Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

The text is John 15:9-17.

Have you ever tried to freeze a fire? How about catching the wind in a net? How about bottling a river?

If you have, my guess is that it didn’t work very well. If you try to freeze a fire, it goes out and ceases to be fire, because it is in the very nature of fire to burn.

In the same way, you can bottle the water from a river, but you can’t bottle the wind or the river itself because it is the nature of rivers to be in motion. A river that doesn’t flow is a lake.

The comedian Mitch Hedberg once remarked that he really liked escalators “because they never break down… they just become stairs. You’ll never see a sign that says ‘Escalator temporarily out of order’; it’ll just say, ‘Escalator…