Jack Hardaway
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Sugar bowls.
There is something about them.
We have an old pressed depression glass sugar bowl, and a Queen Elizabeth II coronation sugar spoon. We call it the sugar shovel.
The bottom of the bowl is always crusty and we scrape it to get that last little sprinkling out.
Then we fill it up again.
Pour the sugar in slowly to the top, and run the spoon around it smoothing it out, like mini sand dunes in the desert.
Frances, our youngest, once did a drawing with the three wise men on their camels traveling across the dunes of the sugar bowl.
Or the old Southern pronunciation where the r is silent, sugah. The wise men in the sugah bowl.
A full sugar bowl. It is a beautiful thing, ready to be scooped into the tea cups.
Its like magic, it never runs out, always being filled back up. An essential lesson of a well run home.
The full measure, the good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.
Most of the time we live like our sugar bowls are almost empty, and we hold back on it, unforgiving, resentful, unsharring, judging, selective.
The gospel reading from Luke this morning rarely shows up in the lectionary, only on a third year with a late Easter. I have never preached on it in 27 years.
It is a hard teaching. No wonder we hear it so seldom in Sunday worship.
The measure we give is the measure we receive.
The mercy we give is the mercy we receive.
The judgement we give is the judgement we receive.
Love those who hate.
Bless those who curse.
We make our own heaven.
We make our own prison.
We make our own hell.
The world tries to enslave our words, and thoughts, and actions to be merely reactions to what others say and do. Tit for tat. This for that. Quid pro quo. Turnabout is fair play. Who I am and what I do is controlled and determined by what other people do and say. Honestly my dogs are smarter than that.
The world counts on and expects our complicit idiocy.
The Gospel. The Good news of God’s kingdom, the gospel of the children of the Most High, is that their actions are determined not by the rage and petty nit pickiness of the world, but rather by the full measure that God has poured forth into our lives.
The good measure of God, that is where we come from, that is who we are, that is what determines our actions.
Someone tips over, smashes, desecrates or steals our sugah bowl, we keep scooping the sweetness of God into the lives of all around us regardless.
Jesus is the full measure of God.
Jesus is the good measure.
Jesus is the right measure for everything.
Pressed down, shaken together, running over, put into our lap.
Where do we come from?
Our thoughts, our words, our actions?
The sugah bowl runneth over.
Share the sweetness of God.