Sermon at the Centenary UMC on August 1, 2010
Jisun Kwak
Matthew 14:22-33

Begging Bowls

For most of my Day-timer, life I began each day making a list – I list, therefore I am – and then spent the rest of the day checking it off, counting it twice, seeing if I’d been naughty or nice. After decades of trying to govern my life by lists, it finally hit me one day that if I can’t get even one day according to plan, what am I doing trying to get months and years and even decades to go “according to plan”?

Think about it. Has there ever been even one day when your schedule has gone exactly the way you planned it? My life has not gone in straight paths. Has yours? My path has often been in circles.
I now begin my day with a different image than that of a list.
I now begin it with this image… a begging bowl. I borrowed this idea from Sue Bender, who reminds us of the monastic tradition of the begging bowl (Everyday Sacred [1996]).
Each day, a monk goes out with a begging bowl. Whatever is placed in the bowl will be his food and drink for the day. Bender quotes the French playwright, Jean Genet, who said he wanted to roam the countryside like a monk holding a begging bowl, trusting life to fill it with what nourishment he needed.
A begging bowl is a very different way to go through each day. A begging bowl invites us to be open like never before to what each day offers and open to a God of infinite surprise.
What am I not seeing that I should see? What have I taken for granted? What are people placing in my bowl? How can each item placed there be a teacher for me in my own spiritual life?
Actually, even if you do not go through life with a begging bowl image, you do go through life as a begging bowl.
Physicists tell us that the universe is shaped like a bowl (those Hebrews were right). And each one of us is a bowl, a crusty clump of clay God scooped out of the earth and breathed into with the breath of life. Each one of us “holds these treasures in earthen vessels.”
So the real question is: How will your bowl be positioned in your life?
There are four ways your begging bowl can be positioned.
The first position is upside-down. There are people who are simply not open to new possibilities and surprises of the Spirit. For these people their bowl is more like an umbrella that keeps life and the Spirit away from them.
The second bowl position is right-side-up, open to the heavens, but already full. Many of us are so full of our own agendas, so fixated on our own productivity and creativity, that we have little space to receive gifts from God.
The third bowl position is up, open, but riddled with stains, cracks and debris. Whatever gets put into it gets polluted and colored by our pain, bitterness and anger. Or it simply seeps out through the cracks that have not been filled or healed.
The fourth bowl position is up, empty, clear, clean and censed. There may be all sorts of cracks in it. But those broken places are actually where we are the strongest, as God’s grace and forgiveness have healed our lives of its fissures and fragmentation.
In today’s scripture, the purpose Matthew seems to suggest for Jesus’ walk on the wild side has more to do with building up the disciples’ life of faith than bailing out their swamped boat. At Peter’s request, Jesus commands Peter to join him on the water. The disciple leaps out of the boat, anxious to test his abilities as one of Jesus’ chosen ones. But once he is in the midst of his discipleship experience, and beyond the safety of the boat, Peter begins to panic. Instead of seeing Jesus, he suddenly sees only the tumult of water, wind and waves that are all around him.
Peter’s own fears and doubts begin to pull him down, and he starts to sink.
The miracle story from this week’s gospel text descries how Jesus appeared to his disciples in a totally unexpected place and time. The disciples had suffered through a long night of wild waves. Yet, they are still struggling to get beyond the midpoint of their journey. Land is yet a long way off. Certainly this was no time to expect visitors-especially someone without a boat. When they least expected it, suddenly, … there was Jesus, striding right up to them in the morning light.
Jesus’ appearance in that place is so unexpected that the disciples don’t even recognize him. Their first reaction in the face of this utterly unpredictable encounter is one of fear. Fright closes their eyes and hearts to the true identity of their visitor. Because they don’t expect to see Jesus out walking on the water, they jump to a conclusion and decide they are seeing a ghost. Their fear sees only a terrifying ghost instead of their beloved teacher and master.
Like the disciples in today’s lesson, how many times have we been given the opportunity to experience a living personal encounter with Jesus—and yet have failed to recognize his presence before us?
In what position is your begging bowl?

Lewis Smedes, in one of his many best-selling books, A Pretty Good Person (1990), he tells this story:
A few years ago, I spent a hot August day at the Los Angeles county jail, waiting for the wheels of the system to open jail doors for someone I was bailing out. It takes a long time to spring somebody from this mammoth prison, so I had to wait and watch. I watched the pimps in white suits bailing out their prostitutes; lawyers in black suits bailing out their clients; drug dealers bailing out their peddlers; girls bailing out their boyfriends; and drunks who disturbed the peace the night before slinking out on their own. As I took in the sleazy parade, I began to see everyone in it as a full-time, obsessive-compulsive, addictive, hopeless loser.
By noon, I lost any desire to know any more about them than that. At mid-afternoon, I decided to go out for a cold drink. As I walked out the door, I met a lanky black man wearing a black suit with a priest’s collar-a prison chaplain, I figured, on his way out at the end of a day’s work of grace. I introduced myself on our way to the parking lot. He gave me the feeling that he had time to talk a while, so I asked him to join me for a drink.
It turned out he wasn’t a priest; he was an insurance salesman. He devoted one day out of every week to bring a moment of grace to those locked up in the county jail. He wore the cloth so that everyone there knew what he was up to. I asked him the sort of questions any decent Pharisee would ask.
“Don’t you keep meeting the same people, coming in and going out? Recidivist, repeaters, losers?”

“Well,” he replied, “every person locked up in that jail has got somebody with a key to let him out. But I meet people in my business every day who are locked up in a cell inside their hearts and nobody on Earth has a key to let them out. So I don’t see an enormous difference between them.”
“Okay, true enough, but still, aren’t most of the men you meet inside this jail hard-core losers?”
“Well, maybe they are, but that’s just not the way I divide people up. The only two categories of people I really care about are the forgiven people and the unforgiven people.”
He had me.
“I met Jesus today,” I told Doris when I came home.
“Oh yeah? What did he say to you?”
“He told me, I was a Pharisee. Have eyes. Don’t see” (1)
What keeps you from seeing the unexpected Jesus?
Is it indifference that keeps your eyes unfocused so that nothing can affect your own life?
Is it bewilderment that keeps your eyes darting from one flashing image to the next, unable to sort out one from the other?
Is it bafflement that keeps your eyes wide but your mind cloaked in confusion?
Is it boredom that keeps your eyes closed because your heart allows nothing to stir it anymore?
Is it fear that keeps your eyes averted, afraid to open any part of yourself to new experiences or encounters?
Do you keep to the same paths every day, never varying your life patterns so that the unexpected or the out-of-the-ordinary can never find you?
Or do you keep moving all the time-new friends, new jobs, new loves, new lovers, -so that no one ever has a chance to really find your heart?
Just as the risen Jesus refused to stay in the tomb, so the Christ of faith refuses to live only in our church sanctuaries on Sunday mornings. Jesus was raised from death into life-and that life is everywhere and all the time.
When we least expect Christ to be present in our lives-there he is! Without power, without friends, without a chance, Christ appears.
Without a name, without parents, without healthy Christ appears.
Without fear, without self-concern, without guile, Christ appears.

Is your faith great enough to recognize Christ when he appears before you? Christ calls on our faith to recognize a presence in our lives, whatever the surprising, unexpected shape he may take.
By the way, I still make lists. But now I keep them small and put them in my begging bowl for the Spirit to do with them whatever.
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(1) Lewis B. Smedes, A Pretty Good Person: What It Takes to Live With Courage, Gratitude and Integrity [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990], 137-38.