Unexpected Grace

Exodus 16:2-15

September 21, 2014

Don’t you just love the “whole congregation of the Israelites”? Can’t you just hear Moses talking with God?

“Take my people. Please.”

What an ungrateful gathering! Seriously! Moses and Aaron have just pulled off one of the greatest feats imaginable. They had walked out of Egypt with thousands of liberated slaves – at the urging of the owner! Of course, the owner changes his mind and chases after them, but Moses and Aaron lead on, God parts the waters. The people – long enslaved – are free at last, free at last! Thank God almighty, they are free at last!

You’d think they’d sing a song of celebration. But, instead, this is the refrain:

“If only we had died … we’d be better off dead than wandering around out here in the wilderness not knowing where we’re going or where our next meal is coming from … we’d be better off ending it all right now, than in not knowing what the future is going to bring.”

Isn’t that so like us, so very human. There’s not much that we hate more than not knowing. As every good suspense writer or film director knows well, we fear most that which we do not know, and, in that fear, we tend to lose perspective, make mountains out of molehills, foresee the worst possible outcome even when it’s the least likely result.

This pattern plays out on small scales – in homes, classrooms, offices, and, yes, in churches. And it plays out on much larger scales in international relations – all too familiar and easy to see as nations, led by ours, march off toward war again, foreseeing the worst possible outcome – “we’re all gonna die!” – and blind to every possibility of grace.

Part of the simple power and truth of John Newton’s great hymn lies in those opening images, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”

We stumble blindly through so much of life. Bound up in fear of the unknown, we miss grace altogether.

But sometimes grace bursts through unmistakably. That’s the story of the Exodus. It’s hard to miss manna on the ground, even if you don’t recognize it or know what it is. Even in their uncertainty and fear, the children of Israel can see what lies right in front of them: a gift from God that will sustain them.

We have all been given such gifts. Indeed, take a deep breath. A gift from God that will sustain you. Sometimes we receive sustaining gifts in challenging moments and in unexpected ways. Manna in our desert times.

I invite you now, into a time of quiet reflection and meditation on this question: when have you received unexpected grace? What did it feel like? Who carried it for you, or made it manifest in your life? What difference did it make in your life?

So, when have you received unexpected grace?

Everyone has experienced grace – whether or not we recognize it. Indeed, rising up this morning to greet another day is a gift; it is grace. Sometimes, all we can do is receive it. We are too tired, too broken to respond at all. We are in the valley of the shadow of death, and a little light is a gift but it doesn’t empower us to do anything more than take one more step through the valley. Sometimes in our lives that is just fine.

But other times – most times, for most of us, I’ll suggest – the deeper question, really, is not so much, “when have you received unexpected grace?” But, rather, what difference did it make? What did it change in your life? How are you living, today, in response to grace?

Indeed, John Newton’s great hymn was possible for him to sing only because grace literally turned his life around – from captain of a slave ship to crusader for abolition. Most of us don’t life lives quite that dramatic, to be sure. But, in gratitude for the graces we have received, we can always live transformed lives.

I’ve been asked many times how I became involved in the work of More Light Presbyterians and People of Faith for Equality in Virginia and other witness for equality and justice for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender – queer folk. After all, I’m a straight, married man with no close relatives who are gay. To that extent, “it’s not my issue.” Right?

When asked, I always tell the same story, though I don’t always think of it in terms of grace. I became deeply involved in this work almost 15 years ago when, on a vacation trip through the land of my birth – Alabama – we visited several significant sites of the Civil Rights Movement. As a white kid growing up in the South during the 1960s and 70s, the unfolding drama of the Civil Rights Movement was the air that we breathed, the context of all kinds of everyday family decisions around neighborhoods and schools and churches. So many of the individuals who gave so much to that movement for human freedom were church folks – people of faith – and they became my heroes.

Standing in the pulpit of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery – Martin Luther King, Jr.’s first church and the birthplace of the Montgomery bus boycott that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement almost exactly five years before my birth – a simple question pressed in on my mind: when my kids are grown and want to know what I did during the great civil rights question of my time, what would I say?

Would I have to say, “well, there was just so much uncertainty and fear in the church, so I played it safe and kept my mouth shut.”

The grace of that moment, the gift of that history, and the graces of my own incredible privilege – were as readily apparent as manna in the grass. The only question was, “how will you choose to live in response to all that?”

That really is the only question for each of us: “how do we choose to live in response to what we have been given?”

A friend shared a note with me and Cheryl on Facebook last week. She wrote, saying, “our beautiful, perfect, created in God’s image son is most at home in a dress with a wig on … I was struggling and my husband said, ‘how blessed are we that God has given us this child, and has enough faith in us to entrust us with this child.’”

How do we choose to live in response to what we have been given? That is the question that presses in on us always. The answer? Paul says simply this: Live a life worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Always. In every moment. Amen.