June 11, 2023
It’s hard to write a sermon at the beach.
I told Gene that a day or two before we left for North Carolina. He told me—“write about what you’re experiencing.”
I decided to do that.
Our first few days were cool—like the temperature.
Much like the Pharisees were “cool” toward Jesus when they saw him eating with sinners and tax collectors—both ‘unclean’ to devout Jews.
But Jesus heard them and told them: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick….I have come not to call the righteous but sinners.”
The Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t trust or like Jesus. They saw him as a threat to their power.
But some, like the leader of the synagogue in today’s gospel, understood he had great power—the power to bring the dead back to life. Like his daughter.
The beach here faces south. The sun rises to my left and crosses the sky directly overhead, finally setting on my right.
During the day there is an island miles away which looks like an ocean liner by day. But at night, it lights up and reveals itself to be an island. That’s a lot like ‘looking for Jesus’ in our world. Jesus can’t be seen in the sunlight, but in the dark night of our souls, he shines in the distance.
That’s what the woman who had suffered from hemorrhages a dozen years saw as Jesus passed—a light shining in the darkness of her pain.
She touches the hem of his garment as he passes and the power flows out of him to heal her.
Jesus turns to her and says: “take heart daughter, your faith has made you well.”
As broken and you and I may be, our faith—what little we have—can make us whole again.
Then there is the wind.
The wind blows almost constantly on Oak Island. It sweeps across us wherever we are.
Tim and Eleanor put up a kite today—shaped and colored like a monarch butterfly. It flew higher and higher and higher in the wind. It took both of them and Mimi and Bern to bring it back to earth.
God is like the wind—blowing us always toward Him. Resist as we might, the wind blows our souls higher and higher toward the Almighty.
It is as it should be—always moving toward God, propelled by the wind of his Voice. Always upward….Nearer and Nearer….
And the birds…the birds!
Three young women were on the beach feeding bread crumbs to a sea gull. Within moments they were surrounded by 40 or 50 gulls. They ran out of bread and had to flee the birds, laughing as they ran.
But my favorites are the Pelicans. A few hundred yards beyond the western edge of Oak Island, there is a tiny island known as Pelican Island. Hundreds of pelicans nest there and fly east each morning over our heads and return west in the early evening.
Their shadows fall over the house we’re in both morning and evening. During the day they fly, in formation, just above the water, occasionally swooping down to catch fish.
Birds are the last of the dinosaurs and the forerunners of the angels of God.
Finally, there is the ocean itself.
Vast and seemingly endless, the Atlantic stretches from the Artic to Antarctica. Between North and South America and Scandinavia, Europe and Africa to the East.
Like the ocean, God’s love is vast and eternal.
It is that vast love, surging through Jesus, that takes that dead girl’s hand and gives her life again.
“She is just asleep,” Jesus tells those gathered outside the synagogue leader’s house.
They laughed at him. How could he not know dead is DEAD?
But when he comes back, holding the girl’s Oh-so-alive hand, they laugh no more and tell of Jesus’ miracle throughout the district.
So much here at the beach points me toward God.
Just pay attention to the wonders all around you each day and turn your hearts toward Jesus and your imagination toward God.
Try it—pay attention to what surround you and long for God…
Long always for God….
Amen.
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