Irresistible Grace

Ephesians 4:1-6; Acts 2:1-13; Matthew 28:16-20
June 12, 2011
Perhaps it is the case that running during midday in the middle of a heat wave produces a sermon that
brings hell and grace, and sacraments and sacrifices together on Pentecost. Whether it was the wind and fire of the Holy Spirit or just the fire of the heat, I can’t say for sure, but I do know that I felt a preponderance of fire and a lack of wind last week, and it occurred to me that Presbyterian pastors might just be close cousins to mad dogs and Englishmen – or, at least this one might be.
It is, indeed, a good day to give thanks for Mr. Carrier! Could air conditioning be sacramental?
We’ve spent the past seven weeks of this season of Eastertide talking together about sacraments. We’ve gathered at table to share the Lord’s Supper, we’ve celebrated the sacrament of baptism. In addition to the “official” sacraments of the Reformed Tradition, we’ve talked about music as sacramental, about our bodies as sites of the sacramental, about families as sacramental, about food as sacrament, about memory and about vocation as sacraments.
I hope that these conversations have not only expanded and deepened your appreciation of the sacramental nature of creation, but I also hope the conversations have prompted some thinking about what it would mean to think about sacraments much more broadly than our tradition generally does.
Throughout these conversations we’ve been guided by the traditional definition of sacrament that traces back at least to Augustine: sacraments are an outward sign of an inward grace, or, if you like, a visible sign of an invisible grace.
In other words, the bread and cup of the communion table let us see – and taste – the grace of Jesus. The water we sprinkled on Tara’s brow – an outward, visible sign of that same grace.
But even in expanding our conversation about sacraments, perhaps we have not gone far enough.
Perhaps we’ve focused overly much on the signs, and need to consider a bit more carefully the nature of the grace.
While it is both of these things, more than inward and invisible grace is irresistible. How else do you explain Pentecost?
Think about it. The disciples, the second chapter of Acts tells us, were all together. Why? Because they were afraid, confused, and lost. Jesus has been murdered by the empire in collusion with the religious leaders. The disciples could well be next on the list. This is a matter of life and death.
But as the story tells us, the gift of the Spirit overcame the fear that they felt and, when they felt the invisible grace of the spirit’s presence they experienced the power of an irresistible grace.
We celebrate Pentecost as the “birthday of the church,” but I am pretty damned sure that the disciples were not sitting around a conference table debating rules and regulations for an institution. They were simply spirits open to the thrust of irresistible grace that was blowing through their midst such that they moved from cowardice to courage, from hiding in a building to building a movement, from their private fears to very public proclamation.
How else do you explain a group of fearful folks suddenly stepping out into the public square to proclaim the truth that they have been given to understand? How else do you explain Peter? The disciple voted most likely to leap before he looked and most likely to say something stupid at the most inappropriate time – you have to read some unauthorized gospels that include the high school yearbooks of the disciples to get this information, but it’s in there! How else do you explain that this same Peter suddenly can preach the good news in ways that everyone can hear and understand?
The grace of Pentecost was simply irresistible, and when the irresistible force, the power of the holy, touched their lives it moved them far beyond the limits they had previously recognized and lived by. Suddenly, these simple folk were speaking to men and women from every corner of their world. Irresistible grace knew no bounds, and so it spread out to touch everyone everywhere.
It still does.
Sisters and brothers, it still does.
The good news of the gospel, that you and I are the sons and daughters of a loving God, made good in the image of that God, beloved for who – and whose – we are no matter what – that good news remains good enough for all the world, and it connects us – whether we like it or not – to all the world.
For example, this past week many of my friends and colleagues in the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship have been fasting to draw attention to the proposed Colombia free trade agreement. I did not join the fast, but I did take the action that the fasters were asking of the rest of us: calling the White House to urge the president to keep a promise he made during the campaign to oppose this treaty.
As our friend, Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly and director of the Peace Fellowship, said, “Our partners in Colombia are crystal clear that this trade agreement will mean greater disparity of wealth, greater insecurity across their country and the weakening of the fabric of civil society.”
Why should we care? There is only slim likelihood that I’ll ever set foot in Colombia, and the same probably goes for most of you. Why should we care?
We care because we are baptized. That’s what happens in these waters: we are claimed as God own – for the world.
As Martin Luther King put it in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
There are more than 4 million internally displaced persons in Colombia – driven from homes, farms, communities by almost 40 years of civil war. That’s roughly 10 percent of the population, and the figure includes hundreds of thousands of children. Like our evangelical brother Rob Bell, I don’t believe in hell – except for the hells that we create ourselves. There are hundreds of thousands of children – as beautiful and precious as Tara – living in hell in Colombia.
These children are Tara’s sisters and brothers because “there is one body and one Spirit, just as we are called to the one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” Tara is our child; they are our children. The vows we just took as a community – to teach Tara the good news of the gospel, to be her friend and, thus, strengthen her ties to the household of God – those vows extend to her sisters and brothers in Colombia because we are bound together in that inescapable network, that single garment, because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Now it may be the case that Colombia is not your particular calling, your vocation – although that does not get you off the hook for contacting the president and our senators. But the larger point remains: injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It is not enough to come to church and seek forgiveness merely to go back out and live unchanged lives – that is the essence of cheap grace. Irresistible grace compels us into the public square to care for our sisters and brothers at risk to ourselves, to feed the hungry mouths that we can feed, to clothe the naked bodies that we can clothe, to make right what we can make right. No excuses! Just like for the disciples at Pentecost, this is life and death.
This is the heart of Christ’s teaching that we are to love our neighbors, and that those neighbors come from everywhere. This is the story of Pentecost.
The disciples probably didn’t grasp this even as they gave voice to good news. Beyond their own understanding, beyond even their wildest imagining, suddenly, what was once the personal, private possession of a privileged few was given to all; what was once understood by only the insiders who spoke the right language was suddenly comprehensible to everyone.
This was the gift of the spirit. This was irresistible grace.
The spirit that gives this grace calls us still today toward a tomorrow of God’s imagining.
Spirit, spirit of restlessness, stir us from placidness. Wind, wind on the sea.
Call from tomorrow, to break ancient schemes,
From the bondage of sorrow the captives dream dreams.
Our women see visions, our men clear their eyes.
With bold new decisions, let the people arise!
Amen and amen.

Sacramental Remembering

May 29, 2011
John 13:34-35, 14:15-21
Have you ever awakened with a start from a vivid dream and wondered where you were? Or ever awakened while on a trip and found the unfamiliar surroundings utterly strange and disorienting? Ever searched for 15 minutes for your car keys – or for your car?
Ever had on the tip of your tongue the name of an acquaintance or a friend or a family member? Ask my kids how often they’ve been called by the wrong name, or worse, by the dog’s name.
More poignantly, have you visited with a loved one who suffers Alzheimer’s or another form of memory loss?
Memory is crucial to who we are. It would be difficult to make it through a single day without the gift of memories. They are as common as recalling a name, a place, a meal, and as extraordinary as the first time you saw your lover, or the birth of a child, or the death of a parent. They are as commonplace as learning to ride a bike or tie your shoes, and as life-changing as remembering your a,b,c’s or that 2 + 2 = 4.
Without memory, we do not know who we are, nor to whom we belong.
That’s why we ask that baseline catechism question all the time: who are you? I am a child of God.
We need to remember who we are, and to whom we belong. Memory makes manifest in our lives the simple grace of that foundational truth: we are children of God.
Memory is clearly crucial to our understanding of sacraments. After all, we gather at this table because Jesus said, “this do in remembrance of me.”
One of my favorite seminary professors, Mac Worford, had a pithy phrase that he impressed upon a generation of seminarians: “the church,” he told us often, “is a house of memory.”
He said this by way of reminding us that the churches we would serve did not and would not ever be “ours.” First, of course, they would belong to God. But second, they would belong to the people who had arrived long before we got on the scene and who would, in most cases, be there long after we moved on.
They – you – have built up the church stone by stone.
Of course, like all phrases that are more than merely pithy, Mac’s observation had a bit of a biting edge to it, as well. For when the foundation stones become stumbling blocks, the house of memory turns into a museum of nostalgia, and the movement of the spirit in the world which is the church of Jesus Christ, becomes an ossified institution unworthy of its namesake or his memory.
So, on this Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend, can memory serve a sacramental function for an institution that is far too often bound to its history such that it is unable to reflect the unbound spirit of the living God? Can memory serve a sacramental function in our individual lives – inspiring us to live into the best of who we are by making newly present in the world the grace of God that we have experienced in the past?
The essence of Ignatian spirituality – named for St. Ignatius of Loyola, father of the Jesuits – rests in the conviction that memory can be sacramental – even if Ignatius, himself, never put it that way. The heart of Ignation spiritual practice resides in the simple, daily work of recalling the day. Of course, it’s not as simple as remembering what you had for breakfast or whether or not you got the milk from the grocery store. It’s more about being attentive to where God is active in your day by paying attention to, and remembering, the moments of the day that fill you up, that remind you of God’s love for you, that witness grace or kindness in the world. Which means, of course, that breakfast or grocery shopping might turn out to be moments of grace, but it’s not just the cereal or the shopping, but rather also the presence of God that you notice in the simple and ordinary moments as well as in the rare and extraordinary.
Our time of confession this morning, for example, was a simple variation on Ignatian spirituality.
We often open session meetings, or other small group meetings at Clarendon, sharing with one another the highs and lows, the moments that lift us up and the ones that weigh us down, places of light and of darkness, from our own lives. This is all straight out of the work of St. Ignatius.
He was convinced that if you pay careful attention, over the long haul, to the ordinary and the extraordinary moments of your life that you will discern patterns. The patterns will reveal what gives you life and what drains life from you, and that will point you toward the presence of God in your life, and toward your own callings in life.
Memorial Day is a fine time to, well, remember, and, in particular, to remember all of the people who have served our nation. Not only that, it is a fine time to remember the moments when you have served the commonwealth.
It is, moreover, a good time to examine our own lives and our common life, to see what we are serving these days.
Are we living sacramentally? Do our lives show forth the love of God? Do our lives make manifest in the world the otherwise hidden grace of God? Are we a means of grace? Do we remember the simple yet profoundly difficult commandment of our Lord – to love one another just as he loved – and do we ground our lives in that challenging word?
Moreover, do we believe that doing so matters? Does it – would it – make a difference in the world to live that way, moment to moment all of the moments of our lives?
Listening to Peg speak about life here during wartime I was struck – as I always am when I listen to people who lived through those days – by the shared sacrifice and the common purpose that bound people together. You do not have to glorify war nor even agree on whether or not it is or was necessary to recognize and honor the sacrifices made by those who set aside narrow personal interest for the sake of a common cause.
A great common cause binds people together.
Living each day in obedience to the commandment of Christ is a great common cause, and it is the singular cause of the gathered community of the church. Or, it could be.
George McCloud, who founded the Iona Community in Scotland in 1938, as a prophetic witness for peace in a time of war and as a sign of hope in the midst of the despair of the Great Depression, argued that a shared commitment to an impossibly large task is a prerequisite to community. In other words, if you don’t have something worth giving your lives to, then you will not give your life to a community because authentic community is about sharing your life deeply and fully and, let’s face it, at great risk. Authentic community takes hard work and shared sacrifice.
The community that formed around Jesus responded to a singular charge, or invitation, that came to order their lives together. Jesus charged them to live according to a new commandment, and he told them that their lives would be measured by it: love one another as he had loved them.
“If you love me,” he told them, “you will keep my commandment.”
It really is all that simple, and, of course, impossibly difficult, as well. But it is that impossibly difficult common task that binds a community together.
In pursuing such causes we often feel the presence of God powerfully and palpably moving in our midst. On our Rebuilding Together work sites over the past several springs, we have taken on some huge tasks, and we have felt drawn tightly together in working to accomplish them. Indeed, without being drawn together we would never have accomplished them.
In such binding together, we are also bound in the spirit’s tether. That is to say, when we come together to take on a worthy, difficult, common cause we are truly the body of Christ in the world, and are bound together as such by the Spirit of God moving in our midst.
We will not be engaged every day in such work, but we can be empowered by the shared memory of the common cause. That is the sacramental nature of memory – it can make visible in our lives a grace that has been hidden by time.
So this morning, what hidden graces do you need to recollect, to remember, that will empower you again to live more fully into Jesus’ simple, yet impossible commandment. What do you remember that enables you to love as Jesus’ loved?
The work of such recollection, such remembering, lies close to the heart of sacramental living.
May this word be bread for your living this week.