"Outpouring of Gratitude"

II Corinthians 9:10-15 I’ve been looking forward to this morning’s service for an entire month. Here are these jars. I first used them as a prop several weeks ago, but I keep finding reasons to keep them set up here each Sunday. So here they are again, but I haven’t been sure how to finish the lesson. I got the idea from the Old Testament story in II Kings 4 of the poor woman with the empty jars. Her husband died suddenly, creditors appear quickly to demand settlement of his debts, but with no money her only choice is to sell her two sons into slavery. When the prophet Elisha gets involved, her boys gather up every bottle or jar that they can find, and then the oil pours and pours until every jar is filled. She can sell the oil to raise the money she needs. The poor woman’s life is saved. “Not enough” becomes “more than enough”, and the crisis of that anxious moment is averted. Scarcity comes plenty. Disaster becomes hope. “No” becomes “yes”. From Elisha we learn that God’s love flows and flows like the oil from those jars. If nothing else, think about an empty jar in your life, not an empty jar or bottle on the shelf in the pantry, but what’s empty inside of you and how is God going to fill that emptiness? And, remember, God is not stingy. What will God cause to flow in you? In the past year, the most difficult year in my whole life, I’ve come across more than a few moments when the jar seemed awfully empty, but on second look, I found how full it was becoming by the love of God and the generosity of my friends. If nothing else, as you hear the story of the desperate woman we hope you’ll take a second look if there is an empty jar in your life. So how to finish the lesson? What to do with these empty jars? I didn’t think I could bring in a barrel of Olive Oil and make a big mess. Plus, that much oil would cost a lot. And paying Rhonda extra wages to get the oil out of the carpet would cost us even more. Using water instead of oil may not be the best idea, either, if carried to excess. And excess, a lot of excess, is really the only way to tell the story! We would have had to lay a tarp down and then stand by with squeegees and a powerful water vac. Way back in High School my youth group went to Ford Theater in Washington DC to see the musical Godspell, a wonderful presentation of the story of Jesus. My favorite moment in the show comes early on when John the Baptist appears on the stage. He’s got buckets of water, big sponges, and by the time he is done with his song all the other actors are soaked wet, the floor stage is awash, sponges are everywhere, and the front five rows of people in the audience are wet, too! Keep in mind that the only baptisms I had ever seen were almost antiseptic in using the water, just a touch of it was used. I loved how John the Baptist, in Godspell, the water just flows in all directions, left, right, up and down, and there’s no mistaking that in the water of baptism, God’s generous love is flowing out into the world, right to you and me. Maybe you should have brought raincoats this morning, especially you folks in the first five rows? So how to finish the lesson? What to do with these empty jars? Here’s how we’re going to do it, and I thank the members of the Finance and Stewardship Committees for figuring out where this would lead to. How to fill these jars and bottles? It doesn’t need to be oil or water. What are the things that you have “more than enough” of in your home? And can you bring in your extra supply of whatever that is to fill one of these jars? What could you fill these jars with – I can give a few answers, but I don’t want to limit your creativity. You could fill a jar with rice. You could a jar with safety pins. You could fill a jar with compost. You could fill a jar with pennies. You could fill a jar with socks. You could fill a jar with pencils. You could fill the jar with just about anything. But think how you could find something that you have more than enough of that could be spilled into someone else’s life, to make that person’s life better than before. I like how Ruth, Dick, Dorie, Anita and George filled a jar with money they raised from their raffle. I wish I had been there on the day when they presented the money to Genesee County Cancer Assistance and to Crossroads House. But the outpouring of gratitude is hard to stop once it’s unleashed. I especially enjoyed how our friends were surprised to see how easy it was to fill a second jar with turbans they had made for people in treatment for cancer. And I don’t think that their jar-filling will stop even with that. When we get into the habit of filling jars like these until overflowing there’s no stopping us! So Paul’s phrase becomes the key phrase for our reflection this morning: “Outpouring of Gratitude”. You can fill that jar with just about anything, but in the end it is not the things that we put into the jar, it is the faith and the motivation and the vision that is woven into the things in the jar, the love, the joy, the gratitude, and more. It is also our amazement in recognizing that what we thought we had too little of is actually more than enough to become an outpouring of gratitude in the lives of people in the world around us.