The Power of God's Grace

            When Jonathan Edwards preached his renowned sermon in Northampton, Massachusetts that was called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God people in the pews got up and fled the church in terror.  Edwards eloquently spoke about God holding all of humanity over the pit of a fiery Hell by a spider-web thin strand that could break at any moment.  What people mostly miss about this sermon is the point.  Edwards was talking about God’s Grace:  that marvelous safety net that has been provided to all of us by the love of our God to keep us safe even and sometimes particularly from ourselves.  God’s Grace is an incredible benefit to all of humanity because, of our own volition, we would consign ourselves to the depths of Hell.  That is what those parishioners missed, and what many of Edward’s biographers have missed in that tremendous sermon.

            John Newton, the Anglican priest who was a former slave trader got the point exactly when he looked back over his life and repented of the way that he had taken slaves from their African homeland and deposited them in the New World, where their labor was used to their detriment.  He composed the wonderful hymn Amazing Grace to speak of the way that God redeemed his life from his past.  

            God’s Grace is what was operating when Abraham was told by God that he would be the father of many nations and that Sarah would give birth to a son.  When Sarah heard this news, she laughed behind a curtain and hoped that God wouldn’t hear her laughter.  The reason was that she was over ninety and Abraham was one hundred.  She was also barren and the idea of having a child seemed to her to be the most ludicrous thing that she could think of at that moment.  But God’s Grace was certainly operating and in the course of time, Sarah and Abraham became the parents of Isaac, which wonderfully means laughter.  Indeed, Abraham became the father of many nations and kings did indeed come from him.  God’s Grace is that incredible force that we hardly ever see, but which works in our lives to bring us gifts of unspeakable beauty.  We don’t often even know that it is working.  It takes faith to see it and hope to make it evident. 

            In my own life, I have felt God’s Grace work in my life a number of times.  When the television station that I was working for went bankrupt in the early seventies and I was without a job, I called my rector who arranged for me to meet the bishop and we talked about my going to seminary.  Somehow, all of the ruts in that road were easily achieved and I got my seminary education and became an Episcopal priest.  When I look back on all that went on during those three years, it seems as natural an event as I could imagine, although there were many, many problems and conflicts that we encountered.  God’s Grace is what got us through all of it. 

            When I had a large menengioma in the left frontal lobe of my brain, and was lying of the operating table waiting for the skilled surgical staff to remove it, I remember thinking that I had no idea how this was all going to come out, but that I knew that whatever it was that was going to happen, that I was going to be all right.  I meant that.  Even if I did not survive the operation, I knew that I was in the hands of the God who loved me beyond all else.  It was God’s incredible Grace that I was aware of and counting on at that moment. 

            When Jesus spoke to his disciples about what was going to happen in his life, about his crucifixion and eventual resurrection, he frightened them.  Peter took him aside and told him that what he had told them just had to be wrong.  Jesus told Peter to get behind me, Satan you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things.  Jesus was talking about how God’s Grace was operating in his own life, the Grace that would lead to his resurrection even after the evil of the crucifixion had occurred.  Like the parishioners in Jonathan Edward’s church, the disciples missed his point, as do most of us when we read these words in Mark’s Gospel. 

            The point is that God loves all of us infinitely.  God’s care, offered by what we call Grace, will get us through all of the things that this life brings to us.  God’s Love is our refuge from all of the evil that this world projects.  We need not fear, no matter what comes.  

The Wonder of Repentance

            I had my gall bladder removed last week.  It was a fairly easy procedure; I have only three incisions, which have now healed.  There were complications with it, though and I know that your prayers helped.  I got cards from some of you and I know that you were with me when all of this happened.  I thank God that the skills of the surgeon were so apparent in what he was able to do.  My gall bladder was full of stones and they had to get out the stones before they could remove the bladder itself.  It was an artful process that I was ignorant of because I was asleep with the anesthetic.  I have had very little pain with it, and have been getting back to normal with the help of my wife and my kids.  Our daughter Melanie is a nurse practitioner and her skills were needed when I was recovering.  I am a man who is richly blessed.

            We have left the season of Epiphany and have had Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday and are now at the beginning of the blessed season of Lent.  These are the forty days preceding our celebration of our Lord’s resurrection on Easter.  But I don’t want to think about that right now.  I want to focus on the season before us.  Lent is a time of repentance.  I think that is a word that is very much misunderstood by most of us.  We always associate it with sin and think that repentance is a process of admitting our guilt and receiving forgiveness for the bad things that we have done.  Certainly, we all need to be forgiven for those times that we have failed and gotten it wrong; but I think that the word repentance means a lot more.  It is a word that means changing direction.  To turn around and to see again where we are heading and what our goals are.  It isn’t simply about our failures.  It is a time to point to our success.  There is a beautiful verse in the Psalm that we read today.  Verses five and six of Psalm 25: 

Remember, O LORD, your compassion and love, *
for they are from everlasting.

Remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; *
remember me according to your love
and for the sake of your goodness, O LORD.

            I certainly remember the sins of my youth and my transgressions.  Youth is a time of growing up.  We aren’t mature when we are young and some of us take longer than others to understand what is required of us as humans in this world.  When I went to college, I hardly understood what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I didn’t do very well at Penn State, when I first went there, and only stayed for a couple of years.  I went to a radio announcer class in Pittsburgh after that and began a wonderful twenty-some year career in radio and television before the television station that I was working for collapsed and I was out of work.  When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in my church.  I was brought up at St. Paul’s in Mount Lebanon, sang in the choir and even in the Cathedral choir for a couple of years.  I remember that we were paid about thirty-five cents a week to do that, which was enough for the carfare that got me to the rehearsals and to the services.  I also served on the vestry of some of the churches that Rosie and I attended while we moved around the country in my profession.  After the station collapsed, I called my rector and told him that I had been thinking about becoming an Episcopal priest.  He encouraged me, we saw the bishop and that fall, I started my seminary training at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, one of the best seminaries in the church. 

            When I look back on what I have done, I was certainly blessed in my life.  The foolishness of my childhood and my youth was converted in to a wonderful career for me, not by my own doing, but obviously by the Hand of God.  I was fortunate to serve two churches in this diocese after I was ordained, St. Philip’s in Moon Township and Christ Church, North Hills.  After I retired in 1999, we went to West Virginia, where I was the interim rector of three churches and helped them in their continued worship.  I was fortunate indeed to be guided and helped out of my eager foolishness into something that I know was helpful to others. 

            Repentance is not an act that we can do by ourselves.  It requires people who are willing to put the past aside and embark on something new.  I know that is what God means by repentance in the season of Lent.  There is much goodness that needs to be done, and the church is God’s agency to bring it about.  Our churches are more than simply places to worship and feel good.  They are also the center of change for our communities.  I know that there is incredible need in this world, and we are in a place to help to fulfill that need.  Care of the poor and those who need healing are why we are here.  Whatever we can do to bring about hope and use the compassion that our God has bestowed on us is our mission.

The Christian Mission

            Mark’s is a very spare Gospel.  It is almost completely repeated in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.  They add many other stories.  There is no birth story in Mark and the story of Jesus’ resurrection ends very quickly with the women leaving the empty tomb in a great panic.  Mark’s was the first Gospel composed.  Before that, the stories of Jesus were told throughout the Christian community.  Finally, after a number of years, Mark was the first one to write them down.  It is a very short Gospel, making me wonder if the author was possibly a bit worried about telling too much. 

            The part of the story in the first chapter of Mark that interests me is what Jesus tells his disciples about his mission.  He wants to go to all of the little towns and do the same thing that he did for Simon’s mother-in-law.  He wants to heal and to cast out demons.  This suggests to me that this is one of the prime reasons that Jesus was here:  to correct some of the things that God saw as wrong with humanity.  Taking care of the poor and the neglected is one of the first things that Christianity set out to do from its beginnings.  This is in contrast to what was going on in the communities under the thumb of Roman rule at the time.  The power of the Emperor was absolute, and the needs of the poorest of the poor had no interest to them.  If you happened to be rich, you had all of the advantages of the time.

        Consider the story of Lazarus and the rich man commonly called Dives.  Dives stepped over Lazarus every day when he walked out of his house.  Poor Lazarus had nothing, not even a drink of water.  Dogs came and licked his sores.  When the rich man died, he was cast into the depths of Hell and when Lazarus died, he was taken to what the bible calls Abraham’s bosom.  Dives called out to Father Abraham asking that Lazarus be sent to bring him a drink of water.  Abraham said that there was a great gulf between them and that it couldn’t be crossed.  The rich man then asked that Lazarus be sent to tell his brothers about this; but Abraham said that they had Moses and the Prophets to tell them and if they didn’t believe them, then it wouldn’t matter even if someone rose from the dead.  That ended the story. 

            I’ve always been intrigued by what this story says about the resurrection of Jesus.  That it wouldn’t matter if someone rose from the dead to tell them is a terrible indictment of how we have responded to the resurrection.  Taking care of the poor and those in terrible need has been one of the first commandments that our Lord has given to us.  Loving our neighbor as ourselves includes taking care of those who have nothing.  We are not to judge, we are simply to provide loving care when it is needed.  Giving aid and care is primary to our mission. 

            Isn’t it interesting that the rich man after his death, when he was living in Hell, simply wanted Lazarus to provide for him a drink of water?  That is what Dives denied Lazarus when he sat at his door.  Care and healing is what both of them wanted when they were in dire need.  Lazarus had no ability to do anything for himself.  Finally, Dives lost that ability also. 

            Christianity did very well for several hundred years until finally Constantine recognized it as a valid religion, stopped much of the persecution, and the cross started to march ahead of the Roman armies as they fought and conquered.  That is when we began to lose our understanding of the Gospel and started to believe in power.  That’s when many people in the church lost their way and began to neglect the poorest among us.  Wonderfully, at about the same time in history, the monastic movements began to emerge and take care of people.  I see the hand of God entering the world again then and nudging the church in the direction that it had been initially created to go when it began to get out of bounds.  Taking care of those who have nothing is primary to our vocation as Christians.     

            When Rosie and I were in England on a long sabbatical back in 1991, we saw many, many large cathedrals that were originally built to the Glory of God by Christians who employed many workers in the process.  Those jobs made a great difference in the lives of the poorest people.  Today, many of those large churches are falling down and there is no money to restore them.  One of my favorite places in England is a place in Yorkshire called Fountains Abbey.  It is a ruin of a large church that was built by monks in the twelfth century.  It is a haunting place.  Walking though those elegant stones put me in a mystical place that is hard to describe, except that I knew that I was in the presence of God.  That church was also built by the poor and they benefitted from the work that they got in that place.  After Henry VIII destroyed the church and the monks went elsewhere, the spirit of God remained among those stones, and I felt that presence when I went there.  That is what Jesus was doing when he went through those towns and villages and healed and proclaimed the Gospel of God.  He was taking care of those who had no other resource and who needed the touch of God to enable their lives.  That is what we are all called to do as Christians.  God bless us as we do this incredibly important work.