Will Vaus

I imagine most of us remember the movie  Cast Away  with Tom Hanks. In case you don’t remember or never saw it, it is the story of Chuck Noland, played by Hanks, a top engineer for FedEx who gets marooned alone on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean. Obviously, one of Noland’s first concerns after he washes up on the island is finding drinkable water. He tries desperately to split open a coconut, only to watch as most of the milky juice spills out on to the ground. He lifts up a fragment of the shell and drains the few remaining drops of liquid into his mouth.  Most of us have never been marooned on a desert island, but we probably can relate to being thirsty at some time or another. In our passage for today from John 7:32-39, Jesus uses physical thirst as a metaphor for spiritual thirst, something I believe we all have. Listen for God’s word to you… Yet many in the crowd believed in him and were saying, “When the Messiah comes, will he do m...

Parting prayers can be powerful experiences. I remember my father laying his hand on my shoulder and praying for me before I left home in California to travel across the country to Princeton Seminary where I would prepare for a lifetime of ministry. I cannot recall my father’s words, but I remember his hand, shaky from Parkinson’s, on my shoulder and the heartfelt nature of his prayer. It should come as no wonder that John, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, remembered his Master’s parting prayer before he went to the cross. John not only remembered this prayer he must have prayed the words himself over the ensuing years of his life. That is, perhaps, the explanation for the reference to “Jesus Christ” in Jesus’ own prayer, a statement that seems misplaced on the lips of Jesus himself. So, what we have in John 17 is the essence of the final prayer of Jesus, what some have called his high priestly prayer, though it was a prayer made on earth, not in heaven. As we embark on this...

Listen for God’s word to you from John 14:15-21… “ If you love me, you will keep   my commandments.   And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,   to be with you forever.   This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in   you. “ I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.   In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.   On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.   They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them. ” This is one of those passages of Scripture that makes me feel as though I have stepped into a swirling mist, albeit a comforting one. These statements by Jesus do not co...

Today is, of course, Mother’s Day. And I imagine it is a hard one for many who long to be home with their mothers but can’t be because of the coronavirus. This Mother’s Day is my first without my mother. She passed away last August at the age of 90. Years ago, I read a story that, intriguingly, may sum up some of the feelings some of us may have this weekend. It was the story of a couple who went away for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Grandma came to stay with her two grandchildren, who were seven and five years old at the time. After the first day without their parents, the older of the two children summed up his feelings by saying, “Grandma, I’m homesick, and I am home. How can that be?” I believe those profound words are a rather precise diagnosis of a problem faced by every one of us as human beings. We are all homesick for our ultimate home, but we try to cover that homesickness with busyness, distractions, entertainments that we think will satisfy. We try to p...