Sermon: The Birth of Grace

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The Birth of Grace

By Charles Rush

December 23, 2001

ue story -- from Beth Curry, former member at Christ Church. Her brother-in-law lives in South Carolina. There is a new barber in the barber shop in his small town. Her brother-in-law, Mr. Ford, doesn't like to talk much when he gets his hair cut but the new barber wanted to talk, sot he barber said, “Mistuh Fawd, youavani suns?”

“Got two” said Mr. Ford.

“Got any daughters?” said the barber with the shaver running next to Mr. Ford's ear. Mr. Ford thought he said, “Got any dogs?”

Mr. Ford said, “Got two of them too. But don't get me started on em… One of them is 11 years old and blind as a bat. You'd think after 11 years of walking around that house, she'd know where she's going, but she bumps into everything… My wife is partial to her but as far as I'm concerned, I think we ought to put her down.”

By now the barber has stopped cutting hair and is slack-jawed. Mr. Ford continues, “Funny thing is, she's kind of attached to me. Every time I try to leave the house, she stretches her whole body out across the door and I have to step over her just to get to work.”

Finally, he offered, “She is one of the prettiest Springer Spaniels I've ever seen.”

The barber just said, “Thank Gawd.”

Finally some clarity out of this confusion of words. What a relief. I don't know if Joseph had the same sense of relief when he heard from the Angel however. The Angel is supposed to be giving him an explanation of something confusing but I wonder if he isn't left as confused at the end as the beginning. All he knows is this. He is involved in some kind of scandal but God is somehow involved and something good should happen in spite of it's problematic appearance, so just trust that it will all work out. That is not what I would call ‘confidence building assurance.' But apparently, it was enough for this young man -- probably a boy really. Whatever it was that happened to him, it was enough for Joseph to start out on this adventure.

I have a certain admiration for Joseph. We know almost nothing about him from the bible but what we do know gives some indication that he must have been fairly courageous and able to live by faith without a whole lot of reassurance. The poor boy: His first encounter with God makes him look scandalous among polite society. In a short amount of time, he will have to flee for his life, under cover of night when Herod tries to kill all the children in his village. The Gospel of Matthew says that he had to live in exile in Egypt for three years for safety -- a political refugee. His wife thinks she has given birth to God's only son… You think you have parenting issues. Little wonder we don't hear from him in the rest of the bible. And we know the end of the story for Joseph… Jesus healed quite a few people, the crowds of the poor appreciated him. But we are also told that his Mother and brothers came to get him at one point, thinking he was crazy. Joseph isn't mentioned in that story, but trust me on this one, Joseph sent them. And the end…. eventually Jesus is arrested in a high publicity trial. Joseph has to live through the heart-break of one of his children dying before he does.

There is a realism to the Bible in it's depiction of the challenge of the life of faith that even when we are blessed to live in the fullness of the abundance of God's grace -- in this case, face to face with Jesus -- we are not exempt from the difficulty, disappointment, and death.

Somehow, we Americans have gotten the idea in the back of our minds that if we are relatively good people, if we follow the rules, then somehow we ought to be exempt from tragedy, especially if we are religious. We don't really believe that, but we do. We don't give any expression to it, except when something bad happens to someone too young or someone who was healthy and then we say something like they got robbed. God ripped them off. It is not fair, as though, somehow life ought to be fair, when we know that it is not.

We live with an unspoken American mythos, a secular myth that has to do with retirement. Ever since FDR got the social security program passed and corporations and unions developed pensions, we have an unspoken expectation that if you work hard, if you pay into the system, then you ought to be able to retire and live well for several years, possibly many, doing creative things, nurturing community, in a stress reduced life style.

It is a great vision, frankly, far better than aging in any other society previous to ours, where old age too often meant ignominy. There is a Far Side cartoon that has a bunch of Eskimo's gathered on the edge of the ice. An old man is on an iceberg that is being gently pushed out to sea as a crowd watches. A father in the crowd says to his son, ‘it is never too early to save for retirement.' Unfortunately, too often that was old age for too many societies.

But somewhere along the way, we got it in our minds that if we put in our time, then we were entitled to some recreational time. And we came to believe that because so many people actually had great retirements that it seemed like the norm. And we got to believing that if everything didn't work out according to our plan, that we got ripped off, that God ripped us off. Somewhere along the line, with our long economic stability and our long season of peace, we got to believing that we could control our destiny more than we can. Our secular myth set us up for spiritual disappointment and it is not realistic either. It doesn't prepare us for the most substantive spiritual challenges of old age.

Far better, it seems to me, is the ancient Greek myth of the life cycle that is contained in the Odyssey by Homer. The hero Odysseus achieves great wealth and creates jobs for hundreds of people in his homeland as a young man. He has a great reputation as a provider and a community builder in his home town. Then he goes to fight the Trojan War with Ajax, Agamemnon and distinguishes himself with valor and courage in battle, keeping Greece free from their enemies. He wins great spoils from battle.

If this were an American tale, he should be able to just enjoy the rest of his life, and play golf. But that doesn't address the spiritual challenges of old age. Instead, it takes him years to get back home… Many shipwrecks, many side adventures. All the time, the only thing he can think about is getting back to his wife, Penelope, and enjoying the simple pleasures of his horses and grandchildren.

Finally, he gets back to his home… but home is not home anymore. He has been gone such a long time that everything is changed. People that he thought he knew well, are no longer behaving the way they did when he left. He dresses himself up as an old man, a beggar, and he makes his way into town, under cover of cloak. There he sees first hand that men who used to call themselves his friends, have been hanging around his estate day after day, ordering the best of his calves and hogs to be slaughtered for a great barbecue, drinking up all of his wine and beer. He over hears them talking with each other, saying “I hope that Odyseus is dead so we can divide up his estate.” He hears them trying to seduce his wife. A couple of them treat him rudely because he is old and poor, kick him and throw him down the street. Yet others speak of him with honor and respect, despite the fact that he has been gone a long time. Some of them go out of their way to give him some food precisely because he is poor and old. And throughout this couple of days, it is not altogether clear whether his wife has been unfaithful and allowed all of this to happen or whether she is helpless in the face of it.

Odysseus has to withdraw for a few days and reflect on the spiritual question of what is really real. Do people just treat him well because he is powerful? Do peole seek out his counsel just because of what he can do for them financially? Who is it that really has integrity and how can you be sure? How do you know what genuine friendship and love are really all about? What is it that makes for substantial character, substantial living because in this last phase of his life, nothing less than can he really settle for. He becomes restless and pensive. What is it that really makes for the good life? He has to come to grips with some of these questions and they are not easy to answer. Life is not ever easily settled or simply clarified morally speaking. It is a challenge right up through old age to the end of life.

We Christians ought to know that from the characters in the bible. They get called out on risky missions, like young Joseph, that are fraught with uncertainty, bereft of resources and force us to rely on the transcendent dimension of the Spirit.

Someone recently sent me a poem called “What I Tell Myself”[i] that is a concrete reflection on this reality. The author is reflecting on the great unknown character of the future and the afterlife. In the process, he is feeling deeply the need for a substantial faith to embrace the unknown, in all its uncertainty and the anxiety it brings.

Above the water and against the mountain

the geese fly through the

brushed darkness

of the early morning

and out into the light,

they travel over

my immovable house with such unison

of faith

and with such assurance

toward the South

cresting the mountains

and the long coast of a continent

as they move

each year

toward a horizon

they have learned to call their own.

I have known this house,

and this horizon,

and this world I have made.

I know this silence and the particular

treasures and terrors

of this belonging

but I cannot know the world to which I am going.

He goes on to contemplate the ways that he had grown accustomed to his world, the ways that he had confidence in it. Confident until… his spouse dies. He writes:

Just as suddenly

life [it] has become a fireless

friendless

night again

and you find yourself alone

and you must speak to the stars

or the rain-filled clouds

or anything at hand to find your place.

When you are alone

you must do anything

to believe

and when you are

abandoned

you must speak

with everything

you know

and everything you are

In order

to belong.

if I have no one to turn to

I must claim my aloneness.

Suddenly, he is no longer sure of his place. You can almost feel his spiritual dizziness, like he is free falling, without his spouse to ground him, focus his attention, and hug him into reality. The spiritual ground underneath him is no longer certain. Being alone makes him heightened, aware, contingent on the world. He is open, afraid, lonely, and stepping out in faith, not so much out of desire as necessity.

This is what he says:

Watching the geese

go south I find

that

even in silence

and even in stillness

and even in my home alone

without a thought

or a movement

I am part

of a great migration

that will take me to another place.

and though all the things I love

may pass away and

the great family of things and people

I have made around me

will see me go,

I feel them living in me

like a great gathering

ready to reach a greater home.

The sorrow and the deaths that we must endure, particularly those that are around us are -- no question -- very sad. Sometimes they are so sad, we do not feel any reason to go on living. But God is not done with us. There is spiritual growth also to be had in even in absence, even in aloneness, even in loss. We avoid these things as best we can because life will bring them to us soon enough. But, spiritually speaking, they are not simply a curse. They, too, have been redeemed. All these things are part of the process that gets us to a place, hopefully, of spiritual profundity at the preciousness of existence and the fullness of the meaning of living.

The bible is more spiritually realistic when it describes the spiritual life. The paradigm that it uses most often is that of a pilgrimage, a journey that leads us out of bondage through the wilderness and on toward the Promised Land where God will be fully present with us and we will be in harmony with each other and whole in our selves. It is an inspiring hope. But in the going, we will find ourselves like Joseph, probably too young and too naïve to really know what we are getting into. We will find ourselves, like Joseph, not having the resources that we think we need or we wish we had and yet we really have more than enough to meet the task and we really have more faith and daring than we knew we were capable of. We will find ourselves, like Joseph, challenged with real moral and physical danger, desperately longing for the creature comforts of home and the security of a life of ease, and yet telling the stories of our lives in retrospect through the chapters of surviving and working through the challenges we found so threatening when we were living through them. We will likely find ourselves, like Joseph, incredibly alone in our suffering -- whether the death of a spouse, in Joseph's case the death of a child, a pain in it's own category -- and yet in our aloneness surrounded by a transcendent mysterious, sustaining presence that is the holy divine. That may be all we get, but it is also all we need. May blessings be with you in this Christmas season. You, too, are on a great pilgrimage and you are going to be okay. God will get you through. That is the profound spiritual hope of the season. Amen.

[i] From David Whyte in the House of Belonging