BEaster6 Acts10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17 May 17, 2009 – SS Recognition, Rogation Sunday, ‘Pentecost’ picnic If you have read Anne Lamott’s books such as Plan B or Grace (Eventually) you’ve read about her escapades in teaching Sunday School. As you know, if you’ve read them, she was a recovering cocaine addict who joined a Presbyterian church and with great wit and candor shares her insights about the life of faith. About Sunday School she writes: I did not mean to help start a Sunday School, and did not have a speck of confidence that I could do so. I have only mediocre self-esteem when I am doing things that I am good at. I do not particularly like large groups of children, which is to say, more than two at a time. But six years ago I came to believe that I was supposed to start a Sunday School. She got another woman to help her and they went out and bought everything they could think of that young children would need to learn about God: juice boxes, blankets, beach balls, moist towelettes, a children’s bible, a boom box, and art supplies. “What will we teach them?” her friend asked her. This was a problem, she writes. I don’t know much about God; only that He or She is love, and is not American, or male. I do love Jesus, and I’m nuts about his mother Mary. She writes that she began to say ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’ when she was coming down off cocaine and would feel a motherly kindness toward her ‘screwed-up self.’ I’ve been hailing her all along, through my son’s birth and early childhood, through my son’s reunion with his father, through health scares, through my mother’s terrible death of Alzheimer’s… but the most desperate hailing I’ve done has been in the years of trying to help start a Sunday School at St. Andrew Presbyterian. It turned out that I did not like children, or at any rate, they made me extremely nervous, and I had almost nothing to share with them except that Jesus loved them, and I did, too, even when I was in a bad mood. She would try each week to teach them a bible verse by throwing a ball in a circle and saying the verse each time until they got it. She tried “Come unto me all you who are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” But the children had the attention span of fruit flies. So she switched to “God is love.” Even as she and her friend improved as teachers, the children continued to be impulsive and sometimes mean. One day, a mouthy eight-year old said something insulting about my dreadlocks. Rather than hit him over the head with the Wiffle Ball bat, which was my first impulse, I sat beside him and said, “It’s only be in the last ten years that I learned how beautiful my hair and I are, so please don’t say critical things about me. It hurts my feelings. He gaped at me and said, “You’re freaking me out, Octopus Head.” One of her favorite things to do with the little ones is to sit on the couch in the room and say, “Is anyone here wearing a blue sweatshirt with Pokemon on it?” A four-year old will look down at his chest, amazed to discover that he himself matches this description – what are the odds? He then will raise his hand and she says, “Come on over here to the couch. You are so loved and so chosen.” He clutches at himself as though he were a beauty pageant finalist. Then she asks one by one – does anyone here have on green socks, a Giants cap, a vest? And one by one the children will find themselves called to the couch, loved and chosen. - - - - Sometimes when we are doing something we feel called to do, We flounder and make false starts. We have to undo what we’ve done and start over. But eventually, if we keep at it, pulling at all the creativity in us, it will come ‘round right. And that moment, those fleeting moments, are what is called joy. We talk about God being a Trinity of persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – as a way of talking about relationships. The love between Father and Son goes on and on, creates such power, such life, that it cannot be contained and so this joyful love overflows upon the world and we call that overflow the Holy Spirit. If God is a relationship of persons, you might say that the Father’s love for the Son is like the relationship between our being and our doing. We, like God, are creative – and so we put forth paintings or poetry or great food or beautiful gardens or we try our best at our own relationships and the very brave face into Sunday school lesson plans. I’m no master gardener, but even I can take my ideas, what I can see the yard and mix them with my dreams of contentment and beauty, my desire to welcome, the good feeling of being able to watch something grow and change – and I extend myself as I work in the yard. And, yes, you can call what I feel when I’m done and sitting on the porch with a cold drink in my hand and dirty shoes and gloves off - a sense of joy. God’s creativity comes forth as God’s Word – taking human form in Jesus. We love what we create – because it is an extension of ourselves. God loves his son – an extension of himself. The son loves the father by living a human life true to God’s creation. And there is joy. And Jesus says he wants this joy to be in us. And so, when we join in that love and become an extension of it by loving one another, there is that same joy, that sense of completion that Jesus wants for us. The best part of it for me is when I remember that even though my joy may seem to rise and fall in how complete my creative endeavors at gardening or relationships or lesson plans happen to be -it can at times seem so circumstantial- I can remember and find that deep sweet joy in knowing that I am part of the larger, always complete love, that we are given as the Father and Son, the Creator and the Word continue their joyful exchange. And we are all called - loved and chosen - into it.