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.
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.
posted by David Ensign at
10:12 AM
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