Our lay pastor, Gregg Hamann, sprinkles his messages with lively illustrations. A few of these are provided here as it is considered that they are interesting and are effective in driving home basic Biblical truths. A parable uses a comparison to draw an analogy, often with a spiritual meaning, and so it is appropriate to label Gregg's analogies as parables.

Mason Jars

At certain times of the year, when the crop was really in, my father would go down to the grocery and buy a case or two of mason jars and as a family we would make pickles out of cucumbers or jam out of our apricots or sauerkraut out of our cabbage and then we would sterilize those mason jars and carefully fill them with the fruit of our labors.

There is nothing prettier than a row of shiny jars all lined up on a shelf and filled with the bright colors of fruits and vegetables that you grew and canned yourself. I’ve actually seen fancy decorator types who line up jars of hot peppers or green pickles to yellow apricots on their shelves in order to decorate their kitchens.

But do you know what? No one ever lines up empty jars. No one ever goes out and buys mason jars just to set on their shelves alone. No one ever displays them in prominent places… in fact, if they sit around empty for too long, they just gather dust until someone throws them away!

Why is that? Because Mason jars are designed to receive and contain and preserve fruits and vegetables. They are designed to have things put in them! An empty Mason jar just cries out to be filled… and it’s the same with you and me. We are DESIGNED to be filled; filled with the mercy and the presence and the Spirit and the glory of God. Anything less than that and we are simply empty vessels, unfulfilled.

People know this instinctively… that’s why so many people that you know out there are madly trying to fill up their jars with anything that comes to hand. They try to fill them up with success. They try to fill them up with pleasure. They try to fill them up with money or sex or hobbies or activities… but none of these things will really fill our jars.

In fact, if you don’t sterilize your jar, or you’re not careful about what you put into it, its contents are likely turn toxic and dangerous. I’ve even heard of jars exploding right there on the shelf! We are designed to be FILLED with the Goodness of God’s Grace. Anything less, is less than the best.


A Room with a View

For many years, in the prime of his life, my father was a pilot… and a good and careful pilot at that. In the interest of safety, he never got his “instrument rating.” This is the rating that allows you to fly your plane when you can’t see – in other words, through clouds. My father said that most plane crashes took place during instrument flights and he just didn’t need to push his luck, so we just never flew when skies were gray.

During my teen years, as a family we would often go on mini-expeditions around Southern California. We would fly out to Catalina Island for Lunch or go to Orange County for dinner. Sometimes we would go to the Imperial Valley or Riverside on business – and even though I never became a pilot myself the various routine tasks that go along with flying a private plane became familiar to me.

One of the first things that my father would do when we were getting ready to fly was to call the weather service. One time, we were preparing to fly over to Imperial County on a Saturday morning. It was June, and due to June gloom we had waited a few hours for the fog to lift. It was probably close to ten o’clock when the sun finally came out and we drove down to Gillespie Field in El Cajon.

As soon as we got there, my father got on the phone at the airport terminal and called the weather service. He told the weatherman that he wanted to make a VFR (which stands for Visual Flight Rating) Flight out to Imperial. But the man at weather service – which was also in El Cajon – said, “Sorry, sir, but we’re still socked in. We won’t be able to clear you out of there for a couple of hours.’

My father leaned over and looked out of the terminal windows at the beautiful blue sky outside and he said, “Have you looked outside lately?” And the weatherman said, “No. why?” My father said, “Well, it looks pretty sunny to me.” And the weatherman said, “Let me go look.” So he put down the phone and opened the door and looked outside. A few minutes later he came back and said, “What do you know, you’re right! I guess we can clear you for a flight to Imperial.” Boy, did we laugh!

Can you believe it? The weatherman, of all people, was working in a room without windows! He was depending upon instruments, and reports, and computer models to tell him about the weather. Here he was charged with the responsibility of telling the world about the sky; but living in a place where he couldn’t see it. What a tragedy! That weatherman needed a Room with a View – and so do we.

We need to live our lives just as Paul suggests “… in VIEW of God’s mercies.” All too often, we are trying to live our spiritual lives in the closed off room of our own egos – surrounded by walls of self-interest and purposeful ignorance and false innocence and spiritual apathy. We have this compulsion to live our lives in VIEW of our own needs and desires, NOT in view of God’s mercies, but this is a tragic mistake!

All too often, we know conceptually about the great doctrines of our faith, but we discount their application to us. Sure, we know that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, but all too often, it seems hardly necessary. We want to look at ourselves as pretty good guys, as people who may not be perfect, but who on balance have mostly done the right thing. We want to mentally compare ourselves with other people around us and say, “I’m not anywhere near as bad as he is and I’m certainly better than her. ON the whole, God is pretty lucky to have me on his side.


Orchestral Harmony

For most of my teenage years, as many of you know, my identity was pretty much tied up with a musical instrument – the oboe. For many years after I graduated from High School, whenever I would meet an old high school acquaintance he would invariably say, “Aren’t you the oboe player?”

You see, for the ten years of junior high, high school and college, I carried my instrument with me almost wherever I went. For years even after I got out of the music business, I would have these nightmarish moments when I would suddenly realize that I didn’t have my oboe in my hand and I would cast around desperately wondering where I might have left it before realizing that I didn’t have to carry it any more!

There was a period during my senior year in high school when I had either a rehearsal or a concert scheduled for every night of the week for three straight months! If my mother wanted to see me, she had to come to a concert!

I played in orchestras and in bands and in chamber ensembles. I played solo work and church work and opera – and in between I practiced and I made reeds, these are the dual duties of any real oboe player.

And I’ve had to ask myself exactly what it was that motivated me during that time to devote so much of my time and my energy to music. Some of it was the fact that it was something that I could be good at – I wasn’t very good at sports, but music was something that I could do.

But I think that a lot of what inspired me to involve myself so deeply in the musical world was simply, the Power and the Pleasure of HARMONY. Those of you who are musicians know what I am talking about. There is something truly wonderful about gathering together with a bunch of other musicians and making great music together.

I loved the symphony orchestra. As the oboe player you got to sit right in the center of a maelstrom of musical talent that swirled around you in waves of sound. Just a few feet in front of me sat the largest component of the orchestra, the strings – cellos and violas and violins. Behind me were the clarinets and bassoons. Just a few feet further back to my immediate left were the trumpets and the trombones and then on the right we had French Horns and percussion.

And a great symphonic work is composed of the weaving together of all of these elements into one magnificent whole – in any given piece, the first oboist was likely to play solos and small ensemble sections with the rest of the woodwinds and then the great tutti sections at the end when the brass and the timpani and everyone else would come in to build to a climax at the end. This is the power and the pleasure of harmony! Even today when people ask me why I play my classical music so loud, I tell them that it’s because I got used to sitting in the middle of the orchestra!

But really one of the most basic, even physical, pleasures of making music is the joy of playing a simple duet with another woodwind. When you do, there is this strange phenomenon that takes place. I’m not sure that it has even ever been properly explained.

If two oboes or flutes or violins are playing harmony in perfect tune while sitting with one another while sitting close together, often a third note will sound somewhere inside your head. It’s like watching a 3D movie with glasses on where the images seem to leap off the screen or hover in the air in front of you… it’s just that with music, instead of a butterfly or monster hovering in front of your face, it is a perfectly tuned enharmonic note several octaves below the notes you are actually playing that hovers somewhere in the middle of your head! It is an almost physical pleasure!

It is the Power and the Pleasure of Harmony… and it is a good picture of the power and pleasure that Christians can enjoy in the context of the Body of Christ even without musical instruments. When we begin to personify the virtues set forth in the Word of God and to live together in harmony as Christians as members of the Family of God, the result is an almost physical delight that is available nowhere else on earth.

There is power and pleasure to be found in worship and in fellowship together and in service within the Family of God. The instruments for achieving this power are found in the score, God’s Word. It’s just that all too often we leave them moldering on the shelf when we ought to take them out of their cases and play them for all we are worth!