Sunday, September 22, 2013

This Week's Sermon: "Rediscovering Grace"

Galatians 1:13-20

13 You heard about my previous life in Judaism, how severely I harassed God’s church and tried to destroy it. 14 I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my peers, because I was much more militant about the traditions of my ancestors. 15 But God had set me apart from birth and called me through his grace. He was pleased 16 to reveal his Son to me, so that I might preach about him to the Gentiles. I didn’t immediately consult with any human being. 17 I didn’t go up to Jerusalem to see the men who were apostles before me either, but I went away into Arabia and I returned again to Damascus. 18 Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. 19 But I didn’t see any other of the apostles except James the brother of the Lord. 20 Before God, I’m not lying about the things that I’m writing to you! (CEB)


“Seeking God Anew: Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve Crossed,” Week Three

The journalist’s question was an innocuous one.  Can you give us an example of (seeing a person three-dimensionally)?  But it stirred within the elderly, venerable priest a memory of this event was as strong as ever, even though the incident had occurred twenty-some years ago…a girl at the school in his parish had become pregnant, and as he recounts it:

It was one of the first times something like this had happened in that school.  People had a number of opinions about how to deal with the situation; some were contemplating expulsion, but no one took it upon themselves to think about how the girl must be feeling.  She was scared of peoples’ reactions and wouldn’t let anyone come near her.  Until one young teacher, a man who was married with children…offered to talk to her and work out a solution.

When he saw her during recess, he gave her a kiss, took her hand, and gently asked, “So you’re going to be a mother?” and the girl started crying uncontrollably.  This gesture of closeness allowed her to open up and talk about what had happened, and it allowed them to arrive at a mature and reasonable response.  It meant that she did not have to give up her schooling or face life with a child on her own.

What makes this touching anecdote all the more remarkable is the identity of the storyteller: Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio, in an interview only a few years before he would become Pope Francis, who made such big news with his first extensive media interview as pontiff.  And while the conversation was about seeing people three-dimensionally, for who they are, I would also submit that this conversation is just as much about seeing people through the lens of grace itself.

This is a new sermon series that revolves around a new book, by a fairly new(ish) pastor, with a very un-new name: Jay Bakker, the son of the (in?)famous televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, first pinged my radar when he came to speak at my seminary’s annual Earl Lectures series in 2010.  I have followed bits and pieces of his work ever since, and after beginning the Revolution church movement in Phoenix, he has gone on to plant Revolution churches in Atlanta and New York City, and he is now planting a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  In the meanwhile, he has also taken to writing, and his latest book, entitled, “Faith, Doubt, and Other Lines I’ve Crossed” spoke strongly enough for me make a sermon series!  The chapter I am borrowing from this week is called “Rediscovering Grace.”  Jay writes in it (in part):

If you’re not unsettled by grace, you should be.  Grace is unsettling.  For it to be grace, it has to be unfair.  It’s “wild, and outrageous, and vulgar.”  No one is ever completely happy with grace.  Grace makes you uncomfortable.  It doesn’t make sense, and it never will…

We might not have earned grace before we’ve received it, but we think that we have to continually earn it again now that it’s ours.  We do this because we desperately want to have some control over grace.  We want even the smallest ability to claim that we somehow earned this grace, because then we can have some measure of certainty that we’ve got it.  Which in turn allows us to say that other people don’t have it…

We don’t react well to the idea that the murderer or the terrorist or the abuser or the bully are covered by grace, that they can be transformed as easily as we can be.  Grace cannot be that easy, that simple, that widespread, and that…UNJUST.

When we really start to understand it, we will always find grace offensive.  And that’s exactly the way it should be.  If we start to feel comfortable with grace, then we’ve lost what it really means.

This was one of those chapters where I really wish I could just quote every word, let every sentence hang in the air for us to grasp its gravity.  Truly, by distilling this chapter down to 200 or so words, I am not doing it justice.

Nor am I likely doing justice to Paul’s own words here in Galatians 1.  Galatians is not a happy letter—Paul is writing to them out of frustration over a great many things, and more than once, Paul’s frustration gets the better of him…in a debate over circumcision, Paul even exclaims (while going for a truly awful pun?) that he wishes his opponents would castrate themselves.

But before Paul admonishes the Galatians—and he does, at great length—he first admonishes himself.  He makes it perfectly clear that under any other circumstances, he should be the very last person to be lecturing them on matters of spirituality and morality, because on his own, Paul himself is neither spiritual or moral.  He can only teach because Christ has since taught him.

This passage from Galatians is a telling glimpse into Paul’s own humility, and it acts as well as a very powerful and correcting mirror that I must hold up to myself, because if I am completely honest with myself, it bothers me that Paul receives this strange, miraculous thing called grace….because I don’t like Paul!  He is an adroit, thought-provoking teacher and preacher, but he is also a stubborn-as-nails crank who was a party to murder and received not only a revelation from Jesus Christ, but a new calling and a pardon as well.  Now, I may be a stubborn-as-nails crank too, but I’ve never killed anyone, so why do Paul and I share the same job description?!

I have come to understand…I have been called to understand…that this is so because of another thing that Paul writes about here: that he had himself completely empty.  No influence from other teachers, no being told by others what to believe, just pure, unadulterated revelation.

And therein lies the paradox for religious teachers…like myself, but also like all of you if ever you are called upon to testify to your faith or bear witness or offer some sort of Christian perspective on something…ever.  The Word of God trumps the word of a person every single time, but we are persons with mere words, small “w” words.  We are not the Logos that John speaks of in His Gospel, and we never will be.  But we try to be.  We try to be when we try to over-define grace, to paint its boundaries with brushstrokes so broad that it may in fact exclude us even if we do not even realize it—or, perhaps worse—when we do realize it and are in denial.

It’s a natural tendency of ours, though, and not just in the realm of theological treatises.  We want to have control over things.  We long for it, we yearn for it.  We want to be able to achieve whatever it is we want, wherever we want, whenever we want.  We want to be like God.

And so, though it does not look it quite on the surface, everything that has happened to our venerable church facility—the burst pipe, the flood damage, all of it—is a pretty darn good illustration of what grace versus control really does look like.

Going through all the steps of the process of drying out and restoring our historic building, I wanted to just be able to wave a magic wand as opposed to having to wait a week for dehumidifiers to do their thing.  I wanted to be able to send the water away through sheer force of will, I wanted the water damage to just go away—in a way that did not strip apart walls and ceilings and floors.  I just wanted to put everything back to how it was.

Except for that carpet on the stairs and second floor.  We needed to be put out of its misery!

Here’s the thing, though: all of those things, the water being extracted, the damage being removed, the money to make it all happen: that has nothing at all to do with me.  I did not choose for our denomination’s disaster relief arm, the Week of Compassion, to step forward and offer a four-digit grant to help mitigate our insurance costs.  I did not ask for the kindness and professionalism of the specialists who have helped guide me—and, by extension us—through this process.  And I had no way to force out yours or anyone’s understanding and prayers for this latest obstacle to get resolved.  All of those things were offered to me and to us!

Just like grace.

And that’s the zen part of this whole grace thing: in order to get it, to really, truly get it, we must give something up too.  And what we give up—what we are loath to ever give up—is control. Because what we can control is truly very limited, and beyond ourselves, it is limited purely to the surface and the outer layer.  We cannot control what is inside.  So, what interests us lies only on the outside.  We begin to see everything outside ourselves as two-dimensional, lacking that inner quality that God places, because since it is of God, we cannot control it.

Think back to that young girl who became pregnant, decades ago at this school in Argentina.  Imagine her being reduced by other people to just two dimensions, rather than three: she is no longer a person but a thing to be controlled, to have rules set over by the school, to be suspended or expelled, to be punished or exiled.  And here comes this fellow from the school—and as a teacher, someone with authority and control in the school—and he treats her in accordance with, as crazy as it sounds, Jesus’ teachings: do unto others.  He did unto her.  And it mattered greatly.

Yet I have a hard time, a very hard time, extending the same sort of treatment to a religious teacher like Paul, to be able to see him three-dimensionally, as not just a sinner, but a sinner called and redeemed!  But I promise you this: the closer you get to it, the closer you will get to truly grasping the scope and grandeur of this ridiculous thing we call grace…something so ridiculous, something that extends so far, that to understand it without that surrender would make us think it vulgar or offensive.  And perhaps it is.  But there is a reason we call it “amazing,” too.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
September 22, 2013

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