A Parable (not from Jesus): Life is like a pot of boiling water, and there are three ways for you to interact. You can be like a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean. 

 

If you’re the carrot, you will be destroyed. The intensity of the water will work against the very fiber of your being. You can try to resist but eventually you will succumb and be rendered a mush. 

 

You can be like an egg. An egg weathers the boiling water. It goes in and comes out looking like nothing ever happened. It is the same as it was when it went in, but only on the outside. From the looks of things the egg is no better or worse off. But the reality is that inside it is hard. It is solidified and what made it so useful has now been limited. Sure it’s still useful but it’s nothing like what it once was. It is rigid, and limited. And despite looking like nothing has affected it it has, like the carrot, undergone extensive change.

 

The coffee bean is very different. When a coffee bean goes into the boiling water the water does not change it, it changes the water. The water is infused with flavor, aroma, and caffeine. The bean expends its goodness to change the very nature of the water. The water didn’t render the bean; the bean changed the water into coffee. 

 

We all know that life can beat us up. And some believe that the answer is to get “tough” and develop an outer shell. But the real answer is neither of these. It is to let the goodness that you are out into the world and change the world around you. 

 

This is what Christ meant when He said “ Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven” (Matt 5:16). When Jesus said this it was in the middle of a long sermon about who are the people who would call themselves Jesus followers, and what would they look like, as people. They would look like the people who gave of themselves, and in so doing they would change the world. They would show the world that it could be changed. And they would show others that it is possible. 

 

As Lutherans, there is a joke that coffee is the third sacrament, but with this modern parable in mind, maybe it is?