We’ve been waiting for Hurricane Irene all week.  Everyone from the mayor to the weather forecasters has told us to be safe, to stay home.  Governor Patrick said, “Everyone should stay off the roads and indoors.” Bishop Payne urged us to consider canceling worship services.  We were told to get the flashlights ready, turn off the appliances, secure the gutters.  High winds and heavy rain and flooding can be very dangerous, even life-threatening.  The basic message is: Hunker down.  Avoid getting caught in the storm.  Protect yourself.

We here are evidence that not everyone takes these warnings to heart.  But of course Irene hasn’t hit us with full force.  Imagine if we did get the hurricane-force winds that were originally forecast—that shingles were flying off houses, that trees were downed across roads everywhere.  Imagine that we look out our windows and see destruction, and more destruction to come.  Imagine that a young woman is in a small sturdy house on the water, on the South Shore, where she and her family have responsibly gathered candles, flashlights, canned goods, gallons of water.  Imagine she sees through the pounding rain a boat out on the water.  Did the boat get loose from its mooring? Is that a person in the boat? Are they being swamped by the waves? She goes to call 911 but the phone is dead.  I have to go out there, she says to no one in particular.  Her husband shouts, “Don’t go. It’s crazy! You’ll be killed.” He grabs her arm: “There’s no reason to risk your own life. You have a family to think of!” But she slips out of his grasp, and grabs a jacket and heads out into the hurricane. Who was right, the woman or her husband?

I think now of one of our Lutheran saints, a German man, a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who entered a storm of international proportions because he felt he was needed.

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Matthew 16:13-20

Last Sunday, I preached on a story from the Gospel of Matthew, about Jesus healing a woman who was not a Jew.  To me, the story showed that even Jesus had to learn that God’s love was for everyone, not just for the people of Israel, the insiders.  After the service, during coffee hour and then later in the week, a few of you told me your different takes on that story, which I really appreciated.  One person said Jesus was testing the woman; another said that Jesus was being sarcastic.  Somebody brought up the story of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus holds up a non-Jew as a model of compassion.  Did that story come before this one, or after, he wondered?

I was curious about that–how it all fit together chronologically, so I looked it up.  I learned that the story of the Good Samaritan is not in the Gospel of Matthew at all–it’s only in the Gospel of Luke.  And the story of the Samaritan woman at the well is only in the Gospel of John.

Those are two examples of how the writers of the four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—were selective about the stories they included.  By the time the Gospels were written, there was a treasure trove of material about what Jesus did and said—accounts that people had either experienced directly themselves, or heard from someone else, or perhaps read somewhere.  The four evangelists all tell the good news of Jesus Christ—his life and death and resurrection–but they were each writing for a different audience, and they were each showing Jesus in a different light.  So, inspired by the Holy Spirit, they brought together the stories that meant the most to them, that would bring people to faith in the Jesus they knew.

To give you an idea: the writer of the Gospel of John expected that people would believe that Jesus is Christ because of his miracles.  So in John we read about Jesus turning water into wine, and raising Lazarus from the dead.  The other Gospels don’t have these stories.

The Gospel of Luke shows Jesus as a savior especially for the poor and needy.  It’s only Luke that writes about the lowly shepherds coming to the manger.

I think each of us has written our own little Gospel—the Bible stories that mean the most to us, that have stayed in our memory, that we’ve pieced together—our own Gospel that tells who Jesus is to us.

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Matthew 15:21-28

This spring I decided to host a party for one of the organizations I belong to. Just something so that people could socialize without having to get business done. I especially wanted to invite new people and people who have kind of been dancing around the edges. Among them was a couple that I don’t know very well, but I’d been to their house for some fundraisers, They’re movers and shakers in town. Their fundraisers were always replete with VIPs from the North Shore. They have a beautiful house in an expensive part of town; it has acres of woods and meadow that stretch down to the water. And I’ve heard where their summer home is and where they go in the winter….

And I was going to be inviting them to my apartment, my three small rooms, with the chipped linoleum and you have to walk through the bedroom to get to the living room, and the kitchen drawers that don’t close quite right and you can see where some of the repairs to the walls are very slapdash and some of the hand-me-down furniture is not looking so good, etc., etc. But I took a deep breath and said I’m doing it. Because people don’t really care what the place looks like, they just remember having a good time, eating some good food. Still, I was nervous about inviting them. I’d go back and forth: I can’t invite them! I have to invite them! It’ll be great! It’ll be embarrassing. Would they even want to socialize with me? Probably not—all their friends are probably very important and have money. In sum: I needed them to come, but I hoped that they couldn’t.

I was so relieved when they said they couldn’t come.

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