as I look across the list – prayers, presence, gifts, service, witness – I kind of think that those two might be the toughest to get my head around.

I mean…I know in theory what prayer is, right? We pray in worship. We know the Lord’s prayer, we talk about praying without ceasing.

If you have grown up in the church, you probably learned about prayer in Sunday School or confirmation. Maybe you learned what to do with your hands…  You had all sorts of acrostics and acronyms and cues.

Maybe you memorized the Lord’s prayer and perhaps another prayer…you got tools, you practiced in class, maybe as you got older you actually wrote some prayers of your own…

But in some ways, once we move beyond our childhood Sunday School explanations of prayer, we’re kind of left with little else – unless we pursue a practice of prayer for ourselves. I think the very best ways to learn to pray are in conversations with those who are doing it often and well, those who have cultivated the time in their day (every day) and the form. I wonder — how many of you have a prayer mentor?

And then, there is this tricky idea of “presence.”

I mean….presence is one of those words that it is hard to define without using a form of the word itself…Miriam Webster says that presence is the state of being present — or if we dig a little that would be the state of being in view or at hand.  Being there…wherever “there” is.  When we talked about the Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas present, we talked about noticing what was right there in front of our faces in the here and now.

In light of all of that, our commitment to presence is a commitment to show up.  To show up to our church, to our church community, to one another, to our other commitments and to God.

PHEW.  That is also a tough one.

And I can’t help but think that somehow this commitment to prayer and this commitment to presence are linked pretty closely.  Because to be prayerful, I have to be committed to showing up to God on a regular basis.  I have to put myself in the presence of God, because God is always present…but I have to make myself present too.  I have to practice being in the presence of God SO THAT I am actually having a relationship with God the Father/Creator, Jesus the Son who shows the way of love and the Holy Spirit whose swirling presence is nudging, cajoling, moving around me at all times.  I have to pay attention and show up.

I’ve chosen, for my own anchoring and prayer during this sermon series, a favorite passage from the prophet Jeremiah, chapter 29…to the Israelites in exile the prophet calls them to seek the welfare of the city in which they find themselves in exile.  To plant crops, and marry and have babies.  To establish themselves and live their lives. And to do it in community.  Because in the well being of the place they find themselves, even if not by choice, they will find their own welfare.

Bloom where you are planted.

Pray there.

Be present there.

Because the soup is so much richer when you all show up and add what you have.

Our scriptures for today point us to this action of showing up, naming our needs, expecting something to happen as a result.  In that amazing God way, when I went back to the Luke passage after stewing on this sermon for days this week, I was struck by how it was, in its own way a telling of stone soup…

“Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;  for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’  And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’  I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

Beloved, this soup needs your prayers and your presence.  Now. Every day.  My prayer is that as a community of believers, we will show up, to our God and to one another and to this community, and we will seek to grow as pray-ers.  Because it will make a difference.

Amen.