Peach Festival Sunday -- no need for the No Vacancy sign

Reading:  Romans 12:1-8 
(Let everything you do be an offering to God, as holy and blameless as any offering anyone ever lifts up to God in the holiest of Temples.)

This Sunday we expect to have maybe our smallest attendance of the year in worship.  

It's Peach Festival Sunday, and many of our folks have been at church all week peeling peaches for over 1800 pies, or at Fortino's late into the night baking the pies, or at the park much of the week helping set up for the festival, or at the festival all weekend selling pies and who knows what else to help raise money for the church and all kinds of other worthwhile organizations in the community.

Is this the kind of thing Paul had in mind when he writes, "with eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you...as an act of intelligent worship, to give God your bodies as a living sacrifice, consecrated to God and acceptable to God"?  (Rom 12:1 -- J.B. Phillips translation).  Or as Eugene Peterson puts it in his idiosyncratic translation The Message, "take your everyday, ordinary life -- your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, walking around in the world [and volunteering at the church and at the Peach Festival?] life -- and place it before God as an offering" -- an offering as holy and worthy as any that someone might take and offer up in worship in the Temple?

We truly are grateful for all the people who help out, and all the variety of things they help out with -- some of them members of the church who are active in other ways as well, some of them members and friends for whom the work for the Peach Festival is their contribution and gift to the church.  

This Sunday we will remember and celebrate their contributions, and in this be aware of the presence and purpose of God in all life, and in all the ways that life is made good.

A few questions that might help bring some focus and depth to what we do and say:

• what really is it that makes anything we do, "holy" and an offering as holy as anything lifted up to God in a temple?
• maybe if we pray before we start whatever it is, and "dedicate" it to God? (can you imagine an opening prayer to peach peeling and to selling pies at the pie booth?  maybe a word of blessing over each pie sold?)
• is it because it's done for the church?
• or for the good of the community?
• is it because of the way the activity draws people together, and the kind of openness and companionship we find in doing the job together?
• or is it because of what it brings out from us, or nurtures within us -- an openness of heart, a willingness to step out and help, a belief that we can do our part to help make a difference?

• what are the marks of truly "worshipful work"?  how do we know that what we are doing at any time "really counts" as God-focussed, mature and healthy -- a good offering?

• and finally, (maybe a trick question) did God come in Jesus to build and maintain churches, or to help the world work in whole and healthy ways? (Or, to put it maybe another way, what's more important about any peach pie we sell: the money it makes to keep the church going, or the delight and spirit of gratitude felt by the person who buys it when they are able to eat it and enjoy it?)

What's the doxology we're singing in worship this summer?

Praise God from whom all blessings flow;

praise God, all creatures high and low;

give thanks to God in love made known:

Creator, Word and Spirit, One.

May it be so.  Even one holy slice of perfect peach pie at a time.