Sunday, June 17, 2018

The Power of Grace (Grace Encountered, Part 2)


(For Part 1 of the "Grace Encountered" series, go here. For Part 3, go here).


Twenty years ago I went with some seminary classmates to a Benedictine monastery in Southern CA. We were having lunch at long tables, in the dining room with the brothers. There was one monk, a very old, Chinese man, who came around with a water pitcher that his shaking arms could barely hold.  He watched for emptying glasses and silently filled them.  I wondered why this oldest of the brothers, (and the only monk in the room who was an ethnic minority), this man who seemed frail and unsteady, was the one serving the others.  

My professor noticed me watching him. She leaned over and told me this story: This monastery was in fact founded in 1929 in China by an Abbey in Belgium.  They soon established an Institute for Western and Oriental Cultural Studies, which housed an impressive 10,000 volume library. On Christmas Day 1949 the Communists took over the city. The institute was dissolved, the library was confiscated, and the monks were put under house arrest. Those among them who were Chinese were taken from the community and thrown into prison, including the monk with the water pitcher, who had been a young man at the time.  

After three years of house arrest the monks were expelled from Communist China, and they made their way to California, where the Abbey converted a dairy barn into living quarters and a stable into a chapel, and reestablished the monastery there in 1956, in the place it stands to this day.  In the 1980s, this aged monk and two others were finally released from prison. After much searching they tracked down their Monastery, immigrated to California, and were joyfully reunited with their brothers.  
He was the last living member of those who had been imprisoned. 

This monk's decades in prison were marked by severely limited access to water.  He had known terrible thirst, and had watched others die of it.  He had felt Christ meet him in prison and sustain him through his suffering, and when he was freed, Jesus brought him home to his community. He was lost, and now they were found.  
To have water, to share water, to give it freely to others so that none would thirst, was his personal act of sheer joy and gratitude. Ever since his arrival, he spent his meal times filling the water glasses of his brothers and their guests. 

Last Sunday we talked about the unconditional, unearnable love of God that claims us as God’s own. The prodigal son limps home and is swept into his Father’s waiting arms; his attempts to earn forgiveness, or reject favor, are brushed away and he is celebrated, for he was dead and now he lives, lost and now he is found.  
This is grace.  

When we looked closer we noticed that the way this grace is felt and experienced and received is only in our weakness, only when we are quite beyond any sense that we could earn or deserve it.  Grace brings to life the dead, finds the lost and frees the captives. So it it comes to us when we are broken, when loss has devastated us, when what we thought held us up falls down.  It comes to us as ministry.  
Grace is not a thing – the favor of God; it is a person - the presence of God.  God gives us God's own self. Jesus meets us as a minister – coming into our need, bearing our sorrow and pain and guilt and shame – not turning away, but joining us there.

Through 35 years in prison Jesus was there with this monk, ministering to him, sustaining him, meeting him with grace, claiming him as his own, holding him alongside others through the darkness and the thirst.  
And then Jesus brought the lost man home.

I like to imagine the household of the prodigal the morning after the party that went till dawn.  Everyone is at home now, under the Father’s roof once again. The household of grace is asleep.  Morning dawns, the rooster is crowing and the sun is just coming up; the last guests have left and the servants are cleaning up the mess.  
The younger brother awakens and hears them cleaning, but instead of turning over and sleeping, he heads out to the barns.  A bit later he comes back and joins the servants in the work.  He picks up a broom and tackles the well-trampled front entry. He gathers up scattered bottles and cups and fills bags. He grabs a bucket and a rag and starts washing tables.  
His older brother hears the ruckus and comes out of his own room, astonished. He has never seen his younger brother willingly do chores in his entire life. 
What is this boy up to? Who is he trying to impress? He wonders. Dad is still sleeping; what’s the angle? 
He squints into his face, trying to read his expression. But his brother is lost in reverie. His face is peaceful; it radiates joy even!  He looks up and sees his brother staring at him. “Good morning! It was such a late night I thought I’d let you keep sleeping. I did the morning milking so you wouldn’t have to.” 

How long before the older brother started to trust in the change? Before it sinks in that it is real?  Grace doesn’t just give you a clean slate so you can mess it up again, start a new clock, a new tally sheet. It changes your DNA. It reorients your course; it gives you a new direction and purpose and fuel.  
There was a reason people who followed Jesus were called people of “The Way.”  Grace sets you on a new way. One led not by trying to earn or prove something, not acting out of obligation or duty, or vengeance or malice. 
A way of freedom. Not freedom from, but freedom for, as Bonhoeffer would say.  Free for each other. Free for God. Free for life.  
The prodigal son sought freedom from when he set out from home to make his way in the world on his own terms. And he discovered only slavery – to his own desires, to a prison of his own making, to endless appetites and downward spirals.  And he decided to go back to his Father’s house to be free from that slavery, by offering himself as a slave. Better to be a slave to my father where I get a roof over my head and three meals a day than to be a slave to myself out there. 
Then, grace.  
The Father says, You are mine. You belong. I love you no matter what.  
And now he is truly free. He is free for life. Free for wholeness, free for belonging to the household completely, to see and love and serve his parents and his brother. 
He is free to be a minister.  
Ironically, it looks the same from the outside. To the brother, it looks like earning - like he's now playing the game the brother knows so well.  He is serving; and yet is fully free.
The monk with the water pitcher exercised his freedom every single day. 
He knew what it was to be in prison. And he knew what it was to be free.  

There are fancy words for what happens by grace- they are justificationand sanctification. Justification makes us right with God – it is to be brought into the life of God, embraced completely into the belonging of God. This happens through faith, which really just means, it happens when we receive the gift that has already been given to us. It happens when we let Jesus meet us in our weakness and minister to us in our humanity. Then we experience the love of God that comes like the prodigal’s father when we can barely stand and sweeps us off our feet and says, my child, you are home! 
Justification is the free part. Grace makes us free.

Grace makes the dead live and the lost found. So naturally, it doesn't stop at claiming and setting free. The other action of grace is sometimes called sanctification, which means, "to be made holy," and it's also called transformation. 
Sanctification is the for part. Grace makes us for.

Here’s where we mess this part up. We think this part is our job. We forget that grace means God does this too. The Spirit of God breathes new life into us, and transforms us, so that we are being rooted and grounded in love. 
Love changes us. It requires that we change, and then it also does the work in us that makes us want to change, and it even does the changing itself.  
We instinctively understand this with our partners, our children. Loving another person means seeing them in their need, joining them in their own places of suffering. When we are bound to another, we are paradoxically more free and also required to change and changed by loving. 
The ministering Spirit of Christ turns us into ministers; Jesus makes us free for one another. 

In grace we are made holy, made more like God, formed into the likeness of Christ. We become what we are; what has been done to us now happens through us. 
We’re loved; we love. 
We’ve been ministered to; we minister. 
We live this way not out of fear of punishment or desire for reward, but because we have begun to glimpse the depth and height and breadth and width, to know the love that surpasses knowledge. 
We have begun to see from time to time that God accomplishes through us abundantly more than we could ever ask or imagine, if we just show up as our real self alongside someone else’s real self.  
We begin to discover that participating in life in the world gives us joy, it fills us and makes us whole, and it brings us back to our truest and deepest self, where we already belong to God and each other.  
So lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.  Paul writes. With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 

Live what is true of you. Other places he says, You’ve been set free, why do you act like you are a slave still? Live your freedom!  
And here is what it looks like when we live in true freedom, he continues, in the rest of our verses: 
When we are hurt, the pain someone has caused us, or our own fear of conflict, does not have the power to separate us from each other. We are free to tell each other the truth, becausewe belong to each other.  We feel angry but anger doesn't rule over us, we don't have to let it take root and fester into resentment that takes over our lives, because our lives are already ruled by something, that is, love.  
The next line is great, “Thieves must give up stealing, let them labor and work honestly with their own hands so as to have something to share with the needy.” So specific! What circumstances in this community demanded he give that particular instruction?  
And yet, it makes me think of something I read this week about grace, three statements. They were: “What’s mine is mine, I will protect it.” “What’s yours is mine, I will take it.” And finally, “What’s mine is God’s I will share it.”  (from The Discipline of Grace, by Jerry Bridges).  
The first one is the older brother. What’s mine is mine, I will protect it.  
The second is the younger when he left home, What’s yours is mine, I will take it.
Both are the Way of Fear, of slavery, of death. 
But the Way of God, the way of grace and life, is revealed in the words and actions of the Father’s repeated refrain, What’s mine is yours, I will share it.  

So I think about these particular thieves that Paul is addressing, prodigals brought home in grace, and who they were before, in the Way of Fear. In competition and scarcity, we try to be free from one another, so people look out only for themselves, and those who cannot do so honestly do so by stealing. But in God’s abundance and grace, where we all belong to one another, thieves are set free for honest work, and full contribution so that they can share with the needy.  And it perpetuates and multiplies. Those who receive, receive others. Those given dignity and belonging extend dignity and belonging to others. 

Paul goes on to say, our words are for building people up and not tearing people down, our very words give grace, he says.  What comes from your mouth and my mouth can draw people into the gift!  
We are free to let go of bitterness and wrath and anger and arguing and slander and spite, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. We are beloved children, little walking reflections of God’s own being!

I like imagining the day the grace sinks in to the older brother’s heart. 
The day of his faith, when he receives, finally, the gift of his own belovedness and belonging.  Maybe it’s in great loss – the death of their mother, perhaps, when love meets him in his weakness.  Maybe it comes after time tested witnessing of the slow and steady transformation in his brother, as he is being rooted and grounded in love.  
But I suspect it happened right at the moment the father came outside and invited him into the party. 
The son comes in from the field, dirty and tired, toward the swirling music and shining lights of the house, and stands stunned and angry, watching all that he thought made sense of the world crumble around him.  And in one last grasp at meaning, he refuses to enter the house. 
The Father comes to him. 
Leaves the party and meets his missing son right there. Comes to join him right where he is, in the twilight of the yard, the fireflies around them and the cicadas song rising. 
He comes out to embrace his missing son.  
Oh my beloved child, all that I have is already yours, he says to him, it has been all along
Come inside. Come home and join the party. 
Come be free.

Perhaps after the Father’s death, the brothers run the estate together.  And together they reflect the Father’s heart to all who come near, mostly with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. 
Like the Benedictines who welcome each guest as though they are Christ himself, like the monk carrying his water pitcher from guest to guest with the greatest of honor, those who receive the gift are transformed by it, and can’t but give it away, What’s mine is God’s, I will share it.
This is the power of grace.
Amen.


For Part 3 of this series, go here.

The sermon before the sermon: remembering what's true


Sunday, June 17

Children are being taken from their parents at the borders of our country.  They have been ever since the beginning of April.  It's excruciating to contemplate, abhorrent and terrible.

When something terrible happens in the world, or something terrible that has been happening suddenly comes onto our collective radar and we all start paying attention to it, it demands that we don’t turn away.  Because of technology, and social media especially, we are now connected to everything everywhere; we know it all and can feel it all in any moment.  And because that is impossible and would crush us, the collective gaze often turns like a brief and powerful laser on one thing at a time. It’s often, (not always, but often), something important and worth paying attention to.  It is often something that brings great despair and sadness. But we are bad at bearing great despair and sadness, so we try to fix it by focusing on it harder, talking about it more. We pass around articles and post memes; we express outrage and spend our time hand-wringing and worry-praying, so we feel like we are doing something.  We feel so helpless and hopeless that we give it more attention, all the attention we have.  And when we are not giving it enough attention we feel guilty, and make others feel guilty for not giving it enough attention, the attention they would be giving it if they really cared.  We tell ourselves and each other that when we give attention to other things, we must not care about the big thing everyone is caring about at the moment. So the attention we give becomes a measure of caring, and now by measuring, we might also feel like we are doing something. Because we must do something to stop the pain, to end the terrible situation.

Here’s what that means for preachers. Every time something sad or awful comes to our collective attention a wave of advice goes around social media, usually on a Friday, and usually with several versions of this: “Preachers, you’d better rewrite your sermons for Sunday.” And, “If your pastor does not preach about this situation, find another church.”

And it tugs at me. I feel swayed.  Should I switch texts?  Is God calling me to preach something different than I thought? And sometimes that might be the case. But most of the time, it takes stepping away from the noise and taking a deep breath and sinking back into myself to remember some things that are true.  Here is what is true.

Tyrants have risen and fallen since the beginning of time.  
Horrible suffering is happening at any and every moment.  
We are part of this story. It is our story too.  
We need to recognize it and own it.  But it doesn’t get to own us.

Because there is a deeper truer story that holds us all.  
And the reason we come together as Church is to tell and hear that deeper, truer story.  
We come to be rooted and grounded in love.  To be called by God and sent into the world as people grounded in love, with deep, strong roots, ready to bear the suffering without being swept up in it.  

The litany that sustains me at times like these is this:
This is part of the story.
But this is not the whole story.
The world belongs to God.
I don't hesitate to say it several times. To look at the pain and say it again and again. 
Maybe it feels helpful to you too. You're welcome to use it too if it is.

If you want to hear or read a really good sermon about immigration, about Romans 13:1, or 13:10, or law and love, there will be dozens available to you today, and many will be really well done. I plan to read some later myself.  
If you want to hear people talk about what’s going on with substance and insight I commend Jim Wallis and Sojourners (see here), and people like Stephen Colbert, and Trever Noah whose job it is to talk about what everyone is talking about.  They are talking about it really well. (See here, and here, and here).
There are also lots of articles going around about how to get involved, places to donate money, and most significantly, it has been proven that non-violent protest is the most effective means of resistance and change, so I encourage us all to get involved in whatever ways God is prompting us to do so. (Ideas here and here and here).

But as far as our worship service today goes, today we are continuing our series on grace – because the love of God that has come near and claims us in love and for love and sends us out to live that love is still the most powerful and subversive thing in the universe.   
And no matter what, that does not change.  
In fact, in the face of tragedy it is even more important to remind each other of this reality that holds us all.

Because beyond our feeble human attention spans, when the alarm we raise and the energy we amp up becomes unsustainable, when compassion fatigue sets in, or we get distracted by the next celebrity or presidential scandal, or the next terrible tragedy arrives, when we forget the people who right now seem the most pressing, God remains with them. 

And God also remains with us in our own struggles and weakness, and doesn’t say, like we sometimes do to ourselves, Buck up! Your suffering is nothing compared to theirs!
No. God comes into all weakness, because God comes in weakness. 
It’s who God is and what God does. 
Jesus Christ is always with those who suffer, with the broken down and the locked up.  Jesus is right now alongside the children who’ve been taken from their parents, and the terrified, grieving, helpless mothers and fathers.  And he’s with those whose memories are disappearing, and those whose cancer is spreading, and those who can’t find jobs, and those who’ve lost their homes, and those whose children are trapped in addiction, and in all the places we feel helpless and afraid, that is where God is and will always be. 

In fact, this is grace.  This is the only place it can meet us where we are able to receive it – in our own places of need and suffering.   Today’s sermon will be about God and grace and what it does in us and to us and through us. 
Being rooted and grounded in love is slow, and steady, and intentional work that God does in us, in order to move through us that love and grace into the world. So come be church with each other today; come remind one another what's true. Come and share in grace, so we can bear the world's needs and suffering with courage and compassion.

Saturday, June 16, 2018

The Heart of a Father


A blessing for Father’s Day

The heart of a father
who loves his children,
who pours into them wisdom and knowledge,
and teaches them skills, 
and gives them experiences,
and watches them sleep in the night, their faces pressed against their pillows,
dreams flitting across their faces,
and prays,
for their tender hearts,
and their wide open futures,
and the pain that will pierce them,
and the joy that will buoy them…

the heart of a father
that breaks in pieces with his child’s suffering,
and breaks wide open with his child’s delight,
that beats in time with their steps,
and when danger threatens, ceases to beat altogether…

the heart of a father 
that swells with his children’s accomplishments,
and shrinks with their humiliation,
that finds itself utterly linked to their hearts,
mysterious, holy, and maddening…

the heart of a father 
that never before knew such worry,
or wonder,
or waiting,
that would give his beloved child the moon if he could,
would sacrifice his own life if it came to that,
and that sometimes 
wishes only 
to be left 
blessedly 
alone, 
to catch his breath,
to regain his footing,
to place a hand on his chest 
and feel the beat, 
steady, confident, unwavering,
even when he is none of those
at the moment…

the heart of a father,
the heart that hangs onto this small person, 
who is confoundingly both yours 
and not yours at all,
the heart that lets go of your person,
always letting them go
giving them what they need
in order to let them go
into the world
to make their own way,
and to come home into the safe arms of a father
when things fall apart,
to be held and comforted,
and stood up, and brushed off,
and sent out again,
taking with them his own heart….

this heart, God, 
bless this heart today.

Today bless each one 
who bears a father’s heart.

Thank you for those who have fathered us,
whose hearts have shaped and strengthened ours,
who have clung to us and let us go, 
who have loved and taught and prayed and steadied, 
who have fought for us when we were wronged,
and fought against us when we were wrong, 
those who’ve failed and flailed and forgiven, 
sacrificed and celebrated and shown us the way.
Thank you for those who have shared 
their own hearts with us in loud and quiet ways, 
and have given us what we needed to share 
our own hearts with the world.
Thank you, God, for fathers.

God bless and hold and 
keep all fathers’ hearts,
in your own heart today, 
and every day.

Thank you, Abba, 
for the heart of a father.
Amen.

Sunday, June 3, 2018

God's First Name (Grace Encountered, Part 1)

Prodigal Son, by Kristi Valiant, used with permission



Today we are kicking off a year on Grace, immersing ourselves in stories of grace, to try to understand it from the inside and live in it more readily.   
It’s important to say right off the bat, that there is no way to talk about grace as information. That is like trying to talk about love as a thing, apart from a relationship that holds and expresses it. Love is not a concept or commodity, it is a mother tending a sick child, a brother celebrating his sister’s accomplishment with a life-long inside joke, a husband gently washing his dying wife’s tired limbs, two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes and feeling the depths of their beloved’s soul.  
When you are inside of love, you are completely oriented toward another, and simultaneously completely yourself, and also completely connected with something transcendent and beyond.
Grace is like this. It can’t be taught or grasped, it can only be felt, experienced, known with our deep body, heart and mind in unison kind of knowing, and not just our head-only kind of knowing.

Richard Rohr says, “Basically, grace is God’s first name, and probably last too.  Grace is what God does to keep all things he has made in love and alive – forever. Grace is God’s official job description. Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is.  If we are to believe the primary witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe. (Some of us call the Phenomenon God, but that word is not necessary. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the experience because too many of us have named God something other than Grace).” 
(from Immortal Diamond).

God is a relationship of giving and receiving, one in three persons in freedom bound to each other in generosity and self-emptying love.  God is the mother hen who gathers her brood under her wings, the Father who runs to the wayward son, the Jesus who came in weakness into the womb and arms and care of those he made, to share our humanity completely from the inside. God let the very worst possible thing that could ever be conceived of happen – for the creatures to kill their Creator; the Almighty Source of all being submitted to non-being, death itself, and rendered it powerless to separate us from God. God is the Spirit who hovers over the waters at creation and breathes life, comfort and inspiration into the creatures made in God’s own image, and intercedes for us with sighs to deep for words, carrying our grief and losses into the very heart of God when we pray.

Jesus spoke scandalously of grace all the time, which is to say, Jesus revealed the outrageous essence of God, and maybe nowhere more poignantly than in his parable of the Prodigal Son.

If life is reward and punishment, earning and deserving, then the older son is the one who should receive the party, the inheritance, the Father’s devotion.  Not the son who squandered everything and threw away Dad’s fortune.  Not the one who got what he most certainly deserved, when he came to in the pigpen. 
He had it all and threw it away. 
Those were the natural consequences of his behaviors. 

But this Father, he goes against all sense.  
He is not angry with the son, not disappointed in him and eager to teach him a lesson. No.  Rather, everyday, he goes out from his house to watch the road for his boy.  It’s the first thing he does when he wakes up. It’s where he spends his lunches.  It’s the final walk down the lane before bed, eyes peeled to the horizon as the light fades.  And when he can’t be there he posts servants to keep an eye out.  He tells the neighbors to alert him if they see the boy coming.  He longs with all his heart that his beloved child return to him.  
And when the child does come home, filthy and limping, the Father sees him a speck in the distance, and he drops his dignity and lifts his robes and runs full bore to sweep up this child in his arms.  
And this son, who left high on life, no doubt with some parting witty shots, and his half of the his Father’s entire estate’s inheritance weighing down his bag… this son who partied hard and wasted it all, who woke up in vomit and shame more times than he can count, who slunk through dark streets, and used and discarded desperate women, and robbed people at knifepoint, and found what he’d later call in AA his “rock bottom,” propped up in a pig pen with rotten food in his hand… this son, who is too ashamed to look his Dad in the eye, gets the wind knocked out of him by the enthusiasm of his father’s embrace, and tries to stammer out his prepared speech, the one he’d practiced the whole long way home, the one about how he didn’t deserve to be a son and would his dad consider taking him in as a hired hand?  
But he barely gets three words out before the Father has kissed his grimy cheeks, hoisted him onto one arm and walked him back to the house, tears streaming down his own cheeks in joy, shouting orders to the staff, “Prepare the bath! Lay out my best clothes for him and don’t forget my grandpa’s ring, the family heirloom! Break open the bottle we were saving for the finest celebration! Everyone must come and feast! My son was dead and now he lives! He was lost and now he is found!” 


Prodigal Son, by Charlie Mackesy
(check out his other work - including stunning sculptures) of this story.
This is grace.  
It’s not something God does; it’s who God is.  
God can’t not embrace and love us no matter what. 
Grace is not just the opposite of earning and deserving, or a different language, it’s a completely different universe– it’s the way of God instead of the way of fear.  
It’s lost being found and dead made alive.  

Grace is not medicine that fixes the badness in us; it’s the preexisting connection between us and God that never ends.  And it’s available to us right now.  
My beloved professor Ray Anderson used to say, There is no authentic humanity except that summoned forth by the creative divine Word itself. There is no human existence which first of all is in a state of anxiety, indecision or dread before it can realize its own possibilities of response and faith. 
Our most true and fundamental humanity is of rest, not unrest. It is connected to God, not estranged from God.  Disorder is a disruption of what is already the case.  We don’t imagine that people start out sick, and only achieve health from the cure.  Sickness is a distortion of health- we start healthy and then something makes us sick, and the cure restores us to health.  
So it is with grace.

We were made in grace, God’s being spilled over to be shared with us, drawing us from the very beginning into relationship with God.  Our very most true and deepest self already knows being loved and claimed by God.  This reality is already ours; it is the gift we have been given with our very existence – we belong to God.  

The older son is living in the Father’s grace. 
He is right there, in the household, all needs met, all belonging complete.   
At any moment he could let the joy of being loved and claimed as beloved son wash over him. 
At any moment he could rest in gratitude, welcome contentment. 
But he’s been a good boy and he knows it. 
And those of us who live close to the Father are most at risk of this – believing it is our own goodness that got us here, believing somehow we made this happen. He still has enough dignity and enough false sense of his own worthiness or favoritism, that he is incapable of receiving the gift.  His belief that he is qualified to earn something that is unearnable, means, paradoxically, that that he can never receive the very thing he is craving and working for most – the love of the Father.  Because that love is free. It is not earned.  It’s already his, and yet, he cannot feel it, cannot accept his acceptance. 

We can reject God’s grace one of two ways.  
Like the younger son we can run from it and immerse ourselves in things that actively kill our souls and cut us off from our belonging to others, ourselves and God.  
Or like the older son we can stand right inside of it and think it doesn’t exist. We can prop up our souls up to impress God and others, to be as good kind and obedient and successful as we can be, insisting on paying our way and refusing to accept the free gift that is already ours.

Then to come face to face with grace feels like death.  
It is painful and unpleasant and most unwelcome, because it looks at everything we’ve done and all we’ve though we earned and all that makes us worthy, and it considers it pointless, throws the party instead for the reckless deviant who finally came home.  
But when grace makes us alive, it reorients our being to our source, it brings us back to the true reality, it wakes us up from the stupor and gives us eyes to see through grace’s lens- that is, with gratitude and hope, for all is gift, and all belong, and God is holding it all.  
This sounds like crazy talk if you haven’t been seized by grace, if you haven’t succumbed to its soul-transformation.  It makes no sense unless you’ve gone through death and come out the other side.  

At any and every moment God has already restored us to our orientation toward the Source of our life, and we can receive this reality into ourselves.  
But to receive it means to let go of whatever we are orienting ourselves toward instead – our own self-interests and self-preservation, righteous anger or longing for revenge, the isolation or blame that makes the people around us into competition instead of companions, grasping for meaning apart from the ground of our being.  
All the things that make us feel safe and strong and secure and worthy, they must disappear – they are the illness, the sin, if you will, that distorts our true life. But nobody, or at least, not most people I know, willingly give those things up, certainly I know I wouldn’t. 

Would you willingly give up security?  Stability? The ability to trust in your own good health, or reliable mind, or excellent track record, or reputation in the world?  
And so we are rarely ready to receive grace until suffering meets us.  

Until we are freed against our will from something that we depend on for what we thought was our life, we are not likely grateful for grace or even able to see it at work, which is another way of saying, we don’t really need or recognize God.  It is often only when what we thought was our life disappears, and these deaths happen to everyone all the time, it is only in death that we are ready to discover and receive again what truly is our life- our deep and abiding and unshakable belonging to God and to all others.

Then receiving grace doesn’t mean that on this side of eternity we can stay in this blissful awareness of God at all times, or even most times. It means we brush up against it and taste it, and have patience with ourselves when we bounce between the way of fear and the way of God. We eventually recognize when we’re killing our souls or propping them up, and fall back into the grace that holds us, turning our face back toward the one that made us, falling back into the arms that will always catch us when we stagger home.

And once we do, oh, how we long to live in God’s grace! 
Once we do, how great is the joy of participation! 
Because it’s the awareness that all of life is a gift, 
that we ourselves are a gift to others, 
that each experience- the painful ones included- turn out to be gift. 
It’s the consciousness that there is deeper truth and greater hope and stronger love, that can only be received in vulnerability and weakness.  
Grace makes us awake to life, 
and brave to love, 
and able to forgive, 
and willing to sacrifice, 
and free from shame and fear, 
and quick to joy 
and receptive to peace. 
And so we long for the grace of God, for it is the face of God.  

Grace is here right now, because God is here right now. 
So I invite you to pray with me.  
And we’re going to do this first by quieting our hearts, relaxing our foreheads and faces, unclenching our minds, opening our stomachs and filling our bodies with air.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.  
Feeling our seats underneath us and the floor beneath us, our breath in and out and the people beside us, we are present here now, God, where you already are, waiting for us to show up.  And we sit in your presence now, and wait until we feel a sense of your Spirit with us.  
(PAUSE AND WAIT FOR A SENSE OF GOD'S PRESENCE)

As you sit in the presence of God, if you’d like to pray along with me, let your spirit say these words after I do:

Make me vulnerable, God. Make me open to you.
Take away the things that that are killing me, 
and knock over the things that are propping me up, 
remove all obstacles preventing me from receiving your love and welcoming your grace.  Where I am lost, Lord, find me. 
Shake me out of unrest that I may return to rest. 
free from estrangement that I may be connected once again.
Return me to core of my being that knows what it is to be loved and known by You. 
Reorient me to the Source of my life, that I may be fully alive. 
Summon me back into the hope that does not disappoint, 
and immerse me in your love that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. 
Amen.

( follow-up installments in this series can be found here for Part 2, and here for Part 3).



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