God’s Search

November 24, 2002

Ezekiel 34:11-16/ Matthew 4:17-22

Today we start with a quiz. And I want everyone to be very honest. Remember you are in church and the minister is watching. Here I have the proverbial glass of water. I hope you can all see it. If you can’t you could probably have guessed that it has liquid up to about the mid point. This of course begs the question is it half full or half empty. O.k. remember to be honest with a show of hands. Who says the glass is half empty. And who thinks it is half full. Now beyond that who thinks the minister thinks it is half empty, and who thinks the minister believes it is half full? Would you be surprised if I told you that those who thought the minister thought it was half empty were wrong? No of course not you all know me as a half full kind of guy right? But it may surprise you that it isn’t true. I am not a half full kind of guy. For those of you who really know me and have been to a few of my lectures it will not surprise you that I don’t believe it is half empty but I also don’t believe that it is half full. I believe that the question is framed all wrong! If you ask and answer the question in this way your answers are limited and the real meaning of the glass is obscured. Now that is a Tim Ives approach!

Listen. The thing that is important about the water is not the volume. If you are looking at how much you are missing the point completely. Water is the basis of life. Water is the miracle of this planet Water makes all of who we are and what we are possible. Did you know that water is a universal solvent? If it were not true that water could not carry the nutrients and minerals that every living thing needs. Did you know that water has this funny little characteristic called surface tension? Without it could never move up the roots of plants and trees. So plants and trees could not grow up, and really couldn’t grow at all. Water actually floats when it freezes which is very unusual because most things when they become a solid get heavier. If ice did not float all living things in the water would be killed off each winter. Again this would have serious consequences for life on earth. Furthermore, think a minute about where water comes from. Is it something we manufacture? Is it something we created? Is it something that we had any part in providing? No. it is just given to us as. Water is such a miracle that if you are looking at it and only seeing whether it s half there or half gone you are completely missing the point. That argument is academic when you begin to realize the bounty that is ours by just the fact that water exists.

Any glass of water is a sign of how good and generous God really is. And every once in a while there come those people who see water, and life and the world for what it truly is and act accordingly.

I want to tell you about one such person today. He is actually a relative of mine. Alright, he is an ancestor of mine. But I feel a keen kinship with him and he is an inspiration to me. His name is William Brewster. He was also known as Elder Brewster.

William Brewster was the clergy person for the Plymouth Colony in those first years. And that gave him a particularly challenging position. Because God seemed to all but abandon this small band of pilgrims almost from the beginning. They were Seperatists. This was the group who did not think that they could purify the church of England from within. Those were the Puritans. You have heard plenty about them. But this original group of Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower were a little more radical than that. They wanted to have nothing to do with purifying the old church. They thought the only way to live a Godly life was to separate from the Church of England. And they did.

For that the suffered terribly. They lost their homes and their homeland. That is why this group came to these shores from Holland and not their native England. They had already separated from the church and gone to Holland. But in Holland they did not find the life that they had hoped for. In fact what happened was that they started to be assimilated not into the true ways of God as they supposed but rather into the ways of the Dutch that they lived with. It wouldn’t do. So they made plans for the new world.

I think it takes a certain kind of person to believe in such an idea. Going to an uncharted wilderness in a very small boat over an ocean that was at best a frightening void is a wonder. Today we might call the very idea, the same thing I once heard Amelia Earhart called, pathologically optimistic. Only this risk adverse, see-disaster-in-every-event-or-behavior world we live in could ever come up with putting those two words together: pathologically optimistic. But I heard it on one of those biography shows on A & E about Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart is one of my heroes for that exact reason and so is William Brewster.

But what he did and they did was not pathological. It was heroic. And it became more and more heroic as the year unfolded.

We all know that they arrived on these shores in November. They carved out a small village that winter but many died from hunger and exposure and disease. But not the oldest among them. I can only imagine the nightmare for Brewster though. With each death came the demand to lend comfort to the grieving. Before spring the whole lot suffered and that had to have weighed heavily on the person who was there to speak for God.

The summer brought relief but not bounty. They had to wonder in the midst of this life and death struggle why God would not bless them. Or maybe that is only a question that we moderns would ask. Maybe they saw their plight completely different than we could ever imagine.

The truth of how different they saw their situation came at the end of one year. With winter coming on, and with no assurance or indication that it would be any different than the devastating year before they did something amazing. They had a party, a feast, a harvest festival that we remember as the first Thanksgiving. And though there are many things about this event that are mythological or just plain untrue. We know that it was a celebration and all were included. Astounding isn’t it? What kind of people are these that they would celebrate in such dire circumstances? What was William Brewster preaching that enabled joy at a time like that?

As I said William Brewster was one of those rare people who could see way beyond a glass half full. He lived in a world filled with miracles because no matter what God was not far away. You can say anything you want about the Pilgrims and the Puritans. You can believe the bad press they get about being so dour and no fun and having this debilitating work ethic. But they ad a faith that goes beyond anything we experience in these days. God is an after thought for us compared to how their very essence was defined by what they believed. It is faith that founded a nation and I am quite sure that without this powerful faith they would have only known disaster and misery. Don’t get me wrong they knew plenty of disaster and misery but those things finally did not matter because they also knew God.

God searches for the likes of William Brewster al the time. I think God does it by putting challenges before us and ten sees who rises to the challenge. At least I get that idea from the story in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus puts before the people he meets an impossible challenge. “Follow me,” he says. Again only the pathologically optimistic would take him up on it. Or the people of true faith. Jesus then gets exactly who he wants. His ministry will come to nothing without a powerful faith alive in those around him ad so he screens out anyone without faith to follow.

It s what God does all the time and that is the true blessing that we celebrate this week. It is not the fact that our glass is half full. That might be nice but it really is not important. What is important is if you see God in the miracles of your life. And beyond that what are you ready to do for a God who loves you that much.