Sermon - 9/13/20

<p>When preaching on today’s gospel reading, my friend, Bill Uetricht, has shared a story which addresses a practice all of us are so very good at executing – scorekeeping.  And, with his permission, I want to share that story:</p> <p>In the beginning, God didn’t make just two people; he made a bunch of us.  Because he wanted us to have a lot of fun, and he said you couldn’t really have fun unless there’s a whole gang of you.  At first, we did have fun just like he expected.  We rolled down the hills, waded in the streams, ran in the meadows, frolicked in the woods, and acted silly.  We laughed a lot.</p> <p>Then one day this snake told us that we weren’t having real fun because we weren’t keeping score.  Back then, we didn’t know what score was.  When he explained it, we couldn’t see the fun.  But he said we should give an apple to the person who was best at all the games and we’d never know who was best without keeping score.  We could see the fun of that, of course, because we were all sure that we were the best.</p> <p>It was different after that.  We yelled a lot.  We had to make up new scoring rules for most of the games.  Others, like frolicking, we stopped playing because they were too hard to score.</p> <p>By the time God found out what had happened we were spending 45 minutes a day actually playing and the rest of the time working out scoring.  God was angry about that – very, very wroth. He said we couldn’t use his garden anymore because we weren’t having fun.  We told him we were having lots of fun.  He was just narrow-minded because it wasn’t exactly the kind of fun he originally thought of.</p> <p>He wouldn’t listen.  He kicked us out, and said we couldn’t come back until we stopped keeping score.  To rub it in, he told us we were all going to die and our scores wouldn’t mean anything anyway.</p> <p>He was wrong.  My cumulative, all-game score is 16,548. And if I can raise it to 20,000 before I die, I’ll know I’ve accomplished something.  Even if I can’t my life has a great deal of meaning because I