Drunk on New Wine

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See, the thing about self-denial is that you have to work at it. You are who you are. You have needs and wants. That’s all part of being a human, a spirit in a body, a body with a spirit, connected to the earth and all that lives upon it and to the Three-In-One who made it. You are good. Very good, according to the last verse of Genesis, chapter 1. In order to achieve the self-denial that was such a part of my youth and young adulthood, my time cosplaying as straight, you have to deny aspects of yourself that are good and very good. And that takes work. Soul-crushing work.

But soul-crushing work is not what we see here in the Pentecost story.

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The Need for Advocates

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And this is what I want you to remember. This is going to be the take-away of the sermon today. Yes, we’re going to talk about fig trees and advocacy and farming practices in first-century Palestine, but at the end of it all, we’re going to come back to this truth: we all need an advocate. We never get through anything on our own. Everything that we have built and made and endured and survived, we have built or made or endured or survived because of others. And we have the chance to offer that aid to someone else every day.

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The Need for Sleep

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When you watch a lot of Law and Order: SVU, you notice a line that characters repeat over and over again. It’s a signal that something’s wrong, like when a character in Star Wars says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” When someone’s about to break, or when someone wants the moral high ground, inevitably, a character says, “How do you sleep at night?”

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