You meet all kinds of folks in the ministry, and these encounters keep life interesting.  They also tend to make you skeptical, or, at the very least, more careful.  Like Saturday night a hitchhiker showed up at the door of my office at church near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, looking for a place to stay.  My first impression was that he was only loosely connected to what we might call the real world, so I decided against letting him use the spare room in our parsonage, but let him sleep on the couch in my office.  I also offered him a meal, but he declined, saying that he was – and I’m not making this up – “an air-etarian.” 

 When I confessed that I’d never heard of an “air-etarian” before, he said it was like a “vegetarian,” but different in that he didn’t eat either meat or vegetables, or starches.  All he needed to do was smell food to sate his hunger.  The mere smell in the air filled him up.  Early the next morning I walked next door to offer him a smell of breakfast, but he was gone. My desk drawer was open, but all that was missing was some loose change.  I felt as fortunate as I felt foolish.  I learned to keep my guard up when a stranger knocks on the door.  In that experience I was a bit of my foolish innocence.

 Admittedly, mine is an extreme example.  But you get the point.  The ministry is never dull.  God’s human family fascinates me. And I respect the forces of genetics and experience that make us all the wonderfully diverse and holy family that we are.  I love people; I believe deeply in God’s great power.  But over the decades, in various ways, I’ve learned to be less of a fool.

 I tell you all that to help you understand my reaction when, during a meeting in my office several months ago, someone lent me a copy of a little paperbound book titled:  “Love Thyself:  The message from water [volume] III.”  Seeing my questioning look, my friend explained:  “It’s about the work Masaru Emoto, a Japanese scientist.  He uses a powerful microscope to photograph water crystals as they freeze. They look like snowflakes.”  I thought to myself that it made sense.  And there was a photo of a crystal on the front.

My friend went on: “Clean, pure water freezes into regularly shaped, six-sided crystals. Each crystal is different, but each is beautiful.  But polluted water is different.  Its frozen crystals born from polluted water are malformed.  They are irregular, unpredictable, and ugly.”  I nodded.  Again, this made sense.  She continued:  “Emoto then found that music could make a difference.  He played Beethoven before taking the photos, and he found six-sided, lovely ice crystals; but if he played heavy metal and photographed the same water, he found the same ugly, misshapen crystals as had been formed by polluted water.”  I gave an incredulous look.

 Then she got to the punch line.  “But here’s the best part.  Same thing happens when people pray, or bless the water.  Beautiful crystals form.  But talk harshly to the water, and you get the misshapen crystals again.” 

I said, “Right.”  The skeptic in me wondered if this person was also an air-etarian, or maybe thought that I was.  But my friend left the book.  It was fascinating.  The most wonderful part of the book is its hope.  Because our world is mostly water, and so are we, then water transformed means a world and a people transformed.  And prayer empowers transformation, at the smallest level. 

 Looking at the book and at its photos, I regretted my skepticism, somewhat.  I’m grateful that my friend shared the book with me, reminding me of one of my own basic beliefs:  there is more in this world that our rational minds can explain or ever fully understand. I deeply believe that, or I wouldn’t be a pastor.  Still, I’m cautious.

I don’t believe that I’m unique. I believe that maybe we are all cautious; maybe we all want to keep our faith back in the Bible somewhere, away from our messy lives.  Maybe we just want to reflect on the life of faith as history, rather than to live it as a present reality.  Because if faith is real in the here and now, it will bend the edges of the life that has taken me years to build. And I’m not so sure I’m ready for that.  I hazard that confession because the gospel lesson for today is a challenge to us who are comfortable with the world we’ve come to order and understand on our terms rather than on God’s terms.

 Remember the gospel lesson we just heard?  Here in the closing chapters of Matthew, the religious authorities have the hardest time with Jesus.  He does things they don’t understand; he says things that challenge their own conceptions of God and life and love and holiness.  Being human beings with a bit of life experience, they know how to study God from a distance, but they cannot comprehend the work of the Holy Spirit in their own time.  They weren’t bad people.  And they were, I believe, more like you and me than we want to admit.  They merely want things to be predictable and in control.  That describes me.  That describes most of us. 

 My own experience, in fact, leads me to a disclaimer.  I don’t want you to misunderstand.  I’m not saying that trusting Jesus means trusting all the kooky vagabonds that cross our path.  And casting a skeptical eye at photographers who study ice crystals at the molecular level after playing a Beethoven pastorale, is okay, too.  Wisdom is important, and experience is a wise teacher.  Tradition is important, and the religious leaders who confronted Jesus had a reason for their skepticism.  They believed in God.  But they only saw God in the world of their religious heritage.  God was real as they saw it, but only in the past.  God informed their world only from a distance.

 So Jesus comes into their present, and the old way of understanding breaks down.  They cannot see God at work in a new way.  Nor can we.

 So Matthew tells the story of Jesus, to his church and to us.  And Matthew’s story of Jesus reminds us that we must also look skeptically at the world we’ve built.  God breaks in; God transforms; God redeems; God saves.  And the God of new life, the God of Jesus, often has to help us see that Christ is in our present, not just in the past.  The God of new life humbles us precisely when we’ve think we have everything figured out and put in its predictable place.  The God of the present asks us to believe not only with our heads – but also with our hearts, and, even more to the point, with our lives.

 We’re so used to hearing the story of Jesus that we forget what a challenge it was to the world that first saw him.  Hear something of this remarkable, unbelievable story as we overhear Paul reminding the Philippians about this remarkable power of Jesus Christ:  “Let the same mind be in you,” says Paul, “that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:5-8, NRSV)

 The most educated, the most sophisticated, the most faithful, also had the most difficult time seeing God at work in Jesus. That was true in the first century, and it’s also true in the twenty-first century. Those who know and love the God of the scriptures, who understand and worship the God of the past, always have the hardest time trusting God’s new work in Christ in the present.  By definition, the Holy Spirit is paranormal. And this very same, very Holy Spirit breaks our world, cracks commonly accepted world-views.  God’s immediate presence is quite unsettling.

 We know the discomfort.  It’s one thing to trust God in the life of Jesus; it’s another thing to trust that same God with my life.  It’s one thing to believe that God was with Jesus on the cross of Calvary; it’s another thing to trust God is with us as our political system grinds through another election, and our economic system crumbles under the weight of our individual and collective greed.

 God has been with us.  God was in Christ, back then. That is easy to say and safe to believe. It is especially easy when compared to a more immediate affirmation:  God, in Christ, is with us still.  Today.

 And if God has given Christ to us all this day, then we are called to live for each other today.  If Christ Jesus was humbled for us all yesterday, then we, too, are not merely to confess Jesus as Lord, but to live in the truth that Christ is Lord of today.

 We have trusted deeply in the world we have built.  Perhaps it is time that we trust in the world into which God invites us.  Yes, we’re concerned about the thousands we’ve lost from investments in homes, stocks, and retirement plans.  Perhaps it’s time to trust the Lord for our present and our future, like the people I’ve met in Ghana and Costa Rica and Nicaragua and Appalachia.  Their hope is not in their dollars but in their devotion to a living lord.  Jesus Christ is, for them, not a story in a book but a friend in their own village, in their own families, in their own world, today.

 Many of us are not prepared for a God so close, so real, and so alive.  Fred Craddock somewhere tells a story about a pastor who visited a church member in the hospital.  At the end of the visit, member asked the pastor to pray.  At the end of the prayer the parishioner smiled, put their legs on the floor stood up and danced around the room.  “Oh, thank you pastor.  Thank you.  I feel so much better.  I actually think I’ve been healed.  Thank you.  Thank you.” 

 Making his way to the parking garage, the pastor griped his steering wheel in both hands to keep from shaking.  Looking to heaven, he prays, “Don’t you EVER do that to me again.”

 It’s one thing to ponder God in heaven, or God in the past.  But a living, transforming, redeeming God in our midst is a threat.  None of us knows quite what to do with a God like that.

 So Paul has to tell us to trust God as much as we trust ourselves:  “…for it is God who is at work in you,” says the apostle to the Philippians, “enabling you both to will and to work for [God’s] own pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13, NRSV)  God seeks us, and then God works in us, for the sake of the world.

 You can never tell where, or how, or when this living God will turn up in our lives.  The best we can do, I suppose, is keep alert, and keep an open mind.

 And be thankful.  God understands us so much better than we will ever understand God.  There’s the seed of gratitude, breaking through the cracks in our well-controlled lives.