Isaiah 66: 1-5
Thus says the Lord:
“Heaven is my throne
And the earth is my footstool;
What is the house that you would build for me,
And what is my resting place?
All these things my hand has made,
And so all these things are mine,” says the Lord.
“But this is the one to whom I will look,
To the humble and the contrite in spirit,Who trembles at my word.”
“Whoever slaughters an ox is like one who kills a human being;
Whoever sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog’s neck;Whoever presents a grain offering, like one who offers swine’s blood;
Whoever makes a memorial offering of frankincense, like one who blesses an idol.”
“These have chosen their own ways, and in their abominations they take delight;
I also will choose to mock them and bring upon them what they fear;
Because when I called, no one answered,When I spoke, they did not listen;
But they did what was evil in my sight,
And chose what did not please me.”Hear the word of the Lord,
You who tremble at his word;
Your own people who hate you and reject you for my name’s sake
Have said, ‘Let the Lord be glorified, so that we may see your joy;’
But it is they who shall be put to shame.”Matthew 22:23-40
The same day some Sadducees came to him, saying there is no resurrection; and they asked him a question, saying, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘If a man dies childless, his brother shall marry the widow, and raise up children for his brother.’ Now there were seven brothers among us; the first married and died childless, leaving the widow to his brother. The second did the same, so also the third, down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman herself died. In the resurrection, then, whose wife of the seven will she be? For all of them had married her.”
Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ He is God not of the dead, but of the living!” And when the crowd heard it they were astounded at his teaching.
When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
This is the first part of the recording of my presentation on Oct. 31, 2010
Here is the second part of the recording:
My Mother sent me the following story in an email earlier this week and in honor of the San Francisco Giants playing in the World Series (which they won on November 1, 2010!) I would like to share it with you. It’s called God’s Baseball Game and while the theology is a little thin in places the message is a "grand slam."
Freddy and God stood by to observe a baseball game. God’s team was playing Satan's team.
God’s team was at bat, the score was tied zero to zero, and it was the bottom of the 9th inning with two outs. They continued to watch as a batter named Love stepped up to the plate. Love swung at the first pitch and hit a single, because “Love never fails.”
The next batter was named Faith, who also got a single because Faith works with Love.
The next batter up was a fellow whose first name was Holy and last name was Wisdom. Satan wound up and threw the first pitch. Wisdom looked it over and let it pass: Ball one. Three more pitches and Holy Wisdom walked because he never swings at what Satan throws.
The bases were now loaded. God then turned to Freddy and told him He was now going to bring in His star player. Up to the plate stepped Grace. Freddy said, “He sure doesn't look like much!” In fact, Satan's whole team relaxed when they saw Grace.
Thinking he had won the game, Satan wound up and fired his first pitch. To the shock of everyone, Grace hit the ball harder than anyone had ever seen! But Satan was not worried; his center fielder let very few get by. He went up for the ball, but it went right through his glove, hit him on the head and sent him crashing to the ground; the roaring crowds went wild as the ball soared over the back fence . . for a home run! God’s team won!
God then asked Freddy if he knew why Love, Faith and Holy Wisdom could get on base but couldn't win the game. Freddy answered that he didn't know why. God explained, “If your love, faith and wisdom had won the game, you would think you had done it by yourself. Love, Faith and Wisdom will get you on base but only My Grace can lead you Home:
[“For by Grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is a gift of God; not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9; Psalm 84:11, “For the Lord God is a sun and shield; he bestows grace and glory; no good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly.”]
Our Scriptures this morning are two of the more difficult ones in the Bible. We cheer as Jesus puts it to the Sadducees and the Pharisees but what he says to the Pharisaic lawyer is the entire basis of the theology of Grace. First, you shall love God with everything that you are; body, soul and consciousness. Then the second commandment, I think, is not a commandment at all but an imperative that is based upon the requisite of loving God completely. In other words, WHEN we love God with all our heart, soul and mind, THEN we will love our neighbor – that is, everything in proximity to us, whether near or far – as ourselves. That doesn’t mean “like” ourselves; it means, love our neighbors as if they ARE us. This is the divine wisdom that every master who has ever walked the face of the planet has known; that we are so much a part of each other and of God that to make a distinction is really only a matter of convenience or, in the case of sin – that which separates us from full union with God – a matter of truly deadly inconvenience. When we forget how connected we all are we tend to find it easier to hurt and kill each other. Remembering our unity is vital for grace.
I’ve talked a great deal over the last three Sundays about what Grace is. First, I found I couldn’t talk about grace without acknowledging sin and finally concluded that sin is not morally good or bad but, rather, sin is whatever we think, say or do that separates us from being in full relational union with God and that it is our doing. Sin is that state of being for which we are accountable; it is our deliberate attitude of, “I can do it myself!” because God is always inviting us into an intimate relationship and this divine invitation is what I call original grace.
Second, I declared that it is actually impossible for us to be separated from God in any real sense of the word because God is the very source of our being. It is my theological and mystical opinion that it is actually the very substance of God, which we all identified last week as Love, that is not only the basic stuff which makes up all the matter in existence, but it is also the force which holds it all together, the soul of the cosmos. Likewise, we have bodies that are made up of the same substance as all of the rest of the matter in the universe and they inhabit our souls which are what hold our bodies together for the entire time we need them.
My point is that there really is nothing in existence that isn’t God. Interestingly, God’s name in Hebrew is Ehyeh asher ehye. This self-identification of God’s is rendered in English as “I Am that I Am” but, literally translated, reads something more like, “I shall be that I shall be.” The sense of this declaration is that not only is God be-ing right now but that God is ALL Be-ing; then, now and ever.
From a burning bush in the desert God speaks to Moses and God names God’s self as the one Being that is all beingness. This mean that everything is holy and sacred; the dirt, the air, the plants and animals, ourselves, the sun and moon and planets, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe and the entire cosmos are God expressing God’s self as unconditional love. Can you imagine how it will be when we all – everyone and everything that exists – recognize (literally, rearrange our thoughts about our perceptions; re-cognize) that everything is sacred, holy and intimately related with everything else? We will take off our shoes and leave them off because we will remember that every square inch of ground upon which we walk is holy. This existence will become heaven, A.K.A. the realm of God, and it will occur due to God’s grace. Grace is the state of being in full and complete union with God who is all that is.
However, even though I think that for the sake of our own survival we must, and very soon, all become again conscious of our place within the entirety creation, we humans are special among all the species on this planet because we are the only ones who can imagine ourselves to be autonomous individuals; little godlets, if you will, who don’t need God. So, while we are sacred and made of the same stuff as the divine, we are also sinful in that we create within our own little universes an imagined sense that we are separate from God and everything else in our proximity. As lonely as this is and as much as we long to feel whole and complete and "enough" we continue to separate ourselves from that which completes and fulfill us, which is God.
Again, God’s grace saves us from the peril of actually being separate in any real way. The fact that we literally cannot exist apart from God is what saves us from having to really try to do so. The separation, the sin, occurs only in our intentions. Our very existence is divine grace.
Third, I spoke about the eternal nature of grace. Because we have hooked our souls into these bodies which are actually hurtling through space on the face of a little blue, spinning ball, we experience the phenomenon of time. This, in itself, is a little blessing because it allows us to interact with each other and everything else in little, bite sized, digestible pieces. Due to our perception of time as past, present and future, we can have what we call experiences which are memories and interpretations of encounters that happened in specific moments of time. Encounters, ordinarily, are our interactions with other people, places and things that occur in any given present moment. There is something unique, though, about our relationship with God in that we cannot be in conscious awareness of our connection with God in any time other than a present moment; right now.
We spend a great deal of our thinking, however, revisiting past experiences and anticipating future encounters so that our consciousness of God is actually pretty minimal. We have to be intentional about being aware of our relationship with God or we just forget about it. This forgetting about now is what makes it possible for us to think we might somehow be separate from God and each other and everything else. There’s a joke about asking a dog what time it is and the dog answers, “NOW!” The truth in this is that very few, if any, other animals besides ourselves spend as much time out of the present moment as we do. We are actually pretty unconscious! We are vastly unaware of the eternity of all moments. We think these little lives, this string of moments we knit together like a sweater, are all that is during the time we are doing them and we very rarely, if ever, take the opportunity to just be, instead of always doing.
Ironically, separating time into sections the way we do and separating ourselves from the present as we do causes us to feel isolated and alone and we suffer because of it. When we start to feel too awful in our supposed isolation we cry out to God as if God were somewhere far away. We’re like a baby who, after dreaming of the womb, wakes up to find itself separated from its mother and alone. However, God is always right here whenever we cry. God is never more than a thought away. All we need do is to focus our awareness on the present moment and “pop” our consciousness back into full union with God, even though we were never really separated in the first place. It’s as if our dream is of being separated from God and when we wake up to the real “now” we realize we really aren’t.
This waking up time can really only be facilitated by the act of prayer. We are actually designed to be in prayer – conscious connection with God – at all times. Jesus certainly was. What else is all of our non-verbal communication for? To whom else are we commincating? Again, we just forget what we are doing and being right now because we can and because it is easier than staying focused. With practice, we can remember to be right here, right now, more often and the more conscious time we spend with God, the greater our joy because there really is nothing that fulfills us more than being in intentional relationship with God. So eternal grace is the fact of God’s eternal presence and the fact that, even though we are experiencing time as linear and sequential, we can still focus our attention upon God’s presence and “meet” God, so to speak, in the moment, any time we choose.
Finally, only two thousand words later, I’ve reached today’s subject which is the amazingness of grace. Actually though, I’m not talking about how amazing grace is but why we don’t like it because it is clear that we reject the reality of grace all the time. Both of our scriptures this morning are about the majority of people who profess to belong to a faith tradition and yet reject grace. You see, when we focus our attention upon our intimate union with God we are unable to treat each other and our home planet in the ways we have. It is clear, from our behavior, that we have been going it “alone” for some time.
Jesus was teaching the disciples what it looks like to live in grace, to be graceful at all times. He said in order to be all that we are meant to be we must love God with everything we are and love each other as if we were the same entity. Yet, even they did not understand. Why not? Unfortunately, it all boils down to self-centeredness. I hate to put it that way but we don’t have another word in English that means quite the same thing.
The next few things I say are going to sound pretty harsh but bear with me and try not to take any of it personally. This isn't judgment, it's discernment.
This self-absorption of ours can be charted along a spectrum from suicide to homicide. Suicide is the conviction that one’s own life is not worth living. Homicide is the conviction that someone else does not deserve to live. Most of us fall somewhere along the middle portion of this spectrum which is shaped like an upside down bell curve with the majority of us clumping up at the bottom of the bell, sort of sloshing around down there in the trough. Throughout our lives we move along the spectrum between the extremes and, fortunately, it is much harder to move up the side of the curve toward those bitter ends. Sometimes we feel pretty balanced. Other times we feel more or less homicidal or suicidal depending upon our interpretations of our experiences. I’ll offer you a brief example from my own life since I’d rather not implicate anyone else with these assertions of self-centeredness, just in case there’s someone really evolved in the congregation this morning.
A couple of years ago my partner Sally and I were robbed…three times in one week. We were divested of nearly every item either of us had collected that we considered to be particularly valuable. Most painful were the things that can’t be replaced with any amount of money, such as the canvases that Sally’s mother had painted and given to Sally before she died. To say we were devastated would be an understatement, indeed. We were in the process of moving from one house to another and so we just closed the doors on the destruction and left it all there until we felt strong enough to deal with it again.
When we did go back we were like bombing victims returning to their neighborhoods, numb and dull-eyed, sifting through the wreckage to see what, if anything remained of our former lives. I remember feeling the build-up of an impotent sense of rage that we had been so violated and wishing that I were able to confront the thieves with a gun in my hand. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to kill them or just intimidate them but the realization that I felt like holding a gun – a device intended only for killing – upon another human being stopped me in my tracks.
I sat down in the middle of the living room floor and, of course, burst into tears. I prayed and asked God “why” this had been done to us. I apologized for thinking about killing the thieves and explained to God how mad I was and how violated we both felt and asked for guidance about how to deal with the situation; at which point I was granted a vision of grace so powerful that it turned my entire understanding of God and my relationship with God upside down and inside out.
First, God told me in no uncertain terms that I should feel compassion for the thieves because they were hurting so badly inside that they thought they needed things, someone else’s things, our things, in fact, in order to fill up the empty spaces they felt inside. Their biggest problem was that everything they did only separated them further from the one and only thing that could make them feel better, which is a full and completely satisfying relationship with God.
I then saw myself entering a room in which our thieves stood waiting and I opened my arms toward them and said, “Don’t worry. Everything is okay. You didn’t actually steal anything from us because we are giving to you what you thought you had taken and you can’t steal something which has already been given to you. What’s ours IS yours; as it always has been and always will be and we wish you all the joy of these things that we were so blessed by when they resided with us.” But they didn’t understand. They thought I was toying with them. They didn’t believe I had for-given them everything they had stolen. They continued to live in sin because they could not allow themselves to receive grace. (For-given. Fore-given them…I’ll come back to this concept in a few moments.)
One of the best descriptions of this state of mind, of our believing that we don’t deserve grace, is given by Annette Benning’s character in the movie Open Range. She explains, “I don’t have the answers, but I do know that people get confused in this life about what they’ve done, and what they should’ve because of it. Everything they think they are or did takes hold so hard that it won’t let them see what they can be.” This is what it means to live in sin. It’s a confusion that takes hold so hard it won’t let us see everything the way God sees everything. It won’t let us see ourselves the way God sees us.
The way God sees us is as precious and sacred and unique and infinitely important components of all that is. Another movie character, Dr. Ellie Arroway played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, explains how it feels to see ourselves as God sees us. She says, “I had an experience…I can’t prove it, I can’t even explain it, but everything I know, as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever – a vision of the universe that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and how rare and precious we all are; a vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves; that we are not – that none of us – are alone. I wish that I could share that. I wish that everyone – if even for one moment – could feel that awe and humility and hope…but…that continues to be my wish.” This same type of encounter happened in real life for Dr. Martin Luther King who described it as having been to the “mountain top” so that he had a dream.
Unfortunately, the Sadducees and Pharisees from this morning’s reading aren’t the only ones who don’t understand the scriptures. We Christians are woefully disobedient of the teachings of Jesus who says to us, “Whatever you do to the least of these you do to me,” and also, “turn the other cheek” and “You have heard it said ‘an eye for eye’ but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’” About six years ago Bill McKibben wrote an essay that appeared in Harper’s Magazine called, “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong.” He writes that 75% of Americans in a poll think that the declaration, “God helps those who help themselves,” is from the Bible. Actually Benjamin Franklin said it and it runs counter to everything Jesus taught which is to love God with our entire being and to love everything and everyone else as our very selves.
We are like those in our Psalm this morning who have chosen our own way instead of God’s. We do all kinds of good works but we do them without grace, praising ourselves for being so wonderful and accomplished and in so doing, further separating ourselves from God. We make idols of our worldly possessions and even of our good deeds. What is the thought of vengeance but yet another thing that we focus our attention on instead of God? Besides which, the majority of our leaders teach us by their words and actions that grace is actually a weak response to immorality, to those who are being "bad." Forgive them? What does that do but just encourage them to continue being “bad” and probably allowing them to continue hurting a lot of “good” people in the bargain? Let’s just bomb them!
Furthermore, a large majority of we Christians don’t like grace because it is free…to…everyone. We don’t want “them” to experience grace because “they” have not “earned” it and “they” do not deserve it! I know you know of whom I speak when I say “them” and “they” because we all have “thems” and “theys” in our lives. This is precisely what Jesus meant when he said, “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Because we are all together in this, because of our unity in God’s very being, whenever we deny grace to “them” we deny grace to ourselves. There is no grace for some, there is only grace for all and the vast majority of us are not yet reconciled to this truth.
The crux of the problem is forgiveness. Grace is founded upon forgiveness. You see, we think of forgiveness as “pardon” because of the way we experience time. We do something “bad” and then we ask pardon for it if we feel contrite. But the word forgive actually means, “to give before.” That’s what grace is, it is God’s giving before whatever we think, say or do so that there is no need, no want, no lack, no shortcoming, no sin. You see, when we believe we are separated from God we live in fear. Fear produces self-centeredness. Self-centeredness produces all the thoughts, words and actions that we consider “bad” and immoral and they are all found along the same spectrum from suicide to homicide.
If we don’t want to live this way anymore, if we really wish to change the world, we are going to have to accept God’s grace and not only for ourselves but for everyone. We are going to have to become willing to break open our little shells and crawl out into the blindingly brilliant light of God’s love and grace. We have to become willing to be born again, not as in the sense of being “saved” like many of our Christian theologies claim, but as in the sense of becoming who and what we have always been meant to be.
We were never meant to stay so self-absorbed. This is an infancy stage and we’ve been in it for thousands of years, but we were intended for a much greater purpose. Do you want to find out what that is? Do you want to live into your potential? Jesus offers a way out, a way to grow up, but we have to become willing to give up this life and our selfish ways of thinking in order to attain what he offers. We have to become willing to be laughed at and scoffed at. We have to become willing to let go of all the things that we use to keep ourselves separate from full-time awareness of God and live in the holy realm of now.
Grace is not some weak response to immorality that we offer up because we don’t have the fortitude to lay down the law. Grace is advanced spirituality. It’s not for the timid and it requires courage and a faith the likes of which most of us don’t want to pursue because it is like swimming upstream against the tide of the majority of human kind. It requires us to forgive the way God does. It requires us to love the way God does. It requires us to align our wills with God’s will and to be graceful.
Fortunately, God also knows most of us aren’t ready for this, we aren't mature enough to be very graceful even after all this time…but we can always start practicing.
I can’t help myself: I think music is a really fabulous metaphor for grace, for the beauty and the harmony of bringing individual notes and instruments and voices together to make an amazing and unified sound. As children, most of took lessons on some sort of instrument or we sang songs, even if it was just with the radio. I think we are all God’s instruments for grace but we don’t start playing in a symphony without first taking a few lessons. I think this is why we are here in the way we are, to practice. I don’t know what that symphony God is writing is going to sound like but I know I want to participate in it. It’s going to be a harmony the likes of which we can’t imagine in our current, finite state, but we can learn our parts. We can become skilled musicians. We just have to practice and it is said, practice makes perfect. How do we get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice!
Jesus showed us the technique; we are the instruments and the whole world is our practice room. Let’s practice grace together. We don’t have to get it right the first time or all the time but we can get ourselves ready and we can teach the techniques to others, as well. At first, the noises we make are going to be really awful. Most of us are going to have our selfish little dreams of being soloists, at some point or another, but we’ll eventually settle down and learn to play second or even eight-thousandth chair in our section. There will be soloists but there won’t be any prima donas because no one will be afraid of not being loved as well or as greatly as everyone else. Each one of us will know how ultimately important we all are and everyone will learn to play together in order to make the music itself, the grace, the most important aspect of every breath we take and of every note we play. When we finally decide, when we choose with our whole selves, to submit to God’s love and grace and will and allow the Maestro to truly conduct this global band/orchestra/chorale, the piece that we all play together for the pure enjoyment of our entire cosmos will be none other than God’s masterwork arrangement of Amazing Grace.
Break a leg!
McKibbon, Bill. "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong" in Harper's Magazine, April 2005. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080695
This is a recording of the anthem the choir sang during this service, called "Bring Us To Your Light" by Henry Mollicone, published by E.C. Schirmer
This is a recording of the "sermon song" I sang, called "If I Want To" by Burt Bacharach
This is a recording of our closing hymn, called "I Am An Instrument" by Daniel Nahmod
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