Here’s a parable, a story I think we’ve rarely done justice to. Maybe we know it too well, maybe our familiarity with it has blunted the sharp edges of it. It’s almost a tame story now and yet the more you dig into it---it’s true of all the Biblical material---the more you probe, and poke, and nose around, the more treasure you find.

I think I ought to begin this morning by expressing appreciation to you. I don’t know when I have enjoyed working on a series of sermons more than on these sermons on John Wesley the past 3 weeks.

Darryl F. Zanuck, the famous movie mogul, producer of countless Hollywood films, and man of pronounced opinions, once said he knew exactly what he wanted in the story line of his next movie if he could just find it, if - someone would just write it for him. He wanted a plot, he said, that started off with an earthquake, and then built up to a climax.

Most of you here, I presume, know who John Wesley is...or to be more accurate, WAS. He’s not living any more. I’m not trying to be facetious. Some here may NOT know about John Wesley. All who come to worship in this Church are not United Methodist, and that’s all right.

Is there a writer in the Bible, is there a writer anywhere, whose poetry is more lilting, more soaring, more ecstatic and more exquisitely tender than that of the person we know only as the unknown prophet of the Exile?

Call it a miracle story if you like. I’d agree with you, 100%. No question that there are elements of the spectacular in it, and even spectacular may not be a strong enough word. You don’t get people walking on water every day. Walking on water is supernatural stuff. It implies another dimension, another realm entirely, something reserved for only the extraordinary. When we use it about human beings, we do so with tongue-in-cheek, as an oblique way of making reference to the

This is not an Easter Sermon---not yet, not quite---though from the title you might almost suspect it. We’re still in the Old Testament, still on the far side of Calvary, still moving along the Lenten road. The great breakthrough, the Easter miracle that turned everything, everything in history on its ear is still before us.

If there is anything in the world that strikes me as ludicrous, it’s to hear somebody say that the Bible is out of touch with reality. People do say that occasionally...people who obviously don’t know it very well.

Here’s something embarrassing to me, at least modestly so, and the Lectionary reading for this Sunday forces me finally to come to grips with it. I realize with a sense of chagrin that I have never before preached a sermon on John the Baptist.

Jesus talked about it, Paul talked about it, In the early Church it was a central, pivotal issue....Augustine wrestled with it almost daily for the first 36 years of his life, both lured and repelled by its insidious power. It almost drove Luther crazy until he found reconciliation...the first time he served communion he was so aware of it that he literally fainted.

It’s just a simple verse in a long narrative. You could read right through it, and hardly notice it at all.

You know, God is so funny in some ways. And I don’t mean funny, ‘hah-hah’, I mean funny, odd, surprising, startling, unpredictable...You can never put God in a box, or anticipate God.