GOD WITH SNOW SHOVEL

Isaiah 43:1-7

Here's a story:

The day my fiance fell to his death, it started to snow, just like any other November day, just like the bottom hadn't fallen out of my world when he freefell off the roof. His body, when I found it, was lightly covered with snow. It snowed almost every day for the next four months, while I sat on the couch and watched it pile up.

One morning, I shuffled downstairs and was startled to see a snowplow clearing my driveway and the bent back of a woman shoveling my walk. I dropped to my knees, crawled through the living room and back upstairs so those good Samaritans would not see me. I was mortified. My first thought was, how would I ever repay them? I didn't have the strength to brush my hair, let alone shovel someone's walk.

Before John's death, I took pride in the fact that I rarely asked for help or favors. I defined myself by my competence and independence. So who was I if I was no longer capable and busy? How could I respect myself if all I did was sit on the couch every day and watch the snow fall?

Learning how to receive the love and support that came my way wasn't easy. Friends cooked for me, and I cried because I couldn't even help them set the table. "I'm not usually this lazy," I wailed. Finally, my friend Kathy sat down with me and said, "Mary, cooking for you is not a chore. I love you and I want to do it. It makes me feel good to be able to do something for you."¹

That is part of a story written by Mary Cook, an Air Taxi Company employee from Gustavus, Alaska, and is printed in a book called This I Believe, a series of radio essays that have been aired on National Public Radio.

*****

Today, we reflect on both of the sacraments that we Protestants hold dear: we will feast together in the Lord's Supper. And today we celebrate Jesus' Baptism, and in just a few moments we reaffirm our own baptism--we remember what God has done for us in our baptism.

And I just have one very simple point to make today--I told my staff that my meditation would be no more than five minutes; they didn't think I could do it, and I intend to prove them wrong. So, here it is:

We often say that when we were baptized, we were baptized into Christ's death. As human beings, we have or will have no shortage on experiences that emulate that kind of death--like Mary's grief over her fiance's fall from a roof. But we also say that in baptism, we participate in Christ's death...and resurrection.

This story is a story of baptism: the sacramental process through which we give up our muscular attempts to be good and independent and virtuous through our own human willpower. And through baptism, we receive the commitment of God in a friend like this: cooking for us when we can't even get off the couch, loving us when we feel unlovable. A God who calls us by name; who, through people like Mary's friend, raises us from death to life.

In baptism we receive a gift we cannot repay, a God with a snow shovel who clears a path for us even when we cannot walk. And in this vow we're about to take, as we reaffirm our baptismal covenant, we simply promise to receive again that gift--a gift so generous that we eventually can't help but gift such gifts to others.

That's what we promise now. We promise not to be self-sufficient or even virtuous. But to receive, again, that gift that is all virtue. To remember and receive.

Amen.

¹ "The Hardest Work You Will Ever Do," by Mary Cook, in This I Believe; the Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women." Henry Holt, 2006; pp. 37-38.

January 7, 2007

Jeff Vamos

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