I love words. They are my business. And, this morning, we use some very important ones.

The theme of today’s service is that of “calling.” We are called. Like Isaiah in the temple that day, and like every other person who has a sense of hearing God’s voice, we are called. That word is bandied about in church circles as frequently as any.

I thought about doing it for you this week, but I ran out of time. What I had contemplated was reading the Bible all the way through and highlighting all of the times that the words “justice” and “mercy” pop up. I know some of you thought that I read the Bible through every week, so I hate to burst your bubble. But, trust me. If we were to do that, we would find those two words occurring time and time and time again. They are words that are used to describe what God is doing in the world, and they are words that are used to describe what God wants us to be doing in the world.

ENRAGING JUSTICE AND MERCY

My Dad. What are we going to do with him? I was thinking about my Dad’s theatre habits this week. And, his theatre habits are connected to a kind of driven impatience that he would readily admit characterized his way of being when the three of us were small.

Please take this story and put it in your “truth is stranger than fiction” file.

I was going the other night to check out a new restaurant in an area of town with which I’m not all that familiar, so I did what any self-respecting diner would do. I headed to mapquest.

It might not sound like much of a problem to you, but trust me, the Mother of God would not be pulling strings trying to get her son to do something about a problem that was no big deal.

“They have no wine.”

Now, you know as well as I that that’s more than just an observation from Mary. Inherent in that observation is an expectation, a request, even a command.

This morning, we gather once more at the river, where lots of people had gone down to pray. And, they had gone down to the river to be baptized by John. Lots of the people John baptized thought that he was the Messiah. And, questions about whether John might be the Messiah persisted well into the early history of the Christian movement. But, that aside, let’s get back to the point. People were going down to the river to pray and to be baptized.