Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Year C, Proper 22

October 7, 2007

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Bentonville

Gospel:

Luke 17:5-10

     The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!" The Lord replied, "If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, `Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.

     "Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, `Come here at once and take your place at the table'? Would you not rather say to him, `Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink'? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, `We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!'

On the leading edge of the summer in which I turned 16 my restiveness convinced my Dad that I needed a job.  So on a drizzling Saturday morning he drove me in his pickup to meet an old friend of his – a man in the business of drilling water wells.  Knowing my father to be a decent, honorable and hard working man, the owner figured that his scrawny son might not be entirely worthless, and expressed his faith that I might, as he said, “eventually…make a hand”.

I was placed under the charge of Mr. Plunkett – a wizened old man, whose retirement from the trade could be postponed if he had a decent helper.  The company owned modern equipment, rotary drilling rigs, powered by enormous diesel engines, that rapidly drove a diamond-studded drill bit deep into the earth, until, in just a few days, the driller reached the Paluxy sands that held the water deemed so precious to the farmers and ranchers in this parched Cross Timbers section of Texas.

However, Mr. Plunkett and I weren’t needed on those gleaming stainless steel rigs; instead the two of us worked side by side on an ancient timber and iron monster, a cable tool rig, aptly labeled “The Sputter.” Mr. Plunkett and the sputter were united in their mission like no man and machine I have known. 

Instead of neatly slicing a hole into the earth, like the rotary rig, the sputter pounded its way into the ground.  The tip of the tool stem was designed to penetrate rocks and dirt, not with knife-like precision, but with the brute power provided by the thousand pounds of steel that backed up the cutting end of the tool. The sputter was ancient, awaiting the salvage yard, that would claim man and machine the day Mr. Plunkett retired.  A giant cable was attached to one end of the massive cylindrical cutting tool.  The cable wound through an intricate system of wheels and pulleys and eventually wrapped around a massive steel encased wooden wheel.  Attached to a cam, the giant wheel would rotate in one direction and then in another, first drawing the cable tight and then, as the wheel reversed directions, the cable slackened, allowing the drill stem to suddenly drop to the bottom of the hole, where it’s impact would shatter an inch or two of stone and send thunder-like reverberations throughout the land. 

Mr. Plunkett stood with one hand on the cable, allowing it to ride up and down as it lifted and released its weighty load.  Through his fingertips he could sense when the tool had completed its task of penetrating the earth and was bogging down in the rocky mud deep below.  From the intensity of the moan of the prehistoric engine, from the amount of slack or tautness in the cable, he could tell when it was time to wind the cable around its immense wheel and draw the tool out of the hole. 

I learned to watch Mr. Plunkett. Today I might call him a Gnostic.  I didn’t understand the mystery of the subtle signs that revealed to him a sure knowledge that the drill stem had completed its work, but I did learn to read Mr. Plunkett. And I knew that if I didn’t quickly make my way to his side, to assist him in the task of first drawing the cutting tool out of the hole and then dropping the lighter, empty bailer down hundreds of feet to retrieve the accumulated mud – that I would certainly receive a lesson in creative cussing. 

There was a rhythm to each day.  The periodic tending of the machine as it drove its way into the earth.  A time in between for me to lie on the grass and watch the sparse clouds drift across the summer sky.  And then, perhaps as much as a thousand feet into the earth, the bailer would begin to bring up less mud and more water and we knew that we had arrived at the Trinity sands that promised to quench the thirst of this arid Texas landscape. The focus of our rapt attention was no longer a mere hole in the ground, but a flowing, life giving well.

”those who wait upon the LORD shall possess the land.”

Mr. Plunkett possessed the land in a way that a landowner never could.  He knew the land beneath its surface… fingered, smelled, and tasted the soil as we moved through hard clay, through sand stone, past limestone and sensed when the watery soul he was seeking …would draw near. 

I watched him work and learned a bit a about how to live.  Mr. Plunkett taught me how to chew tobacco, or more accurately, how to spit with authority.  And he did teach me the art of cussing, how not to use profanity with senseless abandon, but how to use the most foul language imaginable …appropriately.

Together we drilled about a dozen wells that summer. Most days, my lunch consisted of a tuna fish sandwich, or Vienna sausage and crackers.  One week, however, was different.  We were drilling a well several miles outside of the nearest town, on an elderly couple’s family farm.  They were old school – reared in a tradition once common among farming folk – a tradition requiring that the hired hands be fed.  As lunch time neared I saw the farmer’s wife approach Mr. Plunkett and offer him a few words that were muffled by the sound of the Sputter.  Later, when Mr. Plunkett saw me pull my sandwich from a brown paper sack, he motioned with his chin for me to come over to him.  “Put away your sandwich, we’re eatin’ inside this week.”

I found a garden hose beside the barn and washed the caked mud from my hands and arms, knocked more mud from my boots and we stepped inside the house.  Leaving the glare of the noonday sun behind, I lifted my mud splattered shades, to behold a lunch they rightly called dinner - pork chops cut from a home butchered hog, produce from their garden: new potatoes, mustard greens, pinto beans, tomatoes, onions, cantaloupe, hot biscuits, and a mason jar filled with iced tea.

At this table there was no master and no slave.  No boss man, no helper.  No owner, no employee.  We sat at the table together and shared in the riches of God’s abundant earth.  The farmer offered a tried and true table prayer, but I tasted their thankfulness most clearly in the farm wife’s cooking.  Mr. Plunkett and I showed our gratitude with our appetite.

I know that I am inverting this gospel message.  The usual interpretation is one in which the servant who waits on the master does so without complaint.  The usual lesson is that we are to do what we are called to do, expecting little in the way of praise.  And maybe there is some value in operating in the world that way. 

But that’s not the way I’ve experienced God.  I know a God who wants goodness and abundance for all.  We aren’t called to live in the world as slaves.  We are servants who are also welcome at the table.  Servants who are part of God’s desire for wholeness … for plenty.  Servants who are needed by God to ensure that the abundance of creation is available to all.  God’s table groans with bounty.  There is more than enough food to go around.  No one has to sleep in the cold.  And none of God’s children need go without medical care. 

But how is it that we find that realization? How do we awaken to God’s abundance – to the opportunity to live life fully?  That’s where Mr. Plunkett comes in.  Mr. Plunkett wasn’t a theologian.  I think that his formal education ended in  the 9th grade.  But he had learned a thing or two about how to live – how to be in the world.  With his hand on the Sputter’s cable, he felt the earth, he guided his machine on its journey to find water – the source of life.  The rhythm of his work enabled him to tap into that source in a way that most of us never know.  With all five senses, Mr. Plunkett perceived what God’s earth has in store for us.

He had learned that it’s not so much whether you are master or slave, owner or employee, but how you live into that role.  How you tap into the universality of God’s love for all creation.  Mr. Plunkett started by learning how to feel the earth.

I like to think of Mr. Plunkett, his gloved hand riding up and down with the cable, a brown tobacco stain running down his chin, listening, waiting, doing the work he was called to do – not because he thought he deserved a seat at the table or because he was paid well, but simply because he was called.  His faithfulness might have seemed as small as a mustard seed to the larger world, but his small faith enabled him to plumb the earth’s depths.  May we all know such faith.